Welcome back to The Stop Scrolling, Start Scaling Podcast! Today, we are joined by Rogé Galmish, a funnel expert and the founder of Funelle LLC, a Kajabi-based funnel-building firm. She helps her clients identify the most effective method to niche down, package up their services and convert their audience into paying clients. Rogé was born in Champaign, Illinois, and moved to Germany when she was five.
Our guest Rogé began working as a visual merchandiser, where she started her career as a marketing professional. As a result of her work experiences, she realized that marketing was what she was passionate about. She is now on a mission to assist other female entrepreneurs in developing their companies and living on their terms.
Today’s episode discusses the basics of a converting funnel, what part the funnel plays in the customer journey, different types of funnels and automations, platform recommendations, and tips to prepare your business for the holidays and new year.
In this episode, we discuss:
- [2:25] Rogé’s journey into the online space
- [3:25] Kajabi overview and benefits
- [6:20] The different types of funnels and automations
- [10:39] How to avoid missed opportunities using freebies
- [12:13] The importance of optimizing your funnels
- [19:47] Recommendations of what to include in freebies
- [30:16] How to prepare for the holiday season and slow seasons
- [35:33] Avoiding overwhelm when building your funnel
Rogé’s journey into the online space:
Rogé fell into the online world by chance during COVID after googling how to become a virtual assistant. She found a lot of fun things and then just started to dig her way through different courses and programs and began to understand that they were all very similar. One of her clients happened to have a program called Kajabi, and she said, “What is Kajabi?” but because she was tech-savvy, she could learn super quickly. Her client let her play around in the program to familiarize herself. Rogé fell in love with the program and knew that was her spot, and she became a Kajabi specialist.
Kajabi overview and benefits:
Kajabi is an all-in-one marketing platform; you can have your website on there, and even more importantly, you can have your courses and digital products housed in the same place. You can essentially house your whole online business on this one platform.
We also use Kajabi at Ninety Five Media as well, and it has been such a game changer because it keeps everything under one roof. Because what tends to happen as you scale is that you begin by piecemealing systems together across multiple platforms, which can get very messy. As you continue to grow, you get to a point where you realize that you need to consolidate in order to scale what you have built and Kajabi allows you to do just that. Its backend systems all speak together which end up saving you both time and money.
The different types of funnels and automation:
For anyone who might be newer to the industry, wondering, “what is a funnel?”; A marketing funnel describes your customer’s journey with you. So basically, how they get to know you and go from a lead to become a customer. That is basically what a funnel does for our business. There are four stages in the customer journey; awareness, interest, desire, and action.
The funnel starts at awareness and leads us down the funnel to action, and action is where a customer makes a purchasing decision. The funnel types will vary from industry to industry. We have roughly six primary funnels for coaches, consultants, and content creators. The first one, probably the most popular, is the lead magnet or freebie funnel. Then we have a tripwire, SLO, or self-liquidating offer funnel. Finally, we have the live challenge funnel, the live webinar funnel, and the Evergreen webinar funnel so there are quite a few different ones.
Businesses should start this process by clarifying who their audience is and how they can serve the audience. The market is flooded with freebies, so we must find a way to add value to the customer’s life rather than wasting their time with something worthless. Then, you want to think about what you can provide for your audience to get them to your business’s next step. You want to map this whole journey out before you even get started with creating this funnel. Then, once we know what your audience wants and needs, you can build a funnel.
For example, an excellent freebie idea could be an ad spend calculator if you’re a Facebook ad consultant or teach people how to run Facebook ads. So you know your audience: people who want to learn how to do Facebook ads. You’re likely either in a one-on-one or group coaching service, providing that for your clients/students or you may even have a course on how to do Facebook ads yourself. So that freebie is perfect. It kicks things off well because this calculator is an ideal lead into your services and course. After all, your audience can use it with or without your support.
How to avoid missed opportunities using freebies:
One of the biggest mistakes people make is they only send one email delivering the freebie, and that’s it. We want to avoid this because we want to prevent crickets, and this turns into a prevalent missed opportunity. If someone signs up for your freebie, they are already showing interest in you and your business’ services, and they shared their information with you, so you want to capitalize on that opportunity.
To take it back to the basics, let’s talk about what we need to deliver a freebie. You will start with a landing page, and we need an opt-in form where someone can submit their name, email address, Instagram handles, or whatever else they want to know. You can also add specific questions, considering our Facebook ads example; “Have you worked with Facebook ads?” This will customize it to your particular audience.
