The Definitive Guide On How To Create A Sales Funnel

No matter what you sell, getting prospective customers to buy doesn’t happen in an instant.

Instead, the sales process unfolds in stages (the sales funnel): Warming up cold prospects to the idea of spending their hard-earned cash on your products and priming them for purchases in the future.

Unfortunately, in today’s climate of low trust and fierce competition … that’s no easy task.

In fact, if you’ve ever sold a product or service, you already know how frustrating and painful creating a genuinely valuable offer can be only to have it disappear into the wasteland of failure.

That pain is only intensified if you spend money on marketing and advertising with little to no return on investment (ROI).

The antidote to this pain — and the secret to unlocking success — lies in creating a sales funnel built around five stages. In other words, using a proven template that’s not just easier and faster … but converts like wildfire.

Fair warning: This article is long. Of course, that’s only right with a topic as powerful as sales funnels.

To help guide you, we’ve boiled it all down into a single template and 10 point checklist you can grab right here — think of it as your fast-track cheat sheet to a winning sales funnel …

What is a Sales Funnel?

Answering the question, “What is a sales funnel?” is no easy take (that’s why we wrote an entire article on the subject). By way of offering a simplified definition …

A sales funnel is a marketing strategy designed to turn cold prospects into long-term customers by funneling them through five stages. The “funnel” metaphor means you’ll begin with a large audience of prospective buyers that will eventually pare down to a smaller group of highly-targeted, high-value customers.

“The final goal is not to make a sale, at least not a single sale. Instead the goal is to create returning customers with life-time value.”

Breaking the buyer’s journey down into smaller steps (i.e., stages) allows you to be more precise about how and when you present offers.

For a small business owner, you may start with only one or two products. For a large B2B company, you may have numerous offers fueling lead generation and nurturing new leads through the sales cycle, sales pipeline, or sales team.

Suddenly, everything can feel complex. For the sake of simplicity …

Think about ordering at a McDonald’s. If you order a hamburger, you’re asked if you’d like to add cheese. Order chicken nuggets and you’re asked if you want fries with that. Order a combo meal and you’re given the chance to make it a large or “supersize.” This is a sales funnel.

Then, think about McDonald’s new mobile app and its product-specific loyalty programs, like McCafe Rewards:

Every offer is actually a series of offers designed to increase purchase size as well as drive subsequent purchases.

At the biggest of big picture, a sales funnel is usually divided into three parts:

1. Top of the sales funnel (ToFu): Target audience
2. Middle of the sales funnel (MoFu): Potential customers
3. Bottom of the sales funnel (BoFu): New and existing customers

On some level, this funneling occurs even if you don’t have intentional sales funnel stages in place. By taking a templated approach — especially if you’re growing an online business — you’ll dramatically increase the number of customers you end up generating.

The key to an effective sales funnel: Engage with and provide increasing value to your prospects throughout each sales funnel stage.

No matter how simple or complex, the fact is sales funnels work when they’re built according to certain universal principles. Case in point:

• 87% of consumers choose to do business with vendors who provide valuable content at all stages of the buying process
• 63% of consumers need to hear a company’s value proposition(s) 3-5 times before they trust these claims
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured prospects

In addition to top, middle, and bottom, sales funnels have traditionally been structured around four sales funnel stages known by the acronym …

Sales Funnel AIDA: Awareness. Interest. Desire. Action

The AIDA model was developed in the late 19th century by advertising and sales pioneer Elias St. Elmo Lewis. And, it has become the backbone of almost every successful advertising and marketing campaign since.

Why is it so successful?

AIDA takes potential customers through the emotional journey of making a purchase — guiding the buying decision from initial attraction to taking action.

1. Awareness

Sometimes referred to as “attention,” the first stage of the sales funnel is where a brand catches the eye of new audience members via marketing content and/or a valuable baseline offer.

2. Interest

Here, the brand will begin to forge a deeper relationship with their prospects, becoming more actively involved in learning about their goals and/or problems. In doing so, you can begin providing preliminary solutions, allowing them to experience “quick wins” — and become more engaged.

3. Desire

Consumers who reach this third sales funnel stage have become convinced that they do, in fact, have a larger problem that needs solving. Moreover, they’re coming around to the idea of making a purchase to solve said problem. At this point, the brand showcases how their premium offering can be of service.

