Building the marketing automation sales funnel is quite simple. Place a form on a website, and collect email subscribers. As your subscribers enter the “sales funnel”, they are presented with regular email messages. These are messages designed to help your subscribers in some way, according to your business. With a range of digital products in your sales funnel, you can benefit not only from a single item to sell. With multiple items to sell, you can earn income from:
- Your entry level product – a low value entry level item, priced to sell
- Subscription products – membership and software products which carry recurring fees
- Mid ticket offers – once someone purchases the entry level product, the funnel triggers a mid ticket offer, priced higher than the first
- High ticket products – the mid-ticket offer can trigger the high ticket offer
This is what the “six figure” funnel looks like:
Marketing Automation Sales Funnel: An Autoresponder
Not all sales funnels have multiple products in them of course, and most will only sell one or two, according to the business model. The main thing you need to build a funnel is an email autoresponder. An email autoresponder collects email addresses and distributes messages.
By placing a form on a website, you can encourage your website visitors to opt in by offering some freebie giveaway or other such legitimate bribe! In order to get your visitors to subscribe, your offer will need to be clearly visible throughout your website. It also needs to be an enticing offer which is worth them trading their email address for!
Marketing Automation Sales Funnel: Traffic
Of course nothing will happen without traffic to your website. If you already have traffic, you can simply place a sign up form and some kind of offer, to get people to sign up. But if you don’t you’ll need to generate traffic before anything can happen. To do this there are two main strategies:
- PPC – paid marketing – using Facebook, Google Adwords, YouTube, etc.
- Organic marketing – traffic from search engines, social media etc. through content generation
With paid traffic, you can waste a lot of money sending it to a website, where most of your visitors don’t enter the sales funnel by signing up to your email list. To get round this problem, you can build specifically designed landing pages to optimise the performance of your adverts at getting people to join your email list, and enter the sales funnel.
Using Landing Page Software In Your Marketing
Landing pages a designed specifically to drive traffic into your sales funnel. On a website, there’s a lot of distractions. People can browse about and click on multiple pages to see what’s there. But on a landing page there’s only two choices: sign up or leave. This forces the visitor to make a more carefully designed choice and helps the marketer to optimise for best performance. If you’re running paid advertising, you definitely want to send that traffic to a landing page not a website.
On a website, visitors have a small window to sign up, buy something or browse around. They are around for usually less than 10 minutes and then they are gone forever. But capture their email address and you are able to extend the time period dramatically. By sending messages which provide value, they are also more likely to open your emails when they arrive. But this can be for months, weeks, or even years and decades after they initially signed up!
Products & Services: Email Marketing
Many affiliate marketers use email marketing to promote their products and services online. But email marketing is fundamental for all businesses. It allows the business owner to automate the building of relationships with their subscribers, who will hopefully become long term customers.
With a range of digital products, you can use email marketing to automate sales globally, by only using online marketing techniques such as these. You don’t even need your own products because you can sell other people’s products if you don’t have your own! See also most profitable digital products
The “Engine” Of The Sales Funnel
The “engine” of the sales funnel is surely the marketing at the front end of it. Without a good marketing tactic, you won’t get any leads into your funnel in the first place. As mentioned already, you can create traffic through content generation and paid marketing. Paid marketing is definitely much faster than organic marketing, and you should ideally use both according to your budget and needs.
A good paid marketing strategy can be scaled up so you can attract thousands of visitors to your landing page each day. By cross testing landing pages against similar ones you can improve performance and lower the cost to acquire a customer.
See also the sales funnel explained.