DotCom Secrets
Page 13
Hot traffic already knows you, likes you, and trusts you. They know your products, so it’s time to direct them to the backend as you focus on the highest level of service you can offer. Because these offers have a greater price, you probably aren’t going to be able to close many sales using online methods alone. You need to change the selling environment and get the prospect on the phone or to a live event. My favorite funnel for moving people from the computer to the phone is the High-Ticket, Three-Step Funnel.
In the upcoming chapters, I’m also including my favorite sales scripts to help you write the sales letters and videos you’ll need to include in your funnels. You’ll want to tweak them by adding in the details for your company and your market. Think of these scripts like a framework—all the elements you need are there, and you simply add in the details.
Before we go through these funnels and scripts, there are a few things to keep in mind:
1 These funnels start on the landing page. They do not cover the traffic temperature or the pre-frame bridge. They are the sales mechanisms designed to move a person from being a completely anonymous visitor to becoming a paying customer. Traffic and pre-frame are important elements, too, so be sure to consider them carefully when deciding which funnel to use.
2 When you’re ready to “age and ascend” customers on your Value Ladder, all you have to do is create a new funnel. The people you age and ascend will now be considered warm traffic, so you can treat them like old friends and approach your funnels from that perspective.
3 Some of these funnels and scripts are short and sweet. Some are very long and involved. Generally, the higher up on the Value Ladder you are, the more selling you have to do and the longer your script will be. Although, if you have hot traffic, you can sometimes get away with a less involved script.
THE BIG PICTURE
Fig 12.3: The core funnel moves people from the traffic stage all the way up the Value Ladder.
Before we move on to the individual funnels, let’s zoom out and look at the big picture, how everything we’ve talked about so far ties together. Figure 12.3 shows the overall framework of each of our companies.
Traffic that we control, we drive to a squeeze page. Traffic that we don’t control, we drive to a blog where the top third of the page collects email addresses. As soon as someone joins, through either of those sources, they become traffic that we own, and we start sending them the Soap Opera Sequence so that they can build a relationship with the Attractive Character. When that sequence is done, we start sending daily Seinfeld emails to help them ascend through the other offerings on our Value Ladder.
Now, immediately after a person joins my list, through either the squeeze page or the blog, they are taken to my first frontend offer. This is the offer I use to qualify my buyers. Those who purchase that product will immediately see a few point-of-sale upsells.
After that initial transaction is over, my email sequences will start to encourage people to purchase other products as they ascend my Value Ladder and join my continuity programs. I will use different types of funnels to sell people different products in the Value Ladder.
Figure 12.3 shows you the overview of everything we’ve discussed so far at a higher level. This is how I view companies when I first start working with them. After I see what a business looks like from this highlevel view, I can easily see what is broken and then dive into the specifics to get the results the owners want and need.
I encourage you to take what you’ve learned so far, along with what you are currently doing in your company, and use this image to find your holes. Determine what you need to change or create in order to build your solid foundation.
SECRET #13:
THE BEST BAIT
I have one last thing to share with you before I give you access to my seven proven funnels. I think if you understand this one crucial concept, it will change how you build your sales funnels. When I discovered what I am about to share, it literally changed my company overnight. I went from making about thirty thousand dollars a year online to making over seven figures in less than eighteen months.
THE ONE-HUNDRED-VISITOR TEST
Back when I was twelve years old and a newly addicted junk mail collector, I remember calling 1-800 numbers every day and ordering free information. It didn’t matter what the information was about—it was free and I wanted it. Free samples and free trials are everywhere, online and off. Why? Because they work like crazy to get people’s attention. Humans just can’t resist the word FREE.
If you haven’t read the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, I highly recommend you pick up a copy and read it. In this book, the author talks about an experiment studying the effects of the word free on buying behavior.
You can read about the entire experiment in his book, but here’s the relevant part for this chapter: Researchers offered a group of students a Lindt Truffle for twenty-six cents and a Hershey’s Kiss for one cent and then observed buying behavior. They found that about 50% of participants went for the Kiss, while 50% chose the Lindt Truffle. When researchers dropped the price of both chocolates by one cent, suddenly 90% of the students took the free Kiss, even though the relative price between the two was still the same. Researchers also ran tests in which they lowered the price from two cents to one cent to see if it increased demand for the Kiss, but it didn’t. They ran other tests where they lowered the price from free to negative one cent, but they still didn’t see any changes in buying behavior. They ran this same experiment over and over on college students, children, older adults, and more, yet the results stayed the same. There was power in free!
I thought that was a pretty cool concept, and it got me excited to implement this concept in my company. I asked myself, How can I offer something in my business for free? If everyone in my industry or my town is offering discounted products, but I can offer mine for free, suddenly the majority of people are going to choose me. So, how can I structure my offer to give something away for free?