4. Action

The final stage of the sales funnel has prospects deciding to purchase (or not purchase) the brand’s premium product or service. You’ll need to reinforce the value of your offer — as well as the downsides of not making a purchase.

These sales funnel stages describe the general process all of us go through — as well as some general action steps you should take to keep their prospects moving further in the funnel.

Depending on what you’re selling and who your target audience is, you’ll want to tailor each stage of your sales funnel(s) accordingly.

(Yes, you absolutely can have more than one funnel in place at a given time. This will become more clear in a bit.)

AIDA is a great starting point, but there’s a better way …

Sales Funnel Stages Explained: The 5 Stages of Filling Your Sales Pipeline

Though similar in appearance and structure, our approach  — based on the work of Russel Brunson — differs from the common sales funnel AIDA model:

The key difference involves getting prospects actively engaged with you at every stage of the process.

Whereas AIDA has the company giving, giving, giving until a prospect converts, Brunson’s funnel has both parties engaged in a process of give-and-take throughout. This version elicits smaller conversions from the target consumer along their path to purchase.

It’s called the value ladder and its steps are a direct reflection of the sales funnel stages:

We might even say that each stage of the sales funnel (bait, frontend, etc.) contains a “mini funnel” within itself. Let’s take a look at how to make this happen.

Pre-Stage: Know Thy Offer(s)

First things first, you’ll want to define everything you’ll be offering your customers as they move through your funnel, from bait to backend.

Before digging into each section, look at your overall sales funnel in its entirety with the end goals in mind.

This pre-stage step is vital to success. If you don’t know what you’re offering your customers at different points they won’t exactly have good reason to keep going.

You also want to determine how you’ll connect each subsequent offer within your funnel. The idea is to use your lower-tiered offers to prepare customers to get full use out of the next product or service.

Think of it like: “Okay, you’ve experienced great success with Product A — now let’s supercharge this success by implementing Product B into the mix.”

(Again, if “Product B” doesn’t build on “Product A,” your customers may not have much reason to move to the next sales funnel stage.)

While your customers will, of course, experience your overall sales funnel in stages, you need to have a clear blueprint in place for how and why they’ll move through it on their way to your most valuable offering.

Stage 1. Traffic

Not all traffic is created equal: Be laser-focused on how your target audience enters your sales funnel.

This preliminary stage is a sort of “controlled awareness,” in that you want to be intentional who you bring into your funnel — in turn allowing you to avoid attracting poor-quality prospects.

This stage of the process, then, involves optimizing the ads, content, and affiliate sources you use to drive traffic to your funnel. Think about:

• Where your high-value prospects “hang out” on the web
• What social networks and/or content they interact with
• What free or lower-cost offers get them to take initial steps with a new brand

Needless to say, if you aren’t sure how to get brand new customers interested in even your lowest-tier offers, there’s no way you’ll be able to get them interested in your big-ticket items or services.

But, by meeting your target audience where they are (and where they’re comfortable engaging with your brand), you can get them to enter your funnel on their terms — and get them on track toward where you want them to be.

Stage 2. Bait

A lead magnet offered either for free or at a very low cost to the prospect.

Some clarification here …

While “Bait” is a stage of the overall sales funnel, each “mini funnel” will require the use of some kind of low-risk offer to hook your prospects and get them to engage further.

At the lower tiers of the value ladder, bait may come in the form of free content, webinars, a course delivered as an email sequence, or product samples. At the higher tiers, break-even offers — meaning, you intentionally won’t make a profit on the sale but will make a profit as they continue through your funnel — can be used to keep the customer engaged and ready to move forward.

If you give something away for free now, you’ll have primed the recipient to make a more valuable purchase at some point in the near future — which is where the real money is to be made. You can even operate at a loss for bait offers, as long as the next stages in your funnel are ready to step in to sell at a profit.

You’ll also be able to funnel out those who don’t take you up on your bait offer. After all, those who aren’t interested in your low-risk offers likely won’t be looking to purchase your big-ticket items.

Stage 3. Front End Offer

A low-price and low-risk offer that provides value to new customers, allowing them to solve surface-level issues with minimal investment.

