If you want to be successful in your business and marketing, it’s important to learn about the offer funnel so that you can automate the process by which you create awareness, gather leads, and follow up with prospects so that you can seamlessly increase sales.
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Planning Your Offer Funnel
The offer funnel is what you pull people through as they go through the buying cycle.
It works like this:
You give away a lot of content given away freely such as blog posts, social media updates, and so forth, which will lead people to sign up for a free or low-cost product that requires the customer to opt-in by providing their email address.
Once the potential customer signs up, then your email messages will lead them through the funnel until they get to your highest-cost products and programs such as continuity programs and high-level one-on-one services.
Let’s take a closer look at the offer funnel…
Awareness
At the top of the funnel is awareness.
Your leads will come in via the free content you put out online.
You’ll work on branding efforts through blogging, social media, advertisements, organic search, and SEO to attract potential leads to your website.
These things will bring your audience to you.
All you have to do is describe their problems, educate them about them, and yourself, and the solutions you can provide to them while maintaining a consistent brand using different types of content.
Leads
At some point
during the awareness phase of buying your audience will potentially take some
of your offers that will get them on your list.
These people are considered leads.
At this point, you can offer checklists, eBooks, short reports, and helpful solutions that solve one problem for the audience member.
This may occur with opt-in offers and sales pages.
You will start sending information to your leads to get them to become prospects.
The types of content you might use to get people on your list are webinars, checklists, and anything that your audience will use and trade their email address for.
Prospects
A prospect is someone who has already proven to want what you have to offer because they signed up for your opt-in above.
Now, depending on what opt-in they signed up for because you may have many entry points, you’ll send them email follow-ups and higher tier offerings including upsells, down sells, and cross-sells.
You’ll send content to them that nurtures the prospect so that they become a paying customer.
Content that can nurture prospects and encourage sales includes small reports, case studies, how-to articles, videos, and webinars.
This is where segmentation comes in.
You’ll need to send the right content to them at the right time.
Sales
Eventually, a percentage of your prospects will move all the way through your offer funnel buying your continuity plan, higher-priced products and services, and more.
The content you provide to your audience needs to be designed to encourage them to buy more of what you offer due to the solutions you provide.
This content
will make your customers feel loyal, part of the group, and special.
As you see, an offer funnel is a very powerful way to weed out unqualified leads, get the attention of your ideal audience, and gently encourage your prospects to become customers.
It doesn’t need to be pushy, or even sales-like.
You can simply use content, and solutions, to help your audience achieve their goals.
Why Do You Need An Offer Funnel?
Your job is to create the right information and content to lead your audience from awareness to purchase. A great way to do that is by creating an offer funnel.
You’ll match each stage of your audience’s buying cycle to the content that helps them become a paying customer or to move through your funnel, buying more expensive products or services.
Planning an Info Product
One of the best ways to get people to sign up for your list and get into your funnel is by creating an information product.
The best way to plan any information product is to figure out at least one problem that you can easily solve for your audience.
The information product can be a longer report, a short report, a checklist, or something else that is useful for your audience.
Everything starts with knowing who your audience is, where they hang out, what they do, and what they want or need. You could start with a small item as a freebie opt-in, building up to the most expensive products and services.
However, there is an even better way to create your entire offer funnel fast.
Once you have done the research about your audience, you know who they are, what their pain points are, and how you can solve their problems then you can actually build your offer funnel backward.
Instead of starting with the smallest thing first, start with the biggest most outrageous expensive product or service that you can offer then tiered down to the least expensive item or freebie after the fact.
Identify Your Most Expensive Product First
Depending on your niche, start by writing down what your most expensive product or service will be.
It will help to write it all down as if you’re going to create a sales page.
Choose what the price point will be for this most expensive product or service and all the benefits of it to your audience.
If you already have a super expensive product or service such as a long-term, one-on-one coaching package, start with that.
Because everything you do is designed to get more of your audience into your one-on-one flagship product or service.
When you start from there you can easily create the less expensive products and opt-ins that will most fit with this audience.
Identify Lower Priced Products that Work with Your Most Expensive Product
Now, look at any lower-priced products that you have that fit in with your flagship product or service.
If you don’t have any, you’ll need to create them as they fit in with the buying cycle of your audience.
For example, your flagship product is a $10,000 dollar a year group coaching with one-on-one coaching options mastermind.
What can you find or create that will appeal to and help your coaching clients?
Items like checklists, Facebook Groups, webinars, courses, training, information products, and more can all fit in here as long as they make the audience curious about the flagship product.
