“Always enter the conversation already occurring in the customer’s mind.”
— Dan Kennedy
Websites are dead. The truth is they’ve been on the decline for years now. Websites are overwhelming collections of web pages that don’t convert like they used to. Today, businesses need sales funnels. Sales funnels are like magic little money-making machines. You likely already know that. But when it comes to launching them, what funnel type and which sales funnel template should you use?
There are several funnel types you can launch. It all depends on your objective. You could be going after leads. Maybe you’re just going for the jugular and sales is the objective. Or just maybe you’re running an event or doing something else entirely. Whichever one you do there is a sales funnel template designed specifically for that objective.
Of course, this all depends on the type of sales funnel software you’re using. You could be using some lackluster platform that pales in comparison to the robust features available in others. Although I’m not here to tell you which sales funnel builder you should choose, there is really only one leader of the pack. A company led by a man on a mission to eradicate websites from the face of the earth.
It’s clear. You need a sales funnel. But before you choose the template type for your sales funnel, you have to decide on your objective. Because, after all, each objective will have different purposes and different templates to go along with them.
Lead generation funnels will generate leads whereas presentation funnels will help you run events and actual sales funnels will help you convert browsers into buyers. There are benchmarks for choosing any one of these. But the most important thing to do is get a lay of the land.
When you zoom out, there are actually five sales funnel types that you can choose from:
Every business needs leads. But generating leads is challenging. Combined with the high cost of paid ads, lead generation needs to be approached the right way. This always starts with some type of landing page designed to extract contact information.
Good lead funnels create curiosity. It does this through the headline, an image, a video, or a combination of all of the above. It’s designed to get the prospect’s attention. And once you have their attention, you can gain their interest and spur them to take action.
This does not always include a lead magnet. Meaning, you don’t always have to design a free PDF, checklist, cheat sheet or ebook for this. You simply have to deliver the answer to the headline from the first page. That’s all you need to do.
The squeeze page really has two primary parts. You have the squeeze page itself, which is where the collection of contact information will happen. Then, you have the thank you page. The thank you page should deliver on the promise of the squeeze page.
Other funnel types are designed specifically to convert sales. These are usually targeted towards lower ticket purchases to achieve higher conversion rates. It’s easier to get a low-ticket sale than a high-ticket sale when a prospect is unaware of you.
However, that doesn’t mean high-ticket sales are not possible. It’s simply an ascension model. Customers are ascended to higher-ticket funnels after they receive enormous value from their first purchase and become more aware of you and your story.
There are three kinds of unboxing funnels you can build:
Book funnels are based on the concept of a 2-step tripwire. That means you sell a low-ticket frontend product, then upsell using higher ticket products and services. This involves three primary pages. You have your 2-step tripwire page, an upsell page, and a confirmation page.
You can add in multiple upsells and down-sells here. This is easy to do with a sales funnel builder like ClickFunnels that includes premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor. Meaning, you don’t need to be a web developer to pull this off.
You also don’t need to be an author to use a book funnel. You can replace the book with any other low-ticket information product like a course, a video series, instructional guides, and so on. Free-plus-shipping offers are usually a very powerful way to sell books inside of a book funnel.
Free-plus-shipping offers present the book (or course or whatever) for free, all they have to do is pay for the shipping. And you charge a small amount for shipping. This low threshold helps you make the sale to people who might not know you very well (cold traffic).
Websites with shopping carts can feel overwhelming. There are lots of products and as a customer adds these to their cart, stick shock ensues on the cart page when they see the high price of all products combined. To combat this, many people implement cart funnels.
Cart funnels are actually encouraged by Shopify who encourage doing this and talk about it in this blog post. The concept is simple. Take your best product and create a simple 3-page funnel using the premade sales funnel templates below.
You can even link to it from your existing Shopify store and send traffic there from any ad platform. Cart funnels are ideal because conversions are typically much higher. And, just like in a supermarket, you can offer items (called order bumps) at checkout. Just like you would see a National Enquirer magazine at checkout or a pack of gum.
The best part is that you can add an unlimited number of upsells and down-sells. You’re not confined to only adding one. The reason why this all works so well is because of the 2-step order process on the first page. The first step is shipping information.
When people abandon checkout, you can follow up with them because information from the first step is transmitted to your email system. Keep in mind that cart abandonment is a big problem. Roughly 70% of all carts are abandoned. Remember, you’re spending a lot of money to get customers to your site.
Running challenges is a great way to build your email list. Especially when you offer free challenges. Here’s how it works. You can use premade templates and the drag-and-drop editor built into this landing page software to set the whole thing up.
On the first step, you have the opt-in. On the second step, you have an order form for an upgrade. Even if you offer a free challenge, you should always have an “Upgrade to VIP” on the second step. The third step is a simple thank you page and the fourth step is the actual challenge.
Presentations can be both physical and virtual. The beauty is that there are templates that cover each kind of event. The most common type of presentation is a simple webinar. But webinars can be both live and automated. The trick is having the right software that can handle both scenarios.
