Create a Book Funnel – Jumpstart your Sales.
How Book Funnels Can Jumpstart Your Sales
If you’re a self-publisher, take advantage of the opportunities a book funnel offers. As soon as you decide on your book printing and set up order fulfillment, it’s time to leverage your book’s income-generating potential. Today, an increasing number of business owners and professional practice leaders write a book to market themselves and their businesses. Books help you attract new customers and generate sales leads when they are used strategically. In the long run, the revenue from selling copies of your book is only a tiny portion of what you earn if you handle things wisely.
Once you publish your book, it’s common to become lost in the maze of relentless promotional and marketing activities surrounding a new release. It takes time, effort, money, and sharp business acumen to turn the tide in your favor. No bestseller ever became one overnight. It takes detailed work to reach your target audience and keep them engaged in your journey as an author.
Whether you’re self-publishing a book as a life coach, nutritionist, or entrepreneur, the book you write is your personal advertisement. In fact, it is one of the most effective ways to reach (and impress) potential customers. Your book automatically gives you credibility in your field.
As you begin exploring how to develop a book funnel, consider this novel idea for making the first step. Give your target readers an offer they can’t ignore – a free copy of your book if they pay for only the shipping cost.
What is a Book Funnel?
Simply put, a Book Funnel is a Sales and Marketing Strategy that involves a book. Let us understand a little more about the phenomenon of a Book Funnel and how exactly it can help your business. A Book Funnel is a marketing strategy that promises to take a reader through a journey before he becomes a potential customer or a lead for your service/ product/ business.
When following this strategy, you lead your reader through your book to engage with you – the author. The point of this exercise is to get the reader to take a predetermined set of actions after or while they are reading your book.
This could mean multiple things like the reader joins your mailing list or he schedules a consultation with you or joins your community or signs up for a workshop etc.
Sounds like a brilliant idea, right? But there is a catch.
Yes, you may write a great book full of insights and expert advice and have a foolproof plan on how the reader will go through the journey that ultimately leads him to your business; but how do you get your potential reader to actually buy your book in the first place?
This is where another lovely concept called Free Plus Shipping Offer comes in.
You offer your book as a Free give-away, either via your website or social media pages. The book is free, you only charge for the shipping. Customers value a physical product and it has been proven that they are more likely to read it over a digital version. Besides, who can ignore a freebie? To enjoy the freebie, all he has to do is leave his email address, which will enable you to build the next stage of your funnel.
You can start building an email list and communicating with these prospective customers to hold their attention. You can then proceed to interact with them, reiterate your values/ideas and even provide meaningful solutions to their queries.
Now you are priming these leads to the next stage of the funnel wherein you present a more valuable offer albeit with a price point. This is an ‘upsell’ or an ‘add-on’. For example, a life-coach can offer a ‘mini course’ of small duration, at attractive, discounted prices to engage his followers. When they make this purchase, they’re investing more of their time and resources in your ideas and propositions, making them the ideal target audience.
You can engage in precise marketing as you know your target audience better with every stage of the funnel. When they have your full attention, you go for the sale.
At the top of the funnel, the leads have turned into actual clients. Your book funnel helps to create long-term relationships with readers, giving you a ready customer base to tap into whenever you launch a new project.
The sales funnel or a book funnel is thus, a series of carefully designed steps to generate leads for your business or profession. It begins with giving away freebies to attract potential customers to your brand or book. Most landing pages or funnels give away downloadables, but as mentioned earlier, if you give away a tangible product like a book or USB, the conversion increases by up to 40%.
Once the audience expresses interest in your offer, they are qualified as suitable leads worthy of the subsequent stage in your funnel. Here you make constant efforts to engage with these leads by giving them valuable propositions and pushing them further up the funnel. Eventually, you guide them to make a decision and act. The funnel serves its purpose when ‘leads’ are converted and they purchase your product or make an investment in your business.
Get Published and Find the Right Audience:
We believe every entrepreneur should put down his/her experience in words to build their credibility and to widen their customer base. Taking the route of self-publishing would be ideal to meet the objectives of writing a book. A global fulfillment company like Acutrack makes your job easier by not just printing your work but also by delivering it across the globe. Unlike Amazon, where you’ve no idea who your actual readers are, Acutrack gives you complete customer information on each and every purchase made. With such valuable data, creating your sales funnel for your next project will be a cakewalk.
Talk to one of our experts to know more about how Acutrack can help you achieve your business goals.