NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors.
LHM 012: Solo - Low ticket funnel: no-brainer or waste of time?
===
[00:00:00] hello, and welcome to Lion Hearted Marketing. This is a podcast for bold businesses who are ready to go from a slightly scattergun marketing approach to connecting everything they're doing to create joyful, repeatable customer journeys, that build connection and consistently convert new clients. That's called a funnel. If you fancy.
If you have that nagging feeling, you should have more of a grasp on your marketing, more of a plan, more of a system to support your pretty successful business. You're in the right place. This isn't about trying lows and new strategies. It's about taking what you've got and making the most of it.
I'm Sophie your host. Self-confessed tea superfan marketing strategist and funnels or joyful journeys, as I like to call them, demystifier. Join me every Tuesday for my Lion hearted approach to marketing. To help you navigate those big moves, stay focused on your goals and ultimately take your business to the next level.
Let's jump in to today's episode.
Hello and welcome to [00:01:00] this week's episode of light-hearted marketing. Now if you listen. Every week, you might know this week should be an interview with a guest. However, the logistics of summer holidays. I've had to rearrange a few interviews and it just didn't happen. I just couldn't get an interview recorded in time for this week's episode. So full disclosure. I am recording this on a very, very hot Saturday afternoon. However it is an episode that I have been really, really looking forward to record. It was going to go out next week anyway. So you've got me two weeks in a row. You're lucky things.
So, what I'm talking about this week is should you add a low ticket results? So your passive surveys, online, digital products, that sort of thing. To your business model, your product suite, you know, you're offering. Does it help your business? How do you sell it? What's the best way of doing it? Or should you really just focus your time on your high ticket offer? Because you know, let's [00:02:00] face it. How many people would you need to buy an 11 pound product? To make up for one person buying your 1500 pound. Service. So what I'm going to do is talk to you today about so many different things that come up with clients in my masterminds, I'm in, with coaches, I've worked with. I've seen it across so many different businesses work in different ways. But there are some really core things you need to think about. And ways that you can make it work incredibly well for you and times when you might not want to put your focus on this. So that's what I'm going to be talking about this week. You might have heard me say this before, when I went to a trauma con back in June, which is a marketing conference. Rob and Kennedy who are email marketing specialists. They did one of the keynote talks. And they said that they, in their experience and their research and they do a huge amount of tracking. They've got very big Les, they work with a lot of different types of businesses. They've said if someone joins your email list and hasn't bought from you in 60 days, the [00:03:00] likelihood they will buy, it goes down to under 5%. Now it really, really stuck with me. And I have listened about this on my Instagram as well. And I've had some really interesting conversations with people about it because often actually people find that really, really challenging And people tell me all the time, like, no, no. It takes me much longer. Someone bought from me the other day and they've been on my list for over two years and my clients take a lot longer to think about it. However, I would encourage you to track it because it is really interesting and yes, you'll get those outliers, you know, that's the 5% that do still buy after 60 days. But also it would be really interesting. To see how long does it take people to buy from you once they join your email list? And it absolutely might not be true for you at the moment. However, there is definitely an energy shift when someone becomes a client. So the question I'd also put to you is could you reduce that amount of time down? You know, how can you get someone to become a client quicker? And I'm not just talking about your core product here either. I'm not talking about how can I get someone to you know, buy [00:04:00] my high ticket six grand coaching within three days. I'm talking about, and this is where the low-cost offer comes in. You know, do you add a low-cost offer him now? What I also wanted to say is. Robin Kennedy. They specialize in memberships. Now, obviously, now their membership is $197 a month. So it's not super low ticket. But it's also not really high ticket. You know, it's not like signing up for a six month commitment in a, which is a thousand pounds a month and those programs think absolutely can take longer. And I know some of my clients who have more like a sort of nine month conversion rate to their high ticket programs. So I think the key debate really, and this is what I talk about with my clients and, and my peers and my coaches. Should you focus your time and energy on offering a low ticket passive surveys, weasels online product to convert people on your list from subscribers to buyers quicker and grow the relationship from there. Or should you just focus your time and energy on your high ticket offer? Be super clear about what you offer and then put all your [00:05:00] energy and time and marketing into that one. Service now, now obviously there's no one right. Answer either way. And I'm certainly not saying that everybody needs to go and get a low ticket offer or that nobody should sell a low ticket offer. But I do believe that the first 60 days, all key, when someone joins your email list, now I've talked in previous episodes about what you can do to nurture people as quickly as possible when someone joins your email list and. And that's very much related to strategically sharing your social media content.
