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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to write a highly effective email autoresponder sequence for your sales funnel.
An effective sales funnel is all about taking people from your market, turning them into engaged followers, and ultimately paying customers.
We’re going to walk step by step through a practical example of a sales funnel with Jocelyn’s business Elementary Librarian.
You will learn
- What you need to know about an email autoresponder
- The exact process we go through to set up a sales funnel in our online businesses.
- How to run through the numbers and discover the true potential.
- What a good lead magnet really looks like.
- What your first small paid product should look like.
- What you should expect when setting this up for yourself.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Aweber – email marketing tool
- Jocelyn’s site Elementary Librarian
- 101 Library Centers Book
- The Flipped Lifestyle Sales Funnel Template – Free PDF
- Email templates – COMING SOON!
Click Here to Download The Flipped Lifestyle Sales Funnel Template
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
I recently launched my first online product and made 347 dollars. It was less than what I wanted but more than I ever would have thought I could make just a year ago. I have learnt so much about online products through this first effort and I’m so excited to refine this product, my sales process and re-launch it in the spring. In addition, I’ve learnt a lot about the small potatoes product which will help me launch a signature product this January. This first one was 47 dollars, and my signature will be at least 249 dollars. Thanks so much for all you guys do.”
Dave Shrein at Daveshrein.com
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Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! Today we’re going to show you how to write an email autoresponder sequence with your sales funnel in mind.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you again this week. We are recording this episode on a Friday night here at Flipped Lifestyle headquarters. My mom wanted to have a sleepover with the kids, so we dropped them off, we went a got a little workout at the gym, just and Jocelyn and what do you do when you get rid of the kids on date night? You pop some popcorn and record a podcast.
JOCELYN: We know how to party around here.
SHANE: That’s romance baby, that’s what it’s all about over here at the Flipped Lifestyle, you know what I mean? So forget about that, let’s just go on into our topic today because it’s an embarrassing date night, we don’t want to talk about it anymore. Last week we talked about sales funnels and we talked about how to create a sales funnel template for your business to where you could get people from your market into your audience and then automate that process that takes them to the point of sale. This week, we are gonna take that basic sales funnel template, and show you how to turn it into an email autoresponder campaign where you can automatically get the sales funnel working in your favor, and we are going to do it with a real-life example. We’re gonna take Jocelyn’s elementarylibrarian.com website, we’re gonna look at the sales funnel that we re-create if we were starting over from today, we’re gonna take you all the way through the steps in the sales funnel and show you exactly what each email would say along the way so that you’ve got something that you can look at when you’re creating your own email sequence for your online business. Once again, this is gonna be a pretty dense episode. You’re probably gonna have to go back and listen to this a couple of times, but if you’ll go to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast45, I am going to have a book, like an e-book created for you guys. It’s about five to six pages, I’m gonna have an illustration created exactly what the sales funnel should look like, and it’s also going to have basic templates for each email in the sales funnel so that you can look at it and see what the objective is for each message. And that will help you write your first six or seven emails in your autoresponder so you won’t have to do any guesswork. You can just get something done; as soon as you start collecting emails, you can run people through this and start testing it for your online business. Once again, to get that free guide for creating a sales funnel template, go to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast45. But before we get into the topic today, we want to read to you a success story from a member of the Flipped Lifestyle audience.
JOCELYN: All right, today’s success story is from Dave Shrein, and I hope I said that right Dave. He’s at Daveshrein.com and he says, “I recently launched my first online product and made 347 dollars.”
SHANE: Well done.
JOCELYN: Good job, Dave. “It was less than what I wanted but more than I ever would have thought I could make just a year ago. I have learnt so much about online products through this first effort and I’m so excited to refine this product, my sales process and re-launch it in the spring. In addition, I’ve learnt a lot about the small potatoes product which will help me launch a signature product this January. This first one was 47 dollars, and my signature will be at least 249 dollars. Thanks so much for all you guys do.”
SHANE: That’s an awesome success story Dave; we’re so proud of you man, it’s just awesome to see that you’ve been taking action and you’re seeing some return on the time and money investment that you are making on your online business. We love hearing these success stories from you guys, we love putting them on our walls so we can look up and see different things that you’re doing to your business to make money online, and how things are going great for you guys. If you ever have any success and it comes from some advice you got from our podcast, or maybe you’re a member of our Flip Your Life course, or just anybody out there that uses anything we do and you achieve some success online, please let us know that. It really keeps us motivated and we just love hearing about those stories from our audience. All right, so let’s jump right into our topic right now. This is gonna be a very structured, A-B-C-D type episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast because we’ve got a lot of stuff to cover and just a little time to do it. So we wanna make sure that we make it all the way through this sales funnel template and the autoresponder email campaign that we’re gonna set up in today’s show. So before we jump into the sale funnel, Jocelyn is gonna talk a little bit about email autoresponders and tell you exactly how that works and why it’s critical for your online business.
