What is List Building? How To Build Effective Sales Funnels!
The goal of list building is to build an email list which you can promote offers to your list for long term profits (automatically). This is essentially a passive income generating sales funnel, something you can establish in practically any niche. It does not take any special ability or skill. You do not even need to have your own products or services. You can promote 3rd party offers (products and services) as an affiliate marketer. You merely have to establish the sales funnel system then put it to work for you.
A great sales funnel system involves building a strong relationship with your lists, so your subscribers open and read your e-mails. And most importantly, it will permit you to make money on demand, merely by sending a promotional e-mail.
There are 2 kinds of sales funnel systems you can construct– lead driven and sales driven. When they enter their e-mail address to get your free offer, a lead driven system puts potential customers into your system. A sales driven system is comprised of customers/buyers, these are people that have been proven to spend money. The ultimate goal is to build a massive email list filled with buyers, people that spends money.
However, starting out as a beginner list builder, it is unlikely to start building a sales driven sales funnel system right away. That’s why we’re going to concentrate on the lead driven system, due to the fact that it is easier to get started with and you do not have to have your own products. Rather, you can promote affiliate items and let somebody else stress over establishing sales pages, delivering the products, sales assistance, customer care and all of that. Ultimately you may wish to include your very own line of items, however for today it’s much faster and much easier to let the other sellers manage the product-end while you focus your efforts on getting leads into your sales funnel system.
Now you might question– why not merely send out traffic directly to an affiliate product? Why spend time and effort to construct a sales funnel system? And the response is obviously that with your very own sales funnel system, you get to keep the leads and continue to promote to them over and over again. If you’re just sending out traffic directly to an affiliate sales page you do not own, then no matter whether they purchase or not, you never ever catch the e-mail addresses and they’re lost to you permanently.
A Summary of How a Sales Funnel System Will Work:
You’ll need traffic to your site which has your sales funnel to capture leads. Traffic can be in the form of paid marketing, social networks marketing, media purchases, link swaps etc.
The visitor enters their e-mail address in exchange for your free gift or deal of some sort.
That brand-new customer immediately gets the free deal, and this part is necessary: They are rerouted to a special deal. This deal is typically something that is steeply marked down and very restricted time-wise.
Once the visitor subscribed and get their free offer or deal; they continue to get material and promos from you every day or more, instantly through the autoresponder (automatically) or you can send out new promos whenever you like.
Tracking and Split Testing
This might be among the greatest factors beginner web marketers do not develop affiliate sales funnels– they have no idea that they can tweak their funnels to make even more money. The key is in the tracking, since by tracking you understand exactly what’s working, exactly what’s not and exactly how to keep increasing your clicks and conversions.
Here’s an example of how tweaking your sales funnel work, imagine you have 2 variations of your promos A and B. Variation A is making half the sales of variation B, so exactly what do you do? You remove Variation A, send out all your traffic to Variation B and start evaluating to enhance Variation B even further. Utilizing this technique your sales funnel is ensured to make you earn more – It’s that basic.
Every sale you get will be from dumb luck if you do not evaluate and track. In addition, you will be leaving more money on the table. By tracking and tweaking your sales funnel you will earn more and use the extra funds for reinvesting such as buying more traffic. With your highly optimized sales funnel, more traffic = even more money for you.
Some Basic Terms You Should Know
EPC– Earnings per Click. This is the cash you make versus the number of people that clicked to view your page. If you make $246 for every 100 individuals who visited your page, then you’re making $2.46 per click. 10 clicks = $24.60 and 100 clicks = $246.
Why understanding your EPC is necessary: If you understand that statistically speaking, whenever somebody arrive at your page you’re making $2.46, then you should understand precisely how much you can spend per click and still be profitable.
One note: Your EPC may just consist of the cash you make right away from your sales funnel– normally from your one time deal. Or if you have the ability to track for an amount of time, you’ll understand exactly what your EPC is for the life time of your clients, likewise called the …
LCV – Life Time Customer Value. The typical dollar quantity that every lead earns over their life time while being on your list. If your subscribers have high LCV, then you can potentially spend a little more than the EPC initially.
