"HeySteve!" Show 1: Todd Cardon Asks About Using Sales Funnels With eCommerce
Hey guys, what's going on. I'm super excited because today is number ONE of the "HeySteve!" Show. Sales funnel Radio encompasses all the stuff that I do. However, there's lots of different things like, I'm going to have some interviews here soon for you guys. Obviously I post my own thoughts on what I'm doing for marketing that's working and my own sales funnels.
What I wanted to share though is a show that I'm calling "HeySteve!". Here's how it works, you guys get on Sales Funnel Radio, go to salesfunnelradio.com or you go to salesfunnelbroker.com. Up the top it says podcast. You can look for"HeySteve!". What's cool is right on the website, there's a little widget that I found, I think it's called SpeakPipe, really, really cool software. Simple, but amazing.
What's neat about it is that you can click right in the browser, it says start recording. You can ask a question to me. That little widget or whatever will record whatever you ask and send an email copy over to me, which is awesome. I get a copy of your question.
Anyway, just got the first question in. This is from Todd. Todd is from Littleton, Colorado. He said, "Hey Steve, my background is on online marketing for e-commerce businesses. Each have 20 to 50,000 products ..." Holy crap, "first place I worked was for a ski and snowboards place and now I work for a place that sells restaurant equipment."
In this scenario he said, "Where do funnels come into play?" Do you start with top selling products, do you build the ladder from there, do you build maybe from a group of brands, where do you think the best place to start is or is it better to just find a business that just sells a handful of things where you can find your value ladder?"
Hey, that's a great question. E-commerce is the question on this one. I've had people ask me this before. How should I say this? Sales funnels are not supposed to give the person who is going through a lot of options. That's like totally the opposite of what an e-commerce business does.
E-commerce is 20 to 50,000 in options, that's a lot of products man. A sales funnel, what it's supposed to do is, it's supposed to give them only like one or two options the whole way through. That's why we call them upsells. It's literally one time offers. They literally can only get it right then and right there. It creates urgency and it creates scarcity.
The person wants to go through a purchase, because it's the only time they are going to see it. You get those feelings, "Oh man." That's what a sales funnel is. That's what it's meant to do. How can you use it in e-commerce setting? Now, you certainly can. If you use something like Shopify, I use ClickFunnels, you guys know that.
I love ClickFunnels. If you guys want a ClickFunnels trial you can go to the resource section of salesfunnelbroker.com. There's a free trial on thee you can use or just download any of the sales funnels that I have on the free funnels section. You will get those also.
What's cool is for e-commerce, here's what I would do. I would still use some kind of bait. You want something to get people over to you. If you are using restaurant equipment, that's what you are selling, you can still put something out there that's for free.
That's one of the biggest aspects of marketing when it comes to the funnel. You've got to give something for free off the bat. That's how you get a relationship with people. That's how you create a feeling of reciprocity. If I give you something for free over and over again, that's going to make you feel really indebted to me, whether or not I wanted to.
It's the whole reason we do it, is that if I give you something for free ... Think about my free funnel section for example. That free funnel section represents months and months and months of work. I'm just giving it to you for free. There's probably all the stuff that I've built in there and just decided to just give away, probably represents like a year of my life.
Now, I've made some money from those things. They are great. A lot of them, I just decided to give you for free because I know it would be a lot of value, why, why did I do that? It's because of how I know it makes you feel. I wanted to solve a lot of problems for you. I love building funnels. A lot of people don't like building funnels.
I'm just going to solve one of your problems, give you a crap load of value and you are going to be more apt to listen to things that I say. That's the whole reason I do it. It's to give value and to help you guys. Same thing with e-commerce. The rules of this don't change. That's the whole point of what I'm trying to make here. The rules don't change. You've got to find something.
If you are selling restaurant equipment or you said that you used to work for skis and snowboard place selling lots of e-commerce stuff too, think about that market. Think about like if it's a restaurant equipment ... I used to ski like crazy growing up. That's like all we wanted for Christmas was a ski pass. We would go like 30 times in a season and it's so fun.
Anyway skiing and snowboard, let's take that for example. What do those people want? If they are coming to an e-commerce place, they obviously like skiing and snowboarding. What can you give to that person for free? The rule is that you take the most valuable thing that you have. You take the thing that is the coolest thing and you give it for free, which is really hard for people to do.
It's hard for business owners to do that, which is understandable. You take the biggest thing that you've got, give it for free. Hand it off to those people and say, "Hey, look, here you go" and that's your bait. Now it's irresistible. Now you are someone who has given away tons of value. Now you are someone who has given so much value that they feel the need to purchase something from you in the future. That's the feeling you want to create.
Everybody can give a discount. Everybody can give coupons. That's overdone. I don't care about that stuff anymore. That's not a very good bait, "Order now and get you get 50% off," that's a terrible bait, don't do that in your own business. Oh man, unless you've got like a countdown time or anything, where you can tie it to like an event like there's a holiday going on. Don't use a discount.
That's my own opinion. If you've got data that says otherwise, by all means go for it. Have something that is even more sexy on there. I give away free funnels. You could give something away equipment-wise, it's free, "Hey, we want to give you guys these sweet ski poles or something like that." Something that's low cost to you that is perceived high value.
That's how you can use an e-commerce setting. If you sell equipment to restaurants, you can say, "Hey, look, here's latest tips on how to get more people into your restaurant." PDFs or e-books would be great for this, "Here's a guide on how to get your restaurant equipment cleaner using half of the manpower. The guy that's using your dish washing, here's how to still pay him well, but how to get all the jobs and the cleaning done in half the time."