JOCELYN: So an email autoresponder is basically just a sequence of emails that you write ahead of time and when people sign up for your email list, they automatically deliver to those people on a timeline that you specify. And these messages, they guide people ideally from just being a member of your audience, to becoming a customer, hopefully, and a raving fan who loves your stuff and consumes every single thing you put out later. That is the ideal of course, with an email autoresponder.
SHANE: And basically you use an autoresponder so you don’t have to manually email every single message, every single time, to every new member of your audience. You can automate this process to where you can plan out how to get them through your sales funnel and then deliver those messages over time. Like, you can send the first email as soon as they sign up, a day later they get another one, three days later they get another one and then maybe once a week, until they buy something. You can do anything you want; aweber.com is the service that we highly recommend that you use to do this when you set up an email autoresponder campaign. You can just go in and set all those emails up so you don’t have to do things in real-time and that’s how you start generating passive income with your sales funnel. So, whenever you are thinking about a sales funnel, it’s all about communication and communication starts with that email autoresponder campaign. So that’s kind of the angle that we are going at all this information that we are going to cover in today’s podcast. So with that autoresponder in mind, we’re gonna take you through the steps that we outline in the last podcast, podcast 44, and we’re gonna talk about the sales funnel and then Jocelyn is gonna show you how the email fits in to guide people through this process. All right, step one of the sales funnel process is we’re gonna identify your target market and then you’re going to introduce yourself to them. You can do that with content, you can show them something, just something that says, ‘You like what I do, here’s some of the stuff that I do, come be a part of my audience.’
JOCELYN: In terms of my site, elementarylibrarian.com, my target market is elementary school librarians. There are tons of librarians out there, but people who don’t teach classes everyday probably won’t care a whole lot about my products. So, there are about 90,000 approximately elementary librarians in the United States. That does not include the rest of the world and I do have some international clients. So for the sake of argument, we’re just gonna say there’s around 90,000; of those 90,000, probably about 75,000 of those librarians might possibly be accessible to us in some way.
SHANE: Because you’re gonna have to contact these people somehow whether it’s – you know, they’re searching for content to read, or you can email them, or maybe you can send them a mailer of some kind. You’re not going to be able to reach every single person in your market when you find it. So basically we’ve determined that maybe we could possibly pay to contact or somehow get in front of about 75,000 of those 90,000 librarians.
JOCELYN: And that’s probably over time too. I mean, that’s not something we’re gonna be able to do in a month.
SHANE: Yeah, that’s like three or four years to be able to do that; just to get your message out in front of all those people.
JOCELYN: These are the people that we are gonna target just to introduce my website and my brand to them and the ways that you could possibly do that are through organic content, just blog posts that you write, through Google Search, you could do paid ads on Facebook, on Google, you could to a direct mail campaign to their schools and I do have the benefit because all schools are public records. I can look up addresses and possibly even do a direct mail campaign which I have considered.
SHANE: And this is an important point. Really in any market, if you could figure something out where you can contact business or get those direct mailers out, it doesn’t have to be online contact just because it’s an online business. Any way you can get someone to come to your website, whether it’s word-of-mouth, or sending them a postcard, or a sample of what you do physically, is perfect for getting people in your audience.
JOCELYN: You can also target them on social media, maybe you target them on Twitter and Facebook groups, something like that, in forums, I’ve talked about Wikis before, those are kind of big in education. Those are just a few of the different ways that you could possibly target people to come into this world that I have, for Elementary Librarians. These people are what we call, cold leads. They are people who don’t really know me, they don’t know anything about my website, they are just starting to learn about everything that I have on there. And so in order to get them into my sales funnel, I’m gonna have to offer something to them to get them warmed up. I have to turn these potential audience members into prospects.