There are three types of presentation funnels that you can build with these templates:
Everyone knows what a sales letter is. Before the dawn of video on the internet, sales letter would come in the mail as a form of direct response marketing. These long, multipage letters were designed to sell by crafting a message so well that it immediately made you raise your hand and buy.
Really good sales letters are written by skilled copywriters who understand the craft. Video sales letters are simply video representations of that same long-form letter. With the dawn of video on the internet, some people like to consume sales letters in the form of video.
However, some still like to consume sales letters as actual letters and words on the screen. But there’s no reason why you can’t have both. Place the video above the actual words and make the layout look nice. You can use all the prebuilt templates already included here.
Webinars are presentations that can be delivered live or be automated. Long ago we used to have the teleseminar. Everyone would call in for that type of presentation. Today it’s the webinar. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
But if you want to sell high-ticket products or services to the masses, a webinar is the ticket. Webinars are often around 90 minutes but sometimes can be much longer than that. One of the pioneers of the webinar is Jason Fladlien who used webinars to make millions from the Amazing Selling Machine (ASM).
The webinar works in three steps. There’s a registration page, a confirmation page, and then a page where they can actually watch the webinar. To understand more about how webinars work and how you can construct a webinar, make sure you read this book.
Product launches are one of the most popular sales funnel types. The way it works is simple. You spend time driving traffic to an optin page that builds your list. The optin has a promise of an upcoming launch. Once they register they land on a thank you page.
Then, the product launch begins after a short period. It occurs over four separate days. The first three days are unlocked one by one. These are video trainings that occur on each. All of this builds up to the actual launch on the fourth day.
Once the product launches the cart opens for a short time. This creates urgency for the prospect to buy whatever product or service you’re peddling by landing on an order page. Once they buy, they land on a confirmation page and the entire process is done.
Phone funnels help you sell high-ticket products and services. These are not necessary for low-ticket product sales. However, whenever you’re selling something very high ticket, webinars typically won’t cut it. You need to actually get on the phone with the person to close the sale.
When you’re trying to build a high-ticket mastermind or coaching program, an application funnel is the way to go. This is a phone funnel that gets people to provide a lot of information to validate and prove that they are a right fit for your program.
There are typically three steps in an application funnel. You can use the sales funnel templates below to quickly launch one of these funnels. It starts with the optin page and that’s designed to help create desire in the prospect to join or buy the thing you’re selling.
This often includes powerful social proof in the form of video included inside a video sales letter, identifying the problem and agitating it to help lead the prospect to the next page. The next page is the application. This can be as in-depth as you want it to be. Once completed, they land on a thank you page.
Applications flip the script by making the prospect prove that they are worthy. It also helps to have this information before getting on the phone with the prospect to sell them the high-ticket thing you’re selling. Use applications to illuminate problems, state why they think it’s a good fit for them, provide contact details, and so on.
Not each of these sales funnel templates fit in a neat little bucket. There are other types that don’t necessarily fall into a lead funnel, an unboxing funnel, a presentation funnel, or a phone funnel.
There are fives types of other funnels that you can build using these other sales funnel templates:
A bridge funnel is a simple two-step sales funnel that helps bridge the divide between you and an affiliate offer. This is perfect for when you’re selling other people’s products and services. This way, you can add the prospect to your list before bridging them over to the other offer.
This is important because you have no control over the site where you send your traffic to. You have no idea what’s happening between the time they leave your link and after. When you use a simple bridge funnel, you have some amount of control.
An ask campaign is when you ask your existing list questions to help create a better product or service. You can also use ask campaigns from social media, paid ads, and so on. It does not have to be your existing list, but it helps if you do have an existing list to ask.
This is a simple two-page funnel. The first page contains all the questions you want to ask along with collecting some basic contact details. The second page is the thank you page. You should add these individuals to some type of email list and a follow-up sequence to communicate with them afterward.
Daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social offer deals to customers on a regular basis. They’ve also formed the foundation for substantial businesses. Now you can build a daily deal funnel with ease. This is a simple two-step funnel.
The first step starts with the order page where you send traffic to. There, they fill in their details and land on a confirmation page. The confirmation page can be used to deliver the digital file, ship a product, provide access to a membership, send a coupon, and so on.
Hero funnels help you place your link in your bio of any social media site. When people check your hero funnel, they can optin to your list. This is a very simple funnel. But some people pay $20 to $100 per month for a simple link in bio tool.
This is a great way to capitalize on the traffic you are already getting on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and others. There are six premade sales funnel templates below that you can launch in a single click.
Storefront funnels are simple three-step funnels that allow you to test out and sell very specific products without going wide with an ecommerce site. You can use this to test or you can simply use it to scale by marketing one product.
Although you see three steps below, you can always add order bumps, multiple upsells, down-sells, and so on. But starting it out it’s best to just keep it simple. This is a great way to test your product directly to a list.
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