I started trying things out and testing the results to see which offers I could give away to get the biggest response.
Eventually, I came up with my own experiment to test the effects of offering something for free. I call it my One-Hundred-Visitor Test. I ran it many times in different environments with different target audiences and products, and the results were pretty consistent in almost every test we ran. While we ran this test with hundreds of thousands of website visitors, I broke it down and simplified the findings to show what our core numbers looked like for every hundred visitors we sent through this test funnel.
Here’s how it worked: I sent one hundred people to a website where they could purchase a product. The product was offered for $197. We paid a talented copywriter and tested different pitches until we got a high-converting page. After all the testing and tweaking, we wound up getting about 1% of cold traffic to convert and buy the product. So, for every one hundred visitors, we made $197, and we got one new customer on our list. Most marketers would consider that result about average.
Then we started shifting things around and experimented with offering something for free. We wanted to see how this new offer would change the metrics and our income. So, we splintered off one of the best parts of our product and put it into a form we could ship to our customers for free if they’d help cover the shipping costs. We offered to put this information on a CD, a DVD, or a book. After people signed up for the free-plus-shipping offer, then we’d immediately upsell them on the same $197 product we were trying to sell before. I figured I would lose money because I was making people pull out their credit cards and buy the free-plus-shipping offer before they even saw the $197 offer. I mean, if only one-tenth of potential customers ever even saw the $197 offer, logically I should make less money, right?
Here’s what happened: We sent people to the website, and on average, a whopping 8% of people purchased the free-plus-shipping offer. (Remember, that’s up from 1% on the original page. And the free-plus-shipping page neede
d almost NO copy to sell, whereas on the original $197 page, we had to include really convincing text to persuade people to buy.)
Now, this is where the magic happens. Because the customer had ALREADY pulled a credit card out of their wallet and made a commitment towards the concept we were selling, about 25% of free-plus-shipping customers bought the upsell offer. That means we made $394 per one hundred visitors, and we got eight new buyers on our list. I almost doubled my money and got seven times more customers by adding in a free-plus-shipping offer! Pretty cool, huh?
I don’t know what it is about buyer psychology, but once you get someone to say the first yes, it’s so much easier to get the second yes. It’s a slippery slope. You get them started by saying yes to a small thing, then they are much more likely to say yes to a larger thing later.
People ask me if they can just sell (or just give away) a digital product instead of the free-plus-shipping offer. The answer is yes, you can, but you are missing out on some very powerful things. I like to make the free offer physical because it gives me the ability to use the word free, while also requiring the interested customer to pull out their credit card to pay for shipping and qualify as a buyer. If I decide to sell this as a digital product for a small price, then I lose the power of free. And if I just give it away free digitally, then I lose the power of qualifying the buyer when they pay the shipping costs. I also lose the ability to do a one-click upsell on the next page. Does that make sense?
Over the years, this concept has continued to evolve, as you’ll see in the coming chapters showing you the funnels. My team started adding multiple upsells after the initial free-plus-shipping offer, and we saw a huge increase in revenues. We also created sales scripts that work almost universally across most of the markets we’ve tested them in. You’ll get to learn more about those funnels and scripts and the evolution of our process in the next section of this book. However, the biggest advancement we stumbled upon was the order form bump. Let me explain how it works.
THE FREE-PLUS-SHIPPING ORDER FORM BUMP
After many initial tests, we started testing our free-plus-shipping concept against our thirty-seven dollar products. What we found is so simple, yet it has been one of our biggest secrets to increasing our frontend revenue with almost no effort.
We took our thirty-seven dollar products and tested them against a free CD—a simple audio recording teaching one of the most exciting concepts from the product. We started driving traffic to both landing pages, and we found that, on average, we could get about three times as many customers to pay shipping for the free CD.
So, we had three times as many customers following the “free” route and that meant three times as many people were now seeing our upsell path. But we were missing out on getting our thirty-seven dollar product into the hands of our customers and losing the extra up-front revenue from this frontend product. In other words, we were getting more frontend customers, but our average cart value (how much money you average from each person who goes through your funnel) was lower, making our revenue come out about the same.
Fig 13.1a: Order form bumps take about five minutes to implement and can dramatically improve your bottom line.
And that’s when we discovered the order form “bump.” We found that by adding a small box on the order form AFTER someone fills in their credit card information, but BEFORE they click on the submit button worked miracles. The small box offered to add the thirty-seven dollar product on to the order. We wound up with an average of about 34% of our customers adding the thirty-seven dollar product to their order!
This meant that by using a free-plus-shipping offer, we immediately got three times as many customers, and by adding the thirty-seven dollar order form bump offer, we were also able to get about one out of every three people to also order the more expensive frontend product. This new tactic gave us almost the EXACT same frontend revenue, but it brought three times more people through our upsell flow.
