What is a front end sales funnel?
A front end sales funnel is a sales funnel usually used for selling first time customers.
These visitors might know a little bit about you & your brand from consuming content, but that’s it.
Most front end funnels start with either a very low priced offer…
For Front end sales funnels that start with a lead magnet, the 2nd page in the funnel is usually a low to mid range priced offer.
The goal of a front end sales funnel is to get a visitor to pull their wallet out…
Even if it’s for a small dollar amount, the amount of trust that someone builds with you from buying ANYTHING makes later sales easier.
And because it builds more trust, most front end funnels aren’t focused on making a profit…
They just want to be able to break even on ad spend…
Because the goal is to make the profits on later sales.
So even if an optimized front end sales funnel only covers its ad costs, it’s still a VERY successful sales funnel!
Think about it, if you are able to earn just as much as, if not slightly more than, you spend on ads to get a new customer…
Then you can literally afford to generate unlimited leads!
Now how fast could you scale your business if you were able to do that?
What types of funnels are front end sales funnels?
The most popular front end sales funnels are the self-liquidating offer funnel and the free plus shipping funnel.
Another great front end funnel is the tripwire funnel.
Both the tripwire funnel and the free plus shipping funnel focus on offering good products at extremely low prices to draw visitors in.
And both of them work well, but a free plus shipping funnel has to have a physical product.
The Self-Liquidating offer on the other hand starts with a lead magnet that visitors opt-in for before they ever see an offer.
Something like a webinar funnel COULD be used as a front end funnel, but is usually better fit higher up the value ladder.
If you get creative enough, you can make almost any sales funnel into a front end funnel…
What it really comes down to is how much effort you need to expend to get a result.
Yes, you can have a 1 hour webinar to sell a $10 product…
But a 5 minute Video Sales Letter or a short sales page will probably get the same results with much less effort on your part.
The SLO, Free + Shipping, and tripwire funnels are so popular because they are right in the sweet spot of getting the job done and effort.
They aren’t going to take you months to put together, but they are going to get your results!
What are the benefits of using a front end sales funnel?
Front end sales funnels allow you to give newer customers who don’t know your brand yet a low risk way to buy from you.
It’s essentially like going on a date with someone when you first meet them instead of immediately asking them to marry you.
Also, depending on what front end funnel you use, you’re offering something for free…
And people absolutely LOVE the word free.
Even if there’s nothing logical about the offer, if it’s free it gets people excited.
In his book DotCom Secrets, Russell Brunson talks about an experiment one of his companies ran with a front end sales funnel…
The First offer they were running was with ads that went straight to a sales page for a $197 product.
On average, this converted at about 1%.
So for every 100 visitors, they made $197
Then he tried turning it into a Free Plus Shipping Offer.
He made a complimentary product that he could offer for free if customers paid for shipping and then offered the same $197 product as an upsell after.
Here’s what happened…
The Free Plus Shipping offer converted at about 8%…
So for every 100 visitors, 8 of them took advantage of the offer and then saw the $197 upsell…
Out of the 8 that saw the upsell, 25% percent would buy…
Which means out of every 100 visitors, 2 people would buy the $197 product!
Turning the funnel into a Free Plus Shipping offer, literally DOUBLED THEIR SALES!
The real key with this is if you aren’t selling your core product as an upsell in your front end funnel…
Then you can focus on just getting your front end funnel to break even on ad spend and focus on making the big profits in your backend funnels with your core offer.
How do you create a front end sales funnel?
The biggest thing you have to nail down before you build your front end funnel is your offer and how it connects with your core offer higher up your value ladder.
You want to be attracting the right people with your front end funnel.
If you don’t get this right, you’re not going to convert as many people on your core offer later.
Then based on that, you have to decide how you’re going to deliver that solution to people.
Is it in a physical book or an ebook?
Can it just be in a mini course?
Is it a 3 hour training that can be one video?
All of this determines which front end sales funnel you are going to use to begin with.
From there, building the actual funnel itself is pretty easy.
Here’s a quick tutorial that walks you through it:
If you want some free fill in the blank scripts to help you write the copy for your sales funnel, you can get 7 of them in DotCom Secrets.
