The real secret to converting with funnels…
Today’s episode is part 3 of a 3 part series of Russell speaking at a $100k event where he taught about the psychology of funnels.
Here are some of the things you will hear in part 3:
So listen below to find out how to make your funnels awesome and successful.
---Transcript---
Russell Brunson: All right, so now we're going to ... Cause now, like everyone ... I'm the funnel guy, so let's talk about funnels, right? Now that we've got the foundation stuff out of the way, so then it comes to how do we build the funnel? I lost ... There's the lid. For me, the funnel ... Everyone thinks there's some magic. I have people all the time like, "Hey Russell. Do you have an MLM funnel you can give me, so I can grow my MLM?" I have a funnel that's worked for someone I can give you. "Hey, I'm doing this." I give them the book funnel. I was snickering yesterday. Everyone's like, "I need your book funnel. [inaudible 00:46:27] book funnel to work." It's like, well kind of. Y'all have the funnel now. That's the framework. What makes it work is this stuff we talked about, right? The pieces don't change.
My funnels are not complicated If you look at my funnels versus, I have friends who like to brag about the complexity of their funnels. They're insane. My funnels are so simple. They're usually four or five pages and that's it. It's, very simple. My thing, I think ... In fact, I was at a Infusion Soft thingy and I was watching these guys and they had all of their ... These guys were building all of these funnels that had like a billion different segments and all this stuff. You know those Infusion Soft charts, that show all the thing ... I was just sick to my stomach. I'm like, "Guh."
They're like, "Yeah, well if they click here, then it takes them this sequence. If they don't, they take them to here and then if they've done this thing for three days and they haven't done this and then they go here and ..." All this stuff and I was just like ... They have a billion different branches. I'm looking at that, I'm like, "You know the problem with that, is I have no idea what the crap to fix if something's broken. There's so may things. I want five or six variables max I want my cost per ad, I want my landing page conversion, I want my sales thingy. I want four or five things and I'm going to go and spend a thousand bucks driving ads. I'm going to stop and look at it and be like, "Okay, cool. It's one of these five things that's broken. Maybe two of them. Let's fix just those." You've got a thing that's got 8,000 sequences. I can not make it better.
What's more important, is become better at selling. Me getting better at telling a story is better than 8.000 segmentations of lists. I'll make way more money by becoming better at telling my story, than I ever will from the third, the guy that didn't click on email 13, send him this one instead and then send this one at two in the morning and then. Holy crap. Just sell yourself better and that's worth a million times more than that, right? I make them simple. All my ... Everyone's cheering back here, "Yay, simple funnels." My stuff's all very, very, very simple, but I've become a master at understanding this. The opportunity switch to the opportunity stack.
I'm just going to talk about a book funnel, but this could be any funnel. Does not matter. The first thing I'm looking at is that is, what is the opportunity switch. There's going to be a video of me telling a story about the opportunity switch. With my book funnel, I'm telling a story about my book, my epiphany story about how I had an opportunity switch and how this book is going to give you that same thing as well. Right? That's the key. That's the magic. If I'm doing a webinar, what am I doing? Telling a story about my opportunity switch, tell the epiphany story. They have the same epiphany, they're sold. I don't have to sell them anymore. If I'm selling supplements, same thing. Tell them the story, how did my epiphany pitch. It doesn't matter what it is. That's the key, is I'm telling a really good story about how I had my epiphany, and if I do the job right, they'll have the same epiphany and then they'll buy the first product.
From there, it's coming and the biggest thing most marketers do, when they start creating their upsale, downsale sequences is like, "Okay, what else do we have on the shelf we can sell them? Okay, they bought my book. Let's sell them, I don't know, some other random thing." Or, they bought the book. Let me sell them more of that same kind of thing. Now, in supplement world, this is like the default. E-commerce/supplements, it's kind of like remember A-E-I-O-U and sometimes I and W, or E and W or whatever that is. There's two times this rule breaks.
