ONCE UPON A TIME: My understanding of funnels was that they were something you used in the kitchen, our kitchen even had them in different sizes and colours.
They are used to get a larger amount of liquid or fine-grained substances into a container with a smaller opening.
Apparently, that’s not the only sort of funnel around nowadays. There are sales funnels, lead generation funnels, marketing funnels and discovery call funnels, and that’s just to name a few.
These funnels are used to get a large number of people through into a smaller distinct group, hence the name funnel, just like the old kitchen ones.
Neil Patel says on his blog, How marketing funnels work, “A funnel is the set of steps a visitor needs to go through before they can reach the conversion.”
To get the client to convert is basically getting the client to take up the offer you are giving them. Not all funnels will lead to conversion so that’s why I’m going to show you the basics, to what a good funnel is.
We are going to look at what a basic funnel looks like. You have probably used one before, it may have been called an opt-in page instead of a funnel though.
A basic funnel is in two steps:-
- The first page is an opt-in page. This can be very simple or you can make it a bit fancier with a pop-up but that isn’t necessary.
- The next step is the thank you page.
So we have this opt-in page and all our traffic gets sent to this page, I’m talking about our organic social media, our emails, our Tik Toks and even our videos on YouTube, they are all going to point towards our opt-in page.
Hark, what’s that, this is too easy?
Well because you’ve got this funnel stuff sorted, you want to take things a little further and of course, you have some products ready to go.
You could add-in a tripwire.
A what did you say? A tripwire, like when a bomb goes off? What’s a tripwire?
This tripwire isn’t going to explode like a bomb literally, but maybe metaphorically in your business.
A tripwire is a low-cost offer, this could range from $5 – $47.
This tripwire could potentially offset the cost of any Facebook ads that you may be running to generate the opt-ins.
You may want to offer your product straight up, instead of the low-cost offer.
So, say the opt-in goes straight to one of your $199 products.
I’ve found that this doesn’t usually work as well, it seems to work much better if you send the client to your product after the tripwire, this is what we call a very traditional value ladder.
- Opt-in
- Trip-wire $5-$47 offer
- Product $199
This can work really well, you can insert your own products and your own pricing, but this would be a funnel diagram.
You can stay with the basic opt-in and thank you page and keep things really simple, but it’s really up to you how fancy you want to get. It’s a personal choice and the longer you do these the better you will become, hence the fancier your funnels can be.
I recommend whatever is going to get it out there and into the world first is what you do, you can always come back and improve on it later.