But in this episode, I want to talk a lot more about this idea of converting subscribers to clients using a low ticket offer.
Now, when I'm talking about low ticket offer, what I'm talking about is probably something that costs. I would say under about 30 pounds normally. I've seen some of the 27 pound ones work quite well, but generally speaking, when I work with clients is anything from like seven pounds, 11 pounds. Maybe 17 pounds. That's the kind of low ticket that I'm talking about. It needs to be a price where it [00:06:00] feels like a bit of a no-brainer. It doesn't feel like a huge commitment. But it does mean they take a step into your world. Now. Type of product could be anything. Really. Sometimes it's almost like a paid lead magnet. Like it could be a list of 200 prompts or something I've seen quite a lot in I've actually bought. Low ticket, like chat, GPT prompt that you can use.
Another thing that I've seen is small courses. So something with a very, very specific outcome that, you know, you're 17 pound calls and you get your five videos in a workbook and that sort of things. But the essence of it is that it's passive. So once they bought it, they get an email and it gets delivered and that's it. Very very rarely do the low ticket things that I am working with clients on, have any kind of input from them. Because they're obviously so cheap.
So in the context of turning subscribers into clients as quickly as possible. The question is often asked [00:07:00] is do they attract the right people and how do you set it up so that it doesn't take time and energy and resources away from you selling your high ticket offer? So there are three approaches to selling a low-tech offer. I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to talk about selling it organically. A self-liquidating offer funnel, which I know sounds incredibly jargony, and I will, I will talk you through that one and then using the low-ticket offer as part of an email lead gen funnel. So. Let's start with organic and buy organic. What I'm talking about is your social media followers. Your email list and anything else really, that you have to podcast YouTube channel any other kind of community that you have organically, basically not using ads. So using your organic audience is a great way to test an offer. It's also a great way to test the sales page. However, what you've got to bear in mind is that he needed a critical mass of people really going on the sales page and going through the [00:08:00] offer to really test it.
Now, if you get enough people to buy it from you organically And get feedback that can be incredibly helpful because you can understand what's working. What's not, you can make tweaks to the sales page however, there's two things I'd really encourage you to bear in mind. The first thing is what I tend to call the warm audience bias. Now what that is. Is that you have probably got, let's say your social media or your email list. Maybe you have been growing that for quite a few years. They know you, they know exactly what you offer. Maybe they've been looking at your services for a while. Some of them will be people who've worked with you. Now, if you put something new out, they'll probably be a segment of people that will buy from you. No matter what you put out there, they'll be interested. They'll support you, especially if it's really low ticket. The trouble is, is that it feels like it validates your sales page and your and your offer. But the reality is you're not going to be selling this to people who are in your warm audience that already know you. The reality is [00:09:00] you want to sell it to people who have just come into your world. I, you know, they've been on your less, less than 60 days. So yes, it's great to use organic audience to sell your low ticket offer and to get feedback on your sales page and your offer itself. And, you know, and it can be really helpful. However, just be aware that it could give you The false indication of how good your sales page and the offer is. Or maybe even just that the messaging around it on the sales page. What I often find is people get very used to talking to their warm audience and they kind of forget the skill of talking to your cold audience and making it really clear what you do and who you help to people who've never heard from you before. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later on, but that's just the thing to keep in mind organically. The likelihood is if you're not using ads once, you've promoted your low ticket offer. Yes, you can promote your ongoing to email list onto your social media, but the reality is a, it's not going to [00:10:00] sell itself. Like you're going to have to keep talking about it over and over and over and over again. And if you're not routinely bringing lots of people into your world you know, consistently growing the email list, growing your social media, there's not going to be new people to sell it to. So, if you are growing quite slowly on social media and your email list, you know, you can talk about it too. You're blue in the face, but if you saturate your audience and everyone on your list has bought it, who wants it? You're going to really struggle them. So that's what I would say about organically. It's a great place to start. It's a great place to test, but just keep in mind those things.
