Month: November 2021

As I’ve said before, a funnel is just the automated way of leading a prospect or customer through your sales process. Making it simple is best. I’ve talked about digital or online funnels before. There are some basic aspects or parts that make up funnels, and a given funnel may have some, many, most, or even all the parts built into it. Those parts might include:

• An advertisement, or some way to entice a lead to enter the funnel
• A headline
• A greeting
• A statement of the problem you solve
• The solution you provide
• Your offer, which may include –
  •  – the main offer
  •  – an upsell
  •  – a downsell
  •  – a cross-sell
• Collection of contact information
• Collection of payment
• A thank-you page
• A confirmation message
• One or more educational or relationship-building messages

A short & simple lead generation funnel might consist of a problem statement, the offer of a lead magnet, collection of contact information, and a thank-you/delivery message. It’s always best to “strike while the iron is hot,” as they say, and offer something for sale immediately after you collect their contact information, but we’ll go into that in a few minutes.

It’s now possible to create a funnel directly within the Direct Messaging stream of Instagram, using DM automation software. Traffic is often the single biggest problem and expense for those creating a funnel. Any Instagram account with 10,000 or more followers already has the potential for a steady stream of traffic.

DM automation tools (my marketing agency uses a tool called Chatmatic) allow you to automate conversations with prospects, based on them DMing an Instagram account. Chatmatic also lets you initiate a conversation with someone who interacts with a post or an Instagram Story that they’ve posted.

The conversation is the funnel – you don’t need complex pages, or to even take the prospect away from Instagram, where they’re comfortable. The DM automation tool makes it possible to offer the prospect choices (“Is your basement too wet, or too dry?”, “What size shirt do you wear? Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL” etc.), collect contact information like email or mobile number, and even deliver a digital file or information by offering a button with an embedded URL.

Since the DM automation tool can collect contact information (name, email, mobile number, birth date, etc.), you can then move this information to an email list or similar contact database. Most importantly, you can use the funnel on Instagram to reach back out to your prospect within 24 hours and offer to sell them something that is related to the problem your funnel addresses. As an example, let’s say you sell household heating & cooling solutions, and your automated conversation was about problems with the prospect’s basement. Once you collect their contact info, you can offer them a PDF about basements, and why it’s important to keep them at a constant temperature and humidity level. Within Instagram’s 24-hour contact window, you can follow up with that prospect. If they’ve said their basement is too wet, you can offer to sell them a dehumidifier. If it’s too dry, you can offer them a humidifier. If they take either offer, you can then offer upsells (“Keep your new machine in top shape with our maintenance kit: normally $250, now only $198”) and downsells (“Don’t need the complete kit? Get just the brush and cleaning fluid for $49 plus S&H”) on the sales page on your website, or even from the Instagram conversation itself.

By moving the prospect’s contact info to a list, you can then continue to build a relationship with them, and send them marketing messages. Why is moving followers “off the algorithm and onto your list” important? Instagram’s current system will show your posts only to about 8% of your followers. An email message is likely to be seen by around 16% of your list, effectively doubling your contact ability. And SMS, or text messages, are opened within minutes by approximately 90% of the recipients!

If you’re serious about using Instagram to make sales, you simply must build a list, and then follow up with a sales message. Ideally, by SMS.

In a previous article, I said that building and having a relationship with people online, and then monetizing that relationship, requires three steps:

1. Owning access to those people
2. Owning the product or service that you offer to those people
3. Owning the sales process (or store) that offers your product or service to your target audience

I discussed building a list, and building relationships with the people on that list. This time, I’ll be talking about your offer.

Build it yourself?

There are a lot of folks out there selling products and services to people. Maybe you’re an on-the-road salesperson, or maybe you’re selling as an online affiliate. Do you create or manufacture those things? No. In our world today, very few people create a product or service from scratch and sell it to the end user. Am I suggesting that you personally have to hand-craft what you’re selling? Again – no.

Establish a compelling reason

In this case, what I’m suggesting is that you should create a compelling reason for your prospect to buy from you, as opposed to anyone else. Any product or service has competition, even if you don’t see it as a direct threat. I’ve worked with a number of schools offering lessons in karate, dance, and gymnastics. In a lot of cases, the managers of those schools saw other schools teaching the same subjects as their competition. Some, however, knew that staying home and watching TV was their competition, as is playing video games and other sedentary activities. So in this case how do you sell something that you own?

Each offer that you make should have an added “spice”: you need to include something that only you can give to your prospect. What is that one thing that people can only get from you? Sales managers and marketers might call this a USP, or Unique Selling Proposition (or Point).

What makes your offer unique?

There are any number of things you can add to your offer that make your product or service unique. It might be something physical, like color or size. It could be the way the item or service is presented, which is one reason why chain burger joints sell you a burger for $5, and your local steakhouse charges four or five times that much for essentially the same product.