SHANE: All right, so in step one, we identify our market, we figure out how many people in that market we could possibly get in front of over time, okay, and then we put content out and we get content in front of them, so we can introduce our brand to them. So once you identify your market, once Jocelyn finds this market, she figures out the librarian, she knows who she can talk to, you’re probably going to whittle that audience down even more. So maybe now we’ve got about 50,000 librarians. About 50,000 librarians over – you know, this might be over six or seven years we are talking about but if we can reach 50,000 of those librarians over time, they will become a part of Jocelyn’s audience. That’s all the people that know about Jocelyn. They are not yet in her sales funnel. They just know about her. To get them into her sales funnel, we’re gonna have to give them some kind of magnet or bait that they give us contact information for. So basically we’re gonna create some kind of lead magnet. So basically for free, you’re gonna offer people in your audience, something that will solve a problem, or hit a pain point, or make them feel good. You’re gonna give them something absolutely for free and that’s going to change that relationship between you and the audience member. Now, the person is not just someone who’s aware of you, they’re not just in your audience, they have actually signaled to you, ‘Hey, I am so interested in this, I’m gonna give you my email address and you’re gonna give me more of your content; content that’s not quite accessible so that I can get deeper into your brand. You’re allowed to contact me now.’ And those people are now prospects. Those are people who could eventually become clients, customers because if they want more for free, there’s a chance they want more and be willing to pay you for it. So prospects are starting to warm up to the brand. They are no longer cold in the market, they’re no longer just audience members who kind of know about us, now they are one thing to learn more because they have taken action to show us that.
JOCELYN: So if you look at that audience of possibly around 50,000 librarians and remember these are just numbers that we are picking just for simplicity sake.
SHANE: Yeah, these are not true numbers of Jocelyn’s actual audience demographic; besides, there are 90,000 librarians, all these other members are just so we could pick easy round numbers to move you though the funnel and you can kind of visualize it.
JOCELYN: And this is gonna vary from niche to niche but if we look at those librarians that I could possibly reach over time, probably let’s say maybe half, 20,000-25,000 will ever take that next step and want to learn more about Elementary Librarian. So the next question is, how do I get them to move from just casual audience members who stumble upon my website to somebody who might possibly purchase something for my website?
SHANE: This is where we’re gonna give them something free; so Jocelyn’s gonna just talk about maybe what she offers these librarians and this is really specific to your niche. No one can tell you exactly what this is. You’re gonna have to study the people you want to sell to and learn what they want.
JOCELYN: All right, this lead magnet, or also known as ‘opt-in bonus’, it has to be something that’s really good. Something that people can’t resist. It’s got to be some type of quick win for a problem that your audience is facing that’s gonna make them step forward and say, ‘Yes, I want to have the solution that you have to my problem.’ And we talked about this a few shows back; this is what a lot of people are missing. So if you have been out there doing something online and you don’t have people who are entering your sales funnel, are you solving a problem for them?
SHANE: Is your lead magnet good enough? Are you just giving away something random for free like, I don’t know, the transcript or something of your podcast or like, what else, people give away like, you know, ‘Three tips for being better at this –’ you know, it’s got to be something more substantial than that.
JOCELYN: So, what I do is I offer a series of free, detailed, lesson plans and these are for the beginning of the school year. They are really good because teachers come into the school year, they’ve been out all summer, nobody wants to work on lesson plans in the summer unless you’re me and you’re trying to sell them online, but that’s another story. So, you know, they are here at school, they don’t really want to be there –
SHANE: They’ve been off all the time, they’ve got a thousand other things to worry about; teachers have to clean up their own room, set up their own desks, shelve all the books. I mean, you’ve got so much other stuff going on when you start a school year. It’s so overwhelming. Really, things like lesson plans for three weeks down the road are totally lost in the shuffle.
JOCELYN: So especially during the summer time, I really ramp up advertising and start getting the message out there to these people who have never heard of me before. ‘Hey, here’s some free lesson plans for you. I know you’re extremely busy at this time, I want to help you; just sign up here and I’ll send you free lesson plans to get your school year started right.’ And not only are they free lesson plans, they also include everything that you need to teach your classes and that includes like PowerPoint presentations, worksheets, I have a few videos; everything that you need is included right there in that little package. And the good thing about that is that once they start using those lesson plans, they are now a prospect; they now become a little bit dependent on what I have given them and guess what, that will start running dry. You know, I’m not gonna give them free stuff forever, so then they possibly become a prospect and possibly a paid customer.
SHANE: We really want to stress here, how good this opt-in is going to be; it’s got to be absolutely ridiculous. Jocelyn gives these incredible lesson plans and she basically gives them enough to take care of them for maybe a week or two to where they don’t have to worry about planning their lessons. They know that the eight hours of their day that they are in class is gonna be covered at the beginning of the year, and that’s going to take all the stress off, take all the relief off. It’s really hectic at the beginning of the year, teachers go home really tired so they know they don’t have to go home that night and sit down. They can relax, kick their feet up and just recover from the start of the school year which is so crazy and they don’t have to plan lessons, they don’t have to do that. It takes all that out of the system. So you’ve got to come up with something that’s extremely good for your niche as well. The lead magnet has to be really good to turn audience members into prospects because it’s got to be something that they look at and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have got to have that.’
