We Discuss All Things Funnels Using WordPress, SaaS & Pro Plugins

Johnathan: Welcome back folks the WP tonic show. It’s episode 514. Yes, the episodes are flying, I can’t believe it. A couple weeks ago, we were just at our 500 show. And actually, I know I say regular, but I’ve been really looking forward to this interview. I had a prior chat with John, we’ve got John Whitford with us of Income Mesh but also, he’s got a fantastic YouTube channel that explains all things WordPress, funnels, and other online marketing technology. And I think it’s one of the best YouTube channels in that area. John, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

John: Well, yes, but I need to take a breath because that compliment kind of floored me a little bit. Wow, I really do appreciate that, and thank you guys for having me on the podcast and on the live here. Yeah, so the quick down and dirty backstory for me is I got out of corporate America in 2018. I was a corporate industrial and systems engineer for about a decade, which basically means I would go into a manufacturing process into an office process into any sort of business process and to find ways of making more efficient, reducing defects and overall increasing profitability. So, I’m very data-driven, I’m all about the numbers, all about seeing process maps and seeing how to make things better. And when we had our first daughter, my wife stayed home from her job and I was the sole breadwinner, I guess you would say for a while, but she started blogging pretty quickly after having our first child and she grew it. Day after day we just put it a lot of blood, sweat, and tears and love into that website, and eventually, we started to see that it could become a business.

And that’s when my other side of my brain ticked on. And I started to look at the data and looking at how we could scale it, how we could use the data to actually increase how she builds her email lists, how we sell our products, how much money we get per visitor on our website, and things like that. And so, I dove into Facebook ads, I did all the digital marketing, direct response marketing techniques that allow you to take a visitor and create revenue from that. And over the last five, six years, it’s grown into a seven-figure business and it basically got to the point where it made no more sense for me to continue working in corporate America. I was actually losing money by doing that job, which is kind of weird because I actually liked my job. It’s one of the rare backstories most online marketing gurus talk in a negative way about their corporate life, but I actually enjoyed it, but I like what I do now, way more.

So, now I started this website income mesh.com as kind of a way for me to tickle my own curiosity. I love finding new tools, meeting amazing founders, like Adrian and working with companies and just breaking tools and figuring out how they work and sharing everything that I learned on my YouTube channel. But my primary business is with my wife, as we help teach moms how to start their own websites, how to learn WordPress, and how to make money through blogging. So, yeah, that’s about my backstory there.

Johnathan: That’s great. And I got my great co-host, Adrian. Adrian, would you like to introduce yourself to new listeners and viewers?

Adrian: Hi everyone, my name’s Adrian. I am the CEO and founder of GroundHogg. We help small businesses launch their funnels, grow their lists, and scale their business with proven digital marketing and automation tools.

Johnathan: That’s great. So, what we’re going to be discussing during the show is the main theme of the show is going to be funnels, how to build effective funnels the things if you’re beginning to look at marketing automization, what are some of the things you got to understand that will stop you going down the wrong path. We’re also going to be talking about the latest tools, software is going to be a feast of funnels, [inaudible 04:04]. But before we go to the main subject, I’m going to talk about quickly about some of our great sponsors, because without my sponsors, I wouldn’t be able to do this show because it does cost money, actually, folks. Our main sponsor is Kinsta. Kinsta has been our main sponsor variety of a couple of years. They’re fantastic WordPress only provider.

They specialize in learning management systems membership, WooCommerce, anything where you need that little bit of extra humph for yourself or for your clients. They’re one of the best hosting companies I’ve ever dealt with suburb ethics, great, 24/7 support. The real nice thing is the person that you normally speak to is the person that ends your ticket. You’re not waiting on the phone being moved from one individual to another trying to find somebody that actually knows what they’re talking about. That rarely if ever happens with Kinsta. So, if that sounds good for you or your clients go over to Kinsta look at one of their plans, hopefully, buy one. But the main thing is to tell them that you heard about them on the WP-Tonic Show.

Our other sponsor is a real friend of the show, another great WordPress product. It’s WP Fusion. Now, if you’re into funnels or you’re in some markets in automization and you should be in 2020 for yourself or for your clients, and you’re needing to communicate with something like GroundHogg and native CRM or assess one like ActiveCampaign, and you really want a really fantastic rock-solid system need WP Fusion, not only for yourself but for your clients’ websites. I could go on about all the things [inaudible 05:53], I’m going to leave that for maybe for John cover a little bit. But if that sounds really interesting, go over to the website, buy one of their packages either for yourself or for one of your clients, and also tell them that you heard about them on the WP-Tonic Show. So, John, how are we going to go down this road of funnels? Where should we start John?