In supplements and e-commerce, whatever I sell on the first phase, if I sell supplements, I sell three bottles, my upsell's always six bottles of the exact same crap. If I sell e-commerce, we just did a campaign for Fiber Fix. Three Fiber Fix, I'm upselling a crap ton more Fiber Fix. It's e-commerce and supplements, you sell more of the same thing on the next page. Only time you do that. In information products, that will kill you. First time I really got this, it was when we launched our 108 Split Test book, which was kind of ironic, because the whole book's about split test. We launched this book and the landing page converted and non of the upsells did and I was so pissed. I'm like. "Why is this not working?" I retweaked this offer probably 12 times. I changed the video, changed the pitch, changed the offer, changed the thing, the thing, the thing. I'm like, "Why is nobody buying this crap?"
The main thing I was selling was, they bought a book on split tests, and my upsell was this whole course on split testing. I'm like, "This is all the cool stuff you need. You told me you wanted split testing. I'm selling you more split testing. Why are you not buying that?" I had one of my friends, who went to my funnel and bought it and he texted me. He's like, he said, "Hey man. Cool book. Thanks for the book." Then he's like, "I bet your upsell is not converting." I was like ... I didn't tell anyone, cause the conversion, that's my thing. Like, "Why would you say that?" He's like, "Ah, I can just tell." I'm like, "Well, I'm just curious. Why would you assume that?" Anyway, he shot ... it's Tim Erway, if any of you guys who know him.
He shot me this message, he's like, "Dude, cause you did the cardinal fail of upsales." I was like, "All right. Yeah. What was the cardinal rule again?" He told me, he said, "When somebody buys your first product ..." Think about it. Let's say it's My Gear, The Truth About Abs, right? I want abs so bad, right. I buy Truth About Abs. My mind, as a consumer, I'm like, "I've got abs. That itch has been scratched." And I'm like, "Ah sweet, I got abs. Whew." Then here it's like, "Hey, I'm going to give you workout videos, so you can get abs." Like, "Dude, I already got abs. I just bought them. They're ... It's done. My itch has been scratched." He's like, "When people buy your split test book, in their mind, that itch has been scratched. It's done. Nothing you do will get people to buy more of that." I was like, "But they raised their hand as people interested in split tests." Nope, that itch has been scratched.
He's like, "You've got to look at, you just did an opportunity switch. What is the next thing they need to be more successful with that? What's the stack? What's the next logical thing?" I was like, for me I was like, "Well, if they scratched their itch on conversion, conversion's awesome, but they're only coming to the website and then they're kind of screwed, right?' For me, it was traffic was the next thing. We shifted that to a what's the opportunity stack. Now you know how to make your pages convert, now let's get people to actually show up. Switched it and stacked the next opportunity. Boom. I was like, "Crap, that was so easy." Now everyone in my funnel's [inaudible 00:52:17] the psychology of, okay. First lead is the switch.
Now we've got them believing ... This is why I love free book offers. Why I like low end things, because the lower the barriers initially ... All I have to get them to do is to raise their hand and say, "Yes, I'm going to buy your book." By saying that, they've subconsciously sold themselves on like, "I have now switched off on the opportunity. This is now my future. I'm a guy who has six pack abs." They've made that switch. You know, as soon as you pull a credit card out of your wallet, you are voting. That's why, we don't do customer service and crap, cause I don't care. We get people to vote with their credit card, cause that's the only thing I actually believe.
Every time we do focus groups and all that kind of crap, people give you whatever ... I only care about people voting with their credit card. As soon as they pull a credit card out of their wallet, they have voted that this is the opportunity that they are buying in to. They're done. The next thing is just like, "Okay, you've already bought in to this now." That's why I like making this first opportunity as low barrier, as easy, because as soon as I get them to sell, subconsciously they're 100% in. Now the stacks become easy. Like, "Hey, you got this. Now you need this."