The next step really is using ads then to sell that offer. That's how you get out to people who haven't heard of you before consistently over time without you having to spend a lot of time and energy away from selling your high ticket offer. Now the two ways I'm going to talk about doing this today is the self-liquidating offer. And then using it as part of an email lead gen file. There's lots of other ways you could use it as well. There are a huge amount of ways to you use ads. There was lots of, [00:11:00] lots of different variations and strategies that people use, but these are the two that I tend to talk to my clients about the most.
Okay. So the self liquidating offer. Or SLO, which you might see sometimes referenced. Now it sounds really appealing. Okay. The concept is that you set up ads with the aim of selling your low-ticket offers. So that's the core aim of sales based ads. People buy up. And because it's a no brainer price and off the back of that, you then grow your email list. Which is all clients, because they've all bought from you. Now some people I know have grown their entire business on this way. They only have paid lead magnets to get onto their list. They don't offer a free, you know, freebie. A lead magnet, as we would kind of know. To get onto their list, you have to pay to be on their list.
For most of the clients I work with, they'd be looking to offer a free lead magnet as well. So you obviously could use the SLA funnel alongside a free lead magnet as well. And then with the SLA funnel, [00:12:00] you offset the cost of your ads as well. So you set up these ads and people then buy the product. You obviously then get the money from that product against the ad spend that you're spending often what you'll find as well, that you'll, they'll go through multiple sales pages. And so they'll buy the first thing. They then get like a timer. Where you can then buy a second thing and maybe it's like a. It's called a bump up. Maybe you started with a seven pound product, then you give them something for 11 pounds and then finally you might sell them something for like 97 pounds or something. And all of that money then goes towards your ad costs and you can scale your ads. Or have an additional revenue stream. And that all grows your email list and gets those people going from subscribers to clients immediately because they have to buy to come and be on the list. And this absolutely can work. However, it's not nearly as simple as it sounds to get it running well. And the mistake I see is that. Often people come to me and say like, right, I want to start using ads to grow my email list. I've heard about this. [00:13:00] Great. In a way where you can sell something and then offset the cost of the ads. It sounds brilliant. Does a bit. But I'm going to reiterate what I say to them. What I've said on this podcast before that is not the way to start running your ads, especially if you were thinking of creating an offer for the ads. Okay. So to run a pure SLA funnels, What I talked about before you would need to have a really robustly tested offer. You will need to know that your sales page converted incredibly well. You'd also want to have a lot of data on your ad accounts so that Facebook knows who to target. And an understanding of what ad copy and creative that your audience respond well to. So to get a high converting sales page, you really need to be really, really hot on your messaging. And . To test whether, you know, you've got the messaging, right. And to see if the offer resonates with your audience, you already need to have a big enough organic audience to test and tweak and test and tweak. And even at that point, [00:14:00] you would then want to test with a cold audience. Cause like what I said earlier, you know, if you only test with your warm audience, you can get a bit of a bias. You're then going to go into testing with ads. And when you plug it into ads, if you haven't robustly tested, or you're not sure that it's working already. You're not going to know whether it's the sales page, it's an issue. Whether the ads are not working with the audience isn't right. Whether the offer actually just isn't resonating it's an incredibly expensive way of testing. And it will take you a really long time to get all those elements working really well.
