If you’re just starting out with your online business then how are you going to attract the people that will ultimately determine your success or failure? Drawing customers into your marketing funnel is a basic of business that you will need to put a lot of thought into.
Case Study Of A Sales Funnel That Worked
You may know that I started out online with trading software products, designed to help people create their own business and trade successfully on the stock market.
The products I really wanted to sell were the high-margin information products, but without any credibility initially it was difficult to see me succeeding by going straight into marketing those.
I decided to create a couple of low-cost front-end products that would get people “dipping their feet into” my business and trying first.
I developed “Ultimate Trading Systems” which contained tips for designing trading systems, which sold for under $10. This meant that customers could sign up at minimal risk to themselves – there was no major investment involved. It also allowed me to build my reputation.
This all served a couple of purposes. Firstly it got the customers over the initial BIG step of having enough trust to share credit card and contact details with our business; secondly it allowed us to reference the higher-end products we were selling – the Metastock programming study guide, DVDs, eBooks, software programs , which were the information products that formed the core of our business.
Once we raised our credibility by delivering what we said we would deliver and showing the customer that we knew what we were talking about they became less nervous about spending on the bigger products.
If I was able to wind back time I would probably have added another step into the above process; I would have created an affiliate marketing set up to sell the products from the beginning – perhaps allowing them to sell the cheap products and retain all that revenue but incentivising them with commissions for selling the more expensive products; that way I could have had a whole army of people selling our products with little effort on my part.
Get customers using a marketing funnel.
How Can You Start Your Marketing Funnel?
Now how do you apply the above model to your own business?
The basic idea is to create cheap or free products to introduce customers to your business and connect them to what you really want to sell them.
This may be in the form of a free report, a free video or another low-cost product; something that benefits the customer by providing information that can help them, as well as helping to position YOU as the expert in your business segment.
Start up businesses need to address very early on how they will attract buying customers, as a critical part of their business plan. We have shown you how to go about building a sales funnel; if you would like more great tips about getting started you can check out the free-to-watch Competition Crusher Workshop. Just click here to find out more.