John: Oh, well, I’ve thought for a whole about five, 10 minutes before hopping on live with you guys have three different examples, I’ve used in real-world to create profitable funnels. And so, we can dive into those actual tactics of how you set that process up. But I think there are a few fundamental things to kind of discuss, and for people who haven’t launched their own funnel yet, I think there are a few tenants, like a few core ideals that are important to keep in mind when you’re just getting started before you even dive into the clicking around and building out the pages themselves. So, I think it would probably be best for your audience and everybody else to hear those quick tenants that I’ve learned after doing, I’m pretty sure it’s over a hundred funnels that are actually running, not all active, but over the course of the years of launching multiple funnels and seeing what works and what doesn’t. So, these five things I think are the most beneficial to keep in mind when you’re just getting started. So, shall I begin?

Johnathan: Yes, go on, off you go.

John: Yeah. So, I think the first thing that really hit me hard, I’m an engineer by heart. I like people, but I never like to feel like I’m selling and I’ve always use math and numbers and Excel to make my arguments, not like convincing in psychology and the normal salesy type of methods. And [cross-talk 07:42] it wasn’t… what’s that? Exactly. Yeah, making friends influencing people, all that stuff were things I kind of shied away from as an engineer, until I realized I was really not effective at my job as an engineer until I was able to not master, but until I really focused in on the influential skills as well. And to sum everything up, I would just recommend if you haven’t sold online before, or if you have a product, but it’s not really selling too well, I want you to allow yourself to like release yourself from any feeling that selling feels bad or selling feels salesy.

Selling is a good thing if you have a good thing, if you have a good product if you have a good service. If you have something that people want, I believe it is your duty to get it into as many hands as possible and to make sure that people use it to its fullest and get the benefit from it. So, I struggled for a little while. My wife and I, we first, when we launched our first… we just launched an ebook, was the first product we made. We didn’t know if we were allowed to ask for money for information that we felt that you could go and if you spent a year, you could gather all the information from other sources elsewhere. But when we started to see the results of our efforts and the results that our students and our customers were receiving from a direct result of purchasing our product and getting a shortcut to some of the things we had learned the hard way we realized, oh my goodness, we’re onto something here and we’re actually impacting lives.

So, the first thing before you even get down to building out your first website or building your first sales funnel is allow yourself to be able to sell and know that you’re doing something that the world needs. And if you can’t ask yourself that question, is what I’m doing going to actually help somebody? If the answer is no, then maybe rethink what it is you’re selling and make sure you were putting good out into the world. But in general, if you have a good heart behind you, and if you have good energy and if you’re an honest and authentic person, you’re allowed to sell and it’s your job to do so. So, that’s number one.

Adrian: Can I jump in really quickly? Because I just want…

John: Yep.

Adrian: To put additional context on that. And I think you covered probably one of the biggest obstacles that new founders, new business owners, especially information entrepreneurs struggle with because they think that the information that they have is not worth anything. And I think the reason that that is, is probably down to the actual cost of traditional education. When you look at the cost of traditional education was like somewhere like $50,000 and the whole organization structure around it, you start to feel dwarfed by just the sheer size. But in reality, as someone who’s gone through, if you are the person who has gone through some sort of struggle and then find a resolution that can greatly impact someone’s life if you look at the results that people today are getting from university, and if you looked at the results, people are getting from your program, you could probably charge just as much as some university out there and still be on the low end of the value for dollar spectrum. So, don’t be afraid to charge for your stuff.

John: Exactly. And kind of on that point as well, we’ve tested having the same amount of information offered for free and then offered for money and not a lot of money because it was also offered for free, but charging versus giving it away for free. And what we found was when you actually asked for money for something, people actually take action, or at least they’re more invested in the thing that they just spent money on. So, you may be feeling… if you feel like you just want to give everything away for free, you actually might be doing your customers a disservice that you’re not realizing because if all you have to do is put an email address in, or just click a button to get all this amazing information, you don’t really have skin in the game. And so, by charging, and actually what we found is as the prices of our products go up, the results our students get go up and the attrition goes down like people actually stick through, they take action because they’re actually invested in what they’re doing.