Once your prospective customers have taken you up on your bait offer, you’ll want to send them directly to a landing page or squeeze page showcasing your “leveled” premium offer. (You can also — and should — simultaneously follow up with email offers; a practice known as “funnel stacking.”)

Here’s where the stakes get a bit higher for your business …

Those who see this sales-focused content have been pre-qualified (via your bait offer) — meaning they should be interested in the premium product or service you have for them at this point.

That is, if you’re able to keep their attention and effectively communicate the true value of your offer. You can make this happen by optimizing the various elements of your squeeze page …

Squeeze Page Copy

Copy — that is, the words themselves — needs to quickly communicate the value of your offer and prime your audience to take immediate action.

This can be done by adhering to the following checklist as you create your squeeze page copy:

• Let your brand personality come through (be a relatable character)
• Tailor the message to your audience
• Shorten sentences and paragraphs, but provide MORE depth
• Write at or below a 6th grade reading level
• Use bullet points or numbered lists
• Include a subheader or image every 200-300 words

In short: Speak directly to your target audience — and don’t over-complicate your message.

Natalie Hodson’s landing page does a great job of this. 

The easier it is for your audience to recognize the value of your offer, the more likely they’ll be to take you up on it.

Squeeze Page Images and Videos

Words are the backbone of your squeeze page. But, content can take a variety of forms:

• A backstory video showcasing what your brand is “all about”
• A demonstration (or, explainer) video showing your product in action
• An interview with a current or past client in which they discuss their positive experiences with your product or service

The approach you go with depends heavily on the value ladder level you’re currently targeting.

For example, if you’re aiming to get a new prospect to commit to a preliminary offer, you’d want to quickly introduce them to your brand, and discuss the “quick wins” they can expect to experience.

Typically, this video content should be short and to-the-point — maximizing the chances that your new prospects will watch it in its entirety. VideoMastery.com’s hero video is a mere two minutes and fifteen seconds:

Its testimonial videos (i.e., mini case studies) — later on the same page — are even shorter. All of them are under one minute:

On the other hand, if you’re aiming to make a final sale on a higher-priced product, you might decide to go the longform route with you video content.

Reason being, those who are on the cusp of making a more costly purchase will want as much info as you can give them — and will be more willing to stick around long enough to be convinced to do so.

Squeeze Page Social Proof

Social proof can — and should — be used to reinforce the claims you’ve made on your squeeze page.

Tailor this content to the value ladder level you’re currently targeting. Basically, this means ensuring the customer commentary you use matches the offer being presented — and is specific to the use case of the audience being targeted.

LadyBoss Labs seeds a variety of social proof types throughout its squeeze page, opening with brief testimonials and logos to show authority …

… and adding direct endorsements along with real social media posts from its customers later on:

Generalized social proof regarding your brand may work to engage new prospects. However, you’ll need to use specific anecdotes from successful customers when looking to make bigger sales further down the funnel.

Squeeze Page Call-to-Action

No matter what you’re offering on a given squeeze page, it needs to be crystal clear what your audience needs to do to receive it.

Don’t beat around the bush here. Make sure your CTA stands out from all other elements of your landing page — allowing interested customers to take the next step as soon as they’re ready.

There’s no mistaking what action LadyBoss wants its website visitors to take …

In some cases, you might even want to include CTAs at the top, bottom, and middle of your page. The last thing you want is for your engaged audience to not engage further with your brand simply because they aren’t sure how to do so.

Stage 4. Middle Offer

A progressively more valuable and intensive solution that helps customers solve a more deep-seated problem — and better prepares them for your highest-price point product or service.

Now we’re getting down to business.

At each stage of the value ladder, as your prospects reach the bottom of your “mini funnel,” you’ll need to provide an irresistible offer that allows them to accomplish a certain task — and prepares them for the next tier of the ladder.

Going back to LadyBoss, its middle offer is an invitation to “Join The CLUB”:

If you’ve thought about middle offers before, the question is …

Upsell or Downsell?

An upsell is an offer that costs more than your front end offer; a downsell costs less. It’s an important part of the sales funnel.

Before or immediately after they confirm their order, provide an upsell offer that will increase the value of their initial order — and enhance their overall experience with your brand.

(And, of course, allow you to increase your revenues, too.)

