A gift funnel is where you give away a free product to build an email list, and then sell to the people on that list later. The gift is the trial part of your core product. Customers get a piece of the product to try before they pay.
What is a gift?
A gift is a real product, and the only difference is that it is free. You put effort into making it, it has to be useful to your customers, and then you package it as a gift to give.
Three qualities of a gift
A good gift has all 3 of these:
- It is free for the person who gets it.
- It is truly useful, enough to attract other people.
- It is a part of your core product.
When the gift has all 3, people try it, trust you, and some start to love your brand. From trying, they move to wanting to buy, following the way people normally buy.
Gift split from the core product
The key to the gift lies in the core product. You take the core product as the root, then split off one part for people to try for free. You do not create a gift that is different from the product you sell.
How you split it depends on your field and your brand. For software, the common way is to create a free account and lock some features. For other products, the gift is a part derived from the core product.
When the gift relates to the core product, the people who get it can move on to the sales funnel. The strategy of stage 3 is to give a gift, then lead the person who took it to the sales funnel.
What does a gift funnel include?
Once you have the gift product, you build the funnel around it.
Three parts of the funnel
A gift funnel has the 3 parts in the table below.
| Part | What it is |
|---|---|
| Gift product | The free product split from the core product |
| Gift page and link | The page that shows what the gift is and how to get it, and the link you share to give the gift |
| Automation | Delivers the gift, sends emails, and leads the people who got the gift from the moment they get the gift to the moment they buy |
The link is what you use to share. Because it is a gift and you sell nothing, nobody complains or criticizes you when the gift has value. That is why the gift funnel is a tool for marketing without making people uncomfortable.
After a customer gets the gift
The person leaves an email and gets the gift. From then on, the automation sends them 2 kinds of email in order:
- A how-to-use email: how to use the free product they just got.
- Nurture emails: stories you tell little by little, so the people who got the gift understand and trust you more.
At the same time, the content system you already have keeps working. You send content to the people who got the gift over time, they understand the product better, and they move to the sales funnel when they are ready. With a content system in place, the conversion rate is much higher than when your website has nothing on it.
When a gift fails
A gift fails when the maker puts in little effort because it brings no money. The result is a generic gift, not useful enough for anyone to want to go further. A gift also fails when it is not split from the core product. Then people like the gift but have no reason to buy your product.
The gift funnel gets you emails, and taking payment belongs to the second funnel, which is the sales funnel.
Related pages
- Taking payment and delivering the paid product: see Sales funnel.
- Getting the gift as a stranger would, before you share the link: see Test a funnel.
- The product the gift is split from: see Core product.