Identify Free Content/Gifts That Leads to Increasingly Higher Priced Items
Finally, you can fit in freebies that attract people to your flagship product or your lower-priced products too.
These might be free webinars, blog posts, infographics, eBooks, small reports, case studies, interviews, and more.
As long as it’s of interest to those who would want your main product you can use it.
For example, keep in mind you want people to join your flagship coaching program mentioned above, you might offer content that explains why coaching can work using case studies to prove your point.
Forms & Formats of Products & Services
Let’s look at some potential formats of different levels of products and or services to help get your creative juices flowing. Your most expensive product has a format, as do your other offerings.
Some products include a combination of formats. This is just a potential example for you to use as a guide.
Most Expensive (flagship) Product
Offer: Group coaching, with one-on-one coaching possibilities, as well as a membership website that offers a lot of materials and lessons.
Your price is $10,000 a year and includes all the bells and whistles.
Your exclusive clients get access to all your checklists, mind maps, infographics, lessons, courses, information products, group chat, group discussion board, weekly webinars, weekly Q & A, a one-hour one-on-one call each week, and daily email access and discounts on live events and other products that might be of interest to the audience.
Mid-Range Product
Now that you have your product, you can easily identify mid-range products that will solve a problem or two for your audience, while also making them want more.
A great mid-range item is an information product that solves one of your audience’s problems.
For example, if you’re a business coach, you might offer a course on branding, content planning, or social media marketing.
Essentially, you can take one small part of your cornerstone product and make it one of the mid-range products you offer.
Say that one of the things you help your clients do is choose a business name. You might offer a short course on naming your business.
Intro Product
When you figure which items you’ll offer in the midrange area, then you can identify the intro products to offer your audience. Intro products can be low-priced or free products.
Anything that requires an email address to opt-in will work great here. Webinars, teleseminars, podcasts, social media posts, Facebook live, YouTube videos, free eBooks or reports, checklists, and so forth all make great intro-level products and services as long as they offer a taste of what’s in the flagship or mid-range product or service offerings.
Let’s say you have a mid-range product that is a six-week course on branding.
You can offer a free branding checklist to collect email addresses and market that mid-range product and the flagship product to the people who signed up.
Free Products
While some of your intro products may be free, there are things that you may not consider free products.
Blog posts, social media posts, guest posts, images, and other things can be also be thought of as products.
But, if you have a good grasp of what you can do and what is possible, it’s going to be a lot easier to figure out what you need to offer your audience in terms of tools and free information.
Your product generally will be a combination of all of these types of content and services.
One way to figure out what you can offer in every step of your funnel is to conduct a content audit.
When you find out what you have, and what you need, you can fill in the gaps.
Conducting a Content Audit
A content audit can help you fill in the gaps.
Start by writing down your flagship product in the center of a piece of paper, and then circle it.
Now draw lines out from the circle and add in the mid-range products you have, and then add another line out from the mid-range products to add to the lower-cost product and information, and finally add in the freebies that you create.
It’s important to ensure that each item builds on the next and fits your ideal audience’s needs to a T.
Identify Gaps
You may realize as you are creating your content audit that there are gaps in the content that you can offer.
You may be able to do a better job creating relevant blog posts that have a compelling call to action, for example.
Perhaps you realize you have some blog posts that would make great podcasts and videos and vice versa.
Types Of Content
There are many types of content.
You may not even think of adding some items into a product package if it’s not one of the standard items needed.
However, often the little odd things draw the most attention.
Here are some different items you may want to consider using.
Blogs – You can put blog posts on your website, as guest blog posts on complementary influencer’s sites, and even LinkedIn.
Make sure that each post is unique, relates to the audience, and has a call to action such as sign up for a newsletter, sign up for a free course; download a checklist, sign up for a free webinar, and so forth.
Podcasts – These recordings you can list on your website, iTunes, and in other places that inform your audience.
For example, let’s say you’re a parenting coach.
You may want to do a regular podcast about parenting issues in order to show your expertise.
Again, always include a call to action so that listeners are reminded about the newest podcast and informed about your products and services.
Video – People really do love video and today there are tons of ways to offer video to your audience.
You can appear in webinars, use Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and other means to create a video for your audience.
Even if you don’t want to appear on the video, you can record short how-to videos using a screen recorder like Camtasia to show your audience how to do something that they need to learn that helps solve their problems.
Include a call to action to share, subscribe, and sign up for your email list by offering a free checklist based on the video.
