The Sales Funnel That Nurture Your Audience
Have you ever joined an email into a sales funnel only to find out that once they pitch a product to you, the great content ends? Sales Funnels should nurture your followers first and lastly. They are not complicated. But, if you want them to be successful, they have to be done with the intent of helping your audience. Furthermore, they must be done with the right tools to run smoothly.
If you have not really chosen an online business yet, and you’re just in the learning stage, be sure to see our episode that leads you through brainstorming your online business.
Video Transcript- Sales Funnels
Hey, welcome back. This lesson is going to be on what I call the nurture funnel. Other people might call it a sales funnel to try and get people to buy something from you. But I call it a nurture funnel. And I kind of follow the same route. And I’ll show you what I’m talking about in a minute. But really, your main focus should be improving people’s lives, and giving them something that they did not know before, or did not have and improving their life that way. I actually call mine the nurturing funnel. Grab a cup of coffee, we’re going to have some fun. If you hear my kids shrieking in the background, it’s because they’re home right now. I worked on my other websites in the morning. And so, I have my teenage daughter watching them up in the room while they have their screen time. I saved their screen time so I could record. And so, if you hear them shrieking, she’s probably just, tying them in a closet. No, I’m kidding. She’s a sweetheart. But anyway, you might hear that in the background, or possibly our adorable little bird, Marty.
Let’s talk about the sales funnel. First of all, I want to emphasize, we rise by lifting others, by Robert Ingersoll, this is so true. People try to rise just for the purpose of making money. But if you truly try to lift someone else’s life, then it’s going to happen automatically, especially if you do it wisely and strategically, but with the focus mostly to help. Focus on that. Now, this is what is usually called a sales funnel but, in my case, your nurture funnel. You start by pulling people in either get a Facebook profile. Now, I don’t recommend doing all of these, some people say be everywhere. And I don’t agree with that, because you can’t focus very well, on just a couple social medias or just optimizing with Google if you’re trying to be everywhere at once; especially if this is your side hustle, then you for sure need to narrow it down to maybe just two, or three. But there’s all kinds of different platforms that you can build popularity on, just start posting good information, helpful information, in whatever niche you’re going to go into, and start giving tips and little nice things. And once they start following you through any of these platforms, then you want to bring them and encourage them to get onto your email list. And we’ll talk about this a little bit more in a minute. You want to nurture them, give them more information, more tips, free products, free printables, things like that, down to where you can actually do a product offer. And that’s where you can make some money. And this is important because you are not a nonprofit unless you are. But most businesses are for profit. And for that reason, you need to have some kind of a product and it does not have to be a physical product, but it does have to improve someone’s life or you’re not going to sell anything. And then this is where I’m different from other people. Some people they do a product pitch, if the people don’t buy, they never hear from you, they don’t send out anything else. Oh, that person’s a dead lead or whatever. I say continue nurturing these people, improving their lives, giving awesome content. And I’ll give examples of that. And if they decide to buy your product in the future, great. If not, and they can get everything they need from your free content. That’s fine, too. They’ll probably talk about you and tell their friends about you and all the information that you’re giving them. Give some of your best content out for free. Let’s go into some of these.
Now, like I said, on Facebook, Insta, Tik Tok, Pinterest, Google. First, you want to give out a whole lot of free information. You can do short videos, you can do multiple pictures to get a little lesson across on Insta, or short videos on Insta, Facebook, Tik Tok any of those. You can give out freebies, where you tell them that if they want to sign up for your email, they can get a template. This is really a good way to do it because they want something and people are trained now to get something if you give an email out, then you should get something in return. This is how people are trained. And so, it’s good to have some templates or some free information to help migrate those people into your email list. And the reason getting them to your email list is so important even if they’re still following you on Facebook or Insta or anything is because we have had platforms go dead. There used to be a platform called Vine and people built their whole businesses on it. And then Vine just through bad business management or something, I’m not sure what caused it, but they completely closed down and people lost all of their followers. I know of a lady who had over 100,000 followers on Insta and for some reason, Insta felt that she was violating their terms of use and she had read them, she didn’t feel in any way she was, but you can’t get a hold of anyone to talk them out of it; and she lost all of her followers and had not migrated them to an email list. So, it’s really important to get them to cross platforms. Maybe if they’re on Insta encourage them to join your Facebook too or get them to follow you on Pinterest, and try and get them into your email list so that if any of those platforms go dead, or you get sandboxed in any of those, then you will still have your followers and people that you can give information to and reach out to and that are spreading your word.