People always ask me, "Well how many upsells should I have? What should be the price points on it? Duh, duh, duh, duh." It has nothing to do with price points, it has nothing to do ... None of that crap matters. People are like, "Well, should I go from free to 97 to 290. What's the ..." Everyone worries about that. It has nothing to do with that. It has 100% to do with, what's the next logical thing this customer needs to have success in the new opportunity I just gave them? This might be a $25,000 offer, if it makes sense. If that's the next logical thing that they need, or it might be $37. Price point does not matter. It's the logical sequencing of the offers that is the key. That's what makes any funnel work, is the logical sequencing of offers.
Speaker 10: May I ask a question?
Russell Brunson: Yes.
Speaker 10: With the opportunity switch, is that more emotional and then the opportunity stack is more logical?
Russell Brunson: I don't think anything logical sells. [inaudible 00:54:11] why I think logically, there's still emotion.
Speaker 10: Well you know, you've got this ... You've got emotion and logic here. Is that [inaudible 00:54:18] the epiphany bridge?
Russell Brunson: Yes. Yes, sorry. Yeah, so the emotional part's the [inaudible 00:54:28], the logical part ... Logical's like that how they explain to their wife [inaudible 00:54:33] buy something for 25,000, $100,000. How do I explain to my wife like, "Yeah. I spent a hundred grand to go on this thing, because it's going to be really good for my ... No, I just want to hang out with me and Joe and everyone." Right? We emotionally get bought in, but I'm still always selling from emotion. I'll talk about logical, the logical justifications in the videos and stuff like that. It's still emotional.
Speaker 10: [inaudible 00:54:54] emotional [inaudible 00:54:55] stack.
Russell Brunson: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 10: How do you extend that story, that epiphany story [crosstalk 00:54:59].
Russell Brunson: New story. New story.
Speaker 10: It's a new story?
Russell Brunson: Yeah, so it's like here's split testing. Like, cool. Let me tell you a story. After I got ... I'm sending this book out to you in the mail. You guys are going to go crazy for it, cause it's going to show you split testing. For me, when I started to get in to split testing, I was really excited, but the problem was, I didn't really have traffic coming to my website. I was doing a split test, like three people come. You can't actually ... It doesn't help." I start going in to the whole story.
Speaker 10: A new epiphany.
Russell Brunson: Yes.
Speaker 10: You're sharing.
Russell Brunson: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Okay. Gotcha.
Russell Brunson: Sometimes multiple epiphanies. I'm telling as many stories as I need, to get that idea across.
Speaker 10: Okay.
Russell Brunson: How many stories do you think I've told in the last hour, so far?
Speaker 10: A lot.
Russell Brunson: Anyway. The more, the merrier. It's not like, what's my one epiphany bridge story. Usually, it can be multiple. Any time I explain something that's confusing, I've got to step back again, "Well, it's kind of like millions of motivational speakers running through your blood. That's what ketones are." Okay, and I keep moving forward. Okay, so like I said, some upsells, there's one thing, cause that's the only logical thing they have. Some upsells, there's two. Some upsells, I have one thing and I have a downsell. It matters less to me what it is and more tome just, what makes sense for this customer that's on this path?
I remember reading the Emyth 12 years ago, and one of the initial things he talked about is the process of somebody walks in to a store. Last week, my wife wanted to go to the mall, cause we were going on a cruise in two days and she wanted to get some new clothes. I hate going to the mall, but I love GNC. That's my ... I love supplements. I take more supplements than I should, every day. I love it, right? I go to GNC and, the thing I hate about GNC though ... How many of you has been in to a GNC? What happens as soon as you walk in? They just pounce on you, it's like, "Ahh [inaudible 00:56:30]"
I hate it, so I take a breath like, "Okay." I walk through the door and within like one step, the girl comes out, "oh, blah blah." I'm just like going through this pain like, "What are you looking for? What do you want? What do you need?" I'm like, "I just want to look at supplements. Leave me alone." Then it's like finally, that horrible pain's gone and she leaves me. Okay. I can start looking, right? I'm remembering the E-myth and thinking about, I love GNC but I always have this pain going in, because the process is so weird.
