Nowadays, the “invisible” funnel has become one of the most demanded methods for online marketers. Because it can generate leads or profits within a short period. Because it works like invisible soft poison, the visitor cannot understand how he convinces himself to give out his credit card info or his email address, or his phone number.
Many funnel marketers don’t understand invisible funnels yet. That’s one reason we’ll go into detail about the invisible funnel. So, would you be interested in knowing more about the invisible funnel? An invisible funnel is a system of marketing where you send out emails to people who might be interested in your product or service. Let’s begin to clarify everything.
The sales funnel has no rival when it comes to supporting your business. Today, people have to compete on the highest level to survive. This strategy of the invisible funnel will not just help you get through it but will also help you reach stars.
As you can see from a regular sales funnel, there are multiple places where a business must be active to make a sale. For example, if you want to keep your customers loyal, you might need to be active in maintaining your customer support. Or, if you want to get leads for your business, you might need to communicate with your leads. It takes a lot of time, effort, and mistakes could result in a failed sale.
This is where the concept of an invisible funnel can help you:
Selling Without Selling
An invisible sales funnel is often described as “selling without selling”. It’s because it focuses on making people feel like they’re not being sold to. Instead of going through the typical sales funnel stages including awareness, interest, consideration, and intent, they skip ahead and give you a chance to test your products.
With this option in their minds, they don’t have to go through the first couple of stages in a sales funnel. Instead, they can test your product and services (sometimes, they get full access) and they can decide whether it’s worth their money later. It may seem counterintuitive for some people, but the truth is that there are plenty of good reasons to let your prospects try out your product before they buy it.
We’ll talk more about the benefits of an invisible sales funnel later, but for now, just try and understand the concept of selling a product without the prospect having any idea that you’re trying to sell them something. It’s an excellent alternative to traditional sales funnels and, when used correctly, has numerous benefits that you should be keen to exploit.
Structuring an Invisible Sales Funnel
A simple invisible sales funnel has three parts: awareness, interest, and action. You allow the customer to pay for your product or service by putting their payment details into your online system. Once they decide that your product is worth the money, you can start billing them and accepting payments. If they don’t enjoy the service or product, then you don’t charge them for it.
It sounds like a really bad idea, but there are plenty of ways to stop your prospects from abusing the invisible sales funnel. For example, if you’re selling a product, you won’t sell the whole product to your customer. Instead, you’d offer them a discount for buying more than one unit at a time. You’d send samples to see if people like your product or not instead. You could also set up a formal contract so that you can take the product back if it doesn’t work for them after a certain trial period (for example, 30 days). It’s more common with larger machines, and it’ll be easier to do if you’re working for a business.
Advantages of an Invisible Sales Funnel
Switching to an invisible sales funnel requires a bit of investment on your part, especially if you need to create samples and trial services for your prospects. As such, it’s worth looking at the main advantages of an invisible sales funnel to determine if it’s worth your time, effort, and money to establish.
An Invisible Sales Funnel Shortens the Sales Process
The problem with a long and established sales funnel is that there are too many failure points. With so many places for your prospect to drop out of a potential deal, it makes it incredibly difficult to hold their attention and complete a purchase. You could also be competing against other companies that might snatch up your leads before you get them. It doesn’t matter how long it takes for each customer to move through the sales funnel; what matters is that they pick the right product or service when they get there. They’re more likely to take longer because they’re doing more research before they buy something.
For these types of consumers, they must reduce the number of choices they’re making by putting the product or service into the hands of the consumer so that they can get first-hand experience with it. This is why trial, sample, and demo services are such a big deal. Some businesses offer a complete service or rental-style service for their products.
One of the goals for an invisible sales funnel is reducing the number of decisions that prospects have to make. The fewer decisions you make, the less likely it is that you’ll lose a potential sale with your business.