CPL– Cost Per Lead. What does it cost to obtain a lead into your funnel. If you invest $10 in traffic to bring in 100 visitors and 10 people subscribe to your list, then the CPL is $1/lead.
If your life time customer value is $50, and say you’re paying $5 per lead, then your revenue is $45 in the long run.
Break Even Point– This is the point in your sales funnel where you make back your investment from purchasing traffic. You can compute this by understanding exactly what your CPL is and exactly what the typical conversion rate is on each deal you make in your sales funnel. Depending upon the deals you’re making, your conversion rate and your CPL, you may recover cost the very same day you get a brand-new lead by instantly offering them a one time deal. Or the break even point may be when you promote the 2nd offer a number of days later on, or the 3rd deal after that. By understanding your break even point, you understand when you will recover your cash when you will remain in earnings on the typical lead.
The faster you can reach your break even point, the quicker you can grow your sales funnel system, due to the fact that the quicker you can reinvest your cash into getting more traffic = leads. Therefore you wish to modify your funnel to reach the break even point as quickly as possible.
The very best method to reach your break even point in the least quantity of time is to make an extremely high converting one time offer the minute they join your list.
These numbers are vital to your success. Understanding them and enhancing them are the outright secret to constructing a long term growing system, due to the fact that you understand precisely what you can invest to obtain leads while still making profits. On the other hand, just guessing the numbers or just not knowing your EPC, CPL, etc… is fastest way to failure in list building and developing a money making sales funnel.
Building Your Capture Page
As you may understand, the function of your capture page (also known as squeezepage, landing page) is to get people excited enough to give you their e-mail addresss in exchange for your free gift of some sort. A great capture page does more than this– it likewise prequalifies your visitors, making sure that you are drawing in the right group of people who will be interested in your niche and the products and services you’ll promote to them in the long run.
For creating beautiful capture pages with all of the bells and whistles you’ll ever need, I highly recommend OptimizePress. It is a wordpress plugin, and you can create your squeezepage, landing pages, and salespages in an easy to use manner. If you’re brand new to wordpress, check out my free wordpress tutorial course.
If your target market is men who just recently ended a long term relationship and are looking to get back into dating, your capture page is going to speak straight to them– not to people looking to train their dogs or married men looking to strengthen their relationships. Don’t be broad. Be specific! You’ll make more this way.
And due to the fact that your lists are being built from capture pages, you must also tweak them to maximize conversions. With OptimizePress, this can be done easily with their built-in split-testing features. On top of that, they have beautiful designs and templates which you can point and click to edit to match your niche. Optimizepress isn’t cheap (cost about $97), but at least you can get started quickly vs learning how to code or learn technical tools to setup your capture pages and split testing.
Getting the copy (promo) simply right on your capture page can be a difference between 20% conversions and 50% conversions. You want to send traffic to a page that converts as high as possible, so you don’t waste your money and traffic. Again, if you’re not split testing your capture page/landing page, you’re NOT gonna be successful in list building PERIOD!
Your Free Gift
This needs to be something worthy to the visitor. It has to be something they’d be crazy not to have…especially for free! But don’t give away something with 1 ton of features and advantages, or contain everything they need. Keep the gift HOT! But basic enough so that you can upsell them something even better! Something that they would love to have and gladly pay for it if this can solve their problem quickly and easily.
Your Thank You Page
After the visitor subscribe so that they can get their hands on your irresistible free gift. This is where you make a DYNAMITE deal that they will see and be excited about. It’s an extremely limited time offer (countdown 15 minutes), one time offer, get it now or lose it permanently sort of offer. The worth ought to be through the roof! and it’s got to give them so much value that that they just have to have it. Say like a $397 product, now only $37 for the next 15 minutes only. Your thank you page offer is where you can try and recoup your money back from buying traffic.
Now I do not condone scamming or promoting get rich quick schemes or anything that’s not really going to help your visitors. I highly recommend promoting only legitimate offers, and always promote something with at least a 30 days money back guarantee. You want to promote quality stuff only, this way they will remain loyal to you and your future promotions. Again, think long term! Not just making a quick buck in the short term.
Split Test Everything!
