Last updated on February 17th, 2025 at 01:00 am
A great sales funnel is an experience.
Specifically, it’s an experience that pushes people past their own mental hurdles, persuades them to take action, and helps them along the path to a healthier, wealthier, or happier life.
But… how?
At ClickFunnels, we’ve built thousands of sales funnels — some successful and some not so successful — and learned a lot along the way.
So in this guide, we’re going to show you 8 secrets.
These tips will help you whether you’re just trying to edit and optimize an existing funnel… or whether you’re starting from scratch.
Let’s dive in!
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1. Start With “Who?”
Who do you serve?
You might already know what product or service you’re offering. But the much more important question to ask is, “Who is your dream customer?”
Creating a clear customer avatar for the people you serve will help you create a successful sales funnel.
It’s far more important, even than becoming obsessed with your product. Here’s what Russell Brunson writes in his bestseller, Traffic Secrets:
“The first step in this process is to become obsessed with your dream customer. Companies that become obsessed with their products will eventually fail.
As we’ve grown ClickFunnels, I’ve seen this happen time and time again. Every company we competed against — even though some of them had hundreds of millions of dollars in funding behind them — eventually lost to use because they were busy focusing on their products while we became obsessed with our customers.
What do I mean when I say obsessed? Being obsessed with your customer means understanding them just as well, if not better, than they understand themselves.”
So… Do you know who your dream customers are?
Try to answer the following questions…
- What is their biggest fear?
- What is their biggest desire?
- What do they love more than anything?
- How much money do they make?
- What are their primary points of frustration?
For clarity, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to fill out something like the below graphic and post it on the office wall to make sure you keep a clear idea of who you’re serving at all times.
For help in this process, check out the video below…
Once you understand who you serve, exactly, you’ll be far better equipped to create a sales funnel that speaks to (and converts) your dream customers — not to mention a product that is compelling to the right people.
2. Find Your Target Market
You know who your target market is.
But now we’ve got an equally important question to answer: where are you going to find them online?
The great thing about the internet is that it created a virtually infinite world of niche hang-out spaces. Spend an hour researching and you’re guaranteed to find a ton of…
- Facebook Groups
- Subreddits
- YouTube Channels
- Email Newsletters
- Podcasts
- Instagram Influencers
… where your target market already congregates.
Most entrepreneurs assume that they have to put in some basic demographic targeting information for their advertising, cross their fingers, and hope for the best.
But there’s another way.
And it’s all about finding these niche communities where your dream customers congregate… and infiltrating them (more on infiltration in the next tip).
We call this process The Dream 100.
Make a list of places where your dream customers congregate online (which is why it’s so important to know who your dream customers are!). We try to aim for 100 different places… but you can start with 20, 30, or 70… whatever works.
Try to find…
- 10 top websites and forums where they spend time
- 15 active Facebook groups they participate in
- 50 influencers they follow on Facebook and Instagram
- 30 podcasts they listen to
- 40 email newsletters they subscribe to
- 20 blogs that they actively read
- 20 YouTube channels they subscribe to
Make a list!
These are the places where your target market already hangs out and by infiltrating these places — see the next tip — you’ll be able to drive them to your sales funnel.
Check out the video below to learn how Russell used the Dream 100 process to befriend Tony Robbins!
3. Cast Your Bait
At this point, you know who your target market is and you know where to find them.
If you’re anything like me, then it might seem like the next step is to get super excited and offer them your most valuable high-ticket offer!
You’ve found a gold mine of your dream customers — now you’ve just got to get them to buy your best offer!
Right?
Right?
Well… no
Remember: the sales funnel is an experience. And experiences take time.
These people don’t know who you are. They don’t know if they can trust you. And they’ve probably been burned before.
What you’ve got to do, then, is start by gaining their trust.
How?
By offering them something really exciting and valuable… for free.
We do this all the time at ClickFunnels — we call it “Bait” because this is the front-end offer you’ll use to get people in your target market on your email list so that you can keep marketing to them for free.
Here’s one…
Here’s another…
And there are probably a few even within this blog post as well.
We use bait because it works really well. It’s valuable, risk-free for your target market, and a great introduction to you and your brand.
Ask yourself, “What is a burning desire/problem that I can solve for my target market with a simple resource?”
This could come in many different formats.
You could create a free…
- eBook
- Masterclass
- White Paper
- Cheat Sheet
… or something else.
Keep in mind, however, that even though this thing will be valuable to your target market… it’s still free — so don’t spend months working to create it.
Ideally, your bait should be something you can create in as little as a couple of days.
Now there are two different ways to infiltrate your Dream 100 communities…
- Work Your Way In — This usually means cold calling, text messaging, emailing, and even direct mailing your influencers to try and build a relationship with them and “bribe” them into some sort of collaboration. For example, you might send a free version of your product to influencers and ask them for an honest review.
- Buy Your Way In — If you want to cut to the chase, then you might consider just paying influencers to get in front of their audience. This might include getting a banner ad on their website, putting your YouTube ads at the beginning of their videos, or contacting them and asking what other paid promotional opportunities they offer.
To learn more about this process, get yourself a free copy of Russell Brunson’s bestselling book, Traffic Secrets.
4. Tell Your Story
Let’s take a moment to put ourselves in the shoes of your dream customer.