Customers Don’t Feel Like They’re Being Sold To
Most customers are aware that they need to go through a sales funnel before they can get their hands on a product or service. If a customer has been looking for a specific product online, then they may get lots of ads for the same or similar products later. They might also get emails from your business regarding their shopping cart, or they might suddenly get discount codes and offers from your competitors.
Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the offers and discounts they receive when they leave their items in the cart.
This realization of the sales funnel isn’t good for business. It makes people feel as if they’re being herded through a predetermined sales process. It makes them feel like they’re being treated like every other client, and it makes them look for alternatives for their needs. So, by hiding the sales process as much as possible, you can stand out from the rest. By offering your customers trial products and samples that they can choose to pay for, you attract a much wider audience and shorten the entire sales funnel.
Conversion Funnel
A Conversion Funnel is an e-commerce term that describes the different stages in a buyer’s journey leading up to a purchase. The funnel metaphor illustrates the gradual decline of the number of potential customers as they are guided through the conversion path.
The Conversion Funnel is often divided into “upper funnel”, “middle funnel”, and “lower funnel”, which helps to determine the right marketing tactics to increase conversions. It is also normal to hear terms like “top of the funnel”, and “bottom of the funnel”, which mean the same at “upper funnel” and “lower funnel”. All these terms reference the level of education that a potential customer has of a product and the closer they are to purchasing it.
Conversion rate optimization (or CRO) is the process that helps websites improve their conversion rates by making changes to the design of a website or its content.
Conversion rate optimization helps you understand your website’s usability better by giving you customer behavior insights and tips for making your UX better to meet goals.
Convert More Leads Into Customers
An invisible funnel means offering samples and free trials to your customers. This can be an effective way to draw interest from people who would not normally be interested in your products or services. For example, if you’re selling access to an informative webinar, then offering your customers a chance to view parts of it in smaller chunks is a great way for you to give them a taste of what you have to offer without having to pay for the full thing. Some entrepreneurs would offer an entire webinar for free but only ask users to pay for the ones that were informative and enjoyable. It creates air for confidence, but it can convert even the non-qualified leads who don’t know anything about your brand into paying clients.
With an invisible sales funnel, your customers get more opportunities to try out your products and services. This has a high probability of converting customers who were already interested in your business but can also grab the interest of people who have little interest in what your business offers.
Prospects Can Get Firsthand Experience With Your Products and Services
An invisible sales funnel gives you the chance to provide your prospects with firsthand experience with your products or services. This is common with trial periods and sample products. Many companies use a free trial period to get potential leads into their business by offering them something for free. This is common with virtually any kind of business that offers a premium level of service that includes a subscription fee.
By getting firsthand experience working with your products and services firsthand, your prospects won’t need to do extensive amounts of research to decide whether they even want to consider you over a competitor. They need to be able to request a sample or trial immediately so that they can make a near-instant purchase decision. Firsthand experience is arguably more valuable than any kind of review or information they’ve found online and it can often bypass negative reviews that could be dragging down your business.
In short, an invisible sales funnel makes it much easier for your customers to decide if they want to use your products and services or not. It gives them a chance to gain firsthand experience to make their own decisions quickly, thus speeding up the sales process and resulting in a higher chance to make a sale.
Less Time Spent Creating Content
One of the most time-consuming things about a regular sales funnel is creating different types of content to help convert leads. For instance, you might need to write different guides and focus on outreach to grow awareness around your product. You might also spend a lot of time improving your domain authority to appear as a trustworthy source of information, and you’ll have to spend time showing off why your product is worth the customer’s money. This can be a lot of work and it could involve establishing relationships with freelance creatives to create content for your business.
You could save a lot of time by skipping this and simply giving the product for your customers to try instead. While it’s still important to create some basic content that explains your products or services, you don’t need to focus as much on creating content that separates you from competitors, or explains why your products are better than the alternatives.
An invisible sales funnel differs a lot from a regular one because you spend more time engaging with your audience about your products and services than trying to convince them to pick you over a competitor. This not only saves you a lot of time but can also be more cost-effective despite needing to create trial services and samples for your customers.
