The 3 Types Of Marketing Funnel You Should Sell To Customers Part 1 – List Builder

This is actually some training where we’re going to be talking about the three best marketing funnels to sell.

What I’m going to break down here is pretty much how I run my agency.

I think a lot of people believe that marketing funnels are huge, long, massive, complicated, complex things that involve email and Facebook, squeeze pages, remarketing, and automation.

While that’s true to an extent, they are big, long, complex pieces, they actually don’t have to be these massive long complex projects.

The number one question that I get asked when talking about how do I build a marketing funnel for a customer is people understand what a website is. As in, you, the agency understand what a website is. You understand how a website gets put together.

In fact, in the flow section of these three different funnels, I’m going to tell you how you can put them together. I don’t really care what you use.

I personally use Beaver Builder, AccessAlly, Active Campaign as well as Optin Monster, but we’re actually going to talk about the higher level stuff and more importantly how to sell them.

The reason that my agency was able to build and sell marketing funnels a long time before even ClickFunnels existed, or the concept of a funnel-like a marketing funnel or a marketing automation funnel was well-known is because we broke it down into different product types and we didn’t call it a funnel.

Rule one of selling marketing funnels is don’t call them marketing funnels, but what I’m going to break down for you today that the three best types of marketing funnels or three best funnel projects that you can sell to customers.

I’ve called them the list builder, the faster sales, and the traffic magnet because those are the three products essentially that we’re going to be building.

We’re going to look at what the type of funnel is, who benefits from it the most, which is probably the most important piece because this is going to tell you who to target and who benefits from it.

Although these funnels fit in with each other and when you get into bigger and bigger projects, they all kind of merged together.

There’s no reason why you can’t say I’m just going to do lists builder funnels. I’m just going to do faster sales funnels. There’s no reason why you can’t do that.

Again, you don’t have to call them funnels. In fact, I would argue that you shouldn’t call them marketing funnels.

We’ll also be looking at the benefits of the funnel because that’s ultimately what you’re going to sell. That’s the sales pitch.

When you’re talking to customers, they don’t want a traffic magnet. They don’t necessarily want faster sales. They certainly don’t want a marketing funnel.

What they want is the benefits that are specific to them.

What we’ll also do is writing these out. Then, finally, I’m going to go over a brief overview of the flow, which is the actual structure that your build.

All of these can be built anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 plus depending on the type of customers that you’re going after.

These funnels I have identified as three really profitable products that you could sell to your customers. You could just sell one of them. I do suggest that you do just sell one of them.

What does a List Builder do?

1. Generate leads on automation

We started with the list builder. The list builder is essentially a lead generation tool.

This basically allows your websites to generate leads on automation.

If you’re building for customers and you can perhaps already see what the benefits are for this particular one.

This is going to be how they’re going to generate leads.

You’ll see, in each one of these segments that certain people are going to benefit from this more than others.

A big problem that funnels builders face is they try to build a sales funnel or a traffic funnel for a customer that isn’t really going to benefit from it.

This now will allow you to think, ” Actually, I want to work with this type of customer and I want to deliver these kinds of benefits. This would be the solution I’d want to work with.”

This is also about email list building. Your email list is still the most important asset that you can build.

If I had to get rid of my website or get rid of my CRM database, I’d get rid of the website because I can replicate that anywhere and I can take the blog content and put it anywhere.

My email list is essentially 10,000 people for me personally at the moment, who have heard of me, who know me, who trust me, we’ve got a pretty good open rate. I would rather get rid of my website before I get rid of my CRM.

If your customers know that they want to build an email list, this is the type of file you’re going to want to build for them.

2. Comes up with product ideas

The final thing that the list builder funnel does is it comes up with product ideas.

I’m going to show you how, but when we’ve implemented this funnel here for some of our customers, insurance agents were one of them.

They were told essentially by their customers, by their traffic, we want this type of product. We believe in this type of statement. We like this type of messaging.