Unless you have a super big ad budget So if you don't have a big audience well-tested sales page, a huge ad budget and you actually want to create a low ticket offer. And what I'm telling you is it's going to be quite hard work to sell it organically over time. And an SLO funnel sounds way better than actually is when you were starting out. But you still want to use ads to grow your business and you want to try [00:15:00] potentially a low-cost offer. Where do you start?
So, what I do with clients is called the 15 pound a day ad funnel. And. What we do is we have three types of ads running. So we start with our lead ads. Okay. This is the foundation of everything I do with my clients. And this is about growing your email list. Using ads and using a free lead magnet. Okay. So that would take up the majority of this 15 pound a day budget. And we would spend normally the 10 pounds a day. On those now this is a framework, so you could scale it up. So you could be running 30 pounds a day or 45 pounds a day. However I'm just going to talk about the 15 pounds a day. Cause it's probably the minimum you'd be able to spend on this funnel. So 10 pounds a day on the lead ads, you'd then be spending three pounds a day on engagement ads. Now these are ads that are retargeting people who have downloaded the lead magnet. Okay. So they're called re-targeting ads. They only go out to people who are in your [00:16:00] warm audience. So people who have downloaded the lead magnet. And often I'll include people who follow you on social media or are already on your email list. And what we're doing is strategically showing them content like the, maybe a link to your podcast or a testimonial or a video that you did, you know, live video that you did that kind of shows some really great content. So it's about strategically showing them content that might be of interest to them, just to kind of remind you who you are.
And this is very, very much in the nurture piece of the funnel. Then what, we're also going to show those people who have downloaded your lead magnet and have been on the sales page for the low ticket offer. So when you do the lead ads at the end of the, the form that you fill in, there is an option to send them to click a button. To go to a landing page. So, send them to your low-cost offer sales page, and you can track who goes onto it using the pixel. And then you're going to use ads to retarget them, to try and get them to buy your low ticket offer ads. So that's also [00:17:00] retargeting ads, but with a sales focus, the idea though is only two pounds a day, and we are just putting the offer back in front of people who have come into our world in the last 60 days, anyone that's joined the list in the last 60 days. Anyone who's engaged on social media in the last 60 days, we're offering them this low ticket offer because a, we want to make sure that we turn them into a client. If we can. And B We want to make sure that they see it. And we can have lots of different ads, you know, with testimonials and explaining what it is and showing outcome, they're going to get an all sorts and at this point, I just want to be really clear about what the difference is with this funnel versus a self-liquidating offer funnel. The core purpose of this funnel is to grow your email list using a lead mark map. We then have, as I've talked about before, in other episodes, you then have a lot of stuff in place on your email list to nurture, to connect, to show them strategic, you know, long form content, social media content That's all in place anyway. Okay. [00:18:00] And that's how, you're going to grow your business and get more clients. The engagement ads, then add this sort of automated nurture element. Okay. So this is a, this is a case of, if you go on my email list and everything goes to spam, we're still potentially going to get back in front of you. Again, we're going to be able to show you things that are really important, like the best content that we've made, the most strategic posts that we want to put in front of people.