JOCELYN: All right, when people join my mailing list, the first thing that I’m going to do is send them an email and welcome them to the Elementary Librarian brand and kind of tell them what I’m all about. I’m gonna tell them about my mission, why I started the site and the next thing I’m gonna do is show them where they can learn more about me. My social media pages, my ‘About’ page, different places that I am on the internet. And of course, I am going to include a link to the lead magnet. Now this is a question that a lot of people have; should I attach it or should I include a link to it. We believe that you should always, always bring people back to your site and it’s also a thing about spam; like you shouldn’t really attach things to emails because they can get put in spam folders more easily.
SHANE: And most of the email providers, like Mail Chimp or AWeber or something like that, they are not gonna attach you really big files. So if Jocelyn’s file is three or four, you’re not gonna be able to attach it to the email anyway, so you’re gonna have to link that to a page on your website that’s hidden where people can actually come and download that for you.
JOCELYN: I want to say also, don’t redirect people right after they give you their email address. So in other words, don’t let them hit ‘Submit’ and take them immediately to the opt-in bonus and this is something we have kind of learnt the hard way because people will give you email addresses like Jocelyn@stupid.com that doesn’t even exist.
SHANE: Myspamfolder@gmail.com and stuff like that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and people are going to do that anyway but, people can give you totally bogus addresses that don’t even exist and get your lead magnet if you redirect them immediately. So you need to redirect them to a ‘Thank you’ page and say, ‘Check your email’.
SHANE: Yeah, and the good stuff – and always remember too, everything you do, trains your audience how to interact with you. So by making them wait for the email to get their bonus, that’s the only gateway to get to that lead magnet. You’re training people that the good stuff’s in the email. You’ve got to give me real email address, you need to be opening my email and if you really want the good stuff, it’s in the email. That way, they will read future emails and they’ll look into that. So it’s like an absolutely great point. So that first email is gone, that’s the welcome email, give them the lead magnet and we’re starting to move people from outside of our sales funnel, our general audience, now we are moving them into the sales funnel as prospects. So where do we go next? In step three, now that we have identified the prospects in our audience, we have to figure out which prospects are ready to take the next step down the funnel. Who is really interested in what we have to say and who just signed up for the free lunch. Who just wanted the free thing and as soon as they got it, they completely unsubscribed and they are just gone. So our goal in step three of the sales funnel is to take all of our prospects and watch how they interact with our emails and we want to start engaging with them. All the emails at this point of the sales funnel are gonna create engagement. Who is opening your emails, who are clicking the links in your emails? When you send a survey out, who’s gonna vote in that survey? Who’s actually visiting our site? Who’s coming from our emails to the website on a consistent basis? Which of those email addresses, which of those people in our prospect list now, who’s commenting on post, who’s starting to really get engaged with our brand? So after you’ve taken your audience and you’ve turned them into prospects using a lead magnet, you have to really now ramp up engagement.
JOCELYN: This part of the sales funnel is important because it’s going to help you learn what is important to your prospects. Engagement let’s you not only see who is interested, but it lets you learn what they want exactly; what are their struggles, what are their pain points. It helps you to be able to show empathy and also to establish authority in the subject that you are working with. All right, so moving down the funnel, out of the 20,000 prospects, so let’s just say that half or less are going to engage with my brand through the emails and let’s say about 10,000 people are engaging out of the original 50,000 people in my audience. Once again, these are not an exact science numbers, we are just using these out of simplicity sake because they are easy to remember and say. So, at this point, we are going to send you some emails to your prospects to get them to engage with your brand to learn more about them. You’re maybe going to send about two or three. These emails are designed to let them know that you’ve been there, you understand them, you know what they are going through and that you understand their needs. Ask them things like, ‘What are your struggles?’ you know, you can even give them links to click, you don’t have to just let them have an open-ended answer. If you have a small audience that’s fine, but if you have a larger audience, you may just need to give them a couple of choices and let them click them one or the other. Send them free resources, what some people refer to as an unexpected bonus.