Typically, upsell offers come in the form of:

• Sale prices on bulk orders
• Customized version or a variation of the initial product or service
• An offer to increase subscription length at a discounted price
• Supplemental products (cross-sells)

If they don’t end up taking the upsell, consider sending them a lower-risk offer that meets them where they are.

Examples of downsells include:

• A payment plan for the otherwise expensive upsell
• A smaller, lesser, cheaper version of the upsell offer
• A limited and discounted trial period for the upsell offer

In either case, the idea is to take full advantage of the opportunity at hand — while providing the exact value your prospective customers are looking for at the present moment.

Email Marketing

You’ll notice that in nearly all examples getting a visitor’s email address is emphasized.

That’s because email marketing is a critical part of the customer journey: Before, during, and after buying.

We don’t want to get off topic, especially because email is a detailed tactic. That’s why we’ve written extensively about it all on its own:

• How to Grow an Email List Starting from Scratch
• How to Create Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

Stage 5. Backend Offer

Your most valuable, intensive, and costly product or service that customers can use on a continual basis to solve an ever-present problem in their lives.

By now, we’ve made it pretty clear that your ultimate goal is to tie each of your “mini funnels” together to create one overarching sales funnel.

The hope is to transform brand new customers into high-value patrons of your company. As we’ve said, the vast majority of your target audience simply won’t be ready to engage with your highest-value offer …

Until they’ve gotten a taste via your lower-tiered products or services.

The thing is, there’s no guarantee that your customers will simply move onto the next value level once they’ve experienced all you have to offer at their current stage. In many cases, your customers are more likely to stick to what they know, rather than risk jumping up to your next tier of service.

(Or, they may churn completely after having received all you have to offer at a certain value level.)

The onus is on you to convince them that they stand to gain a ton of value from the next-highest level of your value ladder.

Note that, at this point of ascension, the customer will be in a sort of limbo — they’ve gotten near-full value from the previous stage of the ladder but aren’t quite ready to enter the next “mini funnel” you have prepped for them.

So, instead of heavy-handedly pushing your more valuable offer, you’ll want to simply keep them engaged with your brand.

Basically, this involves doing whatever you can to continue providing value to them after they’ve purchased a given product or service.

This could mean:

• Providing personalized content, in their preferred format, that allows them to get the absolute most out of the product or service they’re currently using
• Delivering high-quality customer service and support — from onboarding to troubleshooting to instructions for “power use” of your offering
• Gradually touching on the added value provided by your higher-tiered service — specific to the value sought by the individual customer
• A community (Facebook group) they can live and grow within

It’s simple …

If you can prove that your main concern is on providing value to your customers — even after they’ve already given you their money — they’ll be that much more likely to trust your more costly offering will be worth the price of admission.

How to Create a Sales Funnel: Don’t Start from Scratch

Conducting Market Research

Many of your competitors have likely already built a sales funnel or marketing funnel, generating engagement and sales from the exact type of customer you’re looking to attract with your own funnels.

We’re not advocating that you simply copy what your competitors are doing. But, you do want to take note of how competing brands are working to nurture their audience toward the “big sale” at the end of their sales funnel.

Which is where sales funnel hacking comes into play.

What is Sales Funnel Hacking?

“Funnel hacking is the process of strategically investigating the sales and marketing process of your competitors, which you can use to model and test within your own sales and marketing processes.”

In other words, you’ll actually participate in the various stages of your competitors’ sales funnels, then reverse-engineer the process in order to determine how to go about creating your own.

How to Funnel Hack Your Competitors

1. List Your Competitors

Your main focus, of course, will be on your direct competition. Make a list of all known companies that sell similar products or services to yours.

You also want to consider looking into your indirect competition, as well. Here, you’ll be considering companies who don’t necessarily sell within your niche, but whose audience overlaps with your own.

In doing so, you’ll be able to gain a better understanding of the sales tactics that get your target audience to take action.

Stay broad as you start out. While you’ll eventually pare down your list to your most-successful competitors, you also want to take note of competing companies whose approach isn’t as effective as it could be — allowing you to avoid making the same mistakes.

2. Engage, Document, and Analyze

More than simply checking out your competitors’ websites, landing pages, marketing platform and other marketing content, you’ll want to take screenshots and create swipe files. As you do so, be sure to categorize these artifacts accordingly.