It’s almost like testing out headlines on your audience in real-time, even though it’s a list builder, even though it’s a lead generator, you can actually get incredible product ideas from this type of funnel.

Who benefits from a List Builder?

1. Someone who already has traffic

Now, who benefits from this? The number one type of customer that you can sell this to is someone who already has traffic.

Now, you might be thinking, “If they’ve already got traffic, then how can I help?” because the traffic’s the number one thing that people want.

There are so many businesses that have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, a month who aren’t generating any leads.

They essentially have that old-school thing where they have tons of people come into their website and they hope that people are going to buy. If they do great, and that’s a 0.1% conversion rate. If they don’t, they just fall off.

Actually, if you’ve already got traffic, I’m going to show you how to generate a list of leads and buyers. As well as grow your email list and grow an email asset will actually reduce your advertising costs.

2. Someone creating content and got a social following

They have to have traffic already. They also really need to be creating content.

Ideally, they’ve already got content on the site and I don’t mean like an about page. They’re regularly producing a podcast or regularly producing YouTube content.

They’re regularly producing even social content, which kind of the other one, maybe they already have a social presence or they have a following or they have an audience of some sort.

Again, you would be staggered at the number of influences on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, all of these kinds of places who have fucking no idea how to make money from their 20,000, 100,000, 200,000 followers or subscribers on YouTube, unless they go, ” I have to get sponsorship. I have to do advertising and I have to create merchandise.”

You and I know, “Fuck, if you just put a landing page together and drove a bunch of your audience to that landing page and then sold to them, you’re basically turning money overhand, over fist.”

They don’t know that don’t take for granted your knowledge.

If they’ve got a social following and they already have traffic, this is the perfect type of funnel for them to start with. Not to say that we can’t move through, but right now this is where they’ll want to start.

3. Someone who only have one type of product and wants to diversify their product range

The last thing is maybe they only have one type of product and they want to basically what we call to diversify.

They want to diversify their product range, maybe they want to offer more products and services, this is actually a really good place.

How frequently should they be producing content? It needs to be at a minimum weekly.

If they have a YouTube channel, that’s like one video a month and they’ve got thousands or even millions of views. Great.

But as a rule, they want to produce it minimum. You want to have seen they’re producing content for at least a year.

It sounds like a long time. That’s still tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.

What that does is it shows you two things. Once they’ve got consistency and they’re continuing their process, they’re continuing to do it.

Anyone can do content for six months and then drop it. We’ve seen it time and time again.

They want to have been doing content for at least six months, at least a year, getting over that initial hump.

If they’re producing it weekly, it also shows you that they’re committed. There are cases where people have only got like 12 YouTube videos.

Mark Rober’s an example of that but he produces extremely high-quality long-form videos. There’s no reason why you couldn’t go after that at all.

But you want to see some kind of consistency. It doesn’t necessarily even matter about views. It’s more about, are they consistently creating content?

Benefits of a List Builder

1. Less time networking

The number one thing that I like about the list builder funnel is there’s less time networking.

Networking is powerful but it’s expensive, it’s time-consuming. Right now, face-to-face networking is pretty much out the window.

Even if people say, “Yeah, but we’ve got back on zoom.” It still took a while for that to ramp up.

If you build a list, build a funnel for people, there’s no reason why they would ever have to attend a single networking event again. I haven’t. I don’t bother with networking events at all.

I think they’re outdated, to be honest, I don’t really like the idea of sharing breakfast with that many people. So, there’s less networking.

It might be that you want to approach, let’s say that there’s a local telco provider. These exist by the way, a local telco provider, they produce weekly blog content or helpful video content.

Maybe they even have a podcast, but they know that the majority of their sales guys have to go out networking for those big deals. That doesn’t necessarily have to happen anymore.

