GSD 222: Standing Up Sales Funnels For Physical Products

Welcome to today’s GSD Daily. What we’re going to talk about today is sales funnels for physical products, and there are a couple of different ways to slice and dice it, but what I want to show you is a couple of ways that you can, well, sell physical products in a direct response fashion or even in e-commerce fashion and model some stuff out.

So first, we need to talk about the differences between the two types of funnels. There is a direct response sales funnel that is a very direct response in nature. Somebody clicks an ad, they hit a page on that page, they buy something, and then we upsell bundles or multiple quantities or whatever. We upsell them through the sales funnel. However, that’s not the only way to do it. There is another way to do it, which is to put an e-com store together.

So you are familiar with this. You have bought things from an e-com store other than Amazon or even Amazon. Amazon is a very, very big e-commerce store. Amazon, you wouldn’t think of as having a sales funnel, but they do. They don’t necessarily have upsells, but they have related products. So their shopping cart software, the shopping cart itself, actually gets you to buy more. Even think of warranties, if you go to buy a camera on Amazon, it’s going to try to offer you a warranty of some sort. So that’s an upsell for them. So it does have native upsells in the platform already, it’s just a different style.

And that’s really how you have to approach physical products. Do you want to have a store, and inside that store, do you want to upsell and downsell either before or after the shopping cart? Or do you want to go direct response style where you have one product and you are shoving all of your traffic into the front side of that one product and then you’re upselling and downs selling from there? So it depends. Do you want to give a choice up front? Do you want to give a choice on the back end? Or maybe you don’t have a choice at all to give. So we’re going to model a couple of these out and go from there.

All right, so in the physical product sales funnel layout, there are a couple of different ways we can cut it up. So we always want… We’re looking at Google Ads, Facebook ads, and banner retargeting, mostly for the traffic sources. You can either send direct traffic directly to an item sales page. This is often a VSL sales page video sales letter or a page with a sales video on it, and then they move directly into the funnel. So upsell one, upsell two, upsell three, and then fulfillment.

If they hit this sales page and they don’t buy, then we want to exit pop them. So a banner ad pops up in front of them and it says, “Enter your email address for a 15% discount or a lead [inaudible 00:03:10] or something.” So we give them some incentive to give us their email address, and then we move them off into some emo promotions.

Now, this format works okay for a sale for an offer for a product that sells well. That’s easy to convey and easy to understand. There is another way that we can break this down. And how we want to do it is if we… We’re just going to unhook these guys. So we are going to pull these off. Then we’re going to add a piece to the puzzle right here. So this, we’re going to turn into an advertorial. So here we go.

Now, the folks who are running a lot of traffic in the physical product space, they aren’t running traffic directly to a sales page, they’re running traffic to some sort of a landing page or a… It’s a landing page. It is an advertorial. It’s something that frames up the offer. And you can… So when you’re paging through a magazine the next time, be careful to spot the advertorials.

An advertorial inside of a magazine looks like an article. So same font, same color, same styling, same pictures, same headlines, everything. It’s usually a six-page spread, somewhere in the middle, but you will see an advertorial up top. So it’s meant to blend into the rest of the editorial, to the rest of the content of the magazine, but it is very clearly created to sell you something. There are advertorials online everywhere, and a lot of the big media buyers who are running traffic, run traffic to an advertorial or a landing page before the sales page.

The reason being is if they run traffic to an advertorial, you’re going to read through the advertorial. The advertorial usually has a case study or some social proof, or it paints the problem, it paints the problem, and then the solution that the offer ends up going to solve, but it’s meant to fly under your radar. It’s meant to be read in a way that you’re not being pitched to anything. So by the time you get to the end of the article, “the advertorial”, you are already pre-framed to go buy that thing. So you’re going to click the button, go to the sales page, and purchase.

As an affiliate, we used to do this all the time. So we would pre-frame them with a review, pre-frame them with some sort of an article, click an affiliate link, go over, and buy that thing. And if that thing is taken down, if that thing no longer exists, the affiliate link expired, then we just swap in a new affiliate link because we know the advertorial works and now we’re promoting something similar or different or whatever. So that is the e-com paid traffic game as an affiliate or if you own those paid traffics. But my point is the sales funnel is the same. You’re going to have Google Ads, Facebook ads, and banner ads into an advertorial that goes to a sales page, and then it upsells them from there.

The other way to do it is very Shopify-based. So Shopify, WooCommerce, whatever, where it’s an e-com store, you launch a new product that you can go through and select your colors and options and all that other stuff. Then there are two ways to sneak and upsell in there. One, it is after you hit add to cart before you hit the checkout, there’s an opportunity to put up an interstitial page that offers to sell them more and add that more to their cart. The other way to do it is to put it after the checkout form. So in one way, it’s before the checkout, and in the other way, it’s after.

And adding the upsell after the checkout is usually a better idea because you already have their credit card information. You don’t want to sidetrack them or try to upsell them too much to the point that they abandon their shopping cart, that they leave because it’s too much, they know they’re going to be upsold, they think it’s too expensive, or whatever. Usually, you make the upsells after they buy the first thing and it locks it in, right? So they enter their credit card information into the checkout page, they hit submit, it locks that purchase in, and then it tries to sell them the next thing. And it’s a one-click upsell. It’s two individual transactions. It’s not one complete transaction as they move through.

So that is… There are two different ways to upsell and create a sales funnel for your physical products. Pretty much any software platform will allow for either. If you’re looking for a more direct response sales funnel where you’re selling one product or bundles of one product, then WordPress, ClickFunnels, that kind of platforms, WordPress with Optimized Press is what we do, those platforms are going to be able to set that up easily.

You can also have Shopify with a plug-in. So there are a couple of landing page plug-ins that work nicely out of the box on Shopify. But if you’re going to have a full store with multiple categories and products and everything, Shopify is the way to go for that. And then you can add the plugin if you want a little bit more direct response flavor. So it just depends on your skill set and what you want to accomplish. Those are usually some of the questions that we will ask in our discovery process before we go about building anything.

If you have any questions at all, just go ahead and comment below this video. We’ll make sure to get them answered. Please like and share the video wherever and on whichever platform you’re in. If you have any questions or if you would like to jump on an action plan call, go to doneforyou.com/start and book a call with me, and we’ll go through, take a look at your sales funnel, your traffic, and do a little mini diagnosis and try to get you all fixed up. And that’s it. So if you have any questions, let me know. All right, thanks. Bye.