So, selling is okay if you not… you aren’t trying to make it hurt for anybody but, if you make them actually make that conscious decision of hey, I actually want to pursue this. Like you don’t just go to college and decide I’m not going to go to class, or I’m not going to do any of these things and there’s some who people do that anyway, most people don’t if they’re paying for themselves. So, when you actually put the money into it, you’re going to follow it through to its logical conclusion and you’re more likely to get success from it. So, I think, Adrian on that as well, the more you pay, the more people really take action on that so…

Adrian: I’m going to bounce off you one more time.

John: Sure.

Adrian: Because on your conversation of free versus paying for something it’s so true that people get better results when they’re financially invested. And I also ran into this recently is if you’re giving a ton of value away for free, there’s something called the ya right factor. And it’s like, just because it’s free there’s no way that it actually works because if someone had this magic bullet to my problem, they’d be charging a ton of money for it. There was a product recently that solves a problem for a major medical condition that’s affecting North America and they were selling the device, which essentially solved this major problem for $150. And their sales are suffering because people are messaging like there’s no way this is true because if it’s so cheap, and it solves the problem, I would be willing to remortgage my house in order to pay for this. So, if you are solving a critical problem, by giving it away for free, you could be doing a double disservice because there’s also the ya right factor on top of that as well.

John: Good point. I definitely agree.

Johnathan: Okay, so go on to step two now John.

John: Yeah. So, step two is it’s all about the offer. So, I have fallen into this trap before, and I’ll unpack this what this means, but when people get into the process of doing sales funnels, they will spend a ton of time on the design of their sales page or a ton of time on all the tech and all the crazy email automation, all the things that can improve your sales at the end of the day but what I oftentimes find is they’re not actually spending enough time on thinking about the offer itself. And I have a really good example from what happened recently on my main business, I’ll share as well, but at the end of the day, if you have a really bad copy, sales copy the words, the images, all the stuff on the sales page, you can still make sales if you have a good offer. If your design is terrible and your colors look like they’re there from 1995 and the images load slowly, it’s going to hurt your sales, but you can still make sales if you have a good offer.

But you can have the most beautiful website, but if you’re trying to sell something that nobody wants, or you’re trying to sell something way out of what it’s worth, then you’re going to have a hard time making sales and even if you do make sales, you’re going to have a ton of refunds if the offer isn’t right. If it’s not what people want and need. So, as an example, we’ve been testing out several different offers in my main business and we do a lot of our new tests through Facebook ads. It’s just something that I like, it’s something we do well with, and it’s a quick way to test out offers without putting it out to our significant list and all of our existing students. It’s kind of like a testing bed for us. And what we found was a small tweak to an offer can make all the difference, no change to the design, but simply adding in a different component or focusing on something in a different way can make all the difference from having an unprofitable sales funnel versus having a very profitable sales funnel.

And so, when you’re getting started, the mindset is number one. But the second thing is before you get into the tech because once you get into the tech, sometimes you never get out of the tech and you never really focus on the fundamentals of what really matters. So, I really urge anybody to drill down and think about who is my ideal customer, all that stuff. We’re not going dive into customer avatar and things like that but understand really what they want, what they need, and give them a little bit of both. If you just give them what they need without anything that’s kind of sexy and what they really want, it’s not going to do that great. If you give them only what they want, but no substance in the thing that they’re buying, they’re not going stick around for very long. You need to make sure you give them what they want and what they need and have a healthy balance between the two.

Johnathan: Step three.

John: Step three is, make sure you have a clear customer journey. Now we’re getting a bit more into the tech and a bit more into the actual funnel process because the general idea of a funnel, right? We didn’t really give that basic definition at first, but you have a step by step process, a journey that the customers can take. And you’re going to basically at the end of the day, put a whole bunch of people into the top of this thing and some people make it down to the next step, some people make it down to the next step, some people make it down the next step. So, that journey of where those customers go and how they proceed through that funnel, it really depends on the clarity and the logic of that customer journey. Every industry is a little bit different on this, but you want to make sure that if you were in the customer’s shoes and you’re being presented with these offers in this sequence, in this timing step by step by step are you still with you with it? Like, are you progressing? And does it make sense? And are you still interested?

