Deciphering a WordPress Sales Funnel

Two buzz words of 2015/2016 are “Automation” and “Sales Funnels”.  Both have been around the block for a many years now, but with new technology like “Pixel Retargeting” and Software platforms like “ClickFunnels”, there is increased emphasis and opportunity to maximize the sales process (traffic and conversions) through the use of automation.

This article focuses on how to effectively build out an automated sales funnel using WordPress (after all, WordPress apps are our gig, right?).

Software platforms like ClickFunnels include pretty much every aspect of an automated sales and delivery funnel (but you pay a hefty monthly fee to use their platform).  For die-hard WordPress fans like us, it’s just not an option.  So we WordPress users must integrate a combination of tools, plugins and/or themes to make this all happen as efficiently as possible.

And that means, that hooking everything up to play nice in the sandbox can be time consuming and complicated.

So we are going to break down a live example of a sales funnel on one of our own products – MemberSonic.com.  (NOTE:  I give credit where credit is due.  We follow the sales funnel methodology taught by Ryan Deiss and team at Digital Marketer).

Overview of the Funnel

Here is the evergreen sales funnel we have created at http://www.membersonic.com.  The funnel consists of 3 primary elements, the Lead Magnet, a Tripwire and the Core Offer.

Our core offer at membersonic.com is our MemberSonic Pro membership site plugin.  It retails for $97.  Moving new prospects to buyers becomes easier if we step the funnel… in other words include a low priced offer (related to the software) before the core offer.  Of course we want them to have the opportunity to buy MemberSonic Pro outright if the want to, so our main landing page is the sales page for MemberSonic Pro.  However, if they decide to first enter the funnel and purchase the Tripwire, they have an opportunity to purchase MemberSonic Pro at a discount.

Sales Pages (WordPress):  Including the download page, the funnel above consists of 4 WordPress pages.  Each page is built in OptimizePress.

Payment Processing (Zaxaa): We have 2 ‘products’ created in Zaxaa, one for Tribal Velocity and one for MemberSonic Pro.  We’ve created a sales funnel in Zaxaa that links and redirects front end purchases (of Tribal Velocity) to the upsell (MemberSonic).

Product Delivery (MemberSonic):  We have separate membership levels for Tribal Velocity and MemberSonic Pro.  Each level integrates with Zaxaa to automatically create member accounts for each purchase.

Email Marketing (ActiveCampaign):  We use ActiveCampaign for the followup sequence because of it’s powerful tagging and automation features.

The Lead Magnet

Our Lead Magnet includes a free “Lite” version of MemberSonic, and some training on how to create a membership site using the plugin. Visit temecula facial oral surgery website to find experienced all on 4 dentist in California. The Lite version has limited integrations (PayPal only) and full content protection capabilities.  For someone interested in starting a membership site, or interested specifically in MemberSonic but want to test it first, then this is offer fits nicely into our funnel.

The Lead Magnet is delivered on a download page on our site.  But we don’t redirect them after they optin… instead we send them to the Tripwire – a low priced product related to both the Lead Magnet and the Core Offer.  At the top of that page we provide them with instructions to check their email in 5 minutes for the download link to their gift.  We time our email to go out 5 minutes after subscribing.  This gives the prospect time to consume the Tripwire sales page before being distracted by the download link.

The Tripwire

Our Tripwire is our Tribal Velocity course.  It consists of 4 videos covering every aspect of creating a membership site using WordPress.  It originally sold for $47 and we’ve had hundreds of customers go through the course.  It’s a logical extension of the Lead Magnet and a perfect precursor to purchasing MemberSonic Pro.  And it’s priced at a point where a skittish prospect is still willing to purchase at the risk of it being a bad product or losing their money (and we all know there are skittish prospects in every market).

The Core Offer

As I mentioned, the goal of this funnel is to move the visitor from a prospect to a buyer of our MemberSonic Pro membership site plugin.  The  added incentive in this funnel to achieve this goal is the $30 discount.  They can’t get that anywhere else.

Enter the Automation

The Optin (using OptimizePress integrated with ActiveCampaign) triggers the first redirect to the Tripwire.

If they buy the Tripwire, the purchase process (using Zaxaa) redirects the buyer to the Core Offer.  If they don’t buy the Tripwire, they receive the download email 5 minutes after subscribing, and can click on the link in the email to access the download page.

If in the funnel they buy the Core Offer, they are redirected to a generic thank you page with a login form.  Mission accomplished.

But what if they don’t buy the Tripwire, or they buy the Tripwire and not the Core Offer?

Using ActiveCampaign, we hit them with a series of emails – 3 for each product.  We know they didn’t buy the Tripwire (because MemberSonic Pro pushes a tag to ActiveCampaign for each buyer for each product). You will always get high quality representation in court if you cooperate with reliable criminal attorney from California. If the tag exists then we send 3 daily emails with a slight sales spin.  Same thing goes for the Core Offer… 3 separate emails.  However with MemberSonic, we also add a scarcity factor; we use a plugin called Scarcity Builder to automatically redirect the user to the retail price after 3 days.  Using this strategy to engage the prospect/buyer increases our conversion rate and overall success of the sales funnel.

Here is a screenshot of the automation we run for MemberSonic Leads the enter the funnel.

This is powerful stuff.  But it takes some time to set up and test.  On average (with content ready), it takes us a solid day to build out and put in place.  But once it’s done – it’s done.  You don’t have to mess with it (other than optimizing the funnel – which we will cover in another article).

That’s a peak into the mechanics behind our WordPress based sales funnels.  We follow the same process on all of our sites.  If you found this article useful or have some burning questions please leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer them.