Backend funnels are becoming quite the topic these days. And for a good reason. The absolute fact is that anyone who makes a ton of money online makes most of their profit on the backend.
In fact, such marketers are probably no better than you in terms of their front-end sales. Their overall profits are much higher than yours thanks to their backend sales. This has always been true, and will always remain true.
And do you know where and how super-profitable backend marketing is done? It is almost entirely done through email. So when people talk about their back-end funnels, you might as well assume they’re mostly talking about their email campaigns, both broadcasts and automations.
With that said, I want to share 6 massive secrets that will help you build back-end funnels that can massively improve your bottom-line profits. So let’s get started.
1) Treat people differently
Look, people are different. And the number one secret to more profitable email (in general) is to become good at personalizing people’s experiences. In an ideal world no two people would receive the same emails in the same sequence. The emails that they receive and when they receive them would be entirely different for each and every person.
How do we achieve this? Well, the main secret to this is gathering data, and then acting upon it. The most obvious data (information) is about how they got into your list in the first place. What was the front-end offer that put them into this list?
In most cases you will offer someone a low-ticket item, and after they buy it, they get moved into your back-end funnels. Now, if you have multiple low-ticket items, and people arrive at the offer from different campaigns, this is all useful and relevant information.
In Emercury you will want to create different tags based on which low-ticket item was their entry point into the list. You can also tag them based on the marketing campaign (or landing page) that generated the first front-end sale.
This information will be crucial in treating them differently inside of the backend funnels
That is, you will want to send a different series of emails based on how they entered the list. You can either build automations that act differently based on said tags. Or, you will use our segment builder to differentiate people into segments based on these tags or other custom data. Then you can send different broadcasts to different segments.
But data-gathering and personalization doesn’t stop there. You will want to gather even more data based on how they act once they’re in the list. You will want to segment and tag people differently based on how they engage with your emails. For example they might respond differently to different topics or different types of emails.
If all of this sounds kind of vague, note that I’m just scratching the surface here. Personalization is a separate topic on its own, and fortunately we have this amazing guide on personalization right here.
Alternatively if you want a more personalized and specific set of advice, consider that some of our plans include strategy sessions.
That way I can sit down with you and get to know your exact business model and give you the exact personalized advice you need. This includes any tweaks you might need, or even how to build out your backend funnels more specifically.
If you want to get a sense for that personalized experience, consider booking a free demo over here while we still have them available.
2) Leverage the right recipes
In marketing you might often hear the phrase “recipe” thrown around quite a lot. It might sound like just a buzzword to make things sound cooler, but there is some good logic behind it.
You see, as you become more experienced in making a lot of money with marketing, you discover that there are optimal ways of doing things. At least if you care about making as much money as possible.
And a lot of the time, these optimal ways of doing things revolve around getting a certain ratio right. It’s not just about knowing which parts (ingredients) go into an effective marketing system, it is also about knowing the right proportions.
If we go back to the recipe analogy, imagine you know all the ingredients to make something, but not the ratios. Imagine that you then put in 3x more sugar than needed, and only half of the necessary flour. You have all the ingredients all right, but because the ratio is wrong, the end result will be an actual disaster.
The same is true in marketing. A lot of people know all of the ingredients, but they have no clue what goes where and in what amount. And a lot of the time the proportion is what makes things work. You need to know the correct ratios, or suffer utter failure.
So what are these secret ratios then?
Well, there are a couple, but today I want to tell you about the two most important ones if you want to make a lot more money. I find that these two are the ones people mess up most frequently.
The first one concerns your usage of automations and broadcasts. What we find in email marketing is that most people go to one or the other extreme. Either they try to do everything through broadcasts, or they try to achieve everything through automations.
You actually need to use both and in the right proportion. If you get the ratio right you can actually achieve a really nice synergy where they compliment each other. To learn more about this, see our article over at Mailcon.
The other ratio you need to get right? Providing enough value
More specifically, this is in regards to informational and sales emails. The fact is that the bulk of your emails have to be informational in nature. You can’t simply go out and just keep sending emails asking people to buy stuff.
At the same time however, selling stuff is why you’re even building a backend funnel in the first place. So you need to understand how to get this ratio correct as well. An easy rule of thumb, to get started, is to say that at least 80% of your emails should be informational in nature.
Now, do not misunderstand this. It doesn’t mean that these emails cannot mention a product, a sale, or include a link that might lead to a sale. It’s just that this isn’t the subject of these emails.
The subject of an informational email is all about giving them some value, for free. And in the process of giving them value, you can sneak in a subtle mention of your product, upsell, cross-sell or anything that brings profit.
When we talk about keeping the percentage of sales emails low, we are referring to those emails where the entire email is all about a sale. In such emails, the sale is the main and only point of the email.
And again, if all of this sounds a bit general, remember that in order to give you more specific advice on your specific ratio I have to look at your specific business.
Consider again that this kind of strategizing and consultation is something included in some of our plans. And again, you can book a free demo if you want to experience this kind of personalized one-on-one attention.