One day they were scrolling through content from their favorite Facebook Group or Instagram influencer or YouTube Channel… and they stumbled across something of yours that appealed to them.
And it was free!
So they gave you their email address, downloaded it, and started consuming the new exciting resource.
What comes next?
Obviously, you’ve only had one interaction with these people and so the best-case scenario is that they’re just starting to trust you.
But they still don’t know much about you, where you come from, who you are, or why they should listen to you.
That’s why the next step is to tell your story.
And you can do that by sending your fresh email list a series of 5-7 emails that provide more free value, explain who you are, and ultimately point people toward actually buying one of your products or services.
We call this the Soap Opera Sequence.
Here’s a great video discussing how to craft an effective Soap Opera Sequence…
Watch that and start crafting your own — you can also get a free copy of DotCom Secrets if you want Russell to walk you through this process step by step.
5. Keep in Touch
The exciting thing about your Soap Opera Sequence is that you’ve now got an automated path for driving people toward becoming paying customers.
Some people will convert. Some people won’t.
Either way, it’s important to keep in touch with everyone on your email list — whether they’re paying customers are simply curious bystanders.
How?
We use a process called Seinfeld Emails.
The idea behind Seinfeld Email is to email once a day (yes… every single day) about pretty much anything — but to always make sure you drive people toward something of value.
Here’s a video that goes a bit more in-depth on this topic…
Let’s look at some examples of Seinfeld emails from real-life entrepreneurs.
Again, these can be about pretty much anything and should always drive people toward something of value. Ideally, they should only take you 10-20 minutes to create every day.
Here’s an example from Bryan Ward…
Here’s another example from Rachel Pedersen…
And here’s one more example from Scott Oldford…
You get the idea.
These emails can be long, short, fun, serious, or pretty much anything else you want them to be. The point of these emails is to stay engaged with your audience and to consistently point them toward both your free and your paid offers.
6. Remember: Emotion, Logic, Fear
We’ve spent a lot of time so far talking about identifying and finding your target market, driving traffic, casting your bait, and sending relevant and compelling emails.
But we haven’t got very granular yet about the sales funnel itself.
That is, how do you convert people when they arrive on your landing page?
How do you compel them to take action?
That’s what these next few tips are going to be about.
To start, we’re talking about the importance of having emotion, logic, and fear (in that order) on your sales pages.
Check out the video below to listen to Russell Brunson explain how this works…
Let me walk you through an example.
On our DotCom Secrets landing page, the very top is targeting people’s emotions. We want them to get excited about the possibility of learning 28 secrets to easily grow their business online.
And we continue hitting those emotions with a few more headlines as people scroll down the page…
Then we introduce logic. Now we want to explain to our visitors why they need this book and how this book can help them.
How?
Well, we tell a story of how the ideas in the book helped Russell…
Finally, after walking people through all of the logical steps and spicing it up with some testimonials, we use fear, urgency, and scarcity at the end.
You can check out the full page at DotCom Secrets to get a better idea of how we do this.
We’ve used this tactic — taking people from emotion to logic to fear — on a lot of different sales pages… and almost always with high-converting results.
Give it a try!
7. Topple the Big Domino
Copywriters and marketers talk a lot about the importance of addressing objections.
Visitors arrive at your sales funnel, after all, with lots of baggage — limiting beliefs, trust issues, insecurities, and so forth…
To get them to buy, you need to address all of those objections, right?
Well, maybe not.
What if there were just ONE THING — one belief — you needed to create in your target market in order to get them to buy…
… one BIG domino that would knock down all the other dominoes?
That’s the premise of the video below — check it out…
Here’s what you need to figure out…
If I can make them believe that [MY NEW OPPORTUNITY] is the key to [WHAT THEY DESIRE MOST] and is only attainable through [MY SPECIFIC VEHICLE] then all other objections and concerns become irrelevant and they have to give me money.
Fill in the blanks for your own offer and business.
Then, using the “Emotion, Logic, Fear” format explained in the previous tip, write copy that creates that one belief in your visitor.
All else will take care of itself.
8. Learn to Funnel Hack
Okay — you’ve learned a lot about building successful sales funnels.
But now we’ve got some bad news.
Every sales funnel is different. And there’s a lot of nuance based on your niche, your industry, your audience, your offer, your story, and your messaging.
So it’s possible that you could follow all of the previous advice in this guide and still not get the results you were hoping for.
BUT…
There is a solution — and it’s name is funnel hacking.
Funnel hacking is the process of strategically investigating the sales and marketing process of your competitors and then using that framework to build, test, and optimize your own.
This process is important because you’ll learn specific tips and tricks to optimizing a sales funnel that works well with your specific niche, offer, and audience.
Find your competitor’s funnels, go through the entire process, and brainstorm about what would work well for your own funnel.
To get started, here’s a video to help you find your competitor’s funnels…
Final Thoughts
There’s a big difference between a successful sales funnel and an unsuccessful one.
And sadly, the world is full of bad sales funnels.
But yours doesn’t have to be one of them!
You now understand all of the steps to crafting an experience that will guide your dream customers toward working with you — from casting your bait and telling your story to topple the big domino and funnel hacking.
Now it’s time for action.
Click the link below if you’re ready to start building your sales funnel for free!