Why use Sales Funnels?

I agree that you should first ask the market to buy something to validate a product idea first. After you know the market wants to buy it, you can increase conversions by creating a sales funnel.

It depends on the business model, but in many cases people are online looking for information and even if they are ready to buy, it might be more effective to get them into your information pipeline first.

If you spend some time in the email marketing forum, you'll find a bunch of reasons why marketers do this.

In many markets people don't buy on the first visit, it might take them an average of 4 to 7 visits before they buy something from you, depending on the product / service, price point, etc.

I have found that creating a sales funnel, when appropriate (you find this out by testing, tracking, and tweaking), that my sales conversions go through the roof. I have sold some high end coaching before and my sales increased by more than ten fold when I implemented a sales funnel instead compared to just sending my visitors to an information page or a sales page.

A sales funnel isn't always required because it depends on the business model, it's one of those things you have to test.

RoD

This model (sales funnel) is the only thing that has ever worked for me. Direct linking to my sales letter got me sales.... but terrible conversions. With the opt-in approach, i make more in the long run - since i have all sorts of other backend marketing products to offer.

If you don't like sending people to a squeeze page first before they go to the sales letter, Send people to the sales letter first and when they go to leave the sales letter, do a downsell to your squeeze page.

After they know you wanted charge them for information, they may be more willing to opt-in for the free information you will offer through the squeeze page.

This way you can still build a list.

I hope this has been helpful,
Steve Yakim

If you do a buy now strategy first you will end up 1 year down the road scratching your head wondering why and how you lost all of your money and why it didn't work.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Sales funnels are a must to make money online. The real answer is way more in depth to be explained right here but do research on 'Lead magnets' 'Tripwire offers' and that is a good place to start

Many times it will take a customer 5 or 6 times to see a product before they decide to actually buy it.

What you say is a common mistake many newbies make and that is getting the quick sale as soon as possible.

Its really short minded thinking. And its amateur thinking

You will make more money in the long run by developing customers through a long term relationship which entails developing a mailing list


- Robert Andrew

Lol when I first got online to make money I thought the same way I was like psh forget a squeeze page, forget a list, I'm sending everybody to the $$ page. $) But after some much needed IM education I can understand that sending traffic straight to a sales page may get you a few sales, but overall you'll be hurting your business because you won't get any long term value. When you collect their contact info, you have an asset and you can put them on an autoresponder sequence to market to them in the future. I can see that thinking long term is important now.

Many people have more than doubled their sales by having a list. With a list you can stay in touch with your audience and promote to them again and again with multiple products. And even with the same product they say the average person has to see the offer like 7 or 8 times before they will buy. That's less likely to happen without a list. If you don't have a list then you have no way to make sure they will come back to your site, and they probably won't. And they're not as likely to go for an offer they only see one time.

I believe you need a good marketing funnel first. People are not always going to buy straight away. You will get hot buyers for sure... but people won't spend money unless they know a problem can be solved for them.

People are looking for ways to solve their problems.... So the plan should be to position and brand yourself as an expert in a particular niche. Show people how you can help solve a problem through a free training, ebook, tutorial etc... work on building the like and trust factor.

As you are building the relationship you should have funnels in place where you are selling products, courses, programs whatever it is. You have to build trust with people majority of the time before they become a customer.

But you do need sales pages in place... afterall you are online to generate an income as well. it's just having a good structure in place.

So the question is what path do you want to take people down to be a long term customer?

If you want to bounce any ideas off me just send me a message.

Have an awesome day

Cheers

Tiff

Well you can get the best of both worlds. Send visitors to a squeeze page and then present them with an offer right after they opt-in. If they don't buy you will have the opportunity to build relationship/trust with newsletters and then ask for the sale again at a later point.


If you send your visitors straight to your offer then you only have one opportunity to make a sale and if they don't buy you probably won't get another opportunity to sell to them.


In the long-run it makes more sense to build an email list, but if you have a really high converting offer then you could still do very well with direct linking.

Well, so far, the two answers that make sense to me are:

1. It's an industry-specific thing.
2. It's a nice back-up strategy for the hesitant buyer.

I like those answers a lot. So thank you. I'm just not comfortable with pushing opt-ins up front. It's like pointing a customer to the left while she's looking straight ahead - at the product.