Or sometimes what people do is they’ll make a sale and then when it comes to the upsell or the bump offer or the next step in that sales funnel process, it’s like they’re coming out of the field with something that doesn’t make any sense compared to the thing they just purchased. And so, having that clear journey and walking a mile in your customer’s shoes, go through your own process, not from like making sure it’s all working, but does it all make sense? And plan out that journey and think about what is the next thing? Let me start that over. In general, when you buy something, you’re buying a solution to a problem, but every time you solve a problem, you’re opening up new problems that are going to come after that first problem is solved. So, you want to make sure you’re able to walk that journey with your customers so that when they’re presented with the next offer to increase your revenue per customer, make sure you’re focused on what is that next problem?

Because when they make that purchase in their mind, psychologically, they already have the feeling that oh my gosh, I’ve solved that problem. If they’re trying to figure out how to start a website and they buy your product, that’s going to teach them how to build a website, it feels to them psychologically, like they’ve already built it, they already have the solution in hand so what is the next thing they’re going to need? Maybe more traffic, maybe how to monetize that website, things like that.

Johnathan: Right. That’s great. And number four, and then we go for the break.

John: Sure, yeah. Number four is, just keep it simple. You don’t need all the tech wizardry; you don’t need all the popups and the social proof and all of this stuff. What happens is if you don’t launch and you don’t start simple, you might never get the market validation to even know you’re going in the right path. So many people try to build this huge, amazing system, and a year later, they still haven’t launched it. And I way prefer a simple method called just the one-page funnel. I think I learned it from the founder over at SamCart, but the general idea of what is the minimum viable funnel? What are the fewest steps you need to get an offer out there to the market to see what the response is? And you can do it on a single page. I’m not saying that’s the best way to do it, but it’s the fastest way to get something up and started, which gives you that market validation and the feedback loop that you need to continue.

Johnathan: That’s great. We’re going to go for a break. We’re going to finish off the number five and then we’re going to go into some of the tech. He’s already… I agree with everything you say John, some great points, some great information. We’ll be back in a few moments.

We’re coming back. We’ve had a feast of funnel info. I’m so [inaudible 20:18] a little bit.

John: He’s so corny. I love it.

Johnathan: Yeah, [inaudible 20:22] I’m corny, that’s why [inaudible 20:24] So we got to the final fifth element. So, what’s number five John?

John: Yeah. And number five is to do your research. So up until now, the previous one was keeping things simple. I want to make sure that there’s something that in the marketing community, it’s a bit divided and it’s a divisive issue. And that is one of, kind of doing competitor research. And it’s called offer hacking or funnel hacking or whatever hacking method you want to call it but it’s competitive research, right. Think of it like this. People feel that when they go out and they look at a competitor’s product, they’ve automatically plagiarized or copied it, or they’re trying to use it for their own gain. But if you sell soap, don’t you think you want to go see what the other soap manufacturers are doing in their bar of soap to make sure your soap is competitive?

If you sell shirts, do you want to make sure like your Levi’s versus Hanes I don’t know anything about clothes, but you want to make sure that your shirt is soft and fits well and all that. I feel strongly about this, people are silly. People feel that because it’s information that you can’t understand what is out there and you have to be totally funneled into your own mindset and only your ideas. That’s a little bit dogmatic. You’re allowed to open up and expand the blinders. There is a point in time when you need to understand there’s a line, right. You want to make sure if you’re launching your first funnel, that you’re not going to charge hundreds of dollars for something that other people are struggling to sell at $47. You want to go in with the chance of success.

For example, I work a lot with a one on one coaching clients, and there’s a man who wants to sell an acoustic guitar, how to fingerpick the acoustic guitar. Great, I used to do that back in the day myself, can’t do it anymore. And he wanted to go in and sell his product for $500. And it was going to be a 10-video lesson course and I was like, it’s possible, it’s possible. Let’s take a look. And so, we did a little bit of competitive research and he knew right off the bat, people were selling more for less. And I was like, you can be successful but if you’re looking at this wall of friction, this wall of not being competitive in the marketplace, you’re going to have a hard time at doing it. So, allow yourself to do some offer hacking. I will tell you what you teach should be your own.