Packaging and delivery are also ways to differentiate yourself. I had a client who was putting together a cleaning service, and she was considering lowering her price below what others were charging. I suggested that she arrive in a tuxedo, leave a rose when finished, and charge a premium price. Her costs went up minimally, but she was able to charge substantially more for her service. Delivering a product in a hand-crafted wooden presentation case makes it unique – something you won’t get if buying the same product elsewhere.

USPs for digital products

If you’ve created a course or an ebook that covers a given topic, I can guarantee you that you have competition. Again, it’s not so much that another book or course covers your subject area, it’s that people can simply not watch or read. People can view a movie, read a mystery series, or simply go to bed instead of consuming your content.

But what happens when you do have a direct competitor? How do you get a prospect to choose you over someone else’s offer? You must have a USP that they simply cannot get from someone else. Again, this could be content, like covering a subject that your competitor does not. It could be media – your video course as opposed to my ebook on the same subject. It could be an extra, like offering downloadable forms with your ebook, or access to a video interview with an industry celebrity.

People who offer affiliate products are very aware of having to offer extras, or bonuses. On the launch of any given product or service, there are a million folks out there flogging the exact same product. Why would you buy from me, as opposed to persons A, B or C? My bonuses, of course. These make my offer unique (at least in theory). During my offer, I’ll tell you that you can’t get these bonuses elsewhere. As long as that’s true, then I have a chance at earning your business.

Owning the product

First, you need to build a list of people and their contact information, a list that you own and control. Next, you need to begin building a relationship with the people on that list.

When you have an offer for the people on that list, you should make sure that the offer conveys the idea that there is some part that they simply cannot get from others. Again, it could be a physical aspect, or a particular feeling or emotion. It could be the delivery method. The important part is that the product or service that you are promising is somehow unique to your offer. In this way, you own whatever you’re selling, regardless of competition.

In my next article, I’ll discuss owning the sales process.

I see a lot of people who build their following on Instagram and other social media platforms. Much like the dog who chases a car – what do you do when you catch ’em?

Having an online business with the “best” (however you define that word) product or service means nothing as far as sales goes. It’s the relationship that you have with your target audience that allows you to make on-demand sales. Many Influencers have well over 100k followers – some even into the millions. But simply having a certain number of people who follow you, or the influencer you want to connect with, is in no way a guarantee that you’ll be able to sell products and services to those followers – or even reach them with your message.

Instagram and other online social media platforms are constantly tweaking their algorithms, not for your benefit but for theirs. Right now, a post made by an account on Instagram reaches only about 8% of their followers – 8,000 people for every 100,000 followers. And when I say a post “reaches” 8% of an audience, that in no way guarantees that they read it, or take any other action based on that post. At best, you can expect about 30 percent of those 8,000 followers to respond. That means out of 100,000 followers, only 2,400 interact with you based on that post.

Building and having a relationship with people online, and then monetizing that relationship, requires three steps:

1. Owning access to those people
2. Owning the product or service that you offer to those people
3. Owning the sales process (or store) that offers your product or service to your target audience

If anyone else controls even one of those steps in this process, you cannot own the relationship with the individuals in your target audience. It can be taken away from you at any time, either temporarily or permanently.

If you have followers or fans on a social media platform, they can disappear at any moment, and so can any influence you have with these people. You must start moving them off the media’s algorithm and onto your own list. A “list” is simply a contact list, where you have an individual’s permission to reach out to them with the contact point they’ve provided to you. For the past several years, I’ve focused on building email lists with my clients.

Depending on factors like message frequency and interest level, email lists have an overall open rate of approximately 16%. Right off the bat, this is double the interaction rate of a social media post. From 100,000 people, you’ll get about 16,000 people to see your message. Using the same 30% action rate example, this means 4,800 people will take some kind of action based on receiving your message. That’s double the number of people from a social media post alone.

Recently I’ve been working with clients to collect mobile phone numbers, and encouraging them to reach out to their list via SMS message instead. Why? Because studies show that over 90 percent of people who get an SMS message read it within 10 minutes of receiving it. Let’s say your list is only 25,000 individuals – one-quarter the number of followers we’ve been talking about. That means approximately 22,500 people will read your message within 10 minutes of sending it. Again using a 30% action rate approximately 6,750 individuals will take action based on that SMS message. That’s a forty percent bump in interaction from sending an email! If you’re selling at a price point of one-hundred dollars, that could be an increase of over $195,000 with a switch to a different messaging medium. That is, of course, based on the assumption that you own the relationship with your clients and prospects.

In just the last few months, Instagram has made it possible to automate direct messaging. Within that automation, you can collect personal information, including contact information like email address and mobile number. That makes it possible to automate list-building from within a direct messaging sequence without your prospect leaving the Instagram app.

But list-building is only the first step down the road towards monetization. I’ll explore owning your offer, and owning the sales process, in upcoming articles. I encourage you to reach out if you want to know more.