KingSumo (affiliate link) - A great tool to get virality going with your contests, get people to want to share you contest, and help collect emails for your list.

Show Notes: https://mastersalesfunnels.com/039/

Episode Transcription

Hello, this is Justin Coleman and we are on Episode 39 of the Master Sales Funnels podcast. Today we are going to continue our talk about lead generation since it is such an important part of any business. We're specifically discussing funnels that we can build to help bring us leads automatically. I say automatically, but I mean, there's a lot of work in any funnels in the beginning, but once you get that set up, then lead funnels are a great way to continue to give you leads over time without much extra added effort.

Today we are going to be discussing the Fish Bowl funnels, which sounds kind of funny because it has nothing to do with a fish bowl.

Really, it's a contest funnels which gets the name Fish Bowl, because if you remember back in school, you likely put tickets into a fish bowl and the teacher withdraw out your ticket. If you want your ticket would get drawn out of the fish bowl. So that's why they call it a fish bowl funnel. But just remember that it is basically hosting a contest.

You give away a good prize and in return you get to collect hopefully good and relevant leads. It creates a buzz for your business, and also it can help you make money right in the funnels if you add an upsells at the end and we're going to go into each of these points throughout this episode. So why would you want to use a contest funnels in your business? To start People love free stuff. People love signing up to try and get free stuff.

They often don't care if they give out their email in order to get free stuff. The possibility of free stuff in return. And specifically if you have a giveaway that is directed at your target market, it's going to pull in that target market because you're giving away a prize that they're interested in. So it helps you find those people who are interested in what you have to offer and it adds them to your email list, which is super invaluable. It shows that people have a huge interest in your product because while people like free stuff and they like giving away their email for free stuff, they're not going to do it if it's something they don't actually want.

So if they do give you that email and your prize is related, then you definitely know that you have someone who is interested in what you're offering. And also you may also get some customers to buy into that upsells on the back end. Again, we'll talk a little bit about that in a couple of minutes, but you want to have some form of monetization within your funnel so that you can recoup some of your ad dollars. You want to make the prize that you're giving away for the contest worth it.

Like I said, you want to be relevant to your business. Maybe it's even a free version of what you're offering. If you have a software, maybe you're giving away a free lifetime license, or if you have a product, maybe you're giving away one of the products that would definitely make sure that people are relevant. The audience that is signing up is relevant because you're giving away what you're going to be selling. You definitely want to make sure that it's worth it. You don't want to be giving away $10 trinket, nobody's going to sign up.

You want to give away. It depends on what your market is what you're offering, but I would say something worth hundreds of dollars, possibly thousands of dollars. And I don't mean just fake value that a lot of funnelers apply to their funnels. "Oh, Here have this free bonus. It's a ten minute video where I talk about my subject and it's really worth $5,000".

Make sure its actual value that people want to sign up to try and win. A big component of the fishbowl funnels is you want to make sure that it's a good way. You have a good way to be collecting leads. It helps you build your leads list when people enter. It helps you to have an email sequence ready to go after people sign up, so you have a sequence that it can send them reminders if you can enter for the contest more than once.

But it also leads them into kind of an indoctrination of your business so that your email series will let them know what you're all about. You can provide them extra value through that series and ultimately lead them into one of your funnels. But you don't want to just collect leads and leave your email list dead. You want to make sure that you have something automatically in place written out, set up, so when they automatically sign up that they're beginning to learn about your business and what you can offer them to help them solve their problems.

Another great thing about contest is that they can create a buzz. Likely you've entered a contest where you get extra entries when you share it with people. So it's great to be able to create that buzz entice people to want to share the contest, and that way you reach more people. You can set advertising up to reach that first set of people, but then hopefully if you have it set up right with the proper product like King Sumo, which we'll talk about in a couple minutes, but just a platform that allows people to easily share the contest and give them some incentive to share.

So that sharing and virality kind of takes over and you don't have to keep pouring money into getting people to sign up. It just kind of takes on a life of its own as people try to get more entries.

And this makes it all the more important as to why you want to have a really good price, because if you have people sharing it and it's a really good price that's going to pull people in more. That's going to make them want to share it more. And it's just overall going to create that buzz that your business needs. And it's really good branding because it gets your brand name out there for cheap or for free. If you have an audience already and you get that buzz going without spending money on ads, that's even better.

You also want to like I've mentioned, make an upsells for your actual product. So right after people enter for the contest, you want it to redirect them to your product. You can offer them a discount on the product, even if it's what you're offering as a giveaway. You can let people know that you can comp them if they win, so they get a discount and you can compensate them for what they've paid for the product if they're the winner of your contest. That way you'll still have a bunch of people who signed up for the discount and you'll have new customers again to recoup that ad cost and start building your not only your leads list, but your customer list.

Another cool thing you can do with the Fish Bowl funnels is that you can collaborate on the contest on the price, so you can pull in industry leaders to donate something to the contest and kind of make a prize pack. And that way you can entice them to do so by saying that you'll share the email list when you're done. So you have not just one other partner, but you have, say, five to ten industry experts or big players in your industry, all contributing a prize to this big prize pack.

Well, when you share that email list, when they're done, when the contest is over, it's going to be a win for everybody, because not only are you getting new people from the sharing of the contest on your list, but you're getting people off of the other people's list. That's a great way to like I said, intrigue people, these experts and get them into wanting to give away something for free for this contest.

And you want to make sure that you have that wording in your rules and regulations for the contest that if you sign up, your email is going to go out to all the contributors to the contest prize because we need to be open. We need to be honest, morally and legally. You have to let people know what's going to be done with their email. So just using that list as a bartering tool to get people to contribute to the prize, and that way it's worth more and you don't have to contribute all of it yourself.

So I mentioned earlier, King Sumo, they have a lifetime deal if you're interested. I'll have an affiliate link in the show notes at MasterSalesFunnels.com/039 the show notes for this episode, it's from the people who made AppSumo, and it's contest platform like we talked about. So it allows you to collect those leads. It allows you to have that virality of sharing to get people extra entries. If they share on Facebook or other platforms, or if they visit specific web pages, they get extra entries.

You can also have the daily entry to make people come back to get them used to going back to your site on a regular basis and create that habit. So it's a program that I use. I haven't ran many contests, but when I have ran contests, I did use King Sumo. Like I said, I'll link to it. It's a pretty good tool.

I don't know if you've heard of Gleam. That's another one that I believe predates King Sumo, but it works relatively the same way. So if you think you have a good enough product or can put together a good enough price package, I think that you should try a fish bowl funnel and host a contest for all the great reasons we've discussed in this episode, and I'd like to know how it goes. Like I said, I haven't ran many contests, and I'd like to see the success of some of my listeners.

So if you want to reach out Justin@MasterSalesfunnels.Com, I would love to hear about that.

Maybe we can pull you onto the podcast and have a discussion about what you did in your contest, what you gave away, and how you use this advice to make it work for you. Thank you, as always, for listening and make sure to keep funneling.