I don’t want people to say, hey, John Whitford went on this podcast and said, I can go buy some of these products and then repackage it and sell it. No, no, no. That is not cool. But kind of like when you walk through the bookstore, you can flip through the table of contents and get an idea of what’s going on in a different authors mindset and use that as inspiration or at least understand if there are gaps in what you’re teaching, where you can fill in those gaps. But I definitely am not giving anybody permission to rip people’s stuff off. Like we’re all trying to make a living for our families and things like that but competitive research is okay.

Adrian: There is no such thing as an original idea they say, and marketing tactics, especially basically come from like the top-down from Dan Kennedy and others then just like redistributed among other people. So, I mean, I consistently just go see what everybody else is doing and then sometimes I’m like, that’s a great idea. And sometimes it’s just like, that’s not such a great idea, maybe I’ll avoid, doing that. But especially when it comes to designing funnels and designing your customer journey, go check out what’s already working from someone else in your niche and you don’t necessarily need to carpet copy it.

John: Right.

Adrian: Emulate.

John: And what’s great about that is because information is out there, right, we talked about earlier in a lot of different cases, you could cobble it together on your own. So, really when it comes to a lot of our customers, what we’ve found is the quality of information is there, right, it’s good content, but it’s also the fact that they want to learn from us. And it’s not just the information, but it’s also the relationship that you build through your free content and through how you support them and the accountability and just that level of you-ness that’s in your product. The information itself is only part of the actual product and the actual business model. So competitive research is allowed because you all have something special, whether it’s your personality, whether it’s your humor, whether it’s whatever it is, they can align to you more than one of your competitors as well.

Johnathan: That’s great. So, we’ve gone through these five higher principles and its great stuff. And you made me think a bit and I’m worried now I’m going have to go back. Well, I know some of it’s not very good anyway. So, we’re thinking the hyphens, but now, have you got some advice and case ideals about how you apply those five on the first funnel that you’re going to build?

John: Yeah, sure. And if it’s okay. My, my wife and I, we biked to the office now so it was kind of fun, we were chatting about this idea where we have a six-year-old daughter, we have three kids and that’s part of like our niche and industry are being able to embrace that we’re parents and we’re not doing this for Lamborghinis. We’re doing it for Pokemon cards and stuff like that for our kids. So anyway, we’re biking to work this morning and we were working on a way for our six-year-old daughter because the world is so crazy right now with all this stuff that’s going on, we’re trying to give her some really useful projects because we don’t even know what school is going to be like anyways. So, we’re looking at a business we can start with her and let her run it and understand it and kind of see a bit of the finance and also fund her own future Pokemon purchases, it’s really blowing up in our household here with Pokemon stuff, any-ho.

So, we’re going to build her a funnel and we’re excited for it. And I want to walk you through the thinking that I have and like the different components that come into working through that funnel. So, she’s six years old, she’s not going to be teaching people how to make money online, she’s not going to be walking people’s dogs. There are a few things that a six-year-old can really do in a way that I feel is safe, especially in 2020. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going create kind of an e-commerce crafting website, where she will be able to… she likes folding papers and doing origami and all these different things, so we’re going to have paper products and we’re, we’ll be able to sell them and we’ll walk through different product offerings and things like that. But here is something that, this is a kind of cute example, we’re not going to go into the big seven-figure examples because I feel that keeping things simple is really valuable in these types of talks.

So, selling paper flowers, when you’re doing physical products and e-commerce products, what I like to think about how can I maximize the revenue of these offerings? It doesn’t always have to be selling them something different than what they just bought. So, for example, if a new customer arrives at our website, we’ll offer them a coupon for buy one, get one free. If they give us their email address, they’ll get a coupon for buy one, get one free in their email that makes sure that we’re starting to build an email customer database as well, without any risk to them. Anybody would give their email address in for a simple coupon and it’s a paper flower store, they’re not going to be too fearful of being stamped from doing that. So, coupons are a great way to get emails because they might not follow through with the purchase yet, but at least you have the opportunity to do follow up through email marketing after that using fantastic tools like GroundHogg.

And so, once they have that coupon, a simple load ticket, especially with e-commerce people want to build up trust with the business so I don’t like to come straight out of the gate with your premier package. We might try to sell them a single rose, a single paper rose, or a wool rose. My wife told me that wool is a thing for craft so that’s interesting. So, we’ll play around something like that, whereas they’re going through the checkout process, using tools like WooCommerce and cart flows, or a number of different ways of setting up the technology here, you can put a little paragraph on the checkout form called a bump offer, and it simply gives them a little checkbox, which allows them to increase the value of their order by simply reading this and saying, yeah, that would make sense. So, when you’re looking at a bump offer, this is something that before you’ve actually received money from the customer right, there at the checkout page, this is a critical step. It’s really important for you when you’re creating a bump offer, to make something so simple, you need to make what the bump offer is so simple because if you’re trying to explain this new thing that they weren’t looking at to buy, it can really hurt your conversions and this is proven through a lot of testing of what offers work where.

