If you’ve spent any time in the midst of content discussing affiliate marketing, you’ve undoubtedly come across two distinct concepts:
- The promotion of expensive products, hence High-Ticket, to generate high commissions.
- An articulated conversion strategy called the Sales Funnel.
So, it came naturally to you at some point to think about combining the two.
And you did well.
In this post, I will try to show you the two most effective strategies you can use to combine the Sales Funnel concept to promote High-Ticket products.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a series of steps that guide potential customers through the process of becoming aware of a product or service, considering it, and ultimately making a purchase.
It is also called “purchase funnel” or “marketing funnel” or “revenue funnel”.
In other words, a Sales Funnel is a graphical representation of the path or “journey” that potential customers take from when they discover they have a problem to when they decide to purchase the product or service to solve their problem.
But I assume that if you are looking for information on Sales Funnels for High-Ticket Affiliate Marketing, you already know what it is. So, I’m going to quickly go over specific elements of this marketing strategy for affiliates in the specific area of High-Ticket products.
Why Sales Funnels are important for High Ticket Affiliate Marketing?
In High Ticket Affiliate Marketing, a sales funnel is essential because these products or services tend to be more expensive and require a greater level of trust and rapport with the customer. The sales funnel helps to build this trust and rapport by educating prospects, addressing their concerns, and providing value at each stage, ultimately increasing the likelihood of a sale.
If you’re trying to convince a user to buy a course on digital marketing (maybe a course on High-Ticket Affiliate Marketing), and that course costs in the $1,000 range, it’s clear that the user is going to think about it a lot more than buying a $50 course.
Most likely a potential client will ask several questions along the way:
- First, he or she will want to get the question out of his mind right away as to whether or not that course is a scam
- he or she will want to get more info on the course content, and how in-depth it is
- he or she will want to hear the opinions of other users who have already taken that course
- he or she will want to maybe find out if there are any good alternatives
… and so on.
With a well-designed Sales Funnel, you can build a series of answers to all the doubts users might have since they realize they have a problem and start asking questions.
Your answers will be designed to take customers to the next level of the funnel as naturally as possible.
There are two main ways to do this work. I call them:
- Open Sales Funnel: when you build an entire site for this purpose, and traffic is mainly organic
- Closed Sales Funnel: when you build a specific sequence, and traffic is mainly paid
I came up with this definition for convenience, to quickly distinguish with my team two concepts of strategy.
Open Sales Funnel for HTAM
You are probably more used to thinking of a Sales Funnel as a precise sequence of landing pages and email sequences to get to a conversion. This is what I call the “Closed Sales Funnel,” and we will look at it in the next section of this post.
But I want to first introduce you to the other way, the “Open Sales Funnel” concept, which I think is more strategic for those who want to do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing and make it their business in the long run.
In Open Sales Funnel your entire site is built to welcome users, meet their search intent or needs, and direct them to the next step to get them as close to conversion as possible.
We can use my main site InvestinGoal.com as an example since we built it that way.
We want to promote eToro, a High-Ticket affiliate program in the forex niche.
eToro fits perfectly into the big niche of “online trading“, and more precisely into the more specific sub-niche of “copy trading“.
So, we decided to build a content series on this topic and created an Open Sales Funnel for organic traffic:
- In the guide on “forex trading” we mentioned the “copy trading” option and linked to the main guide.
- In the main guide on “copy trading” we mentioned the “best copy trading platforms,” and linked to the Top 10 ranking.
- In the Top10 ranking we put eToro number 1, with a mini-review, and then linked to the full review
- In the review we linked to all specific in-depth guides on the services
You get the point: we started from the top, from when a user was still unaware of the existence of an investment option called “copy trading”.
We then walked him down a logical path, trying to answer the sequences of questions he was surely asking, bringing him one post after another closer to the decision to sign up for eToro, possibly using our affiliate link that was always prominently displayed.
In an Open Sales Funnel, users can enter the site at different times in their customer journey; the structure is indeed “open.”
They will find interlinked content that allows them to explore and discover the topic they have been interested in, and then be guided toward purchasing the solution to their problem.
Closed Sales Funnel for HTAM
A Closed Sales Funnel is when you have direct control over inbound traffic, and each step is designed to lead users to take one action and one action only.
This is precisely the case with the most common Sales Funnels used in paid campaigns. The structure of the whole sequence is rigid and controlled, in other words closed.
Thousands of guides have been written on the subject. What I am most interested in here is to focus your attention on what is most important in the case of High-Ticket affiliate products.
I’m talking about bonuses.
As explained earlier, when it comes to buying very expensive products or services, the buyer’s journey is very discontinuous, not very linear. The process of seeking information, reassurance, reviews, is much longer.
A user may start by looking for some rankings of the best products, then read a couple of reviews of specific products. Then he can go back and evaluate whether that type of product is really ideal. Then he can look for forums for real feedback, and the whole thing can repeat itself over and over.
What does this mean for us affiliates who want users to make their purchase by landing on the seller’s site by passing through our affiliate link?
It means that in a closed, rigid funnel, there is a high chance of losing them along the way, once they begin to be assailed by doubts and the need for reassurance about the purchase.
What is the best solution to defuse this problem?
Offer users bonuses.
What do I mean by that?
From the first step of the Funnel, you need to start giving users bonuses that are complementary to the affiliate product-service you are trying to sell them.
The goal is to convince (in some cases force) them to continue to stay “attached” to your sequence, enticed by the possibility of receiving additional free bonuses.
An example?
Imagine you are promoting a weight-loss product. Before revealing what the product is, you capture users’ emails with a promise to give away additional bonuses related to the product.
In the email sequence that follows you will then send:
- A list of FAQs to clear up any doubts right away
- A list of best foods complementary to the product
- A list of daily habits that can increase its effectiveness
… and so on, you get the idea.
Sales Funnel Resources for High-Ticket Products
If you want to build an Open Sales Funnel, you basically want to build a niche-blog.
That’s what you need to learn how to do, and for that there are no better resources than the ones I’ve listed in this post. In summary:
If you want to build a Closed Sales Funnel, the “mother” resource is definitely ClickFunnels.