When it comes to selling your own products (ebooks, digital products, memberships, coaching, software or services), you will universally hear from those who know best (those actually making REAL money in the digital product business) that you will do MUCH better selling to a list.
That list can come from traffic and offers made to paid traffic (Example being Adsense, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, etc…) or organic traffic brought in via organic content, participation on social platforms or affiliate referrals.
Once you get over the hurdle of developing your sales funnel and begin to see results with your list building, the challenge then becomes how you communicate with your list in a way that they will warm to you AND that you still make offers and sell them your ebook or digital products.
Many online entrepreneurs get this wrong, they make common mistakes like:
- Giving away a one-time incentive and then never following up with their prospect again
- Send their list ONLY promotional offers failing to catch the attention or interest of their list before they try to hard-sell them
- Fear selling altogether and simply make a few posts that try to inform or educate their list without ever trying to sell them anything
- Otherwise get the proportion of content, story-telling and selling wrong resulting in a list that quickly learns to ignore you
On the other hand, when you get it right, having leads work through your email sequences can be a GOLDEN path to selling them your digital products improving your sales anywhere from 3X to 10X what you could have sold to your market without a sales funnel or list.
Breakdown Of An Effective Sales Funnel
So what is the process for taking a new list subscriber from not knowing you to wanting to take out their wallet and give you their money – multiple times over a period of time?
I had the benefit of learning from some of the earliest direct sales and online marketing experts over a decade ago about the power of great sales copy and highly effective sales funnel follow up campaigns.
Since then, we have applied hundreds of different pre-sales and post-sales/up-sell campaigns to our own businesses and to those we have coached along the way through Information Marketer’s Zone where we walk prospect’s through an entire 6-week process of developing and launching their own high-profit digital information product.
Here is a sample of typical structure you can apply to your pre-sales funnel campaign…whether your choice of communication method is written, audio or video content – the process remains the same.
Empathy! Target Frustration, Pain And Desire To Change
First, relate and engage your prospect’s BIGGEST challenges, frustrations and desires. Nothing happens until you catch the interest and establish a relationship with your prospect and that starts as any relationship does – with showing you have something in common (empathy with your subscriber). The first two pieces in our follow-up campaigns (whether it be written course or sequence, a video series or audio engagement) is to share through story (where possible) an understanding of the frustration and desire going on inside your prospect’s mind that directly relates to the ebook or digital product value you will eventually promote to them. You can mention your product at the end of these sequences, but the main objective is to get them engaged, listening and wanting to learn more.
What’s Been Missing – Why They Are Still Stuck?
Second, as you move from the first and second segment into the 3rd and 4th you want to begin to show WHY your lead has not yet been able to find the ideal solution and what is required of the ideal solution (faster, simpler, more proven, more effective, etc…) that will frame how your product fits into the bigger picture of what is available to them. At the end of each of these sequences you begin to show how your product addresses that gap and how it has been having a big impact on those that are in the same position as your prospect
Ok – Here’s The Proof
Third, you build social proof through case studies, stories and testimonials from people your prospect can identify with and who have used the material in a way that has gotten them results. This takes some preliminary work on your part in terms of offering “preview” versions of your product to early prospects so you can test and validate your product with the market. You are looking for 2-3 champions (one will do if that’s all you can pull together) who will share their story and help proven that your product is not only good, but that it works and gets results. As part of these sequences, you begin a harder push for the product in terms of the benefit your prospect will see tying it directly to the proof they have just observed. Most conversions will happen at this point in your sales funnel in our experience.
Overcome Objections & Answer Questions
Fourth, you follow up with pieces 6,7,8, etc… with a combination of Q&A, common objections (with counter-arguments) and any additional proof or testimonials you put together along the way. In fact, we typically continue to drip these on our list weeks and months after their original sign-up as well as exposing them to additional products seeing strong conversions well into the weeks and months after your subscriber originally joined your list.
Always remember that your objective in any pre-sales funnel campaign is to
1) Relate and Engage your prospect
2) Show them (through empathy) that you know exactly what they are struggling with and
3) That you show them clearly with proof that you have a solution to get them where they want to be faster, simpler and more effectively than anything they have seen up until now. This last factor is really HOPE – your job is to inspire hope in the minds of your prospects so they will pull out their wallet and invest in your system as “hope in a package” for improving their life.
Structuring your sales funnel follow-up campaign this way not only makes it easier for you to plan each content piece, it turns your entire sales funnel into a highly effective, automated sales machine that will achieve the levels of conversion allowing you to further invest in list-building and powering your way through your market.
