There’s an old saying that says everyone has a book in them. However, for most authors, actually writing the book is the easiest part.

The bigger challenge is finding a way to stand out from the rest of the crowd & get people to purchase your book instead of competing titles…or even just other expenses in general.

If you are an author or speaker, your book & related materials are your product…& like all products, it needs a Customer Value Journey.

Remember…the goal of the Customer Value Journey is to map the adventure your ideal buyer takes from being a stranger to your brand to a total evangelist for it.

And a sales funnel for digital marketing is a key tool for doing it.

The Customer Value Journey is about the incremental steps your prospect takes toward becoming a repeat customer. Therefore, a sales funnel for digital marketing arranges your products in a sequence that gradually lets customers experience more value.

You’re not going to ask your customers to buy your $6,000 consulting program immediately. As with all our success stories, you’re going to start with a lead magnet—an irresistible free offer that will introduce them to your brand in exchange for their contact information.

Once you have their email address, you’re able to follow up with additional offers & continue to create meaningful conversations with them surrounding your brand.

And if you’re an author or speaker…your book is often a great place to start.

The Free Book Sales Funnel That Changed This Speaker’s Business

Entrepreneur, author & speaker Peter Diamandis is truly a jack of all trades. He is the founder of more than 20 education, venture capital & longevity companies, including BOLD Capital Partners & Celularity.

He wrote three New York Times bestselling books, is a compelling speaker & teacher & holds degrees from MIT in molecular genetics & aerospace engineering.

Diamandis has multiple books, taped lectures & visitor series to his credit, but his most important product is his program through Singularity University, a graduate level Silicon Valley institution that equips entrepreneurs to take on the world’s most pressing situations & work together to solve problems.

The Singularity University Executive Program (SUE) is a 5 day experience that explores how technology is changing the world & the necessity of leadership to navigate its challenges to create a more positive tomorrow.

When this sales funnel for digital marketing was originally put together in 2013, the price of the program was $12,000. But of course, nobody is going to spend that much money immediately after learning about Diamandis’s efforts.

He needed a way to show the value of the program & persuade customers to make the investment, and that’s where the Splinter Offer sales funnel for digital marketing came in.

His strategy focused on using incremental offers that built on each other to eventually demonstrate the opportunity SUE affords customers.

Stage 1: The Free Book

As part of the relaunch of Diamandis’s book Abundance, the first step of the sales funnel for digital marketing strategy was to give copies away for free plus shipping.

We’ve already talked about the benefits of the free plus shipping funnel & how it works in a past post. But this particular sequence of products makes it a great choice for a tripwire offer.

The customer gets the book for the cost of shipping (roughly $6.95 in the US) verses around $24.99 in stores.

PLUS….Diamandis promised to give away one ebook to a high achieving high school student of low income for every book requested.

Customers are now not just getting a book practically for free. They’re becoming partners in his mission to make a difference for people in need.

But that wasn’t all. Just for requesting the free plus shipping book, customers also got access to 3 free training videos that covered topics in the book on a deeper level.

Stage 2: The Audio Training Set

By requesting the free book in exchange for their contact information, your prospects have now become pre-qualified buyers who will likely be interested in additional purchases.

As a one-click upsell at checkout for the free book and video trainings, Diamandis offered the Exponential Thinking audio CD course for 2 monthly payments of $97 each.

This training course covers topics like new technologies that are helping multi-billion dollar companies to grow, how to get smarter employees & building more innovation in your life & company.

But there was a problem. Because the free plus shipping book offer came with free training videos, many customers purchased the CD set thinking that it was composed of more video courses, which led to numerous refund requests.

This illustrates how important it is for every offer in your sales funnel for digital marketing to be congruent with what precedes it. Instead of CDs, a better upsell would have been a webinar, a DVD from a conference or additional visual media.

Step 3: The 10-DVD Series

At this point, whether they opted to purchase the CD set or not, customers who requested the free plus shipping book have received their 3 free training videos by email.

After watching the free videos, they were presented with the third offer, the 10-DVD Exponential & Abundant Thinking video series.

This recording of a seminar Diamandis gave at a conference provided both DVD & digital copies of the program, plus a workbook that created an interactive viewing experience, for 3 payments of $332.

Customers had already received a taste of Diamandis’s presentations with their free video trainings, but already strong sales of the DVD set were boosted even more with a Google Hangout presentation where Diamandis explained it.

The take home point? Your product has to have a trustworthy personality, be it your company or the person who is the face of it, at the helm of all offers.

The more personal you can make your interactions with customers, the more appealing the experience will be.

Step 4: The Singularity University Executive Program

We’ve finally arrived at Diamandis’s core offer. Notice that because of the high ticket value of SUE, it’s taken 3 offers, each gradually foreshadowing this program, to get to the point of presenting it to customers.

However…because they’ve also received a free book and training videos, had the opportunity to purchase a CD course & probably purchased a DVD set, they’ve gotten to experience what Diamandis has to offer in a way that has primed them for this offer.

There was one last small step Diamandis took. Given the high price tag of the program, he had customers opt in to be contacted by a representative to discuss enrollment, removing the pressure of immediately making a large purchase & also providing a chance to ask questions.

The Splinter Offer Sales Marketing Funnel & Why It Works

All told, this sales funnel for digital marketing strategy led Diamandis to grow his mailing list by more than 40,000 people, sell over 18,000 books & ultimately make more than $430,000 in overall sales.

And it works because he took advantage of a very specific funnel strategy called the Splinter Offer.

Splinter offers give customers pieces of the core offer in the Subscribe & Convert stages of the Value Journey, forcing them to make additional purchases to truly get the most value out of the lead magnet & tripwire.

For example, requesting the free book also gave customers access to 3 training videos that let them experience a piece of Diamandis’s live course. These videos are “useful, but incomplete”—in order to get a deeper dive into the topics, customers have to buy more.

Better yet, they see the actual value the DVDs offer & want more of it.

This principle shows that sales funnels for digital marketing are not just arbitrary arrangements of products. They design your customer’s journey to contain different “stops” that teach them about what you do & how it can impact them.

At Cirius Marketing, crafting businesses’ Customer Value Journeys is what we do. We go beyond just creating funnels—we create adventures. To learn more, email hello@ciriusmarketing.com or call 855-607-7766.

But if you want to get started with learning how to speak more personally to your list the way Diamandis did with his offers…check out our Next Level Segmentation guide.

 It will teach you how to personalize your email campaigns to fit the actions, interests & purchases of your leads & make your marketing even more relevant to them.