One of the things you want to do is you want to get a email collection company setup. So, with that, you can give out those templates, it will automatically deliver them, it will collect their email address and keep them in a nice file for you. Let me give you some examples. The one I used in the very beginning was MailChimp because at the time, it was the only one I knew about and it was free. They have all kinds of different price tiers here. But as you can see, you can get up to 2000 email subscribers, before you have to pay money. That one was free, and you can get started on that. And they actually help you and walk you through creating some little forums where people can put in their email address, and an automatic email will go out to them to deliver that template. So that’s MailChimp, and they’re pretty cool, especially when you’re small. Once you get a little bit bigger, I recommend going to Convert Kit. This is who I use now, and I love them. So, Convert Kit, they also have a free account. I don’t think they did in the beginning, but they have a free account up to 1000 subscribers. But the neat thing about Convert Kit is the way you can send out email sequences, which is, tell it send this email after they’ve been on my list for a week, send this one after they’ve been on my list for two weeks, send this one after three weeks. And if they click a link, it will tag them. For example, if you’re doing succulents and email number three on the third week is how to grow succulents outside and the person clicks over and once that information, they’ll immediately get tagged. You can set it up so that they’ll immediately get tagged as an outdoor succulent grower so that you know in the future, if you want to just send some information out to just the people that are interested in outdoor growing, then it would go straight to them and not all of your other followers. Some of them might live in an apartment and not need that at all. So, it’s really neat that you can segment them like that and make the information you send them in the future be more unique to them. I love Convert Kit for that reason but either one of those work really well. I would recommend either one of those. That is the first most important step as you start pulling people into Facebook and Insta. And Google’s a whole different story, with Google, you kind of need to have some websites built and optimize those to get Google to start sending you traffic. And that would be a whole different lesson to talk about that. And it’s really good, but it takes a little more time. So, if you have people coming in off of Google, because you already have a website, that’s awesome, migrate them over to your email as well. If you’re just beginning and you don’t have a website yet, then optimize some of those social medias and start pulling people over to that form that Convert Kit or MailChimp form. By the way, I’m going to make these live links on the download that goes with this, the MailChimp and Convert Kit, and anyone else I recommend here, on the PDF that you can get in the show notes below. You can click on that and it will go straight to those websites for you to find them.
Once you get them into your email list by offering them a cool template, or a cool checklist on something that has to do with whatever your niche is. learn something, share it with them and now they’re on your email list. And now you can nurture them the right way. And they can read your emails anywhere. I recommend about two months of good email content before you ever pitch your product. And who knows maybe you don’t plan to do a product for a year that’s fine. In the meantime, you’re collecting those emails and growing your email list. Also, if you’re just beginning like an Insta account or a Facebook, don’t pitch any products for like 60 days at least. Get some people on there, get people loving you, get them loving your personality, loving what you do. You want to do that before you offer a product and by then they like you enough to know whether they want to invest in you or not. Do you know enough information? Do they feel like you’re an expert in what you’re going to share? Or are you on a journey that they want to follow you on. And they won’t know that just within the first week or so, sometimes, but usually, it’s good to nurture them a little bit before you do that. So, nurture, and share. And here’s some ways you can do that.