Creating Your Own Invisible Sales Funnel
Creating an invisible sales funnel will largely depend on the type of business that you operate. The main issue is deciding how you’ll offer a sample product or trial to your prospects, so here are a couple of ideas:
eCommerce
An e-commerce business doesn’t have many ways to establish a sales funnel outside of offering samples or demo products. You could also try offering subscription services to send customers something with the first month completely free. If they enjoy your services, they can leave the subscription running. If not, they may be able to contact you to cancel your subscription.
Retail
Retail environments offer many unique opportunities to establish a visible sales funnel. This can include renting various products to customers and then collecting payment from them if they don’t return them. It could also mean letting your customers try your products in-store, or offering them free samples.
Creative
These businesses make most of their income from producing creative works for their clients. As such, it’s difficult to establish an invisible sales funnel because you can’t give away a trial or sample. This can be abused quite heavily if you have to invest a lot of time creating a sample work for your potential prospects. However, what you can do is offer a free consultation to explain the types of creative work that you can offer your client. Giving drafts and samples can also be a good way to draw in a prospective lead if they show that they’re serious about hiring your services.
Consultancy
Offering a free sample consultation is a great way to establish an invisible sales funnel. This also works for authors, coaches, and speakers. This can also be a great way to trial new products to see what your customers think before you further develop and refine them into fully-fledged products that you plan to sell.
Education and Training
When it comes to setting up an invisible sales funnel for education and training businesses, you can typically offer free lessons and only start charging for more premium services that offer in-depth information on the topics that you’ve already covered. You can also offer free training services to other businesses and only start charging once they see the positive effects your training has on their employees.
Frequently Asked Questions About Invisible Sales Funnels
To help improve your knowledge of an invisible sales funnel and to answer some of the most common questions and answers surrounding them, we’ve put together some of the following:
– What Advantages Does an Invisible Sales Funnel Have Over a Regular One?
The main advantages are as follows:
- Shorten the sales process by having fewer steps
- Focus less on creating content for your products and services
- Hide the generic sales process from your customer to make them feel like an individual client instead of “just another client”
- Spend more time engaging with your audience
- Convert more leads into customers, even people that were originally uninterested in your brand
- Give your customers firsthand experience with your products and services
– Can I Use an Invisible Sales Funnel in Any Industry?
Yes! While it can be more difficult to establish an invisible sales funnel in certain industries, it can be possible regardless of the products or services you sell.
– Do I Need to Offer Free Products as Part of an Invisible Sales Funnel?
This is one of the main principles of an effective invisible sales funnel. Free samples, demos, and trial periods can also work when it comes to offering your customers firsthand experience with what your brand has to offer. While some companies offer a complete product for free, others prefer to only offer a sample or partial product.
– Is an Invisible Sales Funnel Similar to Offering Trials and Samples?
Yes. Offering trials and samples is a key component to an invisible sales funnel as it offers your customers firsthand experience with your products and services.
– What If My Customers Never Pay for My Free Products?
This should be considered as part of your invisible sales funnel. There will likely be many situations where your customers don’t pay for your products and will abuse your invisible sales funnel system. As such, you mustn’t be losing money due to production costs. This is why an invisible sales funnel is more popular for a product that only needs to be produced once, such as a webinar or online training courses.
– How Do I Measure the Performance of My Invisible Sales Funnel?
In most cases, measuring the success and efficiency of your invisible sales funnel is similar to a regular sales funnel. This means analyzing engagement statistics from various sources of content, measuring call-to-action effectiveness, and also looking at customer reviews and impressions of your products and services.
Wrap Up
An invisible sales funnel is an effective alternative to a regular sales funnel that can be used in virtually any industry. It feels weird to offer a product for free, especially when you’re not sure if people will use it. But it’s a great way to attract a wider audience and convert potential leads who would otherwise never consider buying from you.
Need help with creating a high-converting Sales Funnel? We’ve got your back! Just grab our full-funnel script pack currently on a super special at My Funnel Script