We can do that with ads and we don't have to worry about them. You know maybe seeing our email clicking on the fat. To go from, follow us on Instagram and then see the right post that we wanted them to see. We can actually put it right in front of them using ads. So it's really a way of like automated, nurturing. But. But in a really strategic and personalized and connected way because you're choosing what you're going to put in front of them. And then finally the sales ads, these ads are never going to drive like mega revenue for you. They are going to offset some of your costs of your ads for sure. And obviously they're going to support this aim of turning[00:19:00] Subscribers into clients, which then changes that energy and allows you through your welcome sequence and social media to then get to know them and ideally convert them quicker into your high ticket services. And some people have a ladder. So everyone who has bought the 11 pound item then might be offered the 97 pound item. They might have a few different products that you can then layer. I guess the difference is that it's not all done through sales pages. It's done through email. So once they have that first offer, a nurture sequence that then goes out to see how they go home with the offer. And then the next step is almost like, if you really enjoy this and you've got great results, this actually is part of my 97 pound offer or my hundred 97 pound offer. And you can have that middle step. You can also talk about your high ticket offer. You know, if you enjoyed. This then, you know, this is how I work with my high ticket clients. But it's not, it's automated, but it's not. So pressured, I guess I think with the issue with the SLO funnel can be that you are going [00:20:00] from seeing an ad buying an 11 pound thing being offered a 97 pound thing, and then being offered something else as well, all through sort of three sales pages in the space of what could be like 10 minutes. This email funnel is much slower. It's much more about connection and nurturing and fundamentally is about growing your email list rather than the low ticket offer. I guess the focus of the funnel is different.
And at the beginning. I talked about, you know, when is this a really good thing to do? And when I would actually say no, like this isn't the right time for you. And there's probably a couple of things, but I think coming to this conversation, The first one is that generally I work with people who have quite an established high ticket service, whether that's one-to-one, whether that's a group program, monthly services that they offer. And then looking to either add another revenue stream or convert clients more quickly. If they have the capacities, if they're running a group program. It might be that they need to grow their email list, but they also, they don't want to wait the nine months [00:21:00] that currently it's taking for them to convert people, to actually buy from them. You know, if they want to convert them more quickly, this is the kind of funnel. That could really help with that. In my opinion, this kind of funnel or any, and all the SLO funnel, or even doing a low ticket offer just organically. It's just not the place to start. If you are struggling to sell your services, like your higher ticket services. It's really, really unlikely in my experience that adding a low-cost offer is going to enable you to sell more of your high ticket offer. Because the likelihood is your messaging. And your lead gen funnel needs work first. So really what we want to do is have something that's selling really well. Have like a really strong baseline of a business. And then plug in those lead ads to, to make sure that we're kind of growing that email list all the time. Then the engagement ads come in to make sure we're nurturing those people and getting them engaged. And then the offer comes in right at the end. So if you were a place where you're [00:22:00] struggling for clients, Or you just can't seem to get people to understand what you do or how you help them or to buy into that. A low ticket offer. Isn't the place to start with that. Your messaging and your lead gen funnel needs to be the first priority
now just talking briefly your messaging as well is probably one of the biggest factors of a successful ads funnel. Or even to be honest, just any kind of lead gen funnel. Whether it's your lead magnet, your emails, your social media, your ads. If your messaging is not talking to your ideal clients or isn't really on point you were really, really going to struggle with ads. And what happens often is that people think they've nailed their messaging organically. And then they come to me and we start working on ads and they realize that they've got a lot of work to do on their messaging. And the reason this is, is because I briefly talked about earlier. That it's really easy to get into a habit of just talking to our warm audience. We start talking in shorthand. We assume they know [00:23:00] what we offer. And we talk about things in a, quite a broad, generic way. We're often what we're promoting is the solution to the problem rather than why they should work with you. So, for example, it's not enough for me. To make sure my audience knows that using ads can grow their email list and then their business. They need to know how I will help them use ads to grow their email list and their business. And there's a really, really big difference. And a lot of us, when we start our businesses, I'll get quite, have to be quite good at articulating that. And then as we develop this warm audience, we forget that we need to make sure that we can articulate this to a cold audience as well.
And the art of ads and this customer journey is really giving people the right level of information and familiarity at the right time. I thought an example of this actually is if you've ever been to a party and politely sort of asked someone that you vaguely know, maybe a friend of a friend, like, oh, how are you. And 20 minutes later, like you're still hearing about,[00:24:00] their recent divorce and then their children's illness and, you know, details that are way too much for a casual conversation. When you were expecting them to say like, oh, I'm fine. Yeah. How are you? That's what's happening when you're treating new people, like someone who's followed you on Instagram for three years. And so what you need to do is revisit your messaging for ads in particular. And make sure that someone who's never heard of you is going to understand it, know it's for them and be compelled to kind of act on it very quickly.
