Your Minimum Viable Funnel

The Starting Point For A Successful Sales And Marketing Funnel

Hi Guys, in this post we’re going to talk about your Minimum viable Funnel. Now, what is a minimum viable funnel? It’s kind of an adaptation of the minimum viable product idea that comes from the lean Start startup and the $100 startup.

And the idea is don’t spend too much time adding on bells and whistles and fancy stuff. Put together the minimum version of your product and see if the market wants it, and then if they like it and people buy you iterate and make it better and better. If no one buys you, go back into the lab, you kind of change your approach, you change your market, and then you try again with another minimum viable product. So we’re taking that same concept and we’re applying it to our sales and our marketing funnels. We want to put out the most basic funnel we can that still has a high likelihood of success and we want to run traffic through it to see how it performs.

Does this work? Does the audience that we’re targeting actually take action on the messaging we’re using? If yes, we can iterate and tweak the funnel. We can add components to it or get into conversion optimization if it’s a total flop out of the blocks. Great.

We just learned that that doesn’t work. And let’s go put out another minimum viable funnel. And you keep trying them until you get one that really kind of comes out of the box and works pretty well. And you then work with that funnel to optimize it and make it better and better the whole time. The big side benefit for you is you’re building a list with all of these.

So the whole time you’ll be growing your email list, which is the most valuable asset for your online business. So the other benefits of doing the minimum viable funnel versus spending a bunch of time and building it all out fancy, shiny with bells and whistles, it’s not going to cost you that much. You’re going to save a lot of money putting together a two page funnel and running some traffic versus spending weeks or months and thousands of dollars building out a complex funnel before you know if it works. So it’s really important to test our ideas before we invest too much and it’s going to save you time. This is going to quickly allow you to realize or know with actual data from cold traffic.

Does the people I think will want what I have? Do they actually want what I have? If the answer to that is no, great. Let’s learn that as quickly as we can so we can either A, change our audience or B, change our offering. Cool.

So let’s jump into it. I’m going to go ahead and draw it up on the whiteboard and show you exactly what you need for your minimum viable funnel. And the first page is your opt in page. So the opt in page is just it’s really easy to set up. I use either Thrive themes or click Funnels for the opt in page.

And you just pretty much have a headline which offers something and then the opportunity for them to enter their information. So we’re going to go with the free video reveals the secret to the link. Then there’s the email area and then there is the button. So really simple, right? And it can be this simple.

And I recommend you start with it being this simple. The blank up here is ultimately your target market’s biggest problem. So our offer is with our opt in page that we are going to give them the secret to solving their biggest perceived problem. All they have to do is enter their email and click Submit. That’s it.

So once they do enter their email and click Submit, two separate things happen. Number one, they go to another page and we will cover what’s on that page here in a moment. But number two, and this is the most exciting and valuable part is they get put on your email list and they go into your autoresponder and your auto responder will follow up with them for as long as you set it up. Once they opt in, you have the legal right to follow up with them as often as you’d like, forever, until they unsubscribe. And that is really the power of your funnel.

And that is really the engine that drives your business because your email list is effectively your distribution system. So when they get on this email list, we follow Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab Jab Jab right hook concept. And in this concept, that’s the name of his book. Highly recommend reading that the Jabs stand for giving and the right hooks stand for making an offer. Right.

So when they’re on here, our autoresponder sequence needs to give, give, offer. Now, notice I did not say give, give, get. Because you don’t get to get from them. You can present them with offers to solve their problems. If you’ve built enough relationship, if your copy is good enough, if they realize you can help them achieve their goal of solving this problem or kind of moving towards their ultimate dreams and desires, they’ll purchase from you.

If not, you keep this process going, right? We don’t stop here. We have more emails and then we give, give and then offer, give, offer. You can mix it up. Three gives, four gives, two gives.

But you always want to be sure you have an interval of several giving based emails, more content that’s going to help them understand how to solve their problem. Proves you’re an expert. It helps you build a relationship. It gets them to know, like and trust you. So you become a trusted advisor and then they’re more likely to purchase from you.

So that all happens. Automated. You set it up. Once I use AWeber right now for this and they manage all of my emails for me. When they reach this next page, we need to deliver on this promise we gave them here.

And there’s two different ways that happens. The first way is if you have your own products, if you have a membership course, an info product course, even if you have physical products, essentially, if you own and control the checkout page, this will work one way. If you’re an affiliate, it still works. It just works a little bit different. So let’s look at that.