This little secret has allowed us to spend more than our competitors in almost every market we’ve ever entered. Even if you don’t use a free-plus-shipping offer on your frontend (and I think you’re crazy if you don’t), adding this order form bump to every order form will dramatically increase your cart value with almost zero effort.
DOTCOMSECRETS LABS
Fig 13.2: This is a real example of a free-plus-shipping offer “we made on my book 108 Proven Split Test Winners.
Let’s look at a real-world example of the free-plus-shipping principles in action. On the page shown in figure 13.2, people can get a free physical book titled 108 Proven Split Test Winners. It’s one of the best products I’ve ever created, and I was originally going to charge $997 for it. But after fighting with myself for a few weeks, I finally decided to follow my own advice. Instead of charging the amount I thought it was worth, I resolved to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. So I made it a free-plus-shipping offer. I knew when I created it that anyone who got this product in their hands would be a raving Russell Brunson fan for the rest of their life and would want to ascend my Value Ladder. On the order form we added a “bump” for our Conversion Krusher template for just thirty-seven dollars. Then after someone purchased the book, our first upsell was our Instant Traffic Hacks product for $197, our second upsell was my Perfect Webinar product for $297, and our last upsell was my High-Ticket Secrets program for $997. We started to drive traffic to “sell” my free book, and the results that came back were amazing. For each free book we gave away, we averaged about sixty-six dollars in immediate revenue from the upsells!
With numbers like that, just think how much more I can spend to acquire customers. And once we acquire someone as a customer, we continue to lead them up our Value Ladder to other products and services. So the revenue only continues to grow.
HOW DOES THIS WORK IF YOU’RE AN . . .
Author, Coach, or Consultant: Think of the most amazing results you could get for your clients, the one thing that would really solve their biggest problem, and put the information into a book, CD, or DVD. You may hesitate and feel some resistance to this suggestion. Many people think, Oh no, I can’t give that away . . . it’s my secret sauce! Trust me. Give it away for free, and you’ll reap the benefits on the backend.
eCommerce Business: Tailor this concept to your space. For example, if you’re selling something like birdcages, you could give away a CD titled How to Teach Your Parrot to Talk. Or, maybe you sell custom suits; you could offer free cuff links. See how this works?
Network Marketer: For this niche, you could create a CD or DVD showing your secret method of finding leads or converting them into distributors. You can then use this bait to attract people who are already interested in network marketing and who you know will make great distributors for your team.
Affiliate Marketer: Create your own informational CD or DVD to give away and build your own list and then sell other people’s offers on the backend. You can even interview someone with more knowledge about the industry for your free-plus-shipping offer.
Offline Business Owner: Think about your business and the problems you help to solve. Figure out the biggest problem for your potential customers and share your unique solution. Record that solution on a CD or DVD and give it away as a free-plus-shipping offer. Or find a physical product you can offer for free-plus-shipping—anything that will attract consumers and get buyers into your Value Ladder.
Let’s Review: The secret to converting cold traffic is leveraging the power of free. Whatever you’re sharing in your free-plus-shipping offer, it can’t be boring, general knowledge. It has to be unique, sexy, or fun—the more unique, the better. Using free-plus-shipping offers is the fastest way to qualify your buyers and get people into your Value Ladder. Remember, if someone isn’t willing to pull out a credit card and pay a few bucks for shipping on your product, then they probably aren’t going to buy your other products either.
Up Next: Now that we’ve covered all the strategy behind Value Ladders
and how to turn those into sales funnels, would you like to see the seven core sales funnels we use in our companies, as well as the exact scripts we use to sell each of those products? In the next section, I will be revealing the nuts and bolts behind building your winning campaigns.
SECTION FOUR:
FUNNELS AND SCRIPTS
IMPORTANT NOTE
Before we start this section, I want to point out that each of these funnels, and their accompanying scripts, serve a different purpose. I use all of them at different points in our company and at different levels of our Value Ladder. I also want to mention that both the sales funnels and the scripts are just a framework that form a starting point. Once we get the basic framework of a funnel working, we add on other components to grow it into a larger, more complete sales funnel. For example, for the Free-Plus-Shipping Funnel I described in the last chapter, we added an order form bump as well as three upsells or one-time offers (OTOs) to build the final funnel.
The scripts I’m giving you in this section are also just a framework. You need to add in your personality, the elements of your Attractive Character that will make these static scripts come to life. So use these funnels and scripts as the starting point, but don’t be afraid to tweak them for your company’s needs.
One of the biggest questions I get about funnels is this: How in the world do I actually build these out so they all flow together the way they’re supposed to? I don’t want the technology factor to get in the way of implementing what you’ve learned in this book. Each of the funnels I’m about to show you can easily be built out in ClickFunnels.com. In section 5, you will get a full tutorial on how to use ClickFunnels to build out these funnels.