I start looking at ... I became obsessed with this. Everywhere I go, it drives my wife nuts. We're going through anything and the way a waiter pitches me, depends on what I'll buy and what I'll tip them. I want to get sold. I'm obsessed with the process of everything, from offline funnels to online funnels to everything that's happening. For me, I'm just looking at that like, "Imagine that you're your customer, okay, and they come here. What's going to capture them, like a really good video. You're going to cut out the techno babble. You're going to tell a really good story, that's going to be exciting, it's going to be visually good, it's not going to be me against a white wall, trying to be boring. I'm going to find a good background and make it look visually stimulating, so it's cool. I'm going to tell a story that captivates them and make then=m an offer that's so irresistible. It's a new opportunity that's going to change their life, and that's what we do here."
Then I'm like, "Okay, they bought the book." How can I serve them the best? What's the next thing I can do to serve this person the most? It should be this. Do I have a product that does that? No, and that's what I need to make them. I need to make a product that does that, cause it's all about, how do we serve our people at the highest level. That's more important than "I've got a whole bunch of products. What do I plug in and where do they go and should this be the upsell?" No, think about the process.
If you're walking in to GNC, if was walking in to GNC, I would change the whole process to like, "Hey, welcome to GNC. Here's a free power bar. Let me know if you need anything." I'd have been like "Huh." Eating a power bar, I'd buy four times as much stuff. I'd be going through things. I would just be focusing on that customer journey, what's happening through the process. For you guys, that's the way to think through this. Think like, someone buys this like, "Oh man. It's kind of expensive and we ship them out DVDs and all this stuff." Maybe some people don't want DVDs. Maybe they don't have a DVD player. Maybe I'll downsell them. Maybe they just want a digital version. Maybe that would be my downsell, is a digital version, cause that's probably what they'd want.
I'm looking logically, like what makes the most sense to them. If you can craft that, that's the magic. That's how you get a funnel that converts and how you make it work awesome.
Speaker 10: On that first page, how long generally ... Do you have a time frame of the ideal video length? Three minutes, 45 minutes.
Russell Brunson: This is what ...
Speaker 10: Or does size really matter?
Russell Brunson: One of my professors told me one time, he's like, "It needs to be ... it's like a girl's skirt. It needs to be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to still be interesting." That's my gauge I my mind, always. If it's getting boring and long, then I ... But I don't have a timeline. How long does it take me, take the story, where it's still engaging? It might be three minutes, it might be 20 minutes. If I tell a good story, people will sit there. That's more important. Yeah. There is a duration to the price of the thing I'm selling and how long it is. If it's a free book offer, I don't have to do a lot to get people to take that, but still need to get them to buy in to this, or else the upsells won't convert. A lot of times you see people book offers, "Get my free book. It's amazing. You're going to love it. It's free. Ahh." That may work good for getting people to buy initially, but it kills you everything back here, cause they're not bought in to the opportunity switch. If you can get them to buy the opportunity switch, then everything else increases, from the rest of it on. Any other questions about that stuff at all?
Cool. Then the last piece of this ... Oh yeah.
Speaker 11: Where does the traffic primarily come from?
Russell Brunson: Cool. All right. The last piece of this. Traffic all over the place, but I want to show you guys what's working the best for us right now. On the last page right here. This is Anthony DeClemente. He is one of my buddies. He owns this company, biohacking stuff. We started, we're starting an online reality show called Funnel Hacker TV, just cause we want to ... Without people ... I wish we had like five hours, I could talk about more of this. For our customers, to build the whole culture, the biggest thing that we got to do is believe. Get these guys to believe in this right here. What I do, I do a lot of stuff to show belief. Friday we do a show called the Friday Funnel show, where I'm building an entire funnel in 30 minutes and I show them over and over and over again that I drink my own Kool-Aid. That I'm actually doing this. It's like the biggest thing for sales we've ever done.