Interviews – A great way to create content that attracts your audience is to interview not only clients but also interview movers and shakers in the field.
Think of who your audience would like to see you interview and try to get them.
Most people are excited and happy to do interviews if you make it easy for them to do.
Newsletter – A newsletter can be email or even print.
You can create one right on your website too.
A newsletter usually goes out on a regular basis at a regular time each week or month depending on how you set it up.
Also, a newsletter usually includes the same sections each time, for example, a case study, a cool article, a recommendation for a product or service, and of course a CTA for your flagship product.
Often, the newsletter provides a way to link to the content you’ve put up since the last newsletter thus bringing readers back to your website.
Email Lists – Each entry point to your list is usually associated with a freebie or product.
Choosing that item puts the customer on a specific path and email list according to the item he or she chooses.
But the products, paths, and lists should change, somewhat, with each decision made.
For example, if a woman and a man choose the same freebie, each chooses it for a slightly different reason or motivation.
If with the next choice, the man picks the “Dad” item and the woman chooses the “Mom” item, the list can be segmented or divided into two additional paths – one for mom and one for dad.
This makes it easier for you to market to moms’ needs as well as to dads’ because each is added to a different list, specifically to meet those groups’ needs.
Mind maps – You can create mind maps that are helpful to your audience and offer them as freebies or even in a package for a small price.
For example, any mind map you create for yourself might also be of use to your audience, or you can create some especially for the different things your audience needs to do.
Keywords – You may not consider keywords as part of your content but they are. It’s very important to do keyword research in order to help you come up with additional content ideas.
Keyword research is imperative to help you come up with the most relevant content for your audience.
Keywords help you align your business with your goals so that you can reach out to your customers in the most effective way.
Reports – One type of content that you’re likely familiar with our reports.
Reports can be long, short, and even turn into books.
A report typically covers one topic in-depth or it can be an overview of an entire niche.
It’s up to you, but creating reports is a great way to distribute information to your audience both free and for sale.
Surveys – This type of content is a great way to ensure that you get feedback from your audience.
Plus, when you deliver the survey, your audience will consider your offerings, if you word the survey correctly and include a CTA at the end.
Trends – One way to attract your audience is to find out what’s trending and then create or curate content around that trend.
Google trends along with Google alerts can be set up to help you follow trends and stay ahead of your competition.
Competition – Speaking of competition, they’re a great resource for content.
If you notice your competition running long-term ads around any topic of interest to your audience, then you can be assured that they’re also making a profit.
If you can identify gaps in their offering, you can one-up them and make it even better.
Social Media – This is probably one of your most useful forms of content right now outside of blog posts on your own website.
Social media engagement helps build trust with your audience.
You should always post a link to any content or information that is helpful to your audience along with a blurb on your social media networks.
The idea is to lead them back to your website or sales pages.
Webinars – Another very useful type of content today is webinars. Webinars are honestly the “it” thing today and if you want to be successful online, build trust, build a loyal and engaged audience, find a way to do webinars.
There are many software choices are available from Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and places like Zoom.com to help you.
This list isn’t comprehensive.
There may be other kinds of content such as apps for your audience to help you connect, engage, build trust, and more.
The important part is that the content is planned with your cornerstone product in mind so that you lead the right audience through your offer funnel.
As you fill in gaps, you’ll create more content in different forms.
This helps acknowledges your audience’s different learning styles.
They will also help promote your products and services with the idea of leading them to your pilot product.
Your Offer Funnel Checklist
Using offer funnels to help guide your strategy is an essential marketing step that gets huge results. So use this checklist to help you stay on track.
Outline Your Flagship Product or Service
Even if you don’t create it yet, you need to know what your highest-priced product or service will be so that you can design every lower-priced item or freebie item with the flagship product in mind.
- Know your audience – Do some research to find out who they are, where they are, and what their pain points are. Get to know the audience’s buying cycle, as well as how it fits in with the offer funnel.
- Make it amazing – During this phase, go all out. Imagine your flagship product as if there is nothing stopping you from making it.
- Price it well – Based on the offering, price it accordingly. Make the price high enough that you can limit how many people buy it while still being profitable. For example, if you have decided your flagship product will be a continuity program, mastermind, with personal one-on-one coaching price it what it’s worth based on the time you can devote to each individual. For example, this flagship product may only enable you to accept 20 people a year. What do you need to price it at for that to work?
- Create a Sales Page – Make a sales page for your flagship product.
Outline Your Mid-Priced Products or Services
These are also entry points into your list so that you can market your flagship product, but they are also products in their own right.
