To Sum It Up…

I’ve spent the last three days at Funnel Hacking Live, and while there were so many great ideas – I’ve pulled out my top 7 and I hope they’ll give you some great project ideas to add to your list next week!

1. Your offers, optins and sales copy should represent your program/product/service as a new opportunity. Don’t make an improvement offer that ends in ‘er’. (i.e. better, faster, stronger)

2. Know where your audience is on the Promise Exposure Spectrum.

3. Avoid techno babble at all costs and replace with metaphors to help connect the unknown to the known when you’re introducing a complex feature or benefit.

4. The longer the runway, the better the results. So don’t be afraid of a “long” launch.

5. Make your first upsell offer more of the same! Give them an opportunity to order more copies of your book, more seats your event or more of your products.

6. Calling out your audience ‘by name” in your Facebook ads, based on their identity or location.

7. Clearly defining CTAs and funnels for cold, warm and hot leads – and stop sending everyone to the same offer!

If any of these peak your interest, take a moment to watch the whole video or skip below for more details on each takeaway!

Your Turn

Which of these new tips do you want to put into place first? Make a commitment in the comments below!

Full Transcript

I just wrapped up my third and final day with Russell Brunson and his ClickFunnels team and I really wanted to share with you all some of the biggest takeaways that I’m getting from his event. It was filled with keynotes by him, really great other speakers offering tips on copies and different types of funnels they’ve used. There was really inspiring people there who had made million-dollar funnels. It’s super cool to meet them and also, I hadn’t heard of almost any of the entrepreneurs that were winning these awards. That’s always really cool to know. Sometimes, we might feel the marketplace is a little crowded but there’s so much more opportunity online. If online is your dream, don’t give up just yet. Come to this event next year and see what’s really possible.

I wanted to share some of the biggest takeaways with you that I’m taking from this event that I will be implementing soon in my business, and I also want to share this really great t-shirt with you that’s one of three I got for free at this event. One of the takeaways was they talked really about building a culture and getting people excited and giving them a new identity. We will get into that later on in this video. Today, I’m going to share with you seven big takeaways from Funnel Hacking Live 2017.

I spent the past three days deep into funnel hacking and it wasn’t just about funnels but it was really also really great business lessons because one key part of a funnel is the sales page or the opt-in page and really having strong copy to get people to take action, because you can drive all the traffic in the world that you want to an opt-in page or a sales page but if it’s not converting and the copy doesn’t resonate with anyone, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good.

Takeaway #1
One big copy tweak that I’m going to be taking with me after this event and implementing almost right away is phrasing my offers as a new opportunity instead of an improvement offer. If your headline or your copy has any [er’s 00:02:03] in it that you can be better, faster, stronger, if you want to say, “Do this faster or do anything like that,” you are having an improvement offer and this might actually be hurting your sales.

Now, it doesn’t mean that that’s not the result that they want, but if you phrase it as an improvement offer, meaning something that they might have seen before or tried before, they have to admit past failures. Because they have to say, “Oh, I tried something like this before and it didn’t work for me,” that could hurt your conversions. If you frame it as, “This is a brand new opportunity. This is a totally new way of doing things that will still get you to these results, that’s how you make the sales, so making sure that it’s a new opportunity.

A really good example they gave and I don’t even know what some of these words means, if you have to go Google them, feel free but the goal is weight loss. I feel like health coaching examples are always a little bit easy to jump to, because almost everyone had some type of struggle or familiarity. The goal is to lose weight. If you tell me that you have a better program for diet and exercise, that’s an improvement offer. I’ve tried diet and exercise before. I’m someone who’s trying to lose weight and it didn’t work for me.

If you say, “Your body needs to be in a state of ketosis and ketones are the key to losing weight,” then that’s a whole new opportunity. That’s saying like, “Oh, it wasn’t me that was missing. It was maybe this new way of doing things that was missing.” If you can find a way to frame your offer as a new opportunity instead of an improvement and I hope that example cleared it up for you. That’s one of the best ways to start increasing sales conversions using your copy.

Takeaway #2
My next takeaway was from a talk by Todd Brown and he told us about the Promise Exposure Spectrum. This was to gauge where your audience is in terms of hearing about your solution. There’s that promise and a promise expanded and then a promise plus unique mechanism. Taking the weight loss example again, the promise is lose weight. I’ve probably heard from that tons of different programs if I’ve been looking for a weight loss solution for a long time. I’m burnt out and jaded. Are you saying that this is going to help me lose weight?