So it says, watch the video now, right? And then there’s the video on this page, and then there is a button here.

So first we’re going to look at this. If you are an information marketer, if you have a membership program or a physical product, this video is going to actually truthfully reveal the secret. We always have to deliver on what we’re talking about and what we promise to people if you don’t deliver, if you skip that step, there’s no way anyone’s ever going to purchase from you. So the first thing we do is we do actually reveal the secret to them. And generally speaking, secrets are conceptual and within the idea of a secret.

There’s a lot of little steps. So you’re able to transition in this video from here’s a secret. This is exactly how it works to. And then here’s all the little steps that are involved. And all you got to do is ABC, one, two, three, ABC one, two, three.

And by the time that they realize everything that’s involved in solving their problem, they’re a little bit overwhelmed. And at that moment, you can offer them your membership program, your product, your info product that either takes them by the hand and walks them through every single step, and you will help them get through the problem like you’ve helped hundreds of other people. It’s really simple, but I just got to really stress this. .1 more time, you have to actually give the value. You have to give them the secret first.

And then you transition into how your product or membership system will help them do that more quickly. And you’ll hold them by the hand and walk them through the whole process. And then they click this get it button. They go into your shopping cart, they check out, and boom, you’ve made a customer. At that point in time.

If you’re an affiliate marketer, this is the same sort of system as what you want to build. The only difference is you need to go to Clickbank or wherever your affiliate marketplace or network you’re joined with. And you need to find an affiliate product that reveals a secret in their video sales letter. So essentially, you just are relying on an affiliate or a merchant, excuse me, to create this for you. And this video becomes you actually taking out your cell phone and actually introducing yourself something to the effect of what I’m going to do here in a moment.

So it would be Hi, I’m Miles Beckler. And I’m so excited to share this secret with you because when I first learned this secret, it really helped me change my life for the better. And I’m just so grateful that I learned this and I took action because now my life is more enjoyable than ever before. Click the button below and you’ll get access to that video right now. And by the way, I’m going to send you a few emails over the next couple of days.

They’re going to help you understand even more about how to solve your biggest problem because I was there and I’m now through that and I’m really excited to help you get through that, too. So click the button below and watch the video. Now that’s the video you would put in as an affiliate. And then when they click this button, that button is your affiliate link. And that would take them to the affiliate product where they would watch the video sales letter that delivers on this for you.

And if they purchase over there, you earn a Commission. Right? So either way, we’ve got this set up to where it goes from opt in to the opportunity to purchase very quickly. Then we have the follow up sequence here, which is really where we make money. We never expect this system here to be cash flow positive off of paid traffic.

And that’s because really our goal is to have this break even if you can get to where all the ad money you spend is broken, even, you get just as much as you put in back from the one time offer you’re putting in here or from the affiliate product that you have here, then everything you make off of this here is pure profit. So what are the numbers? What’s the possibility of this? Right. So I’m going to give you some basic numbers that you would look for coming out of the box, starting your first kind of affiliate funnel or your first personal funnel.

So of course, we’re going to have advertisements up here, right. And advertising costs money. So let’s say I’m going to use some really rough numbers just to kind of give us a baseline to work off of. So let’s say you spend $100 and your opt in page converts at about 25%. And let’s say I would say out of the box you want to see 20% to 25% opt in rate.

Now, you should be able to get that up to 30%. Most of my often pages that I run cold traffic to convert at 35 to about 50% of traffic. But if you’re just starting out and testing your minimum viable funnel, you do want to see something in the 2020 5% range. If you’re in the 15% to 18% range, easy to boost it. And you boost it by testing new headlines.

So let’s say for $100 and you get enough traffic at the 25% conversion rate to get 100 subscribers, right. So 100 people actually make through. That puts it at about a dollar per lead. I often see $50 to $0.65 per lead. I’ve got friends who are new.

They’re able to get like a dollar dollar, 25 per lead. So these numbers are very possible, but they’re going to fluctuate. And as you practice and get better, you’ll be able to lower the numbers on the cost and you’ll be able to increase the returns that you’re getting from your advertising dollars through optimization. So 100 subscribers go through this follow up sequence, right. And 100 people go look at your offer here, whether that’s your offer or whether that’s an affiliate offer.