We do, we built this reality show, where basically each week, we pick an entrepreneur that's got a really cool product and we take them, figure out the product, the offers, build the thing and launch it. He's episode number one that's coming out. He had no list, no following, switching markets to a whole completely different thing, but he's just really good at what he did. We had him write a book. This whole campaign went from zero. I'm saying, you don't have to have a big following for this to work. This went from zero. In the last six weeks, we sold 8,000 copies of his book. He just finished his very first biohacking week in Chicago, had a whole bunch of people pay a crap ton of money to come out there and go through the experience and this whole business went from zero to it'll do a couple million bucks, yeah number one. All just from this. No other traffic source except for this.
As you start going further down the cold, it's different, but for most people, you can build really good off of this. Facebook live, Facebook loves us right now. They are wanting all of us to do it, so what we do, and I'll kind of give you Anthony for example. He's got a book funnel. Some questions like what's the message? What's the best Facebook ad? I don't know. I have no idea what message is going to be right. Everyone responds to different things. What, Anthony I said, "First thing he has to do is, every single day you have to do a Facebook live video on a different topic. Every single day, for the rest of your life." He's like, "But I don't know if I have enough ideas." I don't care. Every single day for the rest of your life. That's your only job, is to make a Facebook live video. What he did was he made a first Facebook live video and I was like, "It's biohacking. Do the weird crap. Get things with lasers up your nose and all sorts of weird stuff and that'll be your Facebook live."
Then he did that and nobody cared. We did another one, and nobody cared. Then we did another one. We found out that about one out of 10 does what we call force virals. One out of 10, and what's weird is, it's usually the message that I think is the stupidest message ever. The first video we had that went force viral, the title of it was How to Biohack Your Vegetables. It was like, "Hey." He's cooking, he's like, "What you do is you put butter in your vegetables and it's biohacked now." It got like two or three million views and sold hundreds and hundreds of copies of the book. I was like, I thought the cools ones with the lasers in his eyes and ears would be the cool thing, but no. It's never what you think. We build a marketing campaign, we focus on one thing and it's the wrong one, it's like no. Do a Facebook live every single day for the rest of your life, on a different message and you'll find what the market actually cares about. What things they do. It's a consistency thing. Over and over and over again.
Here's a couple things on Anthony's, just printed out a guide to help you guys, cause there was a lot of questions on it yesterday. The main thing is again, profile picture has a huge thing to do with people actually being part of it. The name should not be a company. People do not want to engage in companies and they do not want to share things from companies, they want to engage with you, the attractive character. The ult leader. All the headlines are super easy. They're things that are shareable, so it's not too complex. It's like, ,"Hey cool, how to biohack your vegetable. How to ..." What was this one? "How to biohack, detox and get a flatter midsection." There's a simple call to action with the URL that's not clickfunnels.com/1234/ ... It's something that's also benefit driven, like biohackers guide. It's like, "Oh cool. There's the guide.
Speaker 12: Do you boost these or no?
Russell Brunson: Yeah, I'll talk about that in a sec.
Speaker 12: And you can boost with a URL? You can do that? Okay
Russell Brunson: Yep. I'll talk about kind of that strategy here in a second. Can the video structure, typically this is the structure. They're usually three to five minute videos. The first 15 seconds is like, "Hey. I'm Anthony DeClemente." Then, if you have a cold like me, so I'm, "Hey, I'm Russell Brunson. My fellow funnel hackers, I want to talk to you about whatever." Calling them out. Then the next thing is, this is ... We ask people to share like, "Hey, if you like this video, at the end of it if you can please share it, that way I know if you like this content, and I'll make more like this. If you don't like it, don't share it and I just won't make any more like this." Some people are like, that's how they're voting if they like it, by sharing. Which is huge. The first 15 seconds, we tell them to share it if they like it, we ask them to do a favor like, "Hey, if you thought this was awesome, share it. That way I know." Huge thing. Then, four minutes of teaching. I would say teaching/telling epiphany bridge stories is more important. Telling a good story. The end of it, a call to action to whatever it is your front end things is. "Go get my free books." Anthony, every single day, he's showing one biohack, and then "Hey, go get my book Biohackersguide. Com."
