Blogs are another great way to pre-frame an offer. Often we’ll contact someone who’s gone through our business program and been successful. We’ll sometimes pay them to write a blog post, testifying to the incredible experience. They can then post this praise on their blog. Next, we drive traffic to that blog post so readers see the recommendation and then click over to our product. Because the traffic is coming from the pre-frame of somebody else’s site, we dramatically increase our conversions. We are now tapping into the group of people who know and trust the blogger.
We can do the same thing with YouTube testimonials. If someone puts up their own video about one of our products, we’ll ask them to add some keywords to the description and add a link back to our product’s site. Then we drive traffic to the YouTube video that shares the story. Now the traffic comes to our site with a better chance of converting. Our conversion numbers in these scenarios are crazy high simply because of the positive pre-frame.
Another cool type of bridge page is a survey or a quiz. We can ask certain questions to get the mind’s wheels spinning in a particular direction. We plant seeds, and the visitors start wondering about a question we asked. Then they click over to the landing page where we reveal the answer or solution. It’s all about influencing what people are thinking about when they see your offer.
Phase #3: Qualify Subscribers
The whole goal here is to take all the traffic—hot, warm, and cold— and find out who is willing to give us an email address in exchange for more information. (This is known as subscribing to a list.) If people aren’t willing to give their email addresses at this point, they are highly unlikely to give me money later. Qualifying subscribers is done through an opt-in or squeeze page that offers something of value in return for contact information. This is typically the very frontend of your Value Ladder. For my companies, it’s usually a free report or a free video showing the visitor one thing they would really want to know. Let’s say I have one thousand visitors who come to my site each day. If I have a 30% conversion rate at this point, then I know I have about three hundred people who will be interested in my information. Now I have a list of warm leads, and I can continue to move them through the rest of my funnel.
Phase #4: Qualify Buyers
Immediately after you qualify your subscribers, you want to find out who among them is a buyer. How many of those three hundred people who were interested in getting free information are willing to pull out their credit cards and make a purchase? Notice I said you must find your potential buyers immediately after you qualify subscribers. Don’t wait a day or a week. Qualify buyers right away. My early mentor Dan Kennedy taught me this golden principle: a buyer is a buyer is a buyer. If someone is willing to buy from you once, they’ll continue to buy from you as long as you keep offering value. So as soon as someone fills out their name and email address and clicks the submit button, they should land on a page that offers something to buy. Offer them something of value that will hook them. It’s typically a little higher up your Value Ladder, and this is where I’m usually selling my “bait,” which is something your dream clients will really love. It should be priced so low that it’s an absolute no-brainer for them to buy. You want to qualify every buyer on the list, so don’t put up any barriers.
I usually use a “free-plus-shipping” offer or something in the five to seven dollar range. The offer is extremely cheap because I want all the buyers to go for it. Once I’ve identified who the buyers are, then I can market to them differently. I can pick up the phone and talk to them; I can send them a postcard or add them to a separate email sequence. At this point, I have two lists: subscribers and buyers. Each list is unique and gets treated differently.
Phase #5: Identify Hyperactive Buyers
After you’ve identified the buyers, you want to identify the hyperactive buyers. These are the people who are in some kind of pain right now and will buy more than one thing at a time. I’m often a hyperactive buyer myself. I remember taking my team bowling for a company party a while back. Now, bowling happens to be my third favorite sport (behind wrestling and jiu-jitsu). I’m not a superstar bowler, but I can hold my own. I love playing the game. That particular day, I brought my own ball, gloves, and shoes. I’ll admit I kind of wanted to show off in front of my employees. Well, that day one of the other guys had the magic touch. He bowled an awesome couple of games, and he just plain beat me. He was razzing me in front of all my team, and I remember feeling so frustrated. I can laugh at it now, but at the time, I really didn’t like it. So I went home and got online and started buying bowling stuff—books, videos, a new ball—anything that would alleviate my humiliating defeat. I was a hyperactive buyer!
You want to identify these people as quickly as possible. Who’s in pain right now? And what are they willing to buy right now to alleviate that pain? You want to be able to offer them something—ideally several somethings. If you don’t, they’ll leave your site and go find another site to buy from. People love to buy. And when they’re in pain and want relief, they will spend money in that quest. I forgot about bowling a few days later, and life continued on. I was no longer a hyperactive buyer of bowling merchandise. The window closed. So think about what you can upsell or downsell after your initial offer. If you’ve bought any of my products, you know I always have a chain of upsells and downsells. That’s because I want to identify my hyperactive buyers. Once I know who they are, I’m going to treat them differently, too.