The next phase would be promise expanded, so how can you say “lose weight and …” Let’s just say we’re talking about fat burner pill which was the example he gave. The promise is take this pill and burn fat. The promise expanded is take this pill and lose 10 pounds. It’s not just vague, it’s getting something really specific. Again, in a weight loss industry where the person you’re probably trying to attract has been struggling with this for a long time. They’re burned out on the basic promises. They’re burned out on the promise expanded, so where do you go from there?

The next example on the spectrum was the promise plus unique mechanism. You might have heard me talk about this before from a lot of other experts that I follow have always recommended that you need to have a unique system, so some unique process that you do for whatever service or program that you’re offering. It needs to have a unique, I don’t want to say acronym because that’s limiting, but you know what I mean. If people who are teaching things, they have pyramid of trust or they have the art of something and all these pieces come together to make something.

We said this is the sweet spot. If you’re going to combine the promise, so in this example, we’re talking about weight loss or fat burning pills. If you can provide the promise and you can combine it with your unique mechanism, this relates back to the new opportunity to where they’re saying, “Oh, maybe there was this piece that was missing the whole time,” and that’s the reason why none of these other things worked.

If you can figure out where your people are on the promise spectrum, so for example, if you’re coming out with something that’s brand new, the promise might be enough. Whatever result you’re getting, if people are just starting to feel the pain of this problem, the promise you want to make will be enough, but if it’s something that’s been around for a while, if it’s a promise that tons of people and tons of marketers or tons of coaches are doing the same thing, you really want to have that unique mechanism that’s going to make you stand out and make the audience feel like you might actually have the really solution.

Takeaway #3
Avoid techno babble at all cost! I can be really guilty of this. I have been in a couple of masterminds with people who run more brick and mortar style businesses and I talk about discovery calls or funnels or things like this, and I don’t realize that’s jargon. That someone who is just stepping in to the online world doesn’t know what these things are and I take that for granted.

I feel like that can be the case for any experts who are really, really passionate and we’ve done all the research, so we have all the lingo and the jargon and the technical terms and we think it wows people, but it actually confuses them. There’s two quick tricks that I want to pass along that I learned from Funnel Hacking Live, and the first is to use a kind-of-like bridge.

If you say something technical, followed it up with “it’s kind of like”. An example they gave, it’s a little bit graphic but hopefully, it will give you the point was they had a project that kind of improved your brain function and neurons, firing off, I don’t even remember the technical term, but he said, “It’s kind of like Viagra for your brain.” That’s a little bit graphic, but hopefully you get the point of using the kind-of-like bridge to explain something technical. Go through your sales page and start to look for things might be jargony or look at your blog posts and see if anything there is jargony as well and technobabble as they called it and make sure that you replace it with a kind-of-like bridge.

Similar to the kind-of-like bridges, they talk a lot about using really powerful metaphors which is similar to compare things that are known to the unknown. A few examples of that was that you could use metaphors to connect to the unknown to the known. Going back to the example I gave you before, if you took out the kind-of-like and you just said, “This product is like Viagra for your brain,” that’s connecting with something that’s known to something that was unknown.

You could also use metaphors to connect the known to the unknown. He gave an older example of some copy that ran as a direct mail ad and it said, “The secret currency that’s making all these people rich,” and secret currency was actually gold. Instead of saying something that was gold, he used the metaphor to build curiosity. Again, avoid technobabble and try replacing it with metaphors or replacing it with kind-of-like bridges.

Takeaway #4
There was also really inspiring talk by Stu McLaren during Funnel Hacking Live and he shared his experience launching his program, Tribe, which was all about how to create and launch, and build community and build membership sites and how to make money as an online entrepreneur with membership sites. He shared his launch story and my biggest takeaway from that whole piece that he really drove home was the bigger the runaway, the better the results. He actually had a six-month launch that he walked us through and I have been encouraging my clients too, do longer and longer launches for their first timeout, something like three to four months.

To hear him say something so similar, I was reassured that as a launch strategist I’m on the right track, but also he was sharing how much that built relationships and how much that really helped people know, like and trust him because he spent the first two months just really delivering a ton of value and getting people invested in his mission, invested in his cause.

All those first four takeaways were really heavy and just the general business, the copy, setting the foundation for all the funnels that we learned on days two and three. We really got it down into the nitty-gritty.

Takeaway #5There’s one thing I want to share is tip #5 that I’m taking away that blew my mind. I have always done upsells and downsells with my launched clients but he revealed what should really be your upsell. I was always concerned with creating a new program or adding in bonuses and things like that that we could use as upsells, but one of the best things that you can do as your first upsell is actually to sell the more of the same.

This is definitely easier said than done with actual products or things. If I’m buying a t-shirt, you can upsell me two more t-shirts with free shipping, or you could upsell me two more books if you’re an author. More of the same is actually what your first upsell should be and they actually shared the numbers and we’re getting amazing conversion rates on selling more of the same as the first upsell.