Now, let’s say that this is converting at 2%, right. So if you’ve got a 2% conversion rate and 100 people see that, that is two sales, and let’s say it’s $27 per sale.

You have made on the front end, $54. This is the front end of the funnel. Rookies think the front end of the funnel is all there is. And that’s where they focus the pros, the real Internet marketing pros. They know the back end of the funnel is where all of the money is made.

So at this point, right out of the gates, we put in $100. We’ve made 54 back. So we are negative, right? So -100 so we are negative $46. So that means we’ve paid $46 for 100 subscribers.

Here’s the really cool part. These hundred subscribers go through our email, right. And they get to hear where there’s another offer made. And this offer, let’s say this is for a $97 product. And let’s say 1% of these people subscribe there.

That means 100 people times the one subscriber who takes us up on it, right? 1%, one subscriber on 100, that means we just made $97 right here. So now 46, negative, 46 plus 97. What is that? I’m getting crazy with my math here was that 51?

So now four days in, if you have all of these, at this point, we’re profitable, right? So we didn’t expect or make it profitable here. Our profitability came here. Now, this offer could be another product of yours. It could be the same product with a different sales letter.

It could be an affiliate product. That’s relevant. It doesn’t really matter. But here’s where it gets extremely exciting. And here’s where it proves the power of building your list is ultimately what you want to be doing is that they keep going, right?

We have more emails. These automated emails keep going, and you’re able to broadcast this list as well. We email our list almost every single day, and most of the time, 60 plus percent of the time, we’re giving them something of value. And we might mention in a PSI PS, have you checked out our membership program yet? But ultimately we give, give offer them something to purchase and we follow that same process here.

And every single sale you make from this point on is pure profit to your bottom line. So real quick, I want to double down on this a bit if we can. Right. So we’ve run $100 in traffic on this kind of hypothetical funnel. And we are at day number four, we’re $51 positive.

So we have literally just turned $100 into $151. If this is our product we’re selling, that money goes into a Stripe account or a PayPal account instantly. We can get daily dumps from Stripe. I get all my weekly, but literally that money comes straight to you pretty much instantly. And now four days later, you can not only run your original 100 through, but you can increase that budget without going out of pocket.

So your next time around, run number two, you do 150, right? And guess what happens? Your numbers hold, right? So then you’re not only getting this, but you’re getting 50% on top of that because now this time you get 150 subs. And so since this is 2% now you see three sales at $27, right?

So that becomes what, $81 here? And now we’ve got another person here. So maybe they hit this time, maybe they don’t. And that’s how this game works is to really take this front end of your funnel and all the money you make. When you get to break even and you start to profit, you put it right back into the ads and you put more people in your funnel.

The ultimate result is you grow a list from 100 to 1000 to 10,000. I can tell you, when you get to the 10,000 list Mark, it gets kind of fun. Then you can go to 50,000 and beyond. And when your list grows to a certain level, that’s when the real magic happens because you’re doing the same thing. You’re give give, you send the same broadcast email, you’re actually taking the same actions.

But the results you’re getting can be ten X, 100 X, 50 X. It’s really powerful. So this is the minimum viable funnel. And we took it a little deeper than I expected. Honestly getting into the numbers and whatnot if you’re seeing a 20% conversion rate here?

If you’re seeing a one or 2% conversion rate here on your first generation of your funnel, you are doing excellent. And I say work on optimizing it. And we optimize it through our headlines and through our sales video is where you can really optimize it. And ultimately make sure you’re staying in touch with this list because this is the relationship that creates the lifestyle income. It’s not here.

It’s here is where you’re making your lifestyle income. I’m Miles Bagger. I hope this has been informative. I hope you take action and get your minimum viable funnel going. I’ve got a video that I’m linking to below here where I actually walk you through the process.

It’s designed for an affiliate funnel like this. I walk through the process in full in click funnels. It takes about 30 minutes. I literally like click here, you look over my shoulder. This is kind of in the clouds work and that video is in the dirt of exactly where to go, exactly what to click to build this funnel.

It’ll take you about 30 minutes. So I’ll put the link to that video below here. If you have any questions, the comment area is where you can send me your questions. I’m happy to answer those questions here in YouTube and if you want that next video when it comes out, click the subscribe button because I got another video coming for you tomorrow. Thank you again for your time and I look forward to connecting with you on that next time video.