SHANE: That’s one of Jocelyn’s favorite words. Introductory offers and unexpected bonuses, we talk about that like, every single day.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I really like those two. Unexpected bonus is a great thing, it just builds more trust with your people, they think to themselves, ‘Hey, I didn’t even pay for this, this is really great stuff.’ I’ve sent my Elementary Librarian audience a lot of different free things. One thing that I send is an end-of-the-school-year survival guide and this is really good because at sort of like the beginning of the school year, they need a lot of extra help and support at the end of the school year and I know this because I was a librarian for a lot of years. It may be a little bit different for you with your niche but that is what the purpose of these engagement emails are for. People that engage with my additional content and respond, they help me to know that they are getting their problem solved, and they learn that I have the answers that they need, and it just builds more affinity toward Elementary Librarian and the brand. So, all of those little things do help. The people who are engaging with this content are no longer prospects. Prospects are warm and they might be interested in my products, but the people who are engaged, they are interested in my products. These prospects who have engaged with my content that I have sent them through email, they are now leads for potential sales in the future and leads people who are very likely to buy a product from me at some point in the future. So, out of the 10,000 people engaging with our brand, maybe half, maybe around 5,000 will eventually become leads.
SHANE: So real quick, now that we’ve got some leads in our sales funnel, let’s go back and look at the process and just outline it a little bit and make sure we are in the same page. We started out with a large market; so maybe we had about you know, 90,000 and we whittle that down to about 75,000 people, that over time, we think that we could actually communicate with and get our brand in front of. We introduced our content out into this marketplace and about 50,000 of those people eventually will hear about us and they’ve become a part of our audience, people who are aware that we exist. We created a lead magnet and we kinda offered that out into our audience and some of those people, maybe about half, maybe a little less than half, let’s say about 20,000 people will become prospects. They will give us contact information to say, ‘Yes, you’re allowed to contact me, I want to learn more’ in exchange for something for free so that they can dive deeper into our brand and understand more about what we do. We take all those prospects, all those people and we communicate with them, we engage with them, we send them two or three emails, we give them free things, we learn about their struggles and we whittle that down even more to figure out who is going to engage back with us. All of those 20,000 people are not going to listen, all of those 20,000 people are not gonna interact with our brand. We might be able to get about half of those people, about 10,000 people will really open every email, start clicking links, and start accepting all of this free stuff that we are giving them to engage with us. And the people that are most involved with our brand, that are really active, maybe about half of those, maybe about 5,000 of our original number, those are our leads. Those are the people who we think we have identified through this process who might be willing to part with money to get more stuff from us in the future. So, now that we have leads the next step, step four in our process is to turn those leads into customers. And always remember, we’re using emails and communication to do this. This whole process, this sales funnel process is being done with communication via email, pretty much primarily as our main vehicle today. The way we turn into customers is, we’re going to offer them something very small, and very inexpensive. It’s going to be a paid product, this is the first time we are going to put something in front of them, and we say, ‘Hey I’ve got this solution to that problem we learned about when we were engaging in those last emails, but this one is a little bit more detailed that the free stuff I have been giving you. I worked really hard on this’ and we’re probably going to have to charge them for this to make sure we can identify who is willing to get their debit card out, who is willing to log into PayPal and send us money for this new product. This is going to be a small-price product, maybe somewhere like you know, 10 dollars to 100 dollars, depending on the niche; you know, a small amount of money is different depending on who you are talking to. But a lot like the lead magnet took that audience and identified the people who were actually interested in what we had to say, the small paid product is going to identify which leads are hot enough to spend money on the solutions we have to their problems. This is where we are going to give them the introductory offer. This is one of Jocelyn’s favorite things to do; it’s such a great way to really identify those people who are really hot and really willing to spend money. We are going to offer them something small, something valuable, something awesome, it’s going to be an introductory offer at a really low price and that’s going to tell us who might buy our bigger products later. It does this because if someone won’t buy the smaller product that is really valuable, then they are probably not going to part with a bunch of money for more stuff. If they won’t buy the little one, they are probably not going to buy the big one. So, this introductory offer is a critical component of our sales funnel template to make sure we figure out who is going to be a customer in our audience.
JOCELYN: An example for this for Elementary Librarian might be my ‘101 Library Centers’ book; this is just a small product that I have created. I could send them an email that said, ‘I’m having a sale on this book, normally it’s around 50 dollars, you can get it today for just 10 dollars.’
SHANE: Introductory offer.
JOCELYN: Or whatever your price is. So you just give it to them at a discount, something that really makes it look like a good deal and the book that I offer is just a sample of some of the lessons that they will get in the whole year of lesson plan that cost a lot more anywhere from like 300 to about 450 dollars. I know that if they buy this, that they are trying the lessons and purchasing lesson plans or something that could possibly be on the radar screen. And this is something that we are still testing so you know, I’m not exactly sure of the pricing I’m going to use and exactly the product, but it just gives you an idea of something that you can do for you audience.