That’s taken from a real-life example. We could say, “How about we stop networking as much. Start building a list builder funnel, a lead generation funnel. Then, we take it over from there. How does that sound?”

Most people are pretty open to that.

2. Get to prove what’s popular

Another benefit, you get to prove what’s popular.

As marketers, we’re constantly being told, what’s the ROI, what’s the return on investment?

I’m like, “I can actually tell you that this blog post generates 200 leads for you a week, a month, a year, whatever. This one doesn’t.

This blog post on how to change your SIM card or which dual SIM card phone should you get is super, super popular. This tells us that our audience is interested in this type of content.

I’m going to tell you how to generate those product ideas is interesting as well.

It also shows you how close people are to the buying decision. If you work with a particular company, maybe they do camera reviews, for example, and they have a series of camera posts, like the best vlogging cameras for 2020, the best Nikon cameras, the best DSLR, the best mirrorless cameras, whatever and you offer a lead generation tool, the same one across all those different blog posts.

You can see that one of them increases the leads, like way more people sign up to it. That indicates that that type of blog posts, people who are reading at closer to buying and more wanting to make a decision.

There are loads of analytics you can get just from the beginning to build an email list out of it.

3. Lower advertising costs

That’s the biggest one, leads on automation. Who doesn’t want to just grow their lead lists and automation and lower advertising costs?

These two together, when you talk to your customers and you say, “Hey, what we’re able to do for you is lower your ad costs and just generate leads for you 24 hours a day. That’s very difficult to turn down.

Don’t fucking talk about marketing funnels. Don’t talk about email marketing lists, building anything. Just focus on those two things.

A lot of your customers are pretty much sick of generating leads at cost and also lowering their ad costs. They want to lower their ad costs their ad spend.

You’re able to do that with the list builder. There’s a massive advantage to basically taking their content and installing a series of opt-in posts.

The Flow

Let me go through the flow then. This is what you’re going to build, right? Ultimately remember they’ve already got traffic and they’ve already got content.

There are probably going to be two places where they have those. First of all, there’s gonna be some sort of social platform for the sake of it.

I’m going to say they’re on YouTube. This could be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram doesn’t really matter. There’s some kind of social platform that they don’t own.

Then they’ve got their website and they create content. They’re already driving traffic to those places and what you’re able to do is twofold.

First of all, and this is quite a specific series of steps. The traffic they are currently getting to the website, even if they have a lot of traffic coming to the site and they don’t create content and they don’t create YouTube content, that’s fine.

If they still have the traffic coming to the site, which still happens, a lot of businesses have a lot of traffic coming to their site, but they don’t necessarily have blog content.

What I want to do is I want to install a popup opt-in specifically what we call a two-click pop-up and I’m going to do an AB test, which is essentially a split test.

Now, if they have their site built on something like BeaverBuilder, elemental, you can build this in already. I use a tool called an optin monster.

The reason I like optin monster is that I can really quickly deploy an AB test. I’ll take a look at their traffic. I’ll do a bit of a deep dive and everyone from telco businesses to fitness, to nutrition, to marketing, coffee, everything, I’m able to say, “I’m going to put two opt-ins in front of them.”

I’m going to say, “Do you want to download our best ever niche coffees list? Like the best ever coffee, micro coffees around the world? Or do you want to know how to make the perfect espresso?”

I’m just going to put the pop-up in front of them, the opt-in. Ideally, if they’ve got a lead magnet or something, I put that behind it so they can have that.

I want to basically measure which one do people click on the most?

I go, “Oh, I actually really want the, I want to know about how to make the perfect espresso.”

Click, click, click, click, click and one of them win outright. Whatever one wins, let’s say that this gets a 5% opt-in rate and this one gets a 3% opt-in rate.

I’m going to take the messaging from the one that wins and I’m going to create a squeeze page for it with pretty much the exact same messaging.

I’m going to say how to make the perfect espresso because I’ve proven that that’s more popular and this is why I like the system. Cause you’re taking the traffic that they’ve already got and you’re asking them, what do you want to see more of?