This is where we learn about the person, what they want, what they need, and what they like. Rogé loves customizing those forms, as they are the initial touch point. This gives you data and information on what to create next and what could be another freebie.
Next, your second freebie could be a video series on a quick step-by-step getting started with Facebook ads. And then, finally, someone submits their form, and it is always good to have a thank you page so the person knows everything was successful.
On the thank you page, you should guide them to check their emails because we want to train our audience to look for your emails in their inbox. We want to make that a habit, which is a crucial step. Finally, submitting the form triggers the automation, and the freebie gets delivered. Then the next big step is to create a nurture welcome sequence.
The perfect scenario would be five to seven emails over the next 14 days. So it’s a quick touch base to check in and ask how do you like the freebie? Have you had any AHA moments? How did you use it?
You should use these emails to engage with your audience, asking for replies. Because this provides more data, which allows us to get to know our clients and how we can better serve them, which turns into more services.
The importance of optimizing your funnels
It is so important to optimize your funnels because you want to understand where it is converting and where it is failing. Because data is such a big thing, and every program we utilize today helps us collect free data from our audience. So many people don’t look at the data and make changes based on it. It can be incredibly frustrating because you’re getting information, whether it’s open rate, click-through rate, or where they are unsubscribing in the funnel, and so it’s easy to look at that information and make these tweaks – but so many people don’t. This is a benefit of having someone like Roge on a team where she can also say, “I see these problems. Here’s how we should fix them along the way to ensure that your conversions are as high as possible.”
Unfortunately, many of the “gurus” out there teach us to produce more instead of focusing on quality over quantity by having one funnel that works seamlessly. The key to successful funnels is to test and tweak, by concentrating on one thing at one time, instead of having ten funnels. In order to do this, you have to learn what your conversion rates are, because the end goal is ultimately for recipients to purchase your service or program.
One of the biggest things Emma sees when working with clients who have their funnel set up and are frustrated because it isn’t converting for them is that they say it’s a failure because they’ve only signed one or two people but that’s what’s supposed to happen, and no one likes to talk about it or acknowledge it because you feel it’s like vanity metrics. It’s a vanity metric, how many people you have coming into your funnel. Your conversion metric is how many people are converting and that’s going to be a much smaller percentage. You want to get as many people in, but where we have seen a lot of people go wrong with funnels with something like a challenge or a webinar is that they get so excited to get those big numbers of people starting the funnel but they’re not ideal clients for them. So there’s a good chance that the audience conversion rate will be low, which messes with your expected conversion rate. Setting realistic goals based on your end goal and your target audience is essential.
Recommendations of what to include in freebies:
This is really hard because it really comes down to the subject you’re talking about. If you have a paid course, pull out one or two golden nuggets from there and put that in your freebie, because then when people sign up, they’re blown away by the value they got for free and can’t even imagine what the paid program will be like. It’s typically a situation where it really truly shows you’re not in it just for the money, but also bringing in your human side; you care about someone. You truly want to help someone and that just shines through. The goal is to focus on what the people come to you for – you really want to focus on what people think they need when creating your lead magnet.
How to prepare for the holiday season and slow seasons:
Rogé’s opinion about Black Friday is that she always gets overwhelmed with bombarding emails and social posts. She is a more laid-back person, but there are two sorts of clients. One client may feel like they want to go to sell tickets, they have flash sales, and they do all those things. Then there are the opposite type of brand owners who prefer to lay back, relax, and enjoy the holiday season.
But overall, Rogé shares her recommendation that having these lead magnets year-round is the best tool. Again, she prefers to have one terrific funnel and lead magnet instead of five different ones. Take a step back, evaluate your brand, use this time of year to prepare for January, and make sure any funnels we want are optimized in November and December, going into January so that it’s ready to capture those leads that are coming in and willing to work with us.
Avoiding overwhelming when building your funnel:
When it comes to funnels, many people can quickly get overwhelmed by the process. She reminds anyone starting this process that it’s not that hard. You need to sit down for a couple of minutes and do it one step at a time. Don’t let the fear hold you back or tech overwhelm hold you back. There are many resources, such as a vast Kajabi Facebook group. If you don’t want to deal with it, hire a funnel specialist to set it up for you!
Resources mentioned:
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