SHANE: And it’s going to be completely different for everything like you – for some industries, it might be a ten dollar product but for other ones, your introductory offer might be 500 dollars. It just depends on how much money the people in your niche have. So you’re gonna have to experiment with this introductory offer. The first one may not work, you’re gonna have to figure out exactly what you can put in front of people because it’s a lot different to entice people to actually spend money than it is to get them to give you an email. Email address is free, people protect their email but they’re gonna give you that email to get something for free. It’s a lot harder to get people to spend any amount of money, especially on the internet, where they don’t know exactly who you are or what you are doing. So this is going to have to be something just like that lead magnet was really awesome, this is gonna have to be something really, really good to get people to move their money from their wallet to your bank account.
JOCELYN: So out of our original 5,000 leads, let’s just for simplicity sake, say that about half of the people are going to purchase this small offer. And if one of those people do buy, they are going to become a customer and what happens next is, we are going to nurture them and send them another unexpected bonus. Maybe, it is another free lesson pack, you know, it’s some other kind of product that I have come up with, and after I do that, then I’ll email them a larger offer.
SHANE: Now, this is like a medium level, this is not – don’t go from 10 dollars to a 300-dollar product. That’s not gonna work, whatever you do. You got to have some kind of middle ground where you push people from that first offer to a little bit higher, and work them towards your big product.
JOCELYN: And again, this is niche dependant because you know, sometimes you might be able to do that but you know, I’m probably going to do it for my Elementary Librarian product because people can use school funds to buy my lesson plans. So you know, I probably will jump on up there to that. If they buy that next offer, then you know that they are going to buy the other things that you put out there.
SHANE: And we also want to stress too, that this is not exactly what we do right now. This is what we wish we would have done at the very beginning if we could have set up a very simple, you know, seven to eight-email sales funnel. We are a little bit farther ahead of this part right now; we’re talking about starting out in your online business and setting up that first autoresponder. We use a little bit more complicated tools that are a little bit more expensive. We got many more layers on top of our sales funnel that we are creating. So once again, this is not exactly what we do but this is what we would have done, if we could have gone and talk to ourselves three years ago and said, ‘Hey knuckleheads, you need to have these seven emails in place the day your product goes live, so that every person that gets on your email list is going to get pitched an offer within the next two weeks. Don’t just let them sit there and live launch to launch and live broadcast email to broadcast email. Put this in place, get it automated, make it simple so you have a baseline that you can study and add things and take things away and make it work for your niche.’
JOCELYN: So something that you go with a medium priced product, and that’s a perfectly viable strategy; you may want to try different things and test them and see how they do against each other.
SHANE: Which one moves money the best, basically.
JOCELYN: And if they do buy that medium offer, then they are probably willing to spend even more money and now that they are your customer, you can offer them your larger product or whatever it is that you ideally would like for them to buy.
SHANE: So the goal here is to figure out who will spend money and then of those people that spend money, figure out who will spend a little more money so you might give them that introductory offer for ten bucks. If they spend that, you might immediately send them to a ‘Thank you’ page that has an up-sell and that’s just something else they can buy immediately for 47 dollars. Now when you find those people that are willing to buy that first thing and they bought that second thing, or maybe you sent another email two days later and you said, ‘Hey, I got another sell, this thing is 47 dollars.’ If those people buy, those people are no longer just your customers, they are your ideal customers. Those are the people that are going to make repeat purchases. They are the ones that are going to love your material, they love what you are doing and they buy almost everything that you put out. They can buy your higher ticket things without flinching because they know you’ve solved all those other problems along the way. It’s an absolute no-brainer. They don’t care to give you 500 dollars because the 50 dollar and the 10 dollar and the free thing was so good. When you take people all the way from your market and move them through your audience, get them to be a prospect, engage with them, figure out who your customers are and then identify those superfans within that customer base. This is when your business really will start churning and your sales funnel is going to do all of this for you automatically. That’s what people talk about when they talk about passive income. You’ve created all of the things you would do – if you and I were to sit down and I was trying to sell you something, and I was calling you every couple of days to tell you about all these things and help you with your problems and do that, you’ve automated all of these systems that you would do in person to sell something so that every single person that discovers you, is going to hear you move through, find solutions and they are willing to become a customer who is going to give you money. If you create your sales funnel correctly even on a simple level like this and you get this in place, you can identify all of the people in your audience that are willing to become your superfans, your ideal customers and that is how you are going to create a consistent income online. So let’s say out of the 2500 customers Jocelyn talked about, about 1500 of those ended up being ideal customers, and once again remember, this is over a long period of time. You are not going to find 1500 customers within the next two months. So don’t be emailing us and be like, ‘You know, I’ve put a sales funnel in place and three days later I didn’t have any customers.’ It’s gonna take time for you to set all this up and make it work. There’s one more step at the very bottom of the funnel that we want. We want superfans and advocates to come out. We want some of those ideal customers, those really, really good repeat buyers, we want to push them even farther into the funnel until they come out as superfans who are going to share our brand. They are going to go out and find people like them and say, ‘Hey, I found this amazing thing. It would be perfect for you too, jump in.’ And they are gonna throw them, kicking and screaming down into your funnel. So that’s the goal in the last step of the sales funnel template is to identify our superfans and our advocates that are going to help us grow our brand.