We advise you to create separate folders for Bait, Frontend, and Backend offers for each competitor you analyze. You also may want to create a folder specifically for documenting ad creatives — which you can further categorize based on the medium the creative is presented on (e.g., Google, Facebook, etc.).

At this point, you don’t necessarily need to engage too far with your various competitors — especially if doing so requires that you spend money on their products or services.

You do want to take as many preliminary steps as you can — such as signing up for mailing lists, requesting additional information, and downloading free content.

Once you’ve amassed a robust collection of artifacts, you’ll then want to start analyzing them from a number of different vantage points.

This involves asking blue-print type questions:

• What words (copywriting) are they using in their headlines?
• What colors are they using throughout their content?
• Are buttons located above the fold or below the fold?
• Do they use videos and images, or just text?
• Are they listing benefits or features?
• Do they include social proof like testimonials?
• Are there any pop-ups during exit intent?
• Is the header section of the site fixed?
• Is there a full sign up form or an opt-in form?
• Do action steps require more than one touchpoint?
• Is price mentioned for their products (if so, what are their price points?)
• How many words are there on the homepage?

The idea is to take note of as many different aspects as possible — and to understand why your competitors decided to take the approach they did.

(It’s actually much more important to focus on the “whys” behind these surface-level questions. Remember, you’re not necessarily going to copy your competition — but you will be implementing their successful approaches in your own way as you create your own funnels.)

As you find the answers to these questions, make sure to document this information within the folders you’ve created.

3. Assess Tracking Strategies

Throughout the above stage of the sales funnel hacking process, you’ve most likely only seen about 20-30% of your competitors’ sales funnels.

That said, we want to know which tools your competitors use and determine whether or not you should be using these same tools as well.

To figure this out, you’ll need to download two add-ons for Google Chrome:

First, check out Ghostery. This extension allows you to see the “invisible” web, detecting trackers, web bugs, pixels and beacons placed on web pages by Facebook, Google, and other platforms that gather information about your internet activity.

While this app is primarily designed to stay hidden from trackers, you can use it to identify which trackers and programs are being used by competing businesses.

The second is BuiltWith Technology Profiler, which allows you to see the tool stack running on a website — especially the marketing and e-commerce platforms — with the simple click of an icon.

This will begin to answer traffic and conversion rate questions about your competitors’ strategies, such as:

• Are they using remarketing (also known as retargeting)?
• Are they using Google, Facebook, or other platforms?
• Are they using any conversion rate tracking software?

The list of questions you might ask (and find the answer to) is nearly inexhaustible.

What’s important is that you dig up the information that will matter most to your company as you begin to build your own sales funnels. All of this should go right into the notes you created during the previous step of the sales funnel hacking process.

4. Use Competitive Intelligence Tools

You also want to find out how your competitors are acquiring traffic in the first place. This will tell you which sources to focus on when looking to uncover high-value prospects for your own business.

To unearth these game-changers, enlist the help of the following competitive analysis tools:

AdBeat or WhatRunsWhere

These tools instantly show you the strategies of online advertisers in your industry. You can see anything from how many days they’ve been spending money and running a particular ad to the creative content and landing pages they’re sending paid traffic to.

SEMRush

Focusing on the SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) side of things, SEMRush gathers insight into how your competitors generate traffic.

This includes information related to search positions (and changes), ads, keywords they’re targeting, the copy, video advertisements, backlinks, estimated traffic generated, keyword research — and much, much more.

SimilarWeb

This traffic-focused tool allows you to check out a wide range of activity that’s going on within the websites you’re profiling. With SimilarWeb, you can identify top referring sites, as well as top destination sites as people flow to and from your competitor.

5. Purchase From Your Top Competitors

Once you’ve determined which of your competitors are worth taking a closer look at, your next step will be to actually engage with them as if you were an interested customer.

(Note: While you might balk at the idea of giving money to your competitors, the insight you’ll be able to glean — and subsequently implement into your own sales funnels — will be well worth the price of admission.)

Here’s where you want to get ultra-meticulous in your documentation and analysis.

You don’t necessarily need to go through with a top-tier purchase — but you want to act like you’re going to do so.