3) Develop & automate your upsells and cross-sells
When people talk about funnels, it is very popular to hype up those frontend upsells and cross-sells. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying those are not amazing. When a person adds one product to cart and you offer them a one-time upgrade or a related product, that does wonders for increasing profits, and it’s definitely a great idea to do this.
I just get the impression that there is an overemphasis on this, to the point where people forget that most of your upsells and cross-sells will come from your backend funnels.
What you need to do is simple, but it will require some work. More specifically you will need to do two things. First, you will need to identify which offers are a good fit to offer as upsells and cross-sells inside of your backend funnels. And then secondly, you will want to automate all of this.
Where it comes to picking the offers, the first important thing is to make sure they don’t clash with the front-end offers. If you offered an upsell as a one-time offer to someone, then you obviously can’t offer the exact same thing again later in your back-end funnels. You can however come up with equivalent offers.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that data is crucial. You want to store data about what they were offered on the front-end, so that you can offer different things on the backend.
And then you also want to track and store data based on their responses inside of the backend funnels so that you can (over time) learn what offers work best at which stage of the back-end funnel. You can learn more about this in our ultimate guide to personalized email for maximum conversions.
4) Profit from related verticals
Pay close attention as I’m about to say one of the most important things that you need to hear. An email entering your list is super-valuable and profitable, even if your list fails at selling them even a single thing.
How can that be possible? Well, consider the fact you can use what you learn about a person (that data again), in order to promote other things to them. Let’s take the worst-case scenario where someone buys your front-end offer, and gets onto the list. But after this, they don’t take you up on a single one of your upsells and cross-sells. What do you do then? Give up?
No way! Remember that just because a person is no longer interested in buying anything further in this vertical, doesn’t mean they cannot spend money on other topics. This is where you can use what you learned about them.
And remember you get this data based on what emails they open, what topics they respond to etc. And then, you can even specifically send emails to tease out if they are potentially interested in other related, or even not-so-related verticals. If they bite, you can tag them as interested in those topics, and then promote those other verticals to them.
There are several ways to do this. You can promote that they sign up for a different list. It might be your own list that you operate for that other vertical. Or, you might strike up a deal with list owners in other verticals, and agree to send them subscribers.
5) Create revival campaigns
In the previous point I mentioned this “worst case” scenario where someone buys your front-end product, gets into the back-end funnels, and just doesn’t buy anything on this topic again.
However, just to be clear, that doesn’t mean “ever again in their life”. They might have lost interest in this initial topic for the time being. However, they might still come back to it months or years later.
Obviously, the idea is that if someone isn’t buying stuff on this initial list, then you do not wait years before trying to sell them on a different vertical and sign them up for a different list. However, it is a good idea to assume that some of those unengaged people could come back around to this initial topic again in the future.
This is where re-engagement campaigns come into play. Typically in such campaigns you offer some sort of a gift to re-ignite their interest. You direct these campaigns at subscribers on a given list who haven’t shown any interest in the topic for a certain prolonged period, and see if you can’t bring them back.
Fortunately, we wrote this super popular guide about how to win back lost subscribers with re-engagement campaigns.
6) Discover your own secrets
As I mentioned a couple of times throughout this guide, my advice is a bit general for a very simple reason: I don’t know you or your business personally. The truth is that a lot of the specifics depend on how things work out in your own situation specifically.
You can let someone help you with some of these specifics, or alternatively you might discover those secrets yourself. And the best way to discover what works and what doesn’t is to pay attention to the results.
This is where reports and analysis come in. If you use a platform like Emercury this is rather easy and straightforward as we provide quite robust reports for everything that you do.
This means that you can go into your reports and study what works. That way you can learn over time how to tweak things for higher profitability, based on real-world results.
No need to feel overwhelmed. We can make all of this a lot easier for you
You know, there is a saying about how experienced people learn from their own mistakes, but the really smart people learn from other people’s mistakes. The same is true when it comes to the smart marketers I know. They don’t want to waste time “learning from their own experience”. It’s a lot faster when you learn from other people’s experiences.
And here’s a funny thing, when you have access to a great mentor, this is exactly what you get. You get access to someone else’s experience. This will help do things right from the start and skip every mistake before it even comes up.
But do you know what’s even better than a mentor who has a lot of personal experience?
A mentor that has a ton of experience helping others. Aside from their own personal experience, they have worked with and helped hundreds of marketers just like you.
And wouldn’t you believe it, you just happen to be so lucky that you ran into just such an opportunity. You see, over here at Emercury we have been personally involved in the growth and success of thousands of marketers. And we have been doing this for over a decade. We have advised, helped and guided all of these marketers to more success and profits. This is just something that we see as integral to the Emercury experience.
And if you want to get a sense for that “Emercury Experience”, consider booking a free demo with our team. Isn’t it about time that you felt what it’s like to have someone on your side? Someone that is excited for, and cheering for your marketing success.
Because that is what we believe in. We don’t see Emercury users as “customers”, we see them as partners. The more profit they make from marketing, the more they will utilize our marketing platform. So it is a general and overall win-win for both of us.
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