You can set up sequences like I mentioned in those emails, and the first week, you might send out a template or something that makes their job easier. Let’s say that you are talking about dyslexia. And you have a cool printable that they can print and help their child that will help them with dyslexia. So, send that out for free. Use email to deliver it, that’s how I do it. And it’s pretty easy. I just use those email servers, they have little training videos that will walk you through and show you how to do that. And you can just have this go out on maybe week one. And then maybe on week two, you have more printable information, information that you’ve collected, that saves them time. They will generally love to get something from you that saves them time where maybe I researched these different sites, or these different subscriptions and this is the best one for children with dyslexia, or none of those are good for children with dyslexia. But you’re kind of doing the homework for them. That could be the second email that goes out. You can also send them out checklists. So, say that we’re doing the succulent website and there’s a checklist of everything you have to remember to do before winter hits if your outdoor growing. That would be a really cool one; with Convert Kit, you can also set these up to go out at a certain time of year, instead of week one or week two. You can also say send this one out to everyone when it hits fall. And they can just get that free information, print it. We’ll talk about how to make these in a second. You can also send out quick surveys, quizzes, or polls. And I do this with a little program called Survey Monkey. And they have different price tiers. But you can also sign up for free. And you can set up a little questionnaire that they can fill in, it sends you the information and the cool thing about that is that it also collects their email. If you haven’t clicked on someone’s email, and you want to do this just on one of your social medias, it will help you get their email address so that you can nurture them further. But this is actually a more popular way right now, people clicking through to take a little quiz. There’s ones out there, which Disney character are you, and things like that that are really popular right now.
But you can make little quizzes or polls that you ask them, how many of you are growing indoors, how many of you are growing outdoors, and they like answering them, and then it gives you an idea as to what your audience is looking for. And you can even have open-ended questions like, what would you like to learn most from me? What would you like me to learn for you and share with you? Those are really fun. And you can do those on that survey monkey website. And then another thing you can do is send them a link for a free eBook download. You can do eBooks as well as printed and self-published through Amazon publishing. And you can price it however you want, you can also make them 99 cents. I actually did an eBook in the very beginning of my self-learning disabilities website. And it was about some of the physical exercises you can do to stimulate your brain and help it work better so that you start eliminate your learning disabilities. But I just did that one on Microsoft Publisher, I believe it was and then I export it as a PDF. You can either print to PDF or export it as a PDF. And then that was just a link in an email that they receive and they click on the link and it would pop up for them. That’s another one, is to do a short eBook. What better way of getting people to know if they like you and the information you can give them. You can also do YouTube videos or any other kinds of videos so that they actually see your face like I’m doing.
So, after you have brought them into your email list, nurtured them for a while, then they know if they like you well enough to invest in you and if you know enough information that’s worth it to them. Will I have a product pitch in this at some point. Yeah, of course, this is a for-profit company. I have goals I have not achieved. I went to Lake Tahoe over the weekend. Now I want a cabin there. Will there be a product? Yes, sometime but I’m going to give a ton of information away for free. And if I do a product, it will be diving a little deeper into something that you could dive deeper into, maybe Pinterest marketing or something cool like that. But the whole point is to nurture and help people and get them into a nurture sequence so that they get to know you, and they know if you know enough to share with them. By the way, I’m doing this in PowerPoint for a reason. And you’ll see why in a second. So, here’s the product offer. Like I mentioned, if you didn’t already, give them an eBook for free in your nurturing sequence, that could be a product. And like I mentioned, you can build an eBook in word. You can go into Word, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, or even point like I’m in right now and you can type things in, import pictures, most of you probably know how to do this, and most of you probably have Microsoft on your computer already. And then you can export it as a PDF. And this is why I’m doing this in PowerPoint this time. You click file, and then you go down, and you say, save as an Adobe PDF, and it’ll pop up where you can save the file and name it. Or you can go to export and say create an Adobe PDF. And that’s really cool, too. You can also go down here to change file type and export it in any way that you want. You can even export it as pictures. But one of the best ways to deliver an eBook, if it’s for purchase is deliver a PDF or on the Kindle through Amazon self-publishing. Those are some really easy ways to do eBooks if you’ve ever thought like, man, I could write a book on this, do it.