So, in the bump offer area, you can offer more of the same thing or something that requires so little explanation that they’re like, oh yeah, I know exactly what this is. That’s going to be your best-case scenario. So in this example, if we’re trying to sell them a single rose, the bump offer will be, would you like to upgrade from a single Rose to a bouquet of 12 roses of various flowers for an additional five bucks or whatever price we need to work on our pricing strategy right now. But the idea here is you don’t have a lot of space, you don’t have a lot of time to make that offer clear so make it something very simple and very easy to understand. Alright, so that’s the bump. I don’t know if you guys want to chat about that or just keep walking through [inaudible 29:32].

Johnathan: Keep going, keep going. You’re on a roll.

John: Yeah, on a roll.

Johnathan: You’re great at explaining this because to try and explain verbally in a coherent way is not easy, but you do a great job, John.

John: I’m going use my hands a lot as I’m speaking as well to help out. So, once the money is received in this case, we’re going to sell them a rose and there’s probably I’m going to say, we’re going to get probably a 40 to 50% uptick on the bump offer. Let’s use, some rough math here. Let’s say we’re going to sell a rose for $5 and then it’s going to be an additional $15 to go from one rose to a bouquet so a total of $20 for that product. We’ll see if this works. I’m not planning on quitting my existing business for this business, but it should make enough money for her. Anyways, once that order is placed, what most people expect is to go to a thank you page and maybe an order confirmation page, and it’s done, and we might start there.

But the idea of sales funnels is once you have somebody who’s just made the conscious decision to spend money on you, a couple of magical things have happened. One they’ve released a chemical they’ve released dopamine, they’re excited, they’re feeling good, they’re happy because people like to spend money, like look at my Amazon history ever since this madness has started. People like to spend money it makes me feel good. So, that’s one thing that’s happened and the second thing that’s happened, which is really unique is credit card companies have this amazing magic technological magic that allows them to continue to keep that order open for a short period of time for you to continue to make additional offers to that audience. Instead of them having to say, hey, do you want this? Now put your information and again, put your credit card in again, you can simply ask them, hey, would you like to receive a personalized video of the creator, making your bouquet and see a little snapshot of your bouquet being made by our six-year-old daughter?

If so, just click the button down below and you’ll be charged $27 or $17 to have a personalized video message sent from the creator of the bouquet. That would be a perfect upsells, what we’re planning on doing for upsell too, because she’s great on camera, she likes to do choreography and all this fun stuff. So we’ll offer them some personalization, which is great because it creates a better bond and also it will increase our possibility to retain that customer for future purchases because now they’re not just buying a flower, they’re buying a relationship, they’re buying an understanding and they’re becoming part of something greater than just the flower itself. So, upsells are where I like to increase the price. Let’s say you’re selling something for $7, you could offer the upsell for $7 as well or you can go to $27 because, with this magical technology, you’re allowed to figure out where your customer is and you can use data in whether Google analytics, however you choose to do it, there’s a million ways of identifying this, but you can figure out what is the optimal price point, what is the best way to figure things out and because of…and this is where the verbal explanation gets a little tricky. You don’t have to be done at no, and I’m married. I feel like I’m married up, I love my wife, she said, no, at first it didn’t stop me. So, there are ethical ways when you’re…

Johnathan: [Cross-talk 32:55] about you. You’re quite determined.

John: Exactly. So with upsells, the reason why I like to shoot for the moon so to say, and I’m not saying ask for a thousand dollars, I’m just saying you can ask for a little bit more than the initial purchase because psychologically that dopamine that just went through the system of the purchaser is going to make them more receptive to future purchases and not only future purchases but slightly more costly purchases. So that’s reason number one. Reason number two, if you ask for only $7 on the upsell or a small amount of money on the upsell and they say, yes, now you’re thinking, oh, could I have asked for 10, could I have asked for 20? Where’s the limit? And our personal strategy is to after the initial purchase, offer them a solution to the next problem or in this case, a personalization at a higher price, because if they say no, there’s one last chance. I don’t like to abuse this, but there’s not only upsells there’s also down sells where if a purchase is made and they decided that the upsell wasn’t quite right for them, depending on the software you use and depending on your strategies and your relationship with your audience, you can offer them, I would say one more try.