Phase #6: Age and Ascend the Relationship
At this point, the initial sales experience is pretty much over. Points one through five all happen in five or ten minutes, and the next two points explain what keeps those people you’ve identified coming back to buy from you again and again. These next steps are what keeps them referring you to friends. During this step, you want to age and ascend the relationship. Remember your Value Ladder? This is where that ladder of products and services really becomes important. If you’ve followed the five phases of the funnel up to here, you’ve already moved people through the first level or two (or three) on your Value Ladder. Now, you’re going to continue to provide value and help people with whatever you offer. Allow some time to pass. How much time is up to you; whatever feels logical for your product is best. Let them dig into whatever products they’ve already purchased, and give them enough time to see the value you give. You’re going to ascend them up the ladder over a longer period of time, eventually moving them to the very top level.
This is the point where we start changing the types of funnels we use. If we started with a Free-Plus-Shipping Funnel, we may move the buyer into an Invisible Funnel or maybe bump them up to a Three-Step, High-Ticket Backend Program. (Don’t worry; you’re going to learn how to build these different funnels in the second half of this book.)
Phase #7: Change the Selling Environment
Typically, it’s difficult to sell super-expensive products or services online. Not many people are going to read a sales letter and click the buy button for a fifteen thousand dollar product. Some might, but usually you have to change the selling environment if you want to sell high-ticket products. The most common ways to change the environment are to sell the pricier items over the phone, through direct mail, or at a live event or seminar. If I send an email out to you and ask you to click an eight thousand dollar buy button, you’re probably not going to do it. But if I can get you to click a button and schedule an appointment to chat on the phone, suddenly I have a completely different sales environment. People on the phone are more likely to listen closely to an offer. The sales person has the benefit of live feedback. He or she can overcome objections and help people make up their minds on the fly. When we change the selling environment, we can communicate at a different level, and it becomes easier to move people up to the higher levels of the Value Ladder.
Let’s Review: If I were to consult with a retail store on how to increase sales, I would look at everything that happens during a customer’s experience with the s
tore, including the moment a customer saw the ad, walked in the front door, and received a greeting from the employees. I would analyze what the customer saw that made them choose certain items, what products were “point of sale,” and how the cashier upsold them during checkout. I would then analyze the follow-up sequences already in place to bring that customer back.
Increasing online sales happens the same way. You need to break out and examine each of the phases your customer passes through in your sales funnels. After you are aware of the distinct steps and break each out into a separate experience, you can then tweak each aspect to get more conversions. In this way, you can help people ascend to the next level of your Value Ladder. If you’re stuck in your business, it’s probably because there’s a glitch in one of these seven steps. What’s the temperature of the traffic you’re driving? What’s the pre-frame bridge you’re taking potential buyers through? On the landing page, are you qualifying subscribers? Are you qualifying your buyers on the sales page, and your hyperactives on the upsell pages? Are you aging and ascending the relationship to match the buyer with the offer they really need the most? And are you changing the selling environment for your high-ticket offers? Most importantly, how are you treating each of your different groups so that each receives a specially tailored experience?
Up Next: Now that you understand the strategy behind the seven phases of a sales funnel, I want to show you what types of web pages we use for four of those phases. Did you like to play with Lego blocks when you were a kid? I did. It was so cool to take the same, simple pieces and create something totally unique, over and over again. In the upcoming chapters, you’re going to learn how to build sales funnels Lego-style. In fact, I’m going to give you a list of building blocks that you can simply mix and match to build your offer to create an instant sales funnel. Then I’m going to give you some short cuts—the exact funnels and scripts I use most often in my businesses. You can copy and paste your own offers and ideas into these proven templates and have your business up and running in no time.
SECRET #11:
THE TWENTY-THREE BUILDING BLOCKS OF A FUNNEL
As I said, I think of sales and building funnels kind of like playing with Legos. I imagine there’s this big box of brightly colored building blocks, and I can put them together any way I want to get the desired results. If I want to get someone to opt-in to my list, I might use a yellow block and connect it to a blue block. If I want to make a high-ticket sale, I might add on green, red, and purple blocks. If I’m not getting the results I want, but I know I have all the right pieces, I might rearrange the blocks and see what happens.
This is the exact same process I teach my twenty-five-thousand-dollar clients. I go through each phase of the funnel and map out which building blocks will yield the best results. Then we test the funnels to see how well they convert. Sometimes we hit a winner right away, but often we need to move the blocks around a bit; for example, we might change some copy or add a video. Then we test the combination again. This is how direct response marketers have created magic for over a hundred years: Try it. Test it. Tweak it. And start all over again.