Another thing is you can sell planners. Let’s say that you’re doing meal plans or exercise plans, you can actually have a planner that they download in PDF, you just build it in point or publisher, or word, and they download that in a PDF, and they can print it and put it in a three-ring binder. And it’s a daily planner, you can make little calendars in there, really easy, they have templates for that. That’s what I did is a planner. Other kinds of printable forms or posters. In our dyslexia website, we have posters that some of the occupational therapists can print and put on their wall, and they download those and send them to a printer. They also have some exercise cards that have some of the exercises that these kids need to do. They can print them onto cardstock and cut them up and give them to the children and be like, hey, do these three this week, now, next week do these three. So, it just depends on what kind of niche you’re going into. But start brainstorming. What are all the things that you can offer that would be helpful? Give a lot of it away for free, save some of it for a product. You can also do mini-courses. You can do mini-courses or a full course. Full courses are usually if you consider a full course, they’re usually anywhere from 300 bucks to 1200. And you better have some good information in there. And then you can do like $99 mini-courses for people who want to just get their feet wet, or who just want to start with some of the beginning information that you have. And by the way, I use teachable.com for that, oh, here’s the self-publishing, by the way, with Amazon, I meant to show that to you. You can go in use your Amazon login and they walk you right through it. They have videos that show you how to do it, and how to upload it and how to do the specs right before you upload your eBooks and things like that.
But this is teachable. Now teachable does cost money. It’s 30 bucks a month is their minimum price plan. And I did start out with that it worked just fine. The cool thing about teachable is you can upload PDFs, you can upload videos, you can put them all into an order, you can name the lessons, you can have lessons 1 through 10 or just give lesson names and each lesson has maybe a PDF download and a video. And you can organize it all, it’s all visual drag and drop, super cool. But they also handle the cart feature. They’ll actually give you a link once you create your course with them, they’ll give you a link and you can give people that link. You can send out an email saying, by the way, I have a course if you want to learn more about watering succulents or X, Y, and Z, helping kids with dyslexia, whatever your niche is, and then they click the link and go over and teachable creates a whole landing page with a cart feature so that they can say subscribe to this course and then checkout and teachable sends the money over to your bank. So, it’s really convenient. We actually upgraded to the $99.The $29 they take 5% of the transaction fee and that’s how they make their money. We actually switched over when we were making enough money that we were actually losing money paying that 5% transaction fee instead of just paying the 100 bucks a month and having no transaction fee. You just look at what plan works for you, probably start out with the smallest upgrade. The other cool thing about switching to the $99 plan on teachable was with the $29 plan, they would only deposit the money after the 30 day, like whatever kind of money back offer you give. Let’s say you give a 30-day money-back guarantee. They won’t deposit the money in the bank until after that in case someone wants their money back. But with the $99 one, the money gets deposited right into your bank and if someone wants their money back, then you issue that refund, and they get their money back. I recommend offering a 30-day money-back guarantee because that way they can kind of get into it and know if they like it. But that’s a whole different course about building courses or a whole different lesson. Anyway, so a mini-course or a full course I use teachable on that. And of course, a physical product.
Some of you might already be selling a physical product and you just want to do it better. Use this nurture funnel, it works great. And even if you have a physical product, there’s got to be something to go along with that, that are checklists or planners or a little eBook or something that you can give them for free and also sell on the side of your physical product. The nice thing about all of these top ones until you get to the bottom is you create it once and its then in a PDF and you can deliver it electronically. You don’t have to manufacture anything, you don’t have to stock any items. You don’t have to buy supplies, all of those once you create it, you have an unlimited number of that, that you can sell and resell and resell. And so, those are all great. Even if you have a physical product, I recommend including some downloadable information too. Physical products are really neat, especially if they’re custom. And everyone can get almost everything on Amazon, but not things that are custom like little cute candleholders, one of my followers. I just saw her cool Insta last night, some cute candle holders, or, little unique things that people usually use for gifts, like something you would sell on Etsy. Those are great physical products. To sell something that Amazon already sells, I’m going to tell you it’s a little hard to compete because they deliver it in two days, and everyone trusts them. And so, if you have a physical product, try to get it on Amazon, you can do that. Or if it’s something custom and cutesy wutesy, then by all means get it over on to Etsy. Let’s talk about some of these. Oh, by the way, another place you can do your course, I keep switching over and then realizing I open another tab to show you something. You can also put your courses on Udemy. I understand it’s less expensive, but I haven’t done it. Check out Udemy if you’re wanting something less expensive than teachable. And I’ll put links to all of these.