Do you want more sales strategies or do you want a list of niches? Do you want a marketing funnel proposal written out and ready to go, or a blog post template?

Do you want product launch templates or a YouTube script? Do you want to know the perfect espresso? Do you wanna know why you shouldn’t stir your espresso.

The top five coffee companies in the UK, the top five ethical companies in the UK.

I’m constantly testing this split test opt in front of them, which is why I like opt-in monster. I take whatever is popular. I create a landing page. And then in the descriptions or the links or the follow-on content for all of the social content, I’ll say, “Make sure to head over to this squeeze page to get your links for your top five coffee recipes or how to make an espresso.

There are a few questions here. I’m going to answer these.

Number one, the messenger funnels using chatbots convert better than traditional funnels with email. The short answer is there’s no way of knowing.

It’s like saying is rock music better than classical music. There were some really shit rock bands. There were some incredible rock bands.

There are some real shit classical composers. There are some great classical composers.

The tool is irrelevant. Don’t fucking worry about the tool.

The number one thing I’ve learned from seeing this all the way back when we had to hand-build our CRMs is that it’s the content that converts.

I’m constantly being asked, we’ve got this new type of sales page. You’ve got a chatbot conversion, email conversion.

Frank Kern popularized the content of the, or the concept of the autoresponder and responding to people for a hundred days or whatever.

He has openly said that he was testing out. It doesn’t really work anymore. The messenger bot works in the same way.

You could have an incredibly tight messenger bot that works and you can have a messenger bot that’s shit.

My advice would be to focus on the message that goes to that customer and test the sales message and make it as simple as possible.

I’m a big fan of landbot.io, as a messenger tool. It’s kind of like halfway between a set, a squeeze page, and a messenger bot.

But don’t worry about the tools. One is not necessarily better than the other. It’s impossible to say.

Are you talking about exit popups or those that flash in front of the audience from the get-go? Both.

I have one opt-in and if they’ve been on the page for longer than five seconds shows up, and if they try to exit, it also shows up it’s the same one.

It’s the exact same pop-up, which is again, why like an opt-in monster, because I’m able to say to it, I want you to show after five seconds, 10 seconds.

I want you to show as soon as someone exits, everyone says, I fucking hate those, but I will take a 6%, which is currently ours is converting at 6%. I’ll take a 6% opt-in rate over anything.

The reason I like this is that it takes the current traffic and tests. What do they want to see more about? You just brainstorm a bunch of ideas you think, well, let’s just test these.

Some good indicators are the most popular pages, popular blog posts, what’s the most popular video.

Let’s take that kind of message and create a lead magnet off the back of it. Throw that up. It was 5%. This one was 0% or 0.1%.

Well, that’s still fine because we can still then take that one that was 5%.

Clearly, people are interested in that. Let’s use that one and then create the squeeze page off the back of that. Then, that’s what I use.

Even if you’re putting it on like old content, if they’ve already got a YouTube channel, just put it in the links in the description link.

You’re able to say, by the way, if you’re creating all this social content, wouldn’t it be great to generate some actual leads from this?

Here’s how we’re going to test it. Here’s how we’re going to build it and you grow their list over time.

That is the first type there.

We found insurance companies who are already generating a ton of traffic to their site and we basically did this.

We tested it in loads of places, the bottom, they already have blog content. We tested it on the bottom of blog posts, and then we ended up testing it.

But on the squeeze page, I want to AB test the headline. But opt-in, I want to test the offer, but two completely different offers in front of people because that will give me at least some indication as to what people are interested in.

Mike Killen

Mike is the world's #1 sales coach for marketing funnel builders. He helps funnel builders sell marketing funnels to their customers. He is the author of From Single To Scale; How single-person, small and micro-businesses can scale their business to profit. You can find him on Twitter @mike_killen.