There are two types of Lego sets. You can buy all the blocks and create your own work of art using your imagination. Or you can buy special kits that give you the pieces you need to build specific things, like the Death Star or the Bat Cave. These kits even give you instructions on which piece to attach where and in what order. If you’re the kind of person who loves the Lego kits, you’re going to love our funnel-building software called ClickFunnels. All the pieces you need are inside the software, easily enabling you to create all sorts of funnels to sell everything from a simple opt-in to a high-end consulting package. And all you have to do is pick which cool thing you want to build and click a button. All the pieces are automatically arranged in the right order for you. If you’d like to try it out, you can get a free two-week trial at www.ClickFunnels.com.
This chapter is going to show you twenty-three of the most effective building blocks for your sales funnels. You will find that certain blocks work better at certain points on your Value Ladder, but remember, they are just blocks. You can move them around as you please. Markets respond according to a huge variety of factors. What works in my world might need a little tweaking in yours.
In the upcoming chapters, I’m going to show you some of my favorite ways to connect the blocks to create working sales funnels. I highly recommend you start with my version, simply because I’ve tested these in the real world over and over. I know what works in general. Then if you want to try moving things around, go for it! You may discover an approach I never thought of before.
The twenty-three blocks I use most often are used at specific times during four specific phases in the funnel: the pre-frame bridge, qualifying subscribers, qualifying buyers, and identifying hyperactive buyers. Remember, these four points all happen at the point of sale. Any time you sell anything through a funnel (which should be most of the time), you’re going to move your buyer through these four points. Most often, you’ll be creating new funnels during the age and ascend and change selling environment phases. When you do that, simply go back to these building blocks and create a new funnel.
Okay, let’s get started.
PRE-FRAME BRIDGE
The following are the most common building blocks I use for pre-frames. Remember, the goal with a pre-frame is to warm up the prospects so they are in the correct frame of mind to be most receptive to your offer.
Quizzes: A quiz is my new favorite pre-frame tool. If you’re on Facebook, it’s difficult to escape all the “What famous actor are you?” or “What jungle animal are you?” quizzes. They seem to get more and more ridiculous all the time. (This morning, I saw one that asked, “What type of storm are you?” Really.) The questions you ask don’t matter much; you just want to get people engaged in the process.
To get a great pre-frame, you want to get people thinking along the same lines as the next step in the funnel. Agitate the problem your business solves for them. Use the quiz questions to help them remember how much they hate weeds in their lawn or being rejected by women. One technique I love to use is to frame the first question like this:
Fig 11.1: A simple pre-frame quiz before someone joins your email list.
If you require people to opt-in (give you an email address) to get their quiz results, you’ve killed two birds with one stone. The prospect has moved through both the pre-frame and the qualify subscribers phases in the funnel. Then you try to qualify him as a buyer by making an offer immediately after he opts-in.
Now, you may be wondering how many questions to include and how to get people to stay with the quiz all the way to the end. I like to use three or four questions, and I number each one so they know how much farther they have to go (Step 1 of 4, Step 2 of 4 . . .). I do know some companies that use up to twenty questions or more in their quizzes with great success. Just like everything else, this is something you might want to test out to determine what is right for your unique market.
Another great reason to use quizzes is that you can segment your audience according to their answers. You might ask, “Do you have a dog or a cat?” Then you segment your list according to the responses. With sophisticated quiz programs, you can even have the subsequent questions match the two segments. So, your next question to the “dog” segment of responders might be, “How old is your dog?” Then offer answer choices like zero to one, under five years, under ten years, over ten years, etc. How does this help you sell more pet food? Well, puppies need different nutrition than older dogs. If you know how old their dog is, you can sell them exactly the right type of food. Also, if you know the quiz taker has a dog, not a cat, the ad on the next page should picture a dog. The quiz helps you segment your buyers, as well as pre-frame your offer.
FIG 11.2: Quizzes are great tools for engaging your audience and getting their brains primed for your sales page.
Articles: I love to use articles as a pre-frame for cold
traffic coming from a banner ad. These can be articles on your website, but I find they’re more effective if they appear on someone else’s site. It’s like a third-party endorsement. Here’s how it works.
Someone clicks your banner ad and lands on a website with a pre-frame article. It might be a case study of how you helped an individual solve a problem. It might be an article about how your product works. Or it might not have anything to do with you specifically, but it sets up the problem and what is required to solve that problem.
Then you add a call to action somewhere on the page. A call to action is simply where you ask the reader to do something: click here to learn more, subscribe today, get your free sample here. In an article, the call to action can be a simple link inside the text, a big button at the bottom of the article, a photo with a link, or a combination of these.
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