Using your flagship sales page, which lists all the benefits to your audience, come up with ideas for mid-priced products that are in alignment with the flagship product.
For example, if you offer branding, coaching, a mid-priced product, might be an information product about do-it-yourself branding to offer.
The up-sell can be a done-for-you service or hold your hand one-on-one coaching option.
- Information Product – Create an info product about something that has to do with your flagship offering, make it comprehensive.
READ MORE: YOUR SHORTCUT TO CREAT PRODUCTS
- Pricing – If your most expensive option is 1000 dollars, your mid-range product should be about 500 dollars. This means you’ll need to create a product worthy of that price.
- Create a Sales Page – Make a sales page for your mid-range product or service.
Outline Your Low Priced Products or Services
Using your sales page for your mid-range product, figure out what you can create that would tempt your audience to purchase that mid-range product.
If your mid-range product is a large info product, with a free forum, and maybe a few webinars or a course, then your low-priced product or service needs to be a little smaller and maybe even more niched down to beginner level.
Here are some ideas for you…
- Checklist – The idea behind the information product can be boiled down to a checklist; this checklist can make the audience member curious about what’s in the information product.
- Price it – If your mid-range product is 500 dollars, then your low priced product or service should be in the 100 to 250 range, or even lower. That can help guide you about what to include. Perhaps you want to create a template package with branding ideas for various niches.
- Create a Sales Page – Make a sales page for your low priced item.
Create Your Freebie Item
In reality, freebie items aren’t a given.
You may choose your entry-level item that is very low priced such as from 5 to 27 dollars, instead of free.
This works well if you have built up your audience and have a lot of information to give.
But, if you’re just starting, consider a freebie to help build your lists.
Some ideas for freebies or super low-cost entry-level products or services are below.
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- YouTube Videos
- Checklists
- Infographics
- Mind maps
- Whitepapers
Use the Right Tools
It’s important that you use the right tools to create and plan your offer funnel.
Consider these:
Autoresponders – Aweber.com, GetResponse.com, Sendlane.com
- Landing Pages – Instabuilder.com, Instapage.com, Clickfunnels.com
- Websites – Self-Hosted WordPress
- Webinars – Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Zoom.com
- Podcasts – Audacity.com
- Graphics & Design – Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva.com
Plan it Backward but Build it Forwards
You should build your funnel backward starting with your biggest product and ending with your freebie.
But, your audience will experience freebie first, expensive product last.
Building out
your ideal sales pages will help you identify the benefits of your product, and
help you match each stage with the right product or service and the right
content at the right time.
Putting it All Together
Create your offer funnel by knowing your audiences’ needs, motivations, and buying cycle.
This will enable you to create your flagship product or service, and then all your other offerings will stem out from there.
Based on your products and services you’ll need to create landing pages for each offering, plus an email list for each as well.
Create the flagship product and then a couple of midrange products along with freebies or entry-level products each with an email marketing series.
Remember, you can reuse and repurpose content for each list as long as it makes sense.
So, for example, let’s say you have 10 short mini-courses loosely based on your flagship product of a 52-week course with one-on-one coaching.
Each of these 10 courses offers an entry point into a new list.
Each list needs to be separate so that you can ensure the messages make sense but the message is to get the next product down the funnel until they approach your flagship product.
Segmentation is important because you don’t want to confuse your audience.
You don’t want to tell people who just signed up for mini-course 1 to sign up for it again, instead, you want to promote mini-course 2 or you might want to promote your webinars that promote your flagship product or service.
But, you can re-word the messages to fit with each list accordingly.
If you use your autoresponder software to its full potential you can actually set it up so it automatically moves someone from one list to the next based on whether they answer your calls to action or not.
Once you have created these products that offer new entry points into your offer funnel, using your website as the hub for all your products, services, and in-depth information, you can use social media as a way to push it out to others, to build relationships, and get attention.
Once it’s set up, it’ll be practically automatic and all you’ll have to do is curate and add new content occasionally based on the season, the trends, and the issues of the day.
And, with each new product you create, you make it easier for your audience to find you and learn about your flagship offering as long as you’re staying on brand and on message.
Getting Started
Now it’s your turn. What is your flagship product?
Don’t worry if it’s not even created yet.
You can create it as you go.
Consider that a 52-week course only needs to be created one week at a time.
But, you can still make the sales page now, and then use that information as a jumping-off point for the rest of your midrange, low price, and entry point products and services.
As you build it out, you’ll soon realize that your offer funnel has and will continue to explode your business in ways that you never thought of before.
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