While most people think sales funnels can only be used to sell ebooks and virtual products, you can use them to sell physical products as well. However, this is not easy because, unlike information products, physical products deal with hindrances like the trust factor and shipping costs.
It’s easy to create a sales funnel for physical products. You can use the pre-designed templates of a funnel builder to upload your product details and can start selling in a matter of minutes. Using a sales funnel for your product also gives you automation and sales tracking benefits.
This article will explore the process of making a sales funnel for physical products. The fundamentals of a funnel are pretty similar, regardless of the product type. Read on to find out why it’s important to make a sales funnel for physical products.
Can You Create a Sales Funnel for Physical Products?
The beauty of sales funnels is that they can be used to sell almost anything. You just need to launch your product, create a marketing strategy, gain traffic, and start selling.
When talking about sales funnels, many people only think of using them to sell intangible items.
Since informational products like ebooks, courses, and webinars traditionally have low overheads and smaller price points, it’s easier to gravitate towards them, especially when you’re a funnel-hacking novice.
There are also mental barriers that hinder customers from buying physical products, including:
- Unforeseen shipping costs which can lead to severe cases of cart abandonment.
- Hopping to a competing affiliate or big-box retailer like Amazon to find a cheaper alternative.
- Concerns over getting the right size, especially for products like bedding, shoes, and clothing.
- Overcoming the trust barrier (trusting a new company with information like your address and credit card information).
Nevertheless, you can easily overcome these barriers if you understand how to run some key elements of your sales funnels.
So, with all the problems above, why would anyone want to sell physical products using sales funnels? Wouldn’t it be easier to sell digital products?
While selling online products using sales funnels might be easier, there are a few great benefits of selling physical products. Here are a few of the main ones:
- Physical products sell on a “what you see is what you get” basis. You’re not promising the customer some transformation with your marketing (as is the case with ebooks and other informational products.)
- If your product is good, you can create many repeat customers. For instance, if you sell a weight-loss supplement, your customers are likely to buy it every month for consistency. On the other hand, if someone buys an ebook, they’re not likely to buy the same ebook again.
- According to Statista, consumers have a greater sense of ownership of physical products.
- Unlike informational products, physical products cannot be pirated or repackaged by competitors.
Therefore, if you have a physical product you’d like to sell, don’t hesitate to use sales funnels to do so. The marketing principles work the same, regardless of what you’re selling.
You can also check out my article on when to use a sales funnel to gain a deeper understanding of how and when to implement these strategies effectively.
What Is a Product Sales Funnel?
A product sales funnel is a guided step-by-step roadmap that your customers go through before purchasing your product.
It shows you their activities at each stage, allowing you to track the purchase journey. With a single sales funnel for your business, you can plan actions for your potential customers to take at each stage.
Here are the four primary stages in a product sales funnel:
- Awareness: You use lead magnets to attract visitors’ attention to your brand.
- Interest: The visitors are interested in your service or product.
- Desire: They start to desire your brand due to advertising and marketing efforts.
- Action: The conversion. (In this case, the customer buys the product)
These are the fundamental stages that every customer goes through.
If you don’t understand these stages and how they affect your business, you will not be able to optimize your funnels for the best results.
Making a Physical Product Sales Funnel
The energy used to market services like insurance, accounting, and coaching differs from the energy you’ll need to sell physical products.
So selling physical products is different, but it’s not necessarily harder. However, the concept of marketing funnels applies to all sorts of products (both physical and digital).
When it comes to advertising and marketing your products online, you’ll need to be creative.
The competition is stiff, and you’ll probably need to use a combination of offline and online marketing skills and tools to stand out.
You can use a variety of funnel-building techniques and programs to help you out, but ClickFunnels is one of the best.
You can check out my article on ClickFunnels vs. landing pages, where I’ve discussed ClickFunnels in one of the sections.
It is a complete digital marketing tool suite you can use to build funnels of varying complexity. In your funnel, you can start by collecting visitors’ contact information before channeling them to the main offer.
Later on, you can present an order bump and then take them through a series of downsells and upsells.
You can then go back to the customers who didn’t convert and offer them special discounts and product information to persuade them to rejoin the funnel.
Simply put, here’s how a ClickFunnels physical product funnel works:
- Create a sales funnel for your product with ClickFunnels.
- Generate traffic to a lead magnet.
- Offer an upsell on a product that supplements your main product, as well as an optional downsell.
- Add a thank you page confirming the order.
- Follow up with the customers by email.
How to Make a Physical Product Sales Funnel Convert?
Now that you know why and how you can use ClickFunnels to make a physical product sales funnel let’s look at some strategies you can use to make that funnel convert.
You can use the sales funnel tactics below to increase your traffic, whether you’re just starting out or are transitioning to physical products from informational tools.
1. Use Photos and Videos
Visual content is essential when it comes to capturing customers who have concerns or questions. This is especially true for physical products that need to be seen to be believed.
If you don’t have any photos or videos of your product, people will have a hard time believing it’s real.
Whether it’s photos, product specs, or videos of your product, you need to give your audience something interesting to look at.
This will significantly improve your engagement and will ultimately boost your conversion rate.
Although written content is excellent for exciting your potential customers, visual content is the icing on the cake that ensures they convert.
For starters, try to implement the following visuals in your funnel/product pages.
- Add high-quality videos or photos to your landing page. This means creating a professional video and posting high-resolution images.
