Small business owners typically slave away to create an incredible product to generate passive income. After online business owners spend time cultivating a following and building a blog, it’s time to launch the product. While that’s a good thing, it’s essential to focus on sales to make sure selling the product is a success. How does a person utilize the right marketing strategies and incorporate them into a sales funnel to create sales? Hang out with us during our next free webinar training to learn some tips on how to fill a sales funnel and for now, check out these fantastic tips! It’s time to start building a subscriber list and turning those subscribers into potential buyers!
Use your existing email list
If you have a current email list, then you’re in luck because Blogging Wizzard says you need an email list to have a better chance at selling your products. Since most of the people who land on your website typically won’t buy something right away, it’s up to you to get them to subscribe before sending out your campaign emails.
In preparation for your product launch, it’s a good idea to build an email list of interested people who you can eventually sell to.
Why? Because about 95% of people who land on your website aren’t thinking of buying. So all the efforts you put into your sales page, sidebar ads or call-to-actions won’t be as effective.
Instead, a much higher conversion opportunity lies in your email list. In fact, you can have up to a 4,300% ROI strictly from your email list.
That’s why it’s important to build your list early – before your product launch.
But don’t get the illusion that once people are on your list they will automatically want to buy what you have to sell.
Part of cultivating a list is to create warm leads. And a very effective method is to use a lead magnet that is highly specific and valuable to your buyer persona.
By understanding your buyer persona, you can develop a lead magnet that will resonate with them and increase the likelihood that they will hand over their email address in exchange for your free incentive.
The added benefit of using email as part of your sales funnel is that it allows for a more personal experience with your subscribers, giving you the opportunity to warm up your leads – sometimes without them really knowing it. This alone can increase sales by 20%.
Two proven methods to consider incorporating into your sales funnel to develop warm leads are a series of welcome emails or an email course.
Understand your subscribers
Do you understand your subscribers? Full Funnel emphasizes how important it is to know your subscribers so you can learn what their patterns, likes, and dislikes are. The more you understand about the audience you’re selling to the easier it’ll be to create a product they’ll want to buy.
Not all leads act the same. However, over time, it is likely that you’ll notice that leads from the same demand channel or source exhibit similar behaviors. For example, leads from paid search typically have higher buyer intent than other digital channels and will move through the sales funnel more quickly than others. On the other end of the spectrum, a prospect that is sourced through cold outreach will almost always take longer to move through the funnel.
The key to understanding these channels and their behavior within the sales funnel is to have a constant and consistent form of lead qualification and data recording within the CRM. By ensuring that all leads pass through the same qualification process, you’ll be able to reduce variables that impact lead quality and funnel velocity – or how quickly a lead moves through the funnel. Accurate data recording will also make it possible to draw conclusions about specific channels. For example, if your sales team is consistently noting that leads from organic search take longer to progress they’ll be able to properly manage both internal and external expectations when working a deal from that specific source.
Leverage social media channels
Another way to fill your sales funnel is by leveraging your social media channels. Impact says there is a lot of power in social media and to take advantage of that power you should use your channels to connect with an audience and get them to learn more about your brand. That’ll help you get more sales in the future.
The power of social media is real.
As a salesperson, you can leverage this power by creating your own profile and building a presence. Similar to lead nurturing emails, the key to establishing a strong social presence is to share relevant and timely resources.
For instance, maybe you saw a story in the news your network would find interesting, or you recently wrote a blog post summarizing key takeaways from an industry conference you attended. Whatever it is, make sure it passes the test of asking: would my network find this useful?
Create your social marketing strategy by first determining the channels you will engage on, how often you will write and share content, as well as the level of participation you will take in discussion groups and forums.
Establishing a strong presence and leveraging social media when you’re prospecting will help you expand reach beyond your own network.
The mere act of sharing on a public scale helps associate you and your company with expertise and thought leadership, making it much easier to gain trust when prospecting.
The bottom line: using social media to stay top-of-mind to your buyers increases your chances of “getting a seat at the table” when the buyer is ready to explore a solution like yours.
Create a mini course
After you have an active subscriber list and have a product or two lined up, Blogging Wizzard recommends setting up a mini-course. Creating a mini-course could be something you can work on right away or consider working on at a later time. Free email courses help people learn more about what they’re interested in, and if your class is good they’ll continue to come back for future courses and other products you release.
One of the most popular and effective lead magnets is a free email course. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and marketers are moving away from the typical eBook and looking at other ways to incentivize their email list.
And courses seem to attract a lot of email subscribers. Visitors feel that a course contains a lot of valuable information that’s bundled up in an easy-to-consume format like email.
Using an automated email sequence, you can create a mini-course on a topic that you know your target audience is craving, interested in or wants to know more about.
And by dripping your sales funnel over a series of days, many subscribers won’t realize you are selling to them.
Instead, it’s packaged as a series of highly valuable and step-by-step instructions to help a subscriber accomplish a task.
My email course for new writers is a free version of my paid course. It provides just enough information to help an aspiring writer get on the road to making money from writing.
The next logical step is to buy my complete course, which gives you a step-by-step proven method to launching a successful freelance writing business.
Over a series of ten or more emails I provide mini-lessons as well as follow-up supplemental guides once the course finishes.
The subscriber can access free lessons from my paid course, learn what my paid course is all about, and then learn more about my credibility with the supplemental guides I provide – all delivered over the course of several weeks.
Narrow your funnel
Don’t be too broad when targeting people through your pipeline; otherwise, you may not generate as many sales as you’d like. Pepperland Marketing says even though it may not make sense to narrow your funnel, focusing on a product that will hook a buyer is what you should focus on to make a profit.
You might be thinking “Why would I want to narrow our funnel? Isn’t bigger better?” Perhaps in some cases. But in most cases, if your funnel is too broad your reps will find themselves spending countless hours taking meetings and phone calls from prospects who are never going to buy. This is valuable time taken away from deals that have a real chance of turning into revenue.
Even if your team are wizards at closing deals with prospects who aren’t a good fit, this can cause more harm than good in the long run. A customer that falls outside the profile of your typical customer will come to realize that you’re not really geared for their type of company once they start to utilize your product or service. This makes them a retention risk; or even worse, someone who might badmouth your company to other clients.
A narrow, highly targeted funnel of good-fit prospects will help your sales team use their time effectively, help your customer success team avoid major headaches, and increase the odds your customers will turn into evangelists for your company.
It takes a while to perfect a sales funnel, but when you do it correctly, you will undoubtedly build your business and make a lot of money from subscribers. We discuss how to leverage your subscribers and how you can use an audience to generate income during our free webinar training. There are a lot of opportunities to make money on the web, and it’s in your power to do so!
Sources: Full Funnel, Blogging Wizzard, Impact, Pepperland Marketing
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