Outcome First

I love selling online and I love creating new relationships. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that business is a very relational thing now.

We have to be mindful of who you are marketing to, and what we are offering them.

Every interaction online either builds trust with a potential customer or is pushing them further away from a relationship with you. This is why you need to consider what your outcome is when you’re communicating, and even more so when constructing your funnel.

Think about the level of trust you’ve earned with each segment of your audience.

Are you selling to a long time follower or a first time blog visitor?

These are two very different groups of people. The followers are like your old friends, you’re comfortable with them. The new visitors are more like someone you’re trying to chat up at a party. Anything is possible!

It may not make sense to throw a huge offer on let’s say an 8-week online course to the first time visitor. Maybe instead you want to send them an email sequence of your best blogs and then follow up with a smaller offer on an ebook. That’s how you build trust and develop the relationship with your blog, your brand, or your business over time.

Segment Next

As I mentioned above, these are the types of questions you should be thinking about in terms of designing your offer, and that’s going to be specific to your business and where you stack up in your industry.

However it’s likely that you will want to pick a particular group of people within your greater audience to target.

This is where your email marketing provider really comes in handy as most services allow you to segment your total list based on previous behaviors.

Some obvious examples are, everyone who’s been to your blog within the past week and has opened up your “Welcome” email from your site opt-in.

Then of course there’s your die-hard fans, the people who open every email within the first 24 hours, and maybe have even purchased from you before.

I personally use Hubspot, although in the past I’ve used Infusionsoft, for my email provider which has an incredible tagging system to track these types of data. It can be a bit of a learning curve but it’s an amazing piece of kit.

Drip has similar functionality, and Mailchimp is one of the best beginner tools out there.

If you’re not sure how to get started, honestly just pick one that fits your budget and connect it to your opt-in. You can always change or upgrade down the road.

Funnel Math

Ok so now we’ve thought about who we’re selling to and what type of offer we want to deliver to them, it’s time to create that funnel.

Let’s says we want 50 total sales on the product, the pricing doesn’t matter for this example. But if that’s our sales target we then need to figure out how many people we need to get into the funnel in total to get that conversion rate.

If the average conversion rate on our list is 5% then working backwards we’d need 1,000 people to opt-in to our emails for this part of the funnel.

The next question then becomes, what do we have to do on the marketing side to get 1,000 people into the lead magnets?

This can be a combination of blogging, guest posts, content from social… There’s a wide range.

For argument’s sake let’s say we use that conversion rate of 5% again. With those metrics you’ll need to ensure your marketing is reaching about 20,000 people for the funnel to work properly.

What happens when you run the funnel is that your 20,000 people will then cut down to 1,000 email opt-ins and then from there, 50 sales.

Of course, all along the way the content you are providing must be valuable and engaging or you risk not hitting your target conversion numbers.

What’s truly great about using funnels is it allows you to create a systematic way to serve your market again and again.

Food For Thought: What segments want lower priced starter products vs high ticket – high value products?

Action Steps

  1. Write down your price and revenue goal.
  2. Divide revenue by price to calculate your total number of sales required. For example, $50,000 revenue from a $1,000 product requires 50 sales.
  3. Multiply total sales required by your average conversion rate to calculate the number of prospects you need. For example, 50 sales at a 5% conversion means you need a list of 1,000 prospects or better.

 

Result You Will Achieve

A formula for how many prospects you need to hit your revenue goal.

Mentor: Martin Shervington

Founder of Plus Your Business – speaker, author & consultant. With a background in organizational psychology, Martin is an expert in building & tracking funnels. Have generated ongoing 30,000 unique visitors to his marketing blog, generating his email subscribers list.

This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.