- Use real-life images of your product instead of stock photos. This may require you to buy the product first if you don’t have it, but it’s worth it.
- Use photos and videos to break up your written text instead of having a wall of written information.
You can easily add photos and videos to your funnels using the image and video elements on the ClickFunnels editor.
Just log into your ClickFunnels account, go to your funnel, choose the step you’d like to add images or videos to, and drag and drop the media.
2. Use Catchy Headlines
Most people read the headline to decide whether the rest of the page is worth their time. Even if you have excellent copy, a weak headline may prevent readers from ever seeing it.
As a result, you should use a combination of killer headlines and informative copy to reel visitors into your brand.
Good headlines and copy are important in all aspects of your brand, but they make a huge impact in specific areas.
Really take the time to refine your writing in the following funnel elements:
- Email subject lines: Most people on your list will receive hundreds of promotional emails. Therefore, they’ll only open the ones with interesting subject lines.
- Landing pages: Use a heading that will attract your visitors’ attention but encourage them to look around.
- Content pages: Since there’s so much content on the internet, it’s challenging to hold your readers’ attention long enough to get to the call to action.
As mentioned above, good headlines can make or break your funnel. My free email subject line generator tool will help you come up with some interesting ideas!
If you’re not sure whether your headlines are living up to their potential, you can try the following approaches.
Start by developing an emotional connection with the customer by using their name or the word “you,”.
This makes them more empathetic towards your product. You can collect names and email addresses with a lead capture form.
There are times and places to use names, so decide if it’s appropriate in a given context. You can also make an impact by using eye-catching statistics and reliable claims.
For instance, you might promote the idea that your product can save your leads hundreds of dollars or help them lose dozens of pounds in a short time.
Make sure you can support these claims with evidence, though!
Lying to your audience will make you lose customers and revenue over time; plus, it’s just not an ethical business practice. Advertise with confidence, but make sure your claims are grounded in reality.
Finally, you can try to create a sense of exclusivity for your guests. This makes your leads feel like they’re experiencing the beginning of something great and are “in the club.”
Offer special benefits to people who sign up for a membership or exclusive access.
While there are many approaches to making headlines, here are a few general things you should keep in mind every time you make a new headline:
- In most cases, shorter is better.
- Personalized copy performs better. Keep the reader’s primary needs in mind.
- Keep your headlines open-ended. Try to leave the reader guessing so that you don’t reveal too much on the front end of your pitch. Make an interesting claim and encourage them to read the copy to learn more.
3. Have Social Proof
Having customer testimonials of your products is invaluable. Most customers who are unfamiliar with your brand will trust what other customers say, as opposed to what you say about your product.
In the modern world, buyers trust reviews almost as much as referrals from friends. Therefore, it’s important to ensure your product gets good ratings and reviews.
The best way to do this is to create a high-quality product and encourage customers to offer you their feedback.
After someone has bought your physical product, you can send them a follow-up email asking them to write a review on your website or product page.
Send a few of these over a long span of time. This ensures they have time to use the product before they need to form an opinion about it.
It’s important to maintain transparency about your product, though. If someone writes a negative review, it may be tempting to delete it or cover it up.
Customers can tell that something is wrong if they can’t find any reviews or if all the feedback is highly controlled.
Be prepared to take a few hits, and follow up with dissatisfied customers to see if there’s any way to win them back.
If you’re not sure where to get testimonials, you can ask for reviews from previous buyers and affiliates.
Check your social media page as well because people will often leave comments or messages if they had a particularly good or bad experience.
There are also a variety of review websites that could help you get an idea of what people think. Remain active in the community, but don’t stifle honest opinions.
Why Would ClickFunnels Work for Your Physical Product?
ClickFunnels is an all-in-one digital marketing software that has all the tools you need to sell physical products online.
Apart from making it very simple for anyone to build a funnel online without a team of experts, ClickFunnels also has the following tools and functions:
1. Software Integrations
You can easily connect a variety of integrations and services to make the buying experience smoother for everyone.
2. Adding Your Products Is Easy
Creating landing pages and product pages with ClickFunnels is simple. You can also sell products directly on this platform.
Do check out my article on ClickFunnels landing page templates to learn how to create your own templates and import other funnel builders’ templates for free.
3. Follow up System
Some ClickFunnels plans give you access to email marketing/follow-up funnels. These help you stay in touch with customers and maintain good relationships after they buy.
4. Customizable Templates
There are a ton of high-quality templates on ClickFunnels. These are easy to customize with the drag and drop editor.
5. Split Testing
One of the best features of this service is the A/B split testing. You can change different elements of your page and funnel and compare the two versions.
One usually performs better than the other, so you can easily make the appropriate changes.
6. Easy Tracking of Sales
ClickFunnels analytics makes it easy to keep track of your sales, traffic, and other important marketing information.
ClickFunnels Simplifies Selling Physical Products…
Using a sales funnel to sell physical products can be challenging.
You have to deal with customer skepticism, competition from other affiliates or retailers, and cart abandonment cases.
However, selling physical products can have its merits. You have a greater potential for repeat customers and won’t have to deal with piracy.
Plus, your customers will develop a greater sense of ownership of your product.
There are lots of ways to sell physical products with a funnel, but ClickFunnels is great because you can create a funnel without any coding or design experience.
The software provides easy-to-use templates and other tools that help you create and sell your products quickly.