So, here’s Etsy, the cool thing about Etsy is if somebody Google’s a product, Etsy, some of the first things that pop up with a picture of some of their more popular sellers. And so, Etsy is kind of cool that it does some of your advertising for you. There is a downside to Etsy, when you go to put a product on Etsy, that notice all of your competitors are right next to you. This is not one seller, these are many different sellers. And so, that kind of drives the prices down a little bit. But most everyone on Etsy is smart enough to know not to let their prices be driven down too far. You don’t need to be the cheapest on the page, you need to be the cutest. But see, this is a great place to buy gifts, gifts of anything. And the neat thing is, is you can also let’s say you’re putting in printable party favors. They do deliver electronically, all of these things, they’re just printable. When you set up an Etsy store, you can tell them this product’s either a physical product that I need to ship and they help you with the shipping label on that after the sale, you can click to create shipping labels really easy. Or deliver this electronically and upload a PDF and they automatically send it to the buyer for you when that purchase is done. All of these are just little printables that you can print and glue on to things and stuff like that. And so, you don’t have to have a physical product to be on Etsy. You can be electronically delivered.
There is also this website called big cartel where you can easily make a little online store. And if you only have five products, it’s free. And you don’t need a credit card to even sign up with them. If you have up to 50 products, so between 5 and 50, then it’s only 9.99 a month. So, you can see if you’re bootstrapping this deal, and you don’t want to spend any money on it yet, there are ways to do this to build, to upload your products. I’ve never tried big cartel, but I’ve seen other people that have and it is affordable and works pretty well. And you can even get your own website address and your own logo and things like this. This is an example of somebody store on there. And when you click on that, that product comes up, you can have a small description of it. This is a guy that sells men’s hankies, it’s kind of cool. But see there can be variations, here we go. You can even have drop-down lists where you give them two different names the blue wonder or the girls wonder. And it lets you know which one to ship if you have different variations on the same product. Etsy is great, big cartel is great.
And the other one is Shopify. I love Shopify, I’ve used it. And it’s super simple. They have pictures you can already use and drag them in, not pictures of your products, take your own product pictures, but like banner pictures and things like that. And then you can just say add a product, you import a picture of your product, type in a title, a description, the price, they handle it all. They have a really cool shipping feature where you can go into the area that shows all of your orders and click a little thing that says ship this product, and then choose UOS or USPS to mail it. They make it super simple. The only downside to Shopify is you have to sign up for their $29 a month if you want to sell on their on their website. They don’t have anything cheaper than that unless it’s just to hold your place. Like you can upload products and things like that, while you’re building it and not pay the $30 a month, I think that’s 15 bucks, or you can use their 14-day free trial. But the time I record this lesson, it’s 29 bucks a month after that once you are ready to go live. But they’re really cool, and they’re super easy to use. So, I do recommend that.
And here’s an example of a Shopify store. They have cool banners, they have different templates you can choose so you can do one that doesn’t even have a banner at the top here if you want. You upload the different pictures of your products, let’s go into one. You upload these pictures, type in the title, and a description, and maybe different variations of the same thing. And they can add to cart. And then they can go in and check out really easy. And Shopify handles all of that for you, as well as the back-end shipping. So, it’s pretty nice if you decide to sell a physical product. I think they also do electronically delivered products as well. Those are all of the different ways to sell something online. You can also use your own website with a cart feature, GoDaddy or Bluehost. They have different options to buy a URL. That’s your website address and build your own little website. They even have like a start for free thing where you can do that while you’re still pretty small. And they have a cart feature and everything with that too. Those are pretty fun. And those would probably be a whole different set of lessons to build your own website. But in the meantime, you can use some of these that are already built for you like Etsy, Big cartel, or Shopify.
