If you’ve been around the info-marketing game for awhile now, you’d have a good grasp of the sales funnel model… and how you need to structure your products range in a way then ensure your offerings fit along the sales funnel so people opt-into your funnel with a FREE report, e-book or seminar and then move through the funnel by purchasing ever increasing priced products and services.
BUT, if your upsell conversions are not where you want them to be, how do you structure your sales pipe to ensure your customers NEED your next offering and continue along the slippery slide ?
Just offering a range of ever increasing priced products around the same niche topic ain’t going to do it folks… You need to structure the information you are offering at each stage of the funnel so that it’s an obvious and needed extension of the last product your customer has bought…
Enter the Why-What-How Structure of Information Marketing.
Let’s take a look an an analog (traditionally offline) example of how to implement this structure - The ’stock or share trading’ education niche.
Stage 1. They offer a free report, or no-cost evening seminar where they talk exclusively on WHY you must start trading equities; The speak about how your 401k or Superannuation won’t be enough for you to survive on, they pull pretty graphs showing how the stock markets value as risen a steady X% of the past 16 years and they even provide convincing examples of how others are now making $100,000 per month using the strategies they teach - All in an effort to convince you WHY.
Stage 2. At the end of the WHY presentation, they pitch a book, audio program or home study program that details exactly WHAT you must do to achieve this level of passive income. The course covers that you need to set-up a trading account, use a latest meta software and follow a fool-proof system. It talks in generics, on a high level simply explaining WHAT you must do. And as a customer you walk away feeling satisfied because you now know WHAT you need to do to get started.
But hang on, 3 weeks have past and you haven’t really taken any action… how can that be? You know WHY you must do something and WHAT it is you need to do?
But do you really know HOW to do it?
Enter stage 3. The 2 day live weekend event. It’s at this high priced seminar (at the bottom of the companies sales funnel) that they will reveal the inside secrets, the step-by-step techniques on HOW to do it… They will walk you through the exact steps on setting up a trading account, they will do live presentations on HOW TO use the trading software all so you can walk away and start doing.
It’s this structuring of information that ensures the next sale - They don’t reveal the HOW-TO information too early, they won’t teach the HOW-TO in the first to stages because if they do - ‘Why would you need their upsell product?”
What you need to do is structure your sales funnel (and offerings) so that your customers NEED to buy your next product… It’s about leaving the ‘key’ to it all in the next level down the sales funnel, so the customer must have the next product to finish the jigsaw puzzle that is your niche.
So how can you apply this WHY, WHAT, HOW approach to your internet marketing sales funnel?
Here’s a few examples:
|
Adwords |
Wedding Planning |
| WHY |
A free e-book might cover WHY you need to control your traffic and why SEO is so unreliable. |
A free video might show (and elicit emotion) on WHY you must have the most memorable (you will only get one and remember it for life) |
| WHAT |
Your $29 audio course, talks about WHAT you must do to ensure a good adwords accounts; tight groups, targeted landing pages etc etc |
Your e-course might go into WHAT it takes to have a magical wedding; the top 10 most memorable bonbonnieres, the most romantic speech and so on |
| HOW |
The home study course will then take each of the WHAT elements and walk them through the HOW TO get a tight keyword group or HOW TO create a targeted landing page. |
The video course would cover HOW TO find the suppliers of these bonbonnieres, samples of the best wedding speeches and HOW TO work them together into your perfect toast. |
Most people get the sales funnel model, and have structured their PRODUCT OFFERING in a correct way, with each product getting more and more expensive, but the majority of people haven’t structured their INFORMATION OFFERING to match.
If you are finding you are not converting your up-sells at a reasonable level, take a step back, forget about tweaking the sales letter…. and take a look at your information structure…
Are you giving away too much GOLD in your early products?
Do your customers really need this new, more expensive product to overcome the need they went looking to fulfill when they first downloaded your FREE e-book ?
If you find that you are giving your customers the HOW TO right up front, why would they spend money later to learn the Why or What? Because when you break it down, everything you offer falls into one of these three categories, so make sure you reveal them at the right time.
Still lost? Try this?
Re-write your entry level product, that’s the free report or ebook to simply reiterate to your prospects WHY they need your stuff, build the bond by showing you understand their frustrations and even throw in some new issues that hadn’t thought of. (Most people attend a stock trading free seminar to make more money now, but leave thinking they need this just to survive when their on the pension) That’s all your free entry offering has to do - build trust and understanding with your prospect so they feel you ‘get-them’
Then jump right to producing the HOW-TO product, and make sure this course covers everything they need to do to reach the holly-grail of your niche, every step-by-step technique they need.
Once this end-product is created, produce an extra-large executive summary outlining WHAT the end-product covers.. talk in generics not details. Make this report/audio/course a educational “list” of WHAT they will need to do to fulfill their need. And you guessed it, this “executive summary” (AKA the how-to’s index page) becomes your WHAT product, the second offering in the sales funnel.
For those playing along at home… please leave other examples of how you might implement this Why, What, How Structure to your info-marketing….
OK, so I’m a little behind the conversation.. like 3 months… but there’s been a lot of chatter recently about “