If you are a restaurant owner, you've got to want to know that stuff, "You are right, yeah, they go straight to my bottom-line, why would I know, I want to figure that out." Solve the problem of the conversation that's goring on in their head. If it's a restaurant equipment, there's just a few examples I just gave there.
If it's a ski and snowboard place, "Hey, here's the best places for powder," "Here are the best places if you are into stunts, this is an awesome place to go. These are the resorts you need to go to," "If you are really into moguls and downhill skiing, things like that, here's the best places to go."
If someone is going to go buy something in a ski or snowboard place, they are buying it because they want to be entertained. It's the hope for entertainment in the future. Getting on the mountain, feeling the snow. Help them have that feeling before they get on the mountain. That's what you are trying to do.
In any of your businesses, in any of your funnels or products, you are trying to help them have those feelings as if what they are buying is already happening. Does that make sense, you guys getting this? I Hope that I am explaining this correctly. For example, I keep going back to the free funnel section I have in salesfunnelbroker.com, but that's the reason why I do it.
I'm giving you a free funnel. The reason why I do it is to help you have the feelings of having a funnel before you have a funnel. It's a future pace. It's called future pacing in sales. I future pace your brain to have the feelings I want you to have before they are even happening.
It's like when you are going on in a vacation. My dad took us to Hawaii once growing up. It's really cool. We didn't start talking about Hawaii the day we got on the plane. We planned months in advance. The anticipation is often just as powerful as the actual experience. That's exactly what you want your bait to do.
I can't believe I haven't got to the upsells yet, I'm talking to you guys to hit you off on talk. That's exactly what you want your bait to do. You've got to help them have those experiences mentally and emotionally before they are even happening. It's the anticipation that things are going to be better. That things are going to be the way they want them to.
The reason that they are hiring, "Ski equipment" or hiring or buying snowboard equipment is because they are hiring those things to help them have a good time later on. That's the job that the customers are hiring those products for. Help them have that. It plays straight into that, "Here's the best places for restaurant equipment," "Here's the best suppliers we found for food for restaurants."
If you can do that, those are great baits. You can totally use them in e-commerce businesses to drive them to your e-commerce store in general. Look at this, you've got your bait, I'm going to be drawing this on a yellow legal pad. You've got your free bait in the front.
Like I said, it hits all those things, it helps someone with what they are wanting. Not what they need, with what they are wanting, the feelings and emotions. We need to drive them over to an e-commerce store. You've clearly got a crap load of products, 20 to 50,000 products is a tone.
I would choose your top selling products. Anytime anyone clicks on them and says, "Yes, I want to buy this," the very next thing is a one time offer. You can still use upsells inside of an e-commerce business. Most places don't do it, but you've seen Amazon is actually doing that now.
Remember when you go when you click through Amazon ... If you don't know this, just go do it right now, you don't need to purchase it. Go through and act like you are going to buy something, what does Amazon do, it says, "Hey, most customers also purchase this." That's totally an upsell. It doesn't necessarily need to be on a one time upsell page. That's totally what's going on there.
They are upselling because you are purchasing this one product, "Most people who buy this also buy this or they also buy this." They say, "Do you really just want one of those or do you want two." Those are the different ways that you can do a funnel-like structure inside of e-commerce.
The other thing you can do is that, after someone purchases a product, drip them onto an email sequence that says ... In five or six days we are going to ask them how much they liked it. We are going to offer them something else to get them back into my e-commerce store or push them over to another funnel that was related to whatever they purchased.
If they purchased skis, your bait was, "There's something really, really cool," let's say you partnered with someone and you are giving them tickets to a mountain or a certain resort and that's your bait. They go through and they buy skis, that's it. You offer them something else, but they don't purchase it. Five or six days later you say, "Hey, do you like the skis, are they awesome?"
It comes over an email or a Facebook ad that re-targets them that says, "Why don't you get the wax that goes with it." Think about complementary things, salt and pepper. Whatever things go together. Here's the rule with one time offers, Todd from Colorado, this is probably way more than you are asking.
There's two more things I want to show you. In upsells, you cannot solve the same problem that they were trying to solve in upsell. For example, if someone is going through and saying, "Hey, I need new skis." Your upsell later on cannot solve the same problem as, "Hey, I need new skis." It's got to be complementary.
Anyways, I won't go more into that. If you want to pull this off, the way to do it, I would still use ClickFunnels. If you use a place like Shopify, Shopify have got some embeddable widgets for their checkout. I would still use something like ClickFunnels. Anytime anyone clicks on something in e-commerce, you can steal the funnel structure inside of ClickFunnels, but embedded with it one of their HTML elements from Shopify over into ClickFunnels. I hope that makes sense.
If you have any questions about that just ask the ClickFunnels support team. They will help you with that. I just want you to know that it's totally possible. When people do it, they often will make a lot more money. For guys who know Marcus Lemonis, he does the show, The Profit on CNBC, I can't remember what other stations he's on.
He's got a really cool show where he goes and invests in people's businesses and help them turnaround the company if he sees potential in them. He's doing that kind of thing, also he's currently, as far as I know, building sales funnels out of e-commerce stores that he has purchased and helped turnaround before.
Anyways, guys, I hope that helped. Todd, please let me know if that helped. If you guys fiend that that was helpful at all please let me know. I would really appreciate that. Actually go to our Facebook page and comment down below. Pleaser rate, review, subscribe and guys I'll talk to you later, thanks so much for tuning in to the "HeySteve!" Show Sales Funnel Radio.
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