When you first start planning your sales funnel and creating your marketing strategy, you may be confused by the terms Back-End Sales and Front-End Sales. Understanding these concepts is key to a successful sales funnel and ultimately your online profits.
Front End Sales. Your front end sale is the first product your prospect purchases or downloads. In your sales funnel, this could be at any price point. Your front end “sale” could be an gift you offer in exchange for an email subscription to your list. Setup your sale as your lowest priced item, say a book or an introductory report, for example. My business mentor Cindy Bidar calls these lead magnets or opt-in gifts. She teaches a course on how to build sales funnels that convert that includes front end sale ideas.
A specific example: I designed a unit around a specific theme for my online educational publishing company several years ago. I created several lessons that students would work through over three weeks. One of the lessons I created around a very well-known TED Talk turned out to be the perfect opt-in gift. Lots of people search for that topic and ideas for how to teach it, so a few thousand teachers downloaded that freebie. Of those, several hundred purchased the back end product in my funnel.
Of course, your front end sales could also be one of your higher priced items. This depends on your market. While most customers may enter your funnel at the very beginning, that’s not always the case. Therefore, it pays to have front end offers designed for each and every price point in your funnel.
Back end sales earn the money
Design your back end products to enhance the product your customer just purchased or is getting ready to purchase. For example, if your customer just bought a book, then your back end offer might be a corresponding workbook or online course. The key to having a successful back end sales strategy is to make sure each offer compliments or enhances the value of the productsold. So, for my curriculum unit, a back end sale might be an hour of professional development for the teacher who needs help implementing the unit.
On the other hand, if your customer purchased a book and your back end offer is an unrelated software product, then your customer is going to be confused. Their confidence in you and their trust in you is going to falter. Not a good thing.
As I mentioned, if your offer compliments what they just purchased or are getting ready to purchase and offers them more value, their trust and confidence in you is going to increase. See how this works?
The key to a successful sales funnel is to create complimentary back end products and offers. Understand that customers may enter your funnel at different points and be ready to up the ante, offer them more value, and increase your profits.
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