That is, once you’ve nearly reached the end of their sales funnel, you’ll want to hop on a sales call with them — all the while taking note of everything they talk about throughout.

Since this is the “big” sale your competitors have been aiming to make from the get-go, you can be sure they’ll leave everything out on the table, so to speak. This, in turn, provides the perfect opportunity for you to uncover any information you may have overlooked throughout your sales funnel hacking process.

(Again, while you don’t necessarily need to make this final purchase, doing so may provide even more information regarding the true value of your competitors’ products or services. This can not only help you further develop your own sales funnel, but also allow you to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ offer — and make the necessary improvements to your own offering.)

Ask yourself questions like …

• What specific value or benefit is being provided by a given offer?
• What action do you have to take to receive the offer?
• What strategies do they use to keep you moving forward?
• How does each subsequent offer relate to the previous and next sales funnel stage?

The answers to these questions will round out your understanding and allow you to clearly see what you should be offering your customers throughout your own sales funnel.

1. Match Domain Name and URL to Your Offer

This is pretty self-explanatory, but still worth mentioning …

The domain name and URL you use for your sales funnel must be representative of your brand and your offer.

A URL like “RobsCompany.com/salesfunnel1” comes off not just as generic, but also as overly-salesy. While your customers are smart enough to know when they’re being sold to, there’s no reason for you to be blatant about it.

It sounds like a small detail, but matching your URL to your offer will add to the customer-facing nature of your brand — and will be one less thing to distract your audience from taking the next step.

We’re disciplined about this at ClickFunnels. Not only for the SEO (search engine optimization) benefits of matching URLs to content, but also for the clarity they bring.

Notice the straightforwardness of our own and a couple of the pages we looked at above …

• https://funnelstackingsecrets.com/start
• https://funnelhackerscookbook.com/funnel-recipes
• https://www.ladyboss.com/slimdown

2. Structure Each Sales Funnel Stage Relationally: WWWH

Speaking of being customer-facing with your sales funnel content, it’s vital that anything your prospective clients see speaks to them on a personal and individual level.

This means using WWWH …

• Who is your ideal customer,who do they trust, and who should you put on the page to embody that (current customers)?
• What do they want out of your product or service? What are they trying to escape from or find a solution to?
• Why do they want it? What are the deeper emotional needs and pains they’re currently experiencing? Why is the cost less than the benefit?
• How can your images, words, and calls-to-action bring it to life?

Remember: Your customers don’t want to be sold to; they want to receive value.

And they don’t want to put all that much effort into solving their problem either; they want you to make it easy for them.

3. Address the “Catch”

If you’ve done the above, your prospective customers will likely be left saying to themselves:

“Well, this sounds way too good to be true.”

Your goal is to clarify to them that your offer is the real deal. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your offer will always be on the table.

Maybe you’re offering a time-sensitive sale or a one-time offer. Or, maybe you’re planning on discontinuing a product or service after a certain period of time.

Whatever the case may be, addressing the “catch” to your current offer can instill a sense of urgency — making them more likely to take immediate action.

Since your customers will likely be looking for a “catch” anyway, you might as well give them one that puts the ball in their court. That way, they’ll understand that the only thing standing between them and the offer is … themselves.

4. Add a Guarantee

In furthering the customer-facing and “too good to be true” nature of your sales funnel, you also want to minimize the amount of risk your prospects will have to take when going through with a purchase.

In fact, you can even take this a step further and explain that it’s you who will be taking a risk by doing business with your customers. Known as risk-reversal, the idea is to make your potential customers feel like they have no reason not to take advantage of the offer at hand.

Whether you’re offering money-back guarantees, double-your-money-back guarantees, or any other kind of risk-free assurance, you’ll inherently bring your prospects to trust your brand in two key ways …

First, they simply have nothing (or very little) to lose, and a ton of value to gain. Second, confidence in your ability to follow through with your promise will shine — building trust when it matters most.

5. Recap

If a prospect or customer is close to the point-of-purchase at any level of your value ladder, two things are all but certain:

• You’ve provided them with some sort of value in your relationship thus far
• They’ve grown in some way since they’ve first engaged with your brand

As you begin to close in on a sale, it’s imperative that you make these two points clear to your potential customer.