This is where I differ from other people. Once you’ve offered a product, you’ve nurtured people for a couple of months, you’ve brought them in through social media or some other way and nurtured them and given them lots of free information and they didn’t buy your product. That’s okay, like 2%, somewhere between 2 and 10% is actually a pretty good conversion. Everybody doesn’t need it. Some people want to just continue with your free information. Maybe they’re not ready to kickstart something so they don’t need whatever you’re offering yet. Or, maybe they’re just learning about succulents but haven’t even bought any yet so they don’t need your course on succulents yet. And so, that’s okay. This is where I differ. You’re going to continue nurturing them and giving them free information so that you can change the world. Make the world a better place by giving people awesome information that makes their life better that helps them. On our dyslexia website, I continue to give information through email sequences. I think I have months set up to do that so that people continue to get information. And you can do this in different ways. You can type emails that have great information that you have not told them yet. You can send them an email that gives them a link to another website that would help them like saying, hey, by the way, these people also give really good tips on X, Y, and Z and give a link to this other website. It’s helpful, it’s a really quick email to write. And people like that you’re not just trying to draw people back to yourself all the time, they like that you’re not afraid of the competition, that you’re willing to say, hey, this guy knows more about that than I do. For example, on my dyslexia website, when we get people that also have problems with ADHD, I refer them to Dr. Melillo, my mentor, because he has a whole course on ADHD and my course is on dyslexia. So, I’m not afraid to tell people hey, if that’s your niche, and that’s what you need information on, check out his website because ultimately help them help them help them. That’s the best thing you can do for them.
You can also send out an email recommending someone else’s social media profile. Like I found this girl on Insta, and she’s super awesome. And I think all my followers would love her. Check it out and follow her. And it’s a quick email, it gives them something, helps them. I found a YouTube video that showed Dr. Melillo doing some assessments and tests. And it was so good that people wrote me emails back saying thank you so much for this, it was so helpful to us. Did it take anything away from what they thought of me? No, it actually improved me in their eyes, because I was willing to help them by referring them to someone else. So, don’t be afraid to refer them to other profiles or a link over to a cool YouTube video that might be interesting to your followers. You can also send out emails that are just reminders to join your other platforms, because like I said, you kind of want them to mix platforms, you don’t want everyone on Insta, or just on Insta. It’d be nice to have them on at least two social media. Facebook and Insta and your email. It’s really good because that way, if you ever run a promotion, or send out a coupon, you can post it on Facebook, Insta, and send it out email and they’re sure to see one of those. We recommend those. And they’ve actually proven that on some of those social medias even if you’re following someone, you may never see a post they do that day. Because if you have a lot of people that you’re following, and they’re all posting, Insta smart enough to say, well, let’s just show 50 of these, this person’s not going to scroll through to 300 posts today, because she’s following two, 300 people. And so, they’ve proven that you actually get a lower percentage of people seeing your posts than the amount of people following you. It’s really important to have them in a couple of different areas so that you have a better chance of them seeing when you’re offering something that can help them. And then more free printables. People love printables, templates, checklists, it’s huge. If you can think of something that would help them in some way, and turn it into a printable that you can just deliver by email, just an email goes out and you don’t even have to automate it, you could just hop on one day, type in and attach the PDF and say, hey, by the way, here’s a cool checklist to help you guys know how to pull your succulents back out of wintering and get them fresh for spring, or something like that to get someone going. And can you pick your product again? Yeah, from time to time, do it with some bonus features, like anyone that buys our product this week is also going to get x, y, and z, maybe some other templates or PDFs or something that they didn’t already receive for free, or with a savings.
All of those features that I showed you, Shopify, all of them, they have a way that you can go in and create a coupon and the coupon code and email that out. And so, you email it out with the link to your store and say, hey, 20% off this week, and you’re helping people by saving money. You can pick your product again, from time to time, run some sales, run some promotions and bonuses. But continue to give out tons of free information in yours sales funnel for as long as they need it. And back to the title page. This is where it comes in. We rise by lifting others. Be sure to lift others and go change the world by making people’s world better and making their day better. And in return, it will change your world too. Good luck and have a lovely week or weekend. Whatever the case is when you’re watching this. See ya.