Everyone talks a lot about sales funnels and how you should be locking all your good, valuable content behind payment gateways. But what if we give people the content ahead of time, and only charge them if we actually fulfill our promise to them?
We are also focused only on the leads that we convert and how to get them to the next stage of our value ladder. But what about everyone else that doesn’t opt-in for our freebie? How are we serving them further if we don’t have their email address?
These two scenarios are both described as an Invisible Sales Funnel. We will be explaining these different scenarios more in-depth, and why they are still both called an Invisible Sales Funnel.
Introduction to the Invisible Sales Funnel: 2 Parts
The Free-First Event
The first version of the Invisible Sales Funnel is when you set up a normal sales funnel, but instead of charging people for your up sells (main products) up front, you give those away for free too.
You still take payment information beforehand, but you let people know that they will be charged on a certain date in the future and not right now.
This gives them the chance to try out your info product or attend your event, knowing that they haven’t been charged yet. You let them know that they can pull their information and won’t be charged if they aren’t completely satisfied with what you have to offer.
This takes all of the risk out of the equation for them, thus giving them confidence to try what you are offering.
Sure some people will cancel their payment, but as long as you offer solid value, a majority of people will be happy they had the risk-free experience, and let the charge go through.
The Invisible Sales Funnel Outside the Funnel
The second type of Invisible Funnel people refer to is the funnel that you don’t really control outside of your main funnel.
You are used to serving the 5% of people who opt-in to your free offering, but what about the other 95% of people that fall off?
These people aren’t necessarily gone from the equation. They are still looking for a solution to their problem. They are still going to go elsewhere to find what they are looking for.
This is the Invisible Sales Funnel happening outside of any funnel that you create, and one that you can take some steps to take advantage of.
We’ll discuss more about this missed opportunity a little later.
The Completely Free Offering
The version of the Invisible Funnel where you give your product now and charge later shows that you really care about your customers more than you do their money.
You let them decide if they like the value you have provided and want to spend their money on it.
Even if someone plans from the beginning to cancel their payment whether they like your content or not, they will be left with tons of value they haven‘t paid for, and will be indebted to you on a psychological level.
This will leave them more open to accepted