Split testing never ends! Split test your Capture Page and your Thank You Page. Split test the deals, the headings, the text, and so on. Test whatever and do not simply evaluate little – test huge, too. Attempt a completely different heading, and different deals and offers, and so on. Who knows…offer A makes you $15/sale but 9% conversion and offer B makes you $30/sale but 2% conversion rate. Which would you choose?
What Products to Promote
Undoubtedly you always want to promote high quality, evergreen items that will help your subscribers/leads/customers. Pick products that fix their problems. And if possible, promote items with subscription payments due to the fact that these will pay you month after month. Passive income from subscriptions is a very good thing..
Provide Helpful Content to Your List
You can discover useful content online that’s fantastic and sharing it with your readers. Quality useful content will keep your list happy and opening your emails up for more promotional opportunities later on.
Simply make sure that whatever you send to your subscribers, always try to provide tremendous worth to help them reach their objectives, and they will remain subscribed.
Getting Traffic
You’re either spending for traffic with your time (free traffic method) or with your cash. And the quicker you can spend for it with your cash, the sooner your you can start growing your sales funnel system at a much faster speed.
Generally, the less you spend for paid traffic, the lower the quality, however there can be exceptions. Facebook ads, for instance, can be a source of really fairly priced traffic that converts actually well.
You can still get totally free quality traffic, Social network is a good choice. Post frequently and all over. Post terrific material and be useful. Discover fan pages/groups and start being a member, then send out that traffic to your opt-in page.
Solo ads is a good source of traffic too, check out the Udimi Case Study here.
The scope of traffic possibilities is much bigger than we have space to cover here, check out our list of the best free traffic sources.
And bear in mind, when you have your sales funnel established, you can dedicate almost all of your time to obtaining traffic due to the fact that your sales funnel system is automated.
People give up because they don’t see results right away. It takes too long. Or they spend some money, don’t see results, and then move onto the next thing. If you keep thinking about short term gains, you’ll fail quickly.
How long will it takes for you to start making money?
It can be in 48 hours, or 6 months. Depends on your experience.
Emailing Your List
One option is to setup all of your emails (and promotional emails) into an autoresponder so that the whole process is completely hands off for you. As soon as someone join your list, they start getting the emails in your autoresponder at the schedule you have established.
In your very first email make sure to provide them the gift as promised. Always thank them for subscribing. Do not make it too official– let a few of your character begin to shine through right from the start.
Ask concerns – “Exactly what do you need assistance with?” “Exactly what’s your viewpoint on ___” Compose emails like you’re writing to a good friend; short, sweet, personalized, to the point, and so on.
For sending out promo emails, if you understand you’re going to be promoting a program (an affiliate product) in 3 days that resolves a particular issue, talk about the issue beforehand. This gets them warmed up for your promo and will convert better when they receive the promo email.
Keep in mind to not bombard your list with all kinds of promos– provide excellent free relevant material and content, too. In some cases offering great material is as simple as suggesting a video that fits right in with your subject. It’s not tough. The trick is to discover what works, put that in your autoresponder and let the system do the work for you.
Again, track and Test everything.
Recommended Top 3 Autoresponder/Email marketing Tools
(ALL Have Free Trials So Test Them Out)
Track your traffic sources, test your conversions on your capture page and your thank you page, track which e-mails work etc. The more you track and test, the more you can make. It’s that basic.
The autoresponder services mentioned can track and split test your emails already built-in. For split testing and tracking your pages, use the all in one tool we’ve recommended, Optimizepress.
Get tracking software application and utilize it as quickly as possible, since it can make all the difference. Keep in mind, without tracking, you are just guessing, and you can lose a great deal of money when you’re just guessing.
Scaling Up Your List Building/Sales Funnels
That’s essentially everything about list building– that’s how you established a long term successful sales funnel system. Your very first funnel is the hardest to build due to the fact that you’re on a big learning curve. When you master setting up a funnel, you can do it over and over again in any other niches with ease.
Imagine having multiple funnels setup, all working for you night and day to make you money. You may want to upgrade them once in a while to promote brand-new products, however besides that, these mini-businesses are established and running for you passively.
Thanks for reading this lengthy post. I hope it gave you some ideas. Please leave comments and share.
