A Different Kind of customer...
Part 3
Back when we were using the traditional tripwire funnels, I used to dread customer emails. I was used to the all-caps, angry, “are you a scam!?” emails from every person who had a simple login issue.

But when we first turned on the RTY Art Story Funnel, one of the things that surprised me was just happy our customers were. It was like a night and day shift!

I remember waking up to a support email just one day after we switched over… And I remember this because, as usual, as soon as I saw it in the inbox I braced for the onslaught...

When I opened it, I could not have been more surprised. Here’s what it said:

“Hi Rebecca, 

I love your teaching style. I’ve been struggling with my art for years and the way you explain things is so much easier to understand.

I’m seeing immediate improvements in my art from just the few tutorials that I’ve seen you do.

You really are amazing. Thank you so much for doing these lessons!

By the way, I’m having issues logging into the course I just bought, can you help me?”

I was speechless.

Never in my 15 year career as a digital marketer had I ever received such a kind customer service request!

And over the next few days, as we started selling a crap ton of courses and customer support emails began coming in, I was surprised to find that by and large, they ALL read like that. 

Even though our customers had just dropped $300 on a drawing course that they’d only just discovered a few hours earlier, they were so kind and gracious! They wrote to Rebecca like she was a person instead of some faceless business who they couldn’t trust.

And what I realized was that, because of the way we were selling, because we built that trust with them even before they became a customer… they considered us their most trusted advisors. 

Rather than resenting us for selling to them, they were happy to buy from us, and grateful for the products we provided!

We positioned ourselves as their advocate, and because we actually delivered real, actionable value, they respected us… and more importantly, they trusted us.

And that’s the purpose of the inner pages of our Story Funnel: to deliver value in a way that earns our customers trust and respect before we ask them for a single dollar.

So let’s go back to the RTY Art funnel as an example. Our big claim is that, even if they don’t have any drawing experience, they can draw a Lifelike Portrait in 21 Days or less.

Now that’s a tall claim for someone who’s best drawing may have been a stick-figure.

So in order to get them to believe that’s even possible, we focus on overcoming the belief gap.
In your standard funnel, the first step would be to sell them a $7 product -- maybe on how to draw the structure of a head or something like that.

But the problem is that you haven’t really helped them achieve their goal… In fact, you’ve actually made your position worse by establishing yourself as a cheap commodity. You’re just another cheap product…one of a hundred just like you, offering a small piece of the solution at best.

The next step in our standard funnel would be to give them another, slightly bigger solution on the way to their ultimate goal. Then you just keep offering upsells that get them closer to actually solving their problem.
So, for someone trying to cross the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, it’s like selling a bridge one plank at a time. They have to walk out over that chasm and just hope that the next piece will keep them from falling in. You’re asking for a lot of trust, without giving them much reason to trust you. 

A Story Funnel is completely different. 

With the RTY Art story funnel, Rebecca took the three biggest things that people struggle with in portrait drawing and delivered a short lesson on each one. 

Here’s a screenshot from the RTY Art story funnel where Rebecca teaches the readers how to handle the biggest problem that most new artists have.

These lessons gave our customers some easy wins to build their confidence.

We knew that just about every one of our customers had at least one of these three problems, and if we could solve them so quickly and easily (and for FREE!)… it would actually help them BELIEVE that they can be a portrait artist. 

This totally reframed our relationship with our customers.
We positioned ourselves as a guide, an advisor, a friend. We’ve built the trust they need to have in us to believe that we can actually take them to their destination. 

Instead of selling them one plank of the bridge at a time, we’ve shown them how to build their own bridge. Then we’re just saying, hey, you could do this yourself, sure, but you’ll save a lot of time and money and frustration if you let us help you do it. 

The only real question left is if they want the outcome badly enough to take action. Because you’ve already shown them it’s possible, and they already believe you can help them. 

And the beautiful thing about a story funnel is that you’re never abandoning people along the way.

A regular sales funnel involves shoving as many people through as possible, knowing that only a fraction of them will actually buy the products that you want them to buy. There’s no value on the front end, so you’re only really helping the very few people who end up buying the whole funnel (all the planks).

With a story funnel, everyone has the opportunity to experience a breakthrough… for free! And they never feel coerced into a choice: you leave it up to them, but by the end, they’re confident YOU are really the only right choice. 

Are you starting to see how revolutionary this way of selling is? Do you see how a Story Funnel allows you to RAPIDLY develop authority and trust with your customer? 

Using this way of selling, you can take a customer from not even knowing you exist to recognizing you as the best and only viable answer to their problem in no time at all.

But most importantly, all this front end value gets them ready for your product before they ever see it. It gets them thinking the right way, it shows them why all those problems they are having are really just surface problems…

And once you help them with what they thought was the big problem --- then they’re ready for the bigger solution you have to offer… in fact they’ll be stumbling over themselves to buy what you have, because they’ll know how much it can help them. 

Plus, you get the added bonus of sleeping well at night, knowing that you are an ethical marketer. 

Now the very last thing that we did with our Story Funnel was clearly illustrate the difference between going it on their own and going with RTY Art.

Most people are afraid of their competition, but with a Story Funnel, you can actually lean into the fact that there are so many alternatives that they can choose from… You’re not trying to hide the fact that there are other options. You’re showing them that you are the BEST option, even when compared to the others.

For instance, for our niche, portrait drawing, a lot of people go to YouTube for solutions. Right now, you can go to YouTube and type in “how to draw people” and you will literally get back millions of results… that’s a good thing!

So instead of pretending YouTube classes don’t exist, we emphasized it. And we showed our readers why that wasn’t the solution they were looking for. 

We actually took a screenshot of the results and put it in our Story Funnel:

By showing your customer that there are several options out there --- especially free ones --- you are basically laying down the gauntlet in preparation for a final showdown between the old way and the new way.

The advantage of this is amazing!

You get to lump every other single program, every other product, every other training resource in the category of the old way of doing things, the old way of training, the old way that didn’t get them results.

At this point in your story funnel, you’re at crossroads where it’s time to either keep going together, or part ways.

At risk of stretching the dating analogy… this is where you draw a line in the sand. You make an ask, or risk being “friend zoned,” and having your customers start to think of you as just an awesome free resource.

Here’s how we do it for RTY Art:
And if you’ve done your Story Funnel right... about 25% of the people who get this far will decide to move forward with what you’ve shown them is the natural solution to their problems. They will happily take you up on a $300+ offer.

On average, for every 100 people that visit the RTY Art Story Funnel, about 8 of them will become customers. 

With an average Cost Per Click of $1.50 that’s $150 for 100 people… which leads to 8 customers… which is a minimum of $2,400.

That’s an 16x ROI! 

It sure beats the hell out of a standard funnel… and I get to rest well at night — without waking up to angry emails.

And here’s the thing… the party doesn’t end here…