I wrote a social media post about a sales funnel, and since I use it in my affiliate business, I want to share this information here in my blog.
Here is the excerpt of the post, with some additional comments at the end that I did not post previously:
What are Sales Funnels, and how can they help any business make more money?
A sales funnel is essentially an online sales process that allows customers to explore a series of products to purchase at the time of sale.
While these funnels have nuisances, generally, when someone buys a product online (after inputting all of their billing information and hitting the ‘buy or purchase’ button), they are immediately taken to another webpage with a complimentary product the customer might be interested in.
The customer can purchase it right then and there or decline it.
That is a basic sales funnel.
Some businesses might have a sales funnel with two products, while others have more.
A grocery store is a familiar example of this sales technique.
Have you ever noticed all the candy, magazines, and other goodies in the checkout line?
They know that people will purchase extra stuff they were not initially expecting to buy while waiting to pay for groceries.
An online sales funnel is similar. The purpose is to provide additional products for someone to buy.
From a business perspective, this technique helps sell more products and increases each customer’s average ‘cart value.’
The customer can also benefit from getting additional products at a discount or quickly snagging other lower-priced products without the hassle of restarting the buying process.
So, if you sell products online and are not using a sales funnel, it might be worth doing so!
As an affiliate marketer, one thing I look for when I join an affiliate program is if the company has sales funnels I can use.
One of the main companies I am an affiliate for is Internet Profits, run by Dean Holland, a well-known affiliate marketer. You might have heard of him.
His company has sales funnels for affiliates to use. If they didn’t, I would have to create them myself, which takes time. Since Internet Profits has them, it is one less thing I have to do. This makes my job easier, which is highly important to me, especially at the beginning while building my affiliate business.
One other thing I want to mention about sales funnels.
This technique became popular many years ago when online advertising costs increased significantly—from what I have heard from many online marketers, online advertising, like Google Ads, used to be incredibly cheap. Marketers were making a profit selling low-cost products.
Then, suddenly, Google increased the ad costs 10-20x (or more). Other ad platforms did the same. Marketers could no longer make money, so they had to devise a new approach.
Someone came up with the idea of a sales funnel. The premise was to keep the main product offer as a low-cost item but introduce more products to a customer at the time of sale, hoping that some would purchase the other products. This worked, and so marketers were able to make more money per sale to cover the costs of higher advertising.
Now, sales funnels are a common technique within the marketing community because they work!
