In this segment of the Sales Funnel process series, I want to discuss “back-end conversion.”
After you’ve struggled to get a prospect to buy your front-end product, your immediate goal should be to increase your front-end sale by offering an upsell OTO (one-time offer). If that fails, you should then promote a downsell product in one final attempt to maximize the front-end sale.
Now, the purpose of the front-end of the sales funnel is to recoup your investment.
Let’s examine a sales campaign a bit closer.
Say you paid $300 for a pay per click ad and ended up with 75 optins to your emails list. In addition you got 10 paying customers from whom you earned exactly $300 profit. I’d say you ran a very profitable campaign.
Obviously, you only earned your money back.
That’s only on the front-end of the sales funnel, though.
You also wound up with 75 subscribers to your email list. That’s even more significant in the long run, because those are the people you’ll target for your long-term, back-end conversion campaign.
You see, the front-end campaign is really only designed to allow you to keep spending money on sales campaigns. If you spend $300 and get back $300, what you really gained was 75 subscribers in your perpetual sales funnel.
If you continue to break even with campaigns like this, you can keep building a laser targeted subscriber list for free just as fast as you rinse and repeat the process. If you actually make money on the front-end, that’s fine. But the truth is, you can actually lose money on the front-end as long as it is offset by your back-end conversions.
The Perpetual Sales Funnel
The back-end of your sales funnel is not more important than the front-end, it is just more profitable. Without a compelling front-end offer and artfully crafted funnel process, you won’t get people into your sales funnel at all, leaving the issue of how to develop its back-end meaningless.
Still, assuming your front-end offers are pulling folks into the funnel, you must recognize that you are now in management of a perpetual sales funnel. It is “perpetual” in theory only, of course. It will exist for as long as you continue to work on it.
To maintain the back-end of your sales funnel, you must work on two main things:
1. Building relationships with your subscribers
2. Presenting them with meaningful conversion opportunities
Building Relationships
The back-end of your sales funnel is usually centered around your email list.
Marketers have talked for years about the death of email marketing, but in fact, it is still the place where most actual “conversion” of subscribers into buyers occurs.
The mistake many email marketers make is to do nothing more with their email list than pitch offers. You can do that, of course, but it’s not the best way to build a strong and perpetual business model.
It is far better to build a relationship with your subscriber that will exist whether or not they become a buyer.
Building a relationship requires that you know what your subscribers want, and giving it to them. Know their problems, and solve them. Share yourself, your stories, and your point of view in order to cultivate a relationship with your subscribers.
Because relationship building is so important, it is a good idea to expand your points of contact with subscribers beyond just email. Pull them into your Facebook group, have them enter your Google+ circles and invite them to your webinars.
These are all excellent ways to build relationships while bolstering your personal brand.
Present Meaningful Conversion Opportunities
The biggest goal of the entire sales funnel process is to convert your subscribers into buyers of your products and services.
For as long as subscriber remains in your sales funnel, you should be offering them two types of purchasing opportunities.
Present them with offers to buy small ticket items on a regular basis. These small ticket items should be things that help them achieve the goals they have and overcome the problems they typically encounter in achieving those goals.
Occasionally, you should introduce a high ticket item that can help get your subscriber to a much higher level of accomplishment. This could be a training course, a done-for you offer or a coaching program.
This is where the sales funnel finally becomes a profitable enterprise.
As people get in the habit of buying small ticket items from you, their trust in you grows.
When you make high end offers, they are far more likely to purchase if they have that trust already built in to the relationship you’ve fostered with them.
Have you ever tried to get people into a sales funnel, only to drop the ball by not developing the back-end of the funnel over a sustained period of time? Have you struggled trying to figure out what to offer on the back-end, or how to present it?
Let me hear what you think in the comments below, and please… be sure to share this article on your social sites.