The following glossary contains the ultimate list of sales funnel terms and will serve to clarify the definitions of any words you might not know or wish to learn more about when discussing sales funnels.
Sales Funnel Terms
Above the Fold
A design term used to refer to the space on a website page that a visitor will see before they have to scroll down the page. This term comes from newspapers originally, where marketers would want to get their information above the literal fold of the paper because it was more likely to be seen. Anything “below the fold” required the reader to turn the paper over.
Ad Spend
The amount of money that you pay to a paid advertising platform, like Facebook, to run your ads. Ad spend does not include any money spent on graphic design, copywriting services or your paid ads manager/contractor.
Average Cart Value
The average dollar amount that a customer spends when finished making purchases in your funnel. Calculated by taking total revenue from all sales in the funnel divided by number of customers (buyers).
Bounce Rate
Percentage of people who visit your website but leave without engaging any further with your site (e.g. without clicking any more buttons to visit any other pages).
Bridge Page
A page used in an affiliate marketing funnel to guide the lead who has just entered the funnel to the affiliate offer. The bridge page acts as a ‘bridge’ between the optin page and the sales page or order form page for the affiliate offer.
ClickFunnels
The industry-leading software suite for building high-converting sales funnels.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Percentage of people who click on your advertisement out of those who have seen it. The percentage of people who “clicked through” from the ad to your website / funnel.
Content Upgrade
An additional piece of premium free content you offer to your audience who are reading, listening or watching a blog post, podcast or video you have which they can download in exchange for their email address. A lead magnet, but one that is tied specifically to upgrading their learning from the content they were already consuming.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of people ‘converted’ from not taking an action to taking an action on a funnel page. Can be used to describe the effectiveness of opt-in pages or sales pages / order forms. Calculated by dividing the number of ‘action takers’ by the total number of page persons and multiplying by 100. Example: “The conversion rate on my opt-in page is low; not that many people are opting in. Out of 500 page visitors, only 2 opted in. That’s just a .4% conversion rate.”
Copy
The literal words that you use on your sales pages, sales funnels, website and other marketing materials to communicate with your prospective buyers. Copy, or “sales copy”, includes not only headlines but any text you use in your marketing to educate your leads and emotionally connect to guide the prospective buyer to a sale.
Core Offer
The main product being sold in the sales funnel, usually placed after the trip wire but before an upsell.
Cost Per Click
The amount of money you pay for each ‘click’ (each time a person clicks on your ad) when you are running a PPC (pay-per-click) marketing ad campaign. Influenced by factors like your maximum bid, quality score and more.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
The average amount of money you have to spend – typically on marketing – to acquire a new customer in a given period of time. Example: If you spend $1,000 in paid ads over one month to acquire 10 customers from those ads in that same time period, your CAC is $100 that month.
Downsell
A product offered to a lead going through a funnel who has rejected the upsell, usually priced lower or packaged in an enticing way (e.g. payment plan) to entice customer to reconsider purchasing this new offer.
Follow-up Sequence
A series of emails someone receives after signing up for your email list.
Landing Page
A webpage on which a funnel builder hopes a lead will “land” so they can input their information in exchange for a lead magnet. Example: https://baileyrichert.com/free-toolkit.html
Lead
A potential customer. A person who opts in for a lead magnet and goes through a sales funnel to potentially make a purchase.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
An estimated amount or prediction of the total profit you’ll make from a customer during the entire time you have a relationship with them.
One-Click Upsell
A product offered to a lead going through a funnel who has already purchased the core offer which they can add to their cart with the click of one button on the page before the order is complete. See also “Upsell”
One-Time Offer (OTO)
A product offered to a lead going through the funnel which is presented as an offer that cannot be purchased anywhere else; lead has this “one time” to make the purchase or else it will go away. May be accompanied with a timer to increase urgency.
Open Rate
Percentage of people who open an email out of all the people who just received the email you sent in your campaign.
Opt-In
The act by a lead of submitting their email address or other pertinent information into a landing page to receive a free lead magnet, thereby granting permission to the funnel owner to keep their volunteered information and continue sending them communications.
Opt-In Rate
The percentage of people who land on the first page of a sales funnel and complete the opt-in process to receive their free lead magnet. The higher the opt-in rate, the better.
Order Bump
A product which can be purchased only as an add-on to the main product being purchased on an order form. Order bumps appear as a checkbox on the order form. If the customer checks the box, the customer will be charged for the product, and it will be added to their order. If the box is not checked when they purchase, they will not be charged anything additional for that product, and it will not be added to their order.
Order Form
A page in a sales funnel where a customer must enter their credit card or payment information for the first time to make an initial purchase before buying other products in the funnel.
Profit Maximizer
A Profit Maximizer has one primary goal – to immediately raise the average transaction value. Let’s say you have a $100 offer that you’ve sold to 100 customers. That’s a total revenue of $10,000. You might not realize it, but roughly 30% of those 100 customers would have bought a $300 offer immediately following the purchase of the first offer. That’s an additional $9,000 of revenue, nearly double the amount of revenue generated from each customer.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
A statistic used to determine whether or not an ad is performing well and generating results. ROAS is literally the financial return generated for the amount being spent to run the ad. For example, a 3x ROAS means that you are generating 3 times from the ads what it costs you in “ad spend” to run the ads.
Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a systematic marketing process for building a relationship with your audience to attract new leads and new customers. Potential customers go through a series of steps to get to know you, like you and eventually complete a purchase. Marketers utilize online sales funnels, allowing them to create a series of online steps for the customer which do not require their personal presence during the sales process.
Scarcity
Marketing tactic which utilizes a limited number of product availability to encourage customers to buy immediately instead of waiting to purchase, lest they should not be able to get the product before it sells out. Usually accomplished by placing the number of inventory remaining on the page. Example: “Grab this amazing offer before it sells out! There are only 3 left, so buy now before someone else does!”
Show Up Rate
Percentage of people who “show up” or attend your webinar out of all the people that registered for it.
SLO (Self-Liquidating Offer)
An introductory offer made to a lead who has just entered your sales funnel with usually a low price point. The idea behind an SLO is to cover the cost of your paid ads or marketing efforts with revenue generated from the SLO alone, which is from where the moniker “self-liquidating” comes. Profit is earned from upsells in the funnel once the lead purchases the introductory offer.
Tripwire
An irresistible low-cost product offered to a lead first in the funnel before a core offer as a way to get them to complete their first purchase which will hopefully lead to others as they move through the funnel.
Upsell
A product offered to a lead going through a funnel who has already purchased the core offer, usually priced higher as a way to increase profits gained from that one customer.
Urgency
Marketing tactic in which the amount of time a lead has to purchase, or their window to buy, is limited. This encourages them to buy sooner rather than wait to purchase. Example: “Grab this amazing offer before the timer expires and this offer goes away forever!”
Value Ladder
A collection of products of usually increasing value and price offered to a lead through a sales funnel.
VSL (Video Sales Letter)
A video shown to a prospective buyer to further explain your product and lead them through the process to making a purchase.
Welcome Email
A welcome email is the first impression a company makes with a new customer, blog subscriber, or newsletter subscriber via email.
