How a funnel can transform your personal brand business

Can you succeed in selling a product without a funnel?

Of course, you can. But it would be like trying to finish a race with your legs tied.

Would you finish?

Absolutely, but in last place. 

The same can happen with your business, you can totally make it work but it will take you way longer than it could.

And let’s be honest, no one wants that.

There are two ways that not having a funnel may hinder your progress. The main problem I have seen is personal brands not being able to direct their traffic to the right offer.

There are two different cases.

1. The personal brand has only one product: In this case, all the traffic is directed to this offer. The problem is most of that traffic will not be ready to buy that product at that moment, and since there is nowhere else to direct that traffic they are simply lost as potential buyers.

2. The personal brand has several products: The problem, in this case, is not having one place to send the traffic, so you end up just showing a big catalog of all the products you have and hoping they will buy something. And again, once they didn’t buy they are simply lost forever.

At the end of the day in both of these cases, the problem is that you lose a lot of potential buyers because you didn’t direct them to the right product for them at the time, and there’s really no way of ensuring they will come back later when they are ready to purchase a product.

This leads to the second big problem, the life span of the customer is very short. They get to your page and once they decide not to buy that is it, there’s nothing else that can be done. 

You want to be able to keep in touch with each of them so that they can potentially buy in the future. But there is no way for you to do this unless you change your strategy.

These are the two big problems that funnels solve (Among other things). But before I get into how it solves them, let me explain briefly what a funnel is.

The funnel

The best way to understand what a funnel is is to think about it as the journey each customer goes through from the moment they first found the brand to the moment they make the purchase you want them to.

It is called a funnel because it is divided into different stages and in each stage, the number of prospects that go through the next one gets smaller. Your job as the funnel creator is to get as many prospects as you can through each of these stages so that you can convert as many of them into buyers.

Hopefully, you can already see that this is a much more systemized approach to selling your product and therefore it has a much higher potential to get you more customers.

Now, I won’t go into complete detail about how a funnel works because that would take a long time (Maybe next newsletter). But the idea is that you start at a low-friction step that is easy for the prospect to complete and you take them through the steps until they eventually are ready to buy your offer.

This solves our first problem because now, all of your traffic gets directed to that first low-friction step instead of being directly sent to the checkout page of your product, meaning more prospects will be willing to take that step and therefore be sent to your funnel.

This means that it doesn’t matter whether they are ready to buy or not, because now, if they are ready, they will, but if they are not, you will have time to convince them.

Now, let us remember the second problem. Once they don’t buy they are lost forever.

One of the great things about a funnel is that email becomes a very important part of it. In most funnels you will be asking for the contact information of the prospects at the very beginning, meaning that if they don’t end up buying you still have their contact information to keep sending emails waiting for them to be ready to buy in the future. 

Of course not just emails reminding them to buy, because you’ll end up annoying them and in the worst case having them report you as spam. And no one wants that. So please don’t do that. Email itself is a whole different subject which we will discuss some other time.

Right now it is important that you see the different benefits that a funnel can provide to your business. 

There are a lot of different types of funnels, they can be as complex or as simple as you want them to be. The important thing is that you learn the principles, how do they work? Why do they work? So that you are able to build one that adjusts to your brand and the needs that you have.

We will be discussing these in future newsletters.

Important considerations

Building a funnel is something that includes several different things, even when you understand how they work you’ll need to learn some other things for it to be successful, so I’m just gonna make a little list of them for you to be aware of them:

• Sales/Opt-in pages: These are probably the most important part of your funnel so, if you don’t want to make them yourself self it is important that you at least know what makes a successful one.

• Copywriting: All of your funnel is based on your ability to persuade someone to take the steps that you want them to, copy takes care of that for the most part. (Obviously, the product needs to be good in the first place)

• Email sequences: Almost all funnels include email sequences to convince the prospect to take the next step.

• Email campaigns: What happens if they decide not to buy? (Whole different subject)

You don’t need to be an expert at any of this. Once you learn the principles behind every one of these you will be able to build them for yourself while making sure that they work.

It will be hard if you have no experience at all but give yourself time to master the basics and practice, make a few mistakes, and eventually arrive at the final iteration of your funnel.