JOCELYN: Once you’ve found your ideal customers, it’s fairly simple to send them types of incentives to turn those people into advocates to go out there and find other customers or to help other people discover that they want to buy your products. And these prospects are the best because they came in from advocates, people who knew that they had these struggles and you know, they went out there and said, ‘This is gonna be great for you. You need to check it out’ and that is a pretty cool kinda lead to get. These leads are a lot warmer and they may already be in your email list. Maybe they say, ‘Oh you know, I got that email and I didn’t open it a while back’ and maybe they’ll start checking you out again.
SHANE: The advocates are going to be like, ‘Dude, open the email, look what it did for me. I got all this blah-blah-blah – it’s going to be amazing’ and they do it and they go – and all of a sudden you have a new customer.
JOCELYN: And there’s a variety of things that you could do; I mean, you can make them affiliates, and if they sell something, you could give them a percentage or a flat dollar amount. A lot of people do this. You can get them to do things for you in exchange for something. I have people create – my customers create video testimonials in exchange for a new, full year of lesson plans. I gave it to them completely free just for being willing to do that.
SHANE: We do this all the time too, like when we have communities, we’ll set up administrators and maybe we just tell our admins in our Facebook group, they kind of help us answer questions, they’ve already been through all of our courses or something so they can help new people along the way when you have questions to take some of that burden off of us. But we might just say, ‘Hey we’ll give you access to everything that we do for free’ so that way, they are getting something in return for working a little bit more in one of our communities. So that’s another great thing you can do.
JOCELYN: I’ve also had people in my audience to write content for my website and you know, I’ll give them a little something in exchange for doing that. It takes work off of me and it helps me to get them contributing and to sharing their story on my website. It helps me to grow the brand even further. So that is great.
SHANE: So once you get these advocates, once you get these customers, once everything is going, you just run some repeat. Once your sales funnel template is done, once your sales funnel is in place, and it’s all automated with something like AWeber, your only job now is to go find new people and get them in it. You got to go out and find all those 75,000 people that we identified that were potential audience members and prospects, and you got to go get your message, get your content in front of them. You start ads, you start moving more content, anything you can do to find those new people; you put your advocates to work, you get them out there and you make people get into your sales funnel so that they can move through and you can just keep – every time you put someone new in, there’s a chance that someone’s gonna come out of the bottom. That is on all of your products and they are now an advocate helping you grow, share and spread your message. That is how you truly create a solid, online business that’s going to grow and most importantly, create passive income that’s gonna take some of the workload off of you of communicating with your people. Every single time you have something to say, you know they are going to go through a process where you can show them all of your offerings and then when you have new stuff, you’re gonna learn a lot of information in those engagement emails that you are just gonna keep tabs of. You’re gonna see common themes in your audience where people are like, ‘Oh, I’ve got this problem –’ or sort of, that person, that person, that person, that person, well now you make a new product and you can sell it to those customers and you already know of that engagement, that they are going to buy it because they told you what to create later. And this sounds like a really complicated process, I know this was probably our longest podcast I think we may have ever done but it really is so critical when you start out to think about the sales funnel and to create a sales funnel template because if you don’t have this in place, you’re gonna be missing out a lot of money. We did not understand this for almost two years into our business and we are just now putting in all the pieces, all the tools to really create that automated system that’s just churning like a machine to start cranking out money off of our digital products because we didn’t know this. No one told us this at the beginning. We heard people on podcast say, ‘Well, you got to have a sales funnel and you wanna create your own autoresponder’ but it took us a year before we even knew what those words meant. So take all of this information from this podcast, go back and listen to it, take some notes and try to get this in place in your own online business, no matter what stage you’re at; whether you are at the very beginning, or you’re a year or two in it. Get this sales funnel in place on a simple level, create a baseline, study it and figure out where people are engaging, where are customers becoming superfans, where are prospects becoming leads, and make it where you can have a passive income system with your email communications. Once again, I want to bring up that we are creating a workbook for this episode because it is so dense and so complicated. This is going to be 100% for free. Head over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast45; I’m gonna have a visual representation of the actual sales funnel on that page in this little booklet that we’re gonna create, and it’s going to actually have templates for these emails that you can write. I’m actually gonna spell out each level of the sales funnel, I’m gonna show you what the email probably needs to look like at that level and hopefully, we can get you a five to seven autoresponder sequence that you can set up in AWeber where when people get on your email list, they take that lead magnet. It’s gonna guide them through this simple sales funnel process, so you’ve got something in place even at the very beginning of your business to make sure that you are making those pitches, you are getting your solutions in front of people and you’ve got a chance to make money off of every person that becomes a prospect on your website. And then over time, you can improve it as you learn more about online business and you learn more about how your sales funnel works with the people that are in your audience.