The goal is reinforcement. On some level, the customer knows these things — but may not be consciously thinking about them when you actually make your offer.

But, with a little gentle nudging on your end, they’ll be reminded of how far they’ve come — and how much further they’ll be able to go.

Notice how Secrets of Success order page summarizes all the elements in short-form immediately next to the two-stage order form:

6. Sequence the Right Pages

The key to successfully nurturing consumers through your sales funnel is to get them to take action at every touchpoint.

You even want to go as far as to create touchpoints for your prospects to engage with throughout your sales funnel. This is where techniques such as the two-step tripwire come into play.

As the name suggests, a two-step tripwire has consumers taking two steps to complete the overall task at hand. Most often, this two-step process is as follows:

1. The prospect fills out a contact info form on the first page of your sales funnel (typically in exchange for a freebie offer)
2. On the second page, the prospect is shown a small-ticket, frontend offer. If they choose to make a purchase, only then will they be asked to provide payment info.

This allows you to implement the “foot-in-door” technique, as you’ll be gradually asking the prospect for more information after they commit to providing some surface-level info.

Then, you can hit them with the more valuable offer after they’ve become a bit more invested in your brand.

Even if a prospect decides not to go through with the follow-up purchase, you’ll still have collected their contact info — and can then send them more applicable offers in the future.

7. Order Your Offers Intentionally

It’s vital to know exactly how each of your “mini funnels” connect with one another to create an overarching sales funnel that encompasses all levels of your value ladder.

Within each “mini sales funnel,” this means offering content and freebies that prepare the customer to get the most out of your main offering at that level. Within your overall sales funnel, it means ensuring those who have gone through one “mini funnel” are fully prepared to enter the next.

Basically, you want your customers to feel like they’ve “graduated” to the next step of your value ladder once they’ve reached a certain point with your lower-tiered products.

If a subsequent offer has little to nothing to do with the previous product or service you’ve offered, your audience will likely be rather hesitant to take the next step with your brand.

8. Connect Bundles, Bumps, Upsells, and Downsells

Once a prospect has gotten to the point where you believe they’re ready to make a purchase, you need to be sure the offer you present them is highly-relevant to their specific circumstances.

Of course, the ideal scenario is that your prospects simply take advantage of your main offering as is.

When your “typical” offer isn’t exactly what a customer is looking for … you’ll need to have subsequent offers at the ready to keep them on track toward converting.

If a prospect doesn’t feel ready to purchase your mid- or top-tier service, you’ll want to have a related, yet lower-value service to offer them. It’s important to tailor these downsells to the prospect’s specific needs (as opposed to providing a more generalized downsell to all prospects who decline your main offer).

On the other hand, if a customer does accept your main offer, you also want to provide an upsell that’s relevant to their needs. They’ll be much more likely to accept this subsequent offer if it provides the specific value they’re looking to get from your brand.

9. Include Social Proof

No matter how valuable your products or services are — and no matter what you have to say about this value — you absolutely need to back up your claims with proof from your current customer base.

By sprinkling social proof throughout your sales funnel, you’ll give your prospects the evidence they need to feel confident.

For one thing, the modern consumer places more trust in their peers than the brands they do business with. Providing various types of social proof can allow prospective customers to truly understand what they have to gain by engaging further with your brand.

Social proof can take lots of different forms:

• Short endorsements
• Long-form testimonials
• Written case studies
• Video testimonials
• User-generated content
• Pictures and videos posted to social
• Logos or “trust seals”
• Before and after images
• Numerical reviews and ratings

10. Remember Exit Intent Offers in Your Sales Funnel

As you probably know, most people who click-through to your landing page will end up leaving without taking even the smallest step forward.

While this is to be expected, you shouldn’t just accept it without putting up a fight.

Rather, you’ll want to take action to keep them on your landing page — and, ideally, giving your offer a second thought.

Include exit intent offers on each of your landing pages. This means adding popups, overlays, and other such “extras” to be presented to your site’s visitors once it becomes clear they’re ready to head elsewhere.

Within these overlays, you can include one-time offers for freebies, downsells, or other lower-value offers that your more hesitant prospects may be interested in receiving.

This way, you can make a last-ditch effort to keep these individuals engaged before they navigate away from your site for good.