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The only 5 tools you need to start building your first sales funnel

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The only 5 tools you need to start building your first Sales funnel

What is a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is the step by step journey a person in your audience takes, from when they first become aware of you and your brand, to them becoming buyers and eventually becoming loyal fans.

Mapping out the sales funnel helps us in better understanding what kind of content and offers will help our audience in that stage of their journey with our brand.

Looking to use Facebook ads for your launch? Get the Free 72-page Facebook ads guide here.

There are many different kinds of sales funnels, depending on your end goal.

The lead generation funnel has only two pages, the landing page and the thank you page. It is used to collect leads in the form of email addresses.

The tripwire funnel is a lead generation funnel but with a low end offer on the thank you page, used to convert the audience to a buyer.

If your end goal is to launch a product or service, you would a funnel such as the webinar funnel or challenge funnel where, on a designated time and day, you will run a webinar/ challenge and then sell your product or service at the end of that webinar/ challenge.

If you want to read about sales funnels in much more detail, check out this free book.

 

The 5 tools to help you get started with your first launch sales funnel:

1. Clickfunnels ($97/ month):

Clickfunnels is an end-to-end sales funnel builder that helps you set-up your first ( or next) sales funnel seamlessly. The reason why it is so seamless is because it lets you add upsells or downsells to your existing funnel and it also integrates with several other tools.

When I first started my business, I used Clickfunnels to build my first lead generation funnel. It took me only 2 days to set-up the entire funnel and I was able to start collecting email addresses almost immediately. It is one of the reasons I absolutely love Clickfunnels.

Clickfunnels provides you with a ton of templates to help you start building your funnel.

There is also an option to create an order form that you can link to a payment gateway such as Paypal or Stripe to start collecting payments for your products/ services.

order page in Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels also has the ability of a membership area, that you can use to host your courses, so you don’t need a third party tool like teachable.

It is easy to get started with Clickfunnels with a 14 day trial. So you can use the platform for 14 days and then decide whether you like it or not.

In summary, according to me, Clickfunnels is one of the best sales funnel builders out there because of the number of templates available, the vast number of integrations and also because it is an all-in-one platform to help you get your funnel up and running.

Get the plug-n-play Webinar Launch funnel template here.

The only 5 tools you need to start building your first sales funnel
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2. Convertkit ($29/ month)

Convertkit is an email autoresponder that lets you set up email sequences and automations. You can integrate Convertkit with Clickfunnels ( or any other sales funnel builder) to send emails to those who opt-in to your funnel.

Email automation being one of the tasks I do as a full-time digital funnel strategist, I have worked with several different email autoresponders and have found Convertkit to be the easiest to use.

Convertkit has tons of different features including creating forms, broadcasts messages, sequences, as well as different automations.

The best way to use email marketing as part of your business is to segment your list based on specific interests, and Convertkit makes this really easy to implement.

Once you create your funnel structure using a sales funnel builder, you can then integrate your funnel with Convertkit and run an automated email sequence with webinar/ challenge reminders.

Once you run the webinar/ challenge, you can then put people through an automated sales sequence to sell your products/ services.

You can get started with Convertkit for free by getting a 14 day trial. I am sure you will love it!

 

RELATED: 5 Ways to use Convertkit to grow your business in 2019.

3. Manychat ( Free)

Manychat is a software that you can use to build Facebook messenger bots.

With the email marketing space being so crowded, email open rates have dropped significantly. Although email marketing is a very important part of business, it has become important to complement email marketing with another touchpoint, and bots work great for this.

Facebook messenger bots especially work great if you are launching a product/ service using a sales funnel.

For webinar funnels or training/ challenge based funnels, you can use messenger bots to send reminders as well as build a connection even before your webinar/ challenge begins.

This helps build authority, thereby driving more attendance to your training lessons.

Facebook messenger bots also work great to help you understand your audience better by asking them relevant questions and driving engagement by way of a 2- way interaction.

I have written more about Facebook messenger bots here.

4. Facebook group (Free)

If you are planning to run a free challenge for mini training series as part of your launch, the easiest way to set this up is by using a Facebook group.

So you create a new Facebook group for this training/ challenge, and after people sign-up for this on the landing page, you invite them to join your Facebook group where you will be running this challenge.

Once you run the training/ challenge over 3-5 days inside the Facebook group, you then launch your product/ service and drive people to the order page.

Since you have already spoken about your product/ service during this entire process, you don’t need have a long form sales page. You can use the order form feature in Clickfunnels to map out the offer and collect the payment.

Having a Facebook group helps you build a better relationship with your audience over the course of your training/ challenge, and your audience is also able to post questions, or doubts, that you can then answer.

By sharing your knowledge in a Facebook group format as part of your launch, you are able to build your authority faster, especially in the eyes of the audience who has just come across you, or your brand.

Jenny Shih used a Facebook group for her recent “Make it work online” launch.

If you are using a webinar for a launch sales funnel, you can use Youtube Live along with Clickfunnels to set up your webinar, or you can use third party platforms like Webinarjam, Zoom, Demio etc.

 

RELATED: How to get your first client using Facebook groups

5. Payment Gateway (Free)

 

In order to collect payments as part of your launch, you will need to integrate your funnel with a payment gateway.

The two most commonly used payment gateways are Paypal and Stripe. They are free to get started, although you will be charged a small fee for each transaction.

Most sales funnel building tools integrate with both these payment gateways.

Paypal also gives you an option to create a “Buy Now” button that you can use on any page, or even in your emails.

So there you have it. It takes a little time to get your first funnel set-up, but once you do, it is an asset that can bring in money for a long time.

Do you use a sales funnel in your business? Let me know in the comments below.

Looking to use Facebook ads for your launch? Get the Free 72-page Facebook ads guide here.

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