Then down here, the very first post ... As soon as he starts a video ... When you first do a video , first it goes out to your fan page, right? Anthony has zero people on his fan page, the first probably hundred videos, right? Nobody was there. He just did it, and then as soon as it's done, then what our guys will do, they'll come in the very first post. We try to post the link to the actual offer, so that everyone sees that initially. It's pulls in a picture of the product, stuff like that. Somebody manually is adding that in. Now, because he's got more of a following, as soon as he starts a thing, someone goes in and posts it really quick as the first comment, so it sticks there, then it goes live.
What we do is typically, for each of these videos it goes live, we put about five bucks behind it, just to see what's going to happen. If you've got more of an audience initially, you don't put money behind it. If you have zero audience initially, you put about five to 10 bucks behind it, just to see which ones get some traction. Then as soon as one thing gets traction, the way that we judge traction is right here, is the ration. It's the 1% share to view ratio. How many people viewed it and how many people shared it? As soon as you get 1% share/view, we call that internally it's a force to viral video, which means I can spend as much money as I want and it's going to go viral and it's going to make us a bunch of money.
About one out of 10 hit that number, and then we dump as much money as we want or can or need to behind that and it'll just kind of blow up. For me, this is ... the biggest thing I can give you guys is this.
Speaker 12: Is the 1% based off of views?
Russell Brunson: It's the ratio of views to shares.
Speaker 12: Views to shares.
Russell Brunson: This video's got 1.4 million views. Its got 10,000 shares, so it's 1%.
Speaker 12: [inaudible 01:06:19]
Russell Brunson: Huh?
Speaker 12: [inaudible 01:06:23]
Russell Brunson: We're not mathematicians, we're marketers. You are definitely way smarter than me. It looks like one to me. It's a ball park. If it's close, we're going to blow it up. That's kind of about what we're looking at. Then we can promote it. What's cool about this, if you think about everything we talked about earlier, right? We talked about traffic temperature up here, right? What's cool about these videos is that, every video, you're learning what people respond to and what they don't respond to. We realize like, "Wow, they actually care about biohacking vegetables. Let's do more things like that, cause they shared it." You're able to speak to different times. You can speak sometimes in techno babble and you're going to boost ... It may not do as good, but you're going to boost it to different audience. For me, I might do a Facebook live talking about funnels for network marketers and I do it and nobody on my page cares, but now that video, that ad's done and my guy will blow up all the network marketing companies, and then boom. We get all the network marketers to come underneath us.
I might do one, funnels for real estate agents. Funnels for ... I'm just, it's like carving out little pieces of the market you can then target differently. It also helps you figure out what people actually care about, what they're listening to, what they click on, what they share. As of right now, this is such a big piece of our strategies, because we're learning so much so fast. I mean, I could write a thousand surveys and not get the same data we get from just doing a daily video, every single day, consistently, consistently, consistently doing it.
Russell Brunson: From the funnel side, those are the keys you guys, and hopefully that helps a lot.
Speaker 16: [inaudible 01:10:05]
Russell Brunson: Am I allowed to celebrate something? Just kidding. We do an event once a year, that's ... Tony Robbins is our key note this year and it's basically me on stage, with a bunch of our ... [inaudible 01:10:18] difference. Me on stage and then we've got people that are click funnels members who are doing it in different markets. We got a really cool couple, Brandon and Kayla. They're in the fitness industry. They sell $149 product. All they do is Facebook lives. In fact, they do an entire webinar pitch on Facebook live and they'll do ... During a live Facebook live, they do 150,000, 200,000 dollars live on it, and they boost it afterwards and do five, six, seven hundred thousand dollars. I've done ... Jason talks about webinars later today.
Speaker 17: That's incredible.
Russell Brunson: Doing, if you do a whole bunch of these viral videos like this on your Facebook live, and you're building an audience and stuff's coming that's really, really good, then you come in and you do your entire webinar. I've done three Facebook lives that were me doing my entire webinar live and in front of everyone, just talking. Al of it over a quarter million dollars in sales, cause it's just engagement and live and it's really fun. A lot of cool ways you can use that. Anyway. I hope that helps you guys and ...
Speaker 18: That's awesome. That was good. Thank you.