Nothing is free in this world and that includes your sales funnel, but that doesn’t mean you should give up everything that costs you in this life.
It’s true that you should try to keep unnecessary spending to a minimum, that’s how you run a successful business.
However, you should not cut spending from something that actually matters and is important for your life, and success.
Sure, gym membership might be a little on the expensive side, but that’s what helps you stay healthy and energized, and the same goes for many other expenses such as the occasional dinner out in the city with your loved one or a good cup of coffee from that local coffee shop every now and then.
Whereas energy and health can be measured by feeling good each morning, what a properly launched sales funnel can achieve is something even better – A positive cash flow in your bank account.
Of course being healthy and feeling good are far more important than money, and that’s why you shouldn’t cut back from them either, but wouldn’t it be nice to spend money on something that could later finance all your other purchases?
With this article I wish to achieve two things: First I want to raise the awareness about the costs most people don’t understand related to sales funnels, and secondly I want to explain why, despite these very costs, you should still build a sales funnel.
The Costs Involved
Paid advertising
After you’ve created your funnel, the visitors won’t just run to your sales page and buy your product, no matter how hard you wish, and so you must market and advertise like your life depended on it (and for some, it might actually depend on it!).
That is why paid advertising, such as Facebook advertising and Google AdWords campaigns, eat up a lot of the starting budget. Luckily there are coupons and discounts available for AdWords with a bit of Googling.
Content marketing
Content marketing doesn’t directly have a cost, but it translates into a time cost if you’re sitting at your computer and writing articles each day.
As well all know, time is money and therefore that means that the longer you spend writing content to rank key terms the less time you have for making sales.
Software
While you can build your funnel solely based on a blogging platform like WordPress (if you have the skills and that’s something you’re capable of doing) there’s still the cost of hosting to factor in.
For most of us though, without the capabilities of web developing and the want of better things like heat maps, optimization tools and analytical capabilities, software such as ClickFunnels, HotJar and Improvely are the way to go.
And unfortunately, they aren’t free, but boy are they worth it.
You can save yourself heaps of time, effort and uncertainty related stress by using software such as the ones I’ve mentioned here, because you can automate and simplify most of the process involved in building, measuring and improving your sales funnel.
I highly recommend you to give ClickFunnels a try, and with the free trial, you can try out how easy the process really can be before committing your credit card for the process.
Hiring
Nobody is good at everything.
Nobody.
That’s why Tim Cook is not the one who designs iPhones and Bill Gates is not the one who does Microsoft’s accounting. They both excel at their own areas, but neither of these two successful men actually excel at everything.
Which is why they run companies with thousands of employees, each with their own field that they excel in.
And that is the reason why most of us marketers need to hire a freelancer or two in the process of creating our sales funnels.
Designers and copywriters are the two most commonly hired freelancers when it comes to sales funnels and landing pages, with the third most common being a freelancer who will build the entire funnel for you.
Whether you’re going for a turnkey project or just outsourcing the smaller things such as copywriting the call to actions, the freelancers will cost you.
Oh and just as a useful tip here, never go for the one with the lowest rate, trust me.
Having work with a multitude of copywriters and designers, you’ll see incredible difference from a designer who charges $400 for a logo to a $5 logo from Fiverr.
I’ve tried it many times and the ‘you get what you pay for’ saying is always true, especially in marketing.
Time
What is the one thing that each millionaire and business leader wishes they had more of?
That’s right, time.
They wish they had more time to spend working on their companies, to spend with their families and to sleep.
That’s why you can find so many articles telling you not to exchange your time for money if you want to be successful in life as an entrepreneur, because you’ll have to sacrifice more of your time to increase your gains.
And I agree, time is a valuable asset to have in life, and building a sales funnel does take time.
You should at least consider hiring a freelancer or two to help you out with some of the areas you might not be so good at, solely based on the amount of time it saves you.
One can always hire more workers, but one cannot buy more hours for themselves to do things by themselves.
Why You Should Build The Sales Funnel Anyway
Profit
Sales funnels do exactly what their name suggest, they sell your product, and that means money.
When your funnel reaches the breakeven point it covers all the costs on its own, and there’s no more financial stress for you, only potential to scale and gain.
Everything is black and white
Nothing to do with the actual colours, but a reference to everything being measurable and within the reach of analytics and data driven thinking.
It means that you can tell when you’re going to become profitable, how much money you can safely spend on expanding and scaling your business each week and month, and also how many customers you can gain over a certain period of time.
Refer to the sales funnel dictionary to familiarize yourself with the key terms.
All of these numbers are extremely valuable to you not only with your current sales funnel and product, but also in the future when building new products and ventures, or expanding your business to new areas and fields.
Without that analytical data all you could do to prepare is to make educated guesses and estimations, but with the actual data in hand there’s no more guessing and estimating.
You know with certainty how your funnel is going to perform.
Lifetime value
Do you know what the lifetime value of each individual customer is to you right this moment? Or do you even know what lifetime value means?
I’ll answer both questions for you.
Lifetime value means how much money a customer is going to spend on your products and services during their lifetime. If you sell directly to customers the lifetime literally means the lifetime of each individual customer, and if you sell to other businesses it means the lifetime of the company in question.
Either way, it’s an important metric to understand and an even more important metric to know the exact value of.
That’s the reason you should build a proper sales funnel if nothing else, to find out the value of each customer to you, and by doing so you’ll guarantee a peace of mind for yourself in the future. Why worry when you know exactly how much money you’re going to earn on average from all those new customers you’re acquiring each week?
Scale it up
Finally, my favourite reason to build a sales funnel, which is a bit of a combination of all the reasons above.
By understanding everything there is to understand and by knowing everything there is to know about your business and customers, you can achieve the ability to scale your business to lengths no one else has been able to scale to.
All you need to do is build yourself a proper funnel, either by using software such as ClickFunnels, or by hand coding it, but the most important thing to do is to actually build it. There’s a wide variety of digital marketing tools you can try out to optimize your funnel and scale it up as well.
After all, if you don’t build it you can’t reap the rewards.
Conclusion
Now that you are aware of the hidden costs involved in building a sales funnel you can prepare for them better than ever before, because now you also know that you really do need to build a sales funnel for the sake of your success.
By being well prepared you can leave the guessing, estimating and hoping for others and know that you will succeed with your funnel.
Well, what are you waiting for?
Is there something stopping you build a sales funnel? Comment below and I’ll get to it in the comments section.
I am brick and mortar propane dealer that trucks propane to my approx 2500 rural consumers with USPS addresses. I have limited number of emails. I greatly appreciate this article and want to pursue the funnel marketing style. Any ideas would help. Thanks.
That’s awesome Bill. What’s your main form of lead generation at the moment?
Well, it’s a business, so there’s going to be costs involved. I wouldn’t consider advertising as something that creeps up on you. But I recently hired a developer to build an app, and one thing that I didn’t factor in was paying someone to do a logo, ‘splash screen’ and icon. It’s my first time working with apps, so, now I know. My main focus was to make sure the app worked as intended and not a logo, etc. (app is still being built, but so far looks promising!)
That’s awesome Ryan, I can definitely relate to app costs as that was one of the first businesses I launched. Stay at it 🙂