JOCELYN: That is all the time that we have for today; unfortunately, we are gonna have to skip our ‘Can’t-miss moments’ this week just because this podcast was so long. But I do want to throw out there, don’t be too overwhelmed by this information. This was a lot of information that we put out there today; just listen to it again and if you still need some additional help, head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast45 and we have some free things there that will help you out.
SHANE: All right guys, that’s all we got for today, so until next time we will catch you all on the flip side and we will see you later. Bye-bye.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Nathan says
Wow great info!
This is EXACTLY what I’m in the process of implementing for MicroBrewr Podcast RIGHT NOW.
Thanks to your great tutorial about how to sell things online, I have already sold some ebooks(! ! !) by manually emailing my existing list. So I’m trying to implement that automatically for new subscribers.
Can’t wait to see the rest of the guide to go with this episode.
THANK YOU!
Ashlyn says
I literally rushed my baby off to sleep so I could jump on my computer to download the email templates! Guess I was a bit too early lol. I think I wanna cry and hug you guys right now!
Faith Janes says
Are the buyers ending up on a separate list (to tailor future email offers to them) or does everyone get the same emails?
Jocelyn Sams says
Ideally they will be separated so you can exclude them from future sale notices, etc.
Luke Benjamin Thomas says
Hey guys!
Excellent podcast as always but there’s one thing I’m confused about.
I know you guys use LeadPages but do you use it to deliver your lead magnet too? If you decide to attach the lead magnet to the LeadBox then they’ll receive it even if they don’t confirm their email address? You mention in the podcast that people give fake email addresses to get the lead magnet and I can this being an issue too because you obviously can’t email people who haven’t confirmed their opt-in.
Is there a way other than creating multiple lists (thought that was one of the main reasons to use LeadPages anyway) to stop people from taking the lead magnet without opting in first? I know you guys use Infusionsoft now so it may be different to AWeber.
Any thoughts would be highly appreciated guys 🙂
Shane Sams says
It depends. The lead magnet deliever in Leadpages can also be an email without an attachment. Just message them with the link to your page.
Also, if they are already on your list, just send them the resource. No use giving them the run around.
It all just depends. However our main optin in the sidebar is almost always an email back to our site.
And yes, infusionsoft lets us get WAY more complicated than Aweber. But we hired someone to make it work. There is no way I would recommend Infusionsoft to anyone in their first 2 years of business. Aweber is 100% what you should be using until you are doing this full time (and then some).
Kate Magee says
Great podcast! You mentioned that you should send people to a hidden page on your website to get the lead magnet. How can you bury that when you have a simple website structure? Do you worry others can find it without opting in? With some downloads from you guys, when I click on the link in the email it doesn’t route me to your site but downloads right to my Mac. Is that just available with Infusionsoft?
I also noticed that when on pages on your website the URL just shows as “flipped lifestyle.com” instead of the full URL. Would you recommend that and how can you do that? It would seem that would be a good way to hide the URL of a lead magnet.
Looking forward to seeing the email templates!
Thanks!
Jason Huskey says
This episode and the one on Facebook advertising have really boosted my understanding of online business. Thanks for all you do.
I’m looking forward to those email templates.
Thank you!
Barb Claxton says
Your discussion brought some much needed clarity to this topic. Thanks for the detail. i too am looking forward to the templates. Appreciate all of your efforts to help us.
Janice Lawrenz says
Loved the podcast guys!
As usual clear and concise 🙂
When will the email template book be available?
Shane Sams says
This month! Wanted to make it amazing!
Rupali says
Am so appreciating your encouragement and guidance, Shane and Jocelyn! I too am excited to see your email templates. Even though I’ve been through Marie Forleo’s BSchool and Jeff Walker’s PLF course, I still am stuck on what EXACTLY to include in my autoresponder sequence.
P.S. So sorry to hear about your hackers. I’m sure it’s put you behind schedule somewhat. No matter, I love how willing you are to share your struggles. Mahalo!
Shane Sams says
We are FINALLY going to have our email templates available at our webinar on Sunday 🙂