Then, the second upsell was something that was more valuable and a little bit more of a parallel offer but to think of how could you apply this to your online programs and products, how could you do this for your information products. Could you say, “Buy one for a friend,” and ask for their shipping address and sell them more of the same? Could you add in two months of something? Maybe they’re buying a membership program and they’re just doing monthly and you say, “But wait, would you like to get three months for the price of one if you upgrade now?”

Different things like that that you could do that’s more of the same as your upsell which was mind blowing to me because one, it was actually working in all of the funnel examples that they shared. Two, how easy that is. I know as online entrepreneurs, we’re constantly creating new content and new things, but to think of like, “Oh, wait, it can just be more of the same as the first upsell,” takes off so much pressure and you should go put one of those upsells in place right now.

Takeaway #6

The sixth takeaway that I want to share with you is really about driving traffic and Facebook ads and how do you get people to come to your opt-in page and opt in. One great tip that was shared in terms of Facebook ad was really to hyper target and call your [audience 00:12:00] out by name as much as you could. For example, he gave the idea of targeting the top 10 cities, New York, L.A., wherever else you want to target or if you’re a local business, you just target locally, but he was selling products in Amazon and he ran ads that said, “Hey, New York, why are you still settling for this old tea kettle? There’s much better things out there.”

I know that sounds a little bit silly, but by calling them out based on location, it was essentially saying like, “Hey, you.” It’s as close to personalization as we can get with Facebook ads and not seemed like Big Brother where we’re doing the same thing. We might do it in our email servers where we insert their name. It was really interesting to me how well this was working for him and it could also totally apply too if you wanted to target people who are interested in different things.

Maybe you’re a health coach and you know Crossfitters are their doing their things. You could say like, “Hey, Crossfitter, do this,” and target them based on what they like or, “Hey, My Little Pony Fan,” or, “Hey, Little Ponies.” Anything like that that you think you would want to target, there’s so much advanced analytics with Facebook ads that if you can call your audience out by name and say, “Hey, yeah, I’m really talking to you,” not just like, “Hey, everyone.” “Hey, males and females, 25 to 35.” It was a really powerful shift in advertising, so definitely try that on your next campaign.

Takeaway #7

The last and final tip I want to leave you with again is about traffic and how to make the most out of people that you’re driving to your opt-in pages and your content. You’ve probably heard the term, or this could be technobabble, cold leads, warm leads and hot leads. If you were like me, you might have been sending all of those leads to the same opt-in page, but apparently, that’s a really bad idea because depending on where they are in the lead cycle and their temperature depends on actually what they’re most likely to do for you.

I had essentially been treating everyone like a warm lead which Russell suggested sending to your opt-in page or your bribe or your quiz or your freebie. These are the best people to take from, say, social media or something like that and drive to this, but I was treating cold leads that way too which was affecting my opt-in rates. He actually said, “Cold leads are where you need to do your relationship building.” For anyone who’s a cold lead, you should be sending them to your blog post. You should be sending them to some of your best material. You should be sending them to your Facebook Live. They should be getting know, like and trust you.

Cold leads would be coming from, maybe you did a guest post on a website, maybe you were on a podcast interview, maybe you did an affiliate partnership or a JV partner emailed his list about you, you don’t want to say, “Send them to this thing.” You really want to start just bring them into your community, if you have a free Facebook group. Cold leads, send them somewhere that they can know, like and trust you before you ask them to opt in.

Now, you might have opt-ins on those blog post that you want to direct them to which is a great idea or in the sidebar but you’re not hard pushing to get the email. You’re saying, “This is a whole bag of cold traffic. Maybe some of them would or would not be interested.” Make your topic broad. Make your headline broad appealing to a [masser pain 00:15:19] point rather than something specific. For warm leads, those are the ones who you do want to get that email opt-in and you do want to get them to be nurtured.

Obviously, hot leads are going to be those raving fans that just want to buy anything that you ever come out with. You might be a raving fan for some people. There are ton of click funnels raving fans at this event and they were ready to buy anything Russell had.

I hope you found these tips helpful. Sorry if I got a little carried away. It’s been a really long three days but I really wanted to share these tips with you this week while the ideas were fresh in my head even with this bad hotel lighting…

But I did get this super sweet t-shirt and again, one of three. So bonus tip, if you’re going to do a live event, throw a ton of swag at your people because now, we’ll be wearing these things in ClickFunnels and they’ll be everywhere soon.

If you have any questions about these examples, I tried to be as brief but thorough as I could. I love to answer them in the comments and until then, I will see you next week.