Every once in a while, I come across company owners who are enormously sceptical about online marketing, because they have invested enormous sums of money in a sales funnel campaign – only for it to bomb completely.
It’s usually an enormous shock. Their team spent a lot of time coming up with concepts and ideas that they thought would really appeal to their target market. Technically, they built their sales funnel just right, developing landing pages and an advertising campaign that followed best practice, and creating a well-written eBook and email sequence.
But then it went live and….. radio silence.
No one bit.
It was all money down the drain.
Of course the disappointments come on a smaller scale, too. I have certainly come up with my own fair share of ideas I was sure were going to fly, only to have them land with a soft thud.
It can be enormously difficult to predict what’s going to work online and what isn’t, even if you know your audience fairly well.
So is there a way to verify that your campaign is going to be a success, before putting so much time and effort into it?
Yes.
You need to build a “Bare Bones Funnel”.
The idea is simple. You create a really basic version of the campaign you want to develop and test that people are interested, before going ahead and developing the whole package.
So, for example, one popular sales funnel tactic is to advertise an eBook, then send a series of emails to anyone who’s downloaded it.
But instead of having an eBook properly laid out before you start, you might want to take the text, and turn it into a simple email. Then run a short campaign on social media, to see whether your audience is prepared to register to get the email.
If they are, there’s proven interest, and they will likely register to get the eBook too. You can go ahead and create it, and also develop the follow up email sequence….
If they’re not, it’s on to the next idea.
Another popular tactic is to offer everyone who opts into your campaign a series of increasingly expensive information products. As soon as a subscriber buys the cheapest one, you offer them the next one in the series.
But you don’t have to have all those information products ready before launching your campaign – indeed, you would be foolish to do so.
Make sure that you can sell the first in the series to a decent number of people. Only when you know for sure that people are willing to pay, should you go ahead and develop the next one.
In short, give your sales funnel a test drive before committing to it.
You’ll save time, money – and ultimately, be much more successful in your marketing.