One more, try to say, okay, you didn’t want this $27 offer, but would you may be like to send a rose to your family member with personalized note? It’s only $17, we’ll pay for postage, we’ll do all this, we’ll write the card and it’s cheaper than the upsell, which means that maybe they wanted to continue to do business with you, but it was just out of their price range, the down-sell may be right where they need. So, it’s kind of a one, two punch where the upsell looks to see where they’re at if it’s not quite in the cards for them, you have one last chance to say, hey, this might work for you. Let me know if you want to do that. And that’s what we’re planning for our down-sell. So, in whole, the funnel we’re planning out is a small ticket with a bump leading up to an upsell that would be a higher price and more labor-intensive effort. And then a down-sell to simply save the sale or increase the average order value. And then there are other components we could talk about. But I feel like we’ve talked about paper roses for quite a while here.

Johnathan: Yeah, well we got to wrap up the podcast part of the show and John’s agreed to stay on for what we call bonus content. And that means you’ll be able to see the whole interview and the bonus content on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel or on the WP-Tonic website. I normally post to the YouTube channel the quickest. So, like I said John’s agreed to stay on, it’s going to be another, probably 15 minutes where are we going to be talking about some of the technology that you can use to build these funnels. So, John, you’ve done a fantastic job already, how can people find out more about you and your great videos and just your great tools.

John: Well, thank you so much. And everyone’s always welcome to come out and check out incomemesh.com is my website where I talk all things, WordPress and tools, and texts, and I put together a special gift. Let me make sure I’ve got the link right for it. It’s incomemesh.com/tonic like WP-Tonic and if you go there, I put together a little ebook that kind of summarizes some of this information as well as goes up and creates, and I need to update my pretty link here in just a second. But it’ll walk you through more about sales funnels, the different technology stacks I use, and I recommend a few different things to kind of get a bit more tactical with it.

Johnathan: Make sure that’s in the chat.

John: Yup.

Johnathan: And then I’ll make sure it’s really in the notes so people can get there.

John: Sure, I’m just going to [inaudible 36:37].

Johnathan: So, Adrian people find out more about you? What you’re up to?

Adrian: So, if you’re curious about, well, I mean, John’s just done a really great job of setting up the sale all the way up to where someone does the upsell down, sell the purchase, the checkout, but what happens after? And a lot of the time afterwards we kind of just shift the product and we wash our hands like, well, that was a great interaction sometimes though you need to continue that conversation in order to ensure that this person becomes a recurring customer. You can do that through a variety of ways. The way that is my favorite is through email marketing automation. We have a vast, extensive suite of tools that will allow you to both nurture as well as regain previous customers in order to entice them in order to make a repurchase and we have lots of tutorials on how to do this as well.

You can go to GroundHogg with two gs.io to pick up that free tool that’ll help you get started. And we also just launched a brand-new course today which talks about how to get more five-star reviews using a proven review funnel. This is of course, absolutely free at no charge, and we’ll help you set up a review collection system with GroundHogg so you can turn all of those new purchases into five stars, either Google reviews or Trustpilot reviews or wherever you decide to collect your reviews.

Johnathan: Yeah, that’s great. And folks, I’m doing a webinar, free webinar on the 4th of August. That’s Tuesday, the 4th of August at 9:00 AM Pacific standard time with the CEO of LifterLMS Chris, my friend, and we are going to be discussing LifterLMS 4.0, Lifter groups at the groups add on when we talking about how to use Elemetor with Lifter. It’s just going to be a feast of LifterLMS information, and how to help you build that first course. And if you register, all you have to do is go to the WP-Tonic website in the top menu there’s a button that says free webinar. You can register for free and you then will be able to join us and you’ll be able to ask any question about LifterLMS to Chris Badgett the Ceo of LifterLMS. So, I think it’s going to be a fantastic webinar. Please join us, I think it’s going to be a heap of fun. We’re going to wrap it up like I come over to the bonus content, and I think it’s already been a fantastic conversation, but we’ll see you next week, folks. Bye.

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