- Today I will be going to talk about sales funnels
for startups.
And you know what?
We will talk about how you can test your idea
with an MVP funnel for your new business.
We'll also cover how you can generate more leads
or sign-ups with some clever tactics and a lot more.
I also have put together a pack that you can download
to access these resources.
Let's start.
This is going to be a good one.
(soft ambient music)
The good thing is even before launching your product
or service, you can test its viability.
I first heard about the term MVP,
when I came across Eric Ries and his book,
"The Lean Startup", definitely worth a read.
So, the idea is to come up
with the most minimal way possible
to test your product.
Let me explain how you can do this.
You can use my Google Doc to put a structure
for a wireframe.
You can easily build a wireframe
in a tool like Whimsical.
Once you have wireframe,
you can head over to Upwork and hire a landing page designer
and ask them to convert the wireframe into mock-up
using your brand logo, colors, et cetera.
So, here's what you can do next.
Head over to usabilityhub.com
and conduct an experiment.
You can define the target audience and the demographics
and ask them simple questions.
Some of the questions could be,
what do you think we are selling on this page?
What was the most appealing thing on this page?
Would you trust this page and make a purchase?
Based on these questions,
you can get some understanding of how people
find your product.
It's a great exercise because as founders
you might know everything you want to achieve
through your startup,
but sometimes that communication has never transferred over.
By running this experiment,
you can get a feel of what some random visitors think.
Once you have a mock-up,
you can ask a landing page developer
to take the mock-up and code it.
You can either choose tools like WordPress or Unbounce.
It really depends on your budget.
Once you have the page up and running,
you can start sending traffic to the page.
Now, here is how the prelaunch funnel gets interesting.
If you know your product or service solves a problem,
then use Google ads and target those keywords,
which people are typing in.
Let's consider you're a SaaS business
and offer a holiday booking API service,
if your prospect is looking for your service,
they will be typing in those keywords
as they're looking for a solution
or product around holiday booking service API.
But if your prospect doesn't even know
that they have a problem
and therefore don't know that you exist,
then you need to first educate them
and then increase their awareness about your product.
You can have a Facebook ad which educates prospects
and then takes them to a landing page
where you can tell them about the solution
and introduce them to your product or service.
In a pre-launch funnel,
you can get visitors to fill out a simple form
to get their email address.
So the idea is to build a list of subscribers,
who you can market to when you actually launch.
As the name suggests,
you want to create excitement around your business
and offer something valuable in return for the email.
For example,
early sign up would get a 10% lifetime discount on launch.
Now, chances are,
you might have heard of the pre-launch landing pages.
Now let me share with you a prelaunch sequence,
which can increase your chances of turning subscribers
into customers by around 20%.
This is known as the reservation or One Dollar Funnel
or the VIP funnel.
In this funnel,
once a visitor signs up on your pre-launch page,
you redirect them to a one time offer page.
On this page,
they see an option to join the VIP list.
The VIP list could get them an exclusive discount
or early bird access to your crowdfunding page.
The catch is,
they need to pay a deposit of $1.
So, what's happening here?
Visitors who put down a deposit have taken this step
of giving out their credit card,
which means they have shown purchase intent.
Once you launch,
you can now create one click upsells
for your pre-launch VIP list
who are waiting to buy your product or service.
You can easily distinguish your Facebook ads
and show different ads to the prelaunch list subscribers
versus the VIP list.
If you would like to know more about this funnel,
let me know in the comments below,
and I will create a video and how to set this up.
As the name suggests, on a book a demo page,
you can get prospects to fill out a form
so they can speak to you.
This is ideal if your product is either high ticket item
or a product or service that's complex and needs education.
I remember signing up for Superhuman
in which I was onboarded by a product specialist.
Only then, I was able to access and pay for my account.
After going through the product demo,
which was by the way, super personalized,
I jumped on signing up for the service.
So, back to our landing page.
If you have an effective book a demo landing page,
you need to have a couple of options.
First, show appointments scheduler form directly on the page
or capture just email on the landing page
and embed an appointment scheduler on the thank-you page.
A free trial funnel is great for signups
for your SaaS business.
Although you might already have a free trial built
in your app,
what I'm talking about is slightly different.
Free trial landing pages sits outside your app.
Because they're outside,
they are less rigid and easily editable.
So, where am I going here?
Free trial landing pages are linked to paid campaigns
and are great for testing out any hypothesis.
When building these pages,
you can capture just email,
which you can track as a conversion
and using your parameters,
pass this over to your main signup page,
where subscribers can complete the registration.
The image had benefit as you can test out
multiple landing pages and match them
to different target audiences.
You don't have to worry about infrastructure
and access management
as these pages that are hosted on a sub domain.
So these pages are completely detached from your main app.
Since these pages can be built using page builders
like Unbounce, Swipe Pages,
you can allow your marketing team to go wild
and test them up.
With clever UTM tracking,
you can pass this data over to your CRM
and know exactly which marketing channel is working for you.
To learn more,
check out my video on using landing pages for Google ads
and UTM tracking.
In a click-through funnel,
you basically redirect visitors to free trial product demo
or signup page.
Your target audience is either problem aware
or they're completely unaware.
Depending on the awareness level,
you can warm or educate them first,
before you send them your app signup page.
Click-through landing pages have a very simple objective,
to push visitors down the funnel,
by increasing their awareness.
One of the benefits of a click-through funnel,
is that it'll create multiple landing pages
to target different personas.
For example,
if you're building a CRM and one of your target audience
is an agency owner,
then you can create a landing page
that is highly relevant to the persona
and talks about the benefits and features of the CRM
for just them.
If you're planning to generate inbound leads,
you need to build lead generation landing pages
as part of your content marketing.
Lead generation pages or lead magnets,
are great for collecting emails in exchange
for a downloadable cheat sheet, calculator,
case study, webinar, et cetera.
You can use lead generation landing pages
as part of your sales funnel.
They're a great way to build trust and authority.
Consider a scenario where you're running Google ads
and sending traffic to your sales pages.
Most visitors will drop-off and won't sign up for a trial
or book a demo.
Now, let's plug in lead magnets.
You can run retargeting ads and show ads,
focusing on a problem these visitors might be facing.
Based on the problem,
you can then build a calculator
and once they interact with it,
they can get the results when they fill out the email.
Once you capture the email,
you can now educate them via an email sequence
and introduce them to how your product solves their problem.
At this point,
you can link to your free trial or demo pages.
So, instead of wasting your paid traffic,
you can now bring them back into your marketing funnel.
I hope you got value from this video.
I'll put together a swipe folder of all the funnels,
which you can download and use.
I've also included the copywriting tool,
which can help you to wireframe your landing pages.
Good luck.
See you next time.