And the benefits really of nailing or messaging is not only are you going to get cheaper leads because people are going to know that it's for them. You also only going to attract the right people that you want on your list. And then it's going to make selling them a low ticket offer. And then eventually your high ticket offer much easier
so that's why a really, really advocate thinking about your messaging alongside all of this as well.
Okay. I know this has actually been a longer episode than I had intended. There was a huge amount of information in here for you to kind of [00:25:00] think through.
And if I was to summarize this episode and I'm what I would do if I was thinking about this next is, I really would think getting ads up and running and growing your email list. Testing or messaging, testing your ads in a helping Facebook understand who your audience is. And making sure we can get leads are relatively cheap. You know, people are coming on to email less day in, day out and you're feeling confident about where you are with them and then while those lead ads are running, you can start strategically creating this social media content. Which you're going to use in your engagement ads. So you're going to start wanting to create that over time. You might create a podcast episode. You might create some social media content. Maybe you're going to put a blog on your website that you want to send some traffic to, like, that's the kind of thing to think about. You can start doing that while you're testing and learning on your lead ads. And in the background, you're going to be working on your emails as well. Your welcome sequence, strategically sending people to your long form content and that sort of thing. Once you've got all of that in place. That's when you're going to plug in your ads to your low ticket [00:26:00] offer. And see if you can start testing and learning and selling some kind of offer. And the reality actually is as well. I should say you don't have to have a super well tested sales page and offer for this because you're spending such a low amount. Like, yes, obviously you want to be testing that offer and that sales page. And if you can do that organically as well, that is really helpful. But because you're only spending two pounds a day and it's not the core focus of the funnel, you can use ads to test out and get those results. And if you're not converting people, you know, you can start testing and tweaking to see if you can start converting them.
And testing your messaging is going to be absolutely key to make sure that when you start selling this a low ticket offer, it's super clear. And it's exactly what your people want. But it's not as critical as basing your entire funnel on the sales page and the offer, which is a totally different kind of shift. So, yeah, so that's where I'd start.
If you're at a point where you think, yeah, I really want to do this, but there's [00:27:00] absolutely no way I'm going to be doing this on my own. I am also very excited that in October. I am going to be co-running a group program with Macbeth. She's a messaging and storytelling mentor. There is actually a podcast episode with her. So you can go and have a listen to that. If you want to find out a bit more about what she does. But she is incredible at the messaging side. I've worked with her, she's worked with me and now we're going to come together because we've both seen how messaging and ads are just so crucial together. So what we're going to be doing a beta group of 10 women. A very reduced price for six months to take you through this entire model with support from collat on your messaging.
Making sure your messaging is totally on point to help this ads funnel fly. So, if you're interested in that we're doing a very low key launch where we're just talking to people that are interested between the two of us and our audiences. We have quite a lot of people. that have already said they're interested.
We're going to be sending out information soon, and then we're going to be doing some compatibility calls just to make sure that [00:28:00] you're right for the program and that we're right for you. And. That's all going to happen at the end of September. So if you're interested and you would like the information when it's ready and we'll send it out to you you just need to DM me on Instagram. So it's at. Sophie Griffis co, which is there's the link in the show notes. Just DME, the word group. And I will send you over the info as soon as it's ready.
Thank you so much for listening today. And I will be back. I promise with an interview. Episode next week.
Thank you so much for joining me this week. Before you go, make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can receive new episodes every Tuesday when they're released. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to rate or leave a review wherever you are listening to it. It only takes a few seconds, but it really does make a massive difference to new people finding me.
Thank you again for joining me, Sophie, in this episode of Lionheart Marketing. See you next time.