How to Create Book Funnels In WordPress – Proven Method To Increase Sales in 2024

How to Create Book Funnels In WordPress To Increase Sales

Sales funnels are always interesting to plan and you will find several creative ways many sell their products online. However, not all tactics work for all businesses. For certain niches, the sales funnel is rather lengthy and takes quite a bit of effort.

For example, authors cannot just create a basic sales funnel and expect to make more money. Or if you think about a freelance marketing trainer, people won’t just trust him that easily with basic sales funnels.

Well, today, we will discuss a unique sales funnel approach that can help you establish commendable trust in your prospects, and eventually get them ready to buy your products – Book Funnels.

A Book funnel may even get you more results than hosting webinars or giving away courses if done right.

Just like the name suggests, a book funnel is used to bring your buyers into a sales funnel using a well-written book.

In this article, you will get some insights on how you may use book funnels to get significant long-term results using a single sales funnel.

After reading this article, you may start planning book funnels yourself.

So let’s begin.

Planning Highly Converting Book Funnels

In a book funnel, you start by offering a well-written book for free, a book that will either help the reader in some way or hook the reader’s interest to read more of your books. (It can be a hardcover book, a paperback, or an eBook).

The catch here is that it cannot be just an ordinary small book with minimal data. It has to be a complete book that people would probably pay $20-$30 to buy from the library. So, you are giving away a complete product here.

However, the book must be prepared in such a way that you leave hooks to your other products that you plan on promoting to these readers at a later stage.

For example, if you are an author, you can leave a quick advertising section after a certain chapter, referring to one of your other books in the same genre. Plus, at the end of the book, leave a promotional page where you may ask the reader to buy your other books. Make sure to leave the website links where they can visit to get your other books.

Or, if you sell software that helps to run sales campaigns on an eCommerce site, you may write a book to teach various strategies to implement such sales campaigns. And in that book, find suitable areas to refer to the activities that can be executed using your tool. You may even include a whole chapter near the end to show how your tool can be used to implement all these strategies on the reader’s website.

The same strategy can be used in many other niches.

Why This Approach Works

If the book provides real value, the reader will be able to trust you. And keeping references to your products in the book means, they will remember it when you reach back to them with your core offer.

Hence, it’s a powerful tactic to increase conversion of your sales funnel.

Let’s consider another example. Suppose you are a business consultant. Then you may write a book on business leadership. And within the book, from time to time, include stats that you have achieved with other businesses to highlight your expertise.

Now, while reading the book, the buyer will certainly love the successful stats. But more importantly, he will love the book even more if the strategies you write about make sense.

However, what your reader doesn’t realize is that now they are more confident about anything you suggest. In fact, when you reach them later, they will remember you, and may even consider the possibility of taking your service.

This extra trust in you will almost double the chances of converting prospects who really need your service.

The same goes when you promote books, software, or any other service.

The book will pave the way for you to easily get into the buyers’ trusted side and make your sales campaign more successful.

Steps Of A Complete Book Funnel

Now before you write the book, or prepare for your funnel, make sure to first plan what products or services you want to eventually sell with your funnel. Your hooks in the book should be planned accordingly.

Also, map out the complete funnel. Get a complete idea of what steps you want your buyers to go through to eventually purchase your main offer.

The steps of your book funnel will vary depending on what your end goal is.

Here’s a quick blueprint to plan your own book funnel. This will be the journey your prospects will go through.

Step 1
Prepare your book

Step 2
Prepare a landing page to opt-in and claim your free book. If it’s a hard copy or paperback, include a checkout step to collect the address as well.
**You may insist the prospect to cover the shipping fee as well.

Step 3
Promote it online via Ads, social media, and emails to your target audience.

Step 4
Prepare a sales funnel that includes a landing page, a checkout page, and a thank you page for your core offer. This funnel will be used to convert your readers into paying customers.
**If you have multiple products, you may also include upsell and downsell offers.

Step 5
Set up an automation email campaign to reach out to the ones who opted in, and send them 3-5 value-added emails over the course of two weeks.
**This will act as a cool-off period for the prospect to read his book, while still getting nurtured to remember you.

Step 6
Launch an email campaign to reach the readers with your main offer funnel in the third week.

Step 7
Prepare another sales funnel with the same core offer, but with an added discount.

Step 8
In the 4th week, reach the ones who didn’t take your core offer, and ask them to get it at a discounted price.

**Make sure to initiate re-targeting Ads for the one who doesn’t end up taking your core offer.

As you can see, this approach is at least a month of effort to execute all the funnel steps, and you will probably be running re-targeting Ads for another month to squeeze out as many buyers as possible.

Now, as good as this sounds, it actually helps you achieve even more. Since the book helped to gain trust, many will remember you for a long time, and you may run sales campaigns to the same people over and over again, maybe with new products/services, in the upcoming years.

Plus, the word of mouth will help to reach more potential buyers out there, that you probably have not targeted initially.

**You can even take it a step further by creating a social community with all your fans, maybe a Facebook Group. This will make it much easier to promote any future offers you may have.

Guide To Creating A Book Funnel In WordPress

Now that you understand what a book funnel is and how you can plan one yourself, let us go ahead and look at how you can devise one in WordPress.

For this guide, we will create a funnel for an Author.

Suppose you are an author who focuses on writing books on Personal Growth. And some of your notable books are:

  • Enhance Your Work-life Balance
  • Productive Psychology
  • The Growth Mindset
  • Performance Anxiety? Let’s Tackle It Together

Now let’s plan a Book Funnel that will help you sell these books in the eBook format. For this funnel, we intend to sell a bundle of eBooks to potential readers.

Let’s plan the whole book funnel step-by-step.

Step 1 – Prepare the Free Book

  1. First, choose one of the books to give away for free or write a new book that is in the same genre. In this example, we will consider giving away the book “Enhance Your Work-life Balance.”
  1. Now, update your publication with areas where you may include short preview Ads of your other books distributed after the completion of a few chapters, let’s say every 3 chapters.
  1. Near the end of the book, include the 1st chapter of one of your other books as a special feature. This will give them a glimpse of the next book. Let’s say, we will highlight the first chapter of “The Growth Mindset.”

Step 2 – Get the Right Tools to Craft Your Sales Funnel

To create a book funnel in WordPress, you will need the following tools:

  • A Funnel Builder
    We will use WPFunnels Pro as the funnel builder. It has the visual planner and everything you need to craft a well-planned book funnel.
  • A way to host products/services
    In this case, we will use WooCommerce to offer the books.
  • An autoresponder Or Email Client
    FluentCRM is a great tool for email automation in WordPress and we will be using it here.

**Make sure to configure WooCommerce and your book products before you start building your funnel.

Step 3 – Setup a Landing Page to Claim Your Free Book

  1. Create a landing page where you will highlight the free book. Make sure to include the benefits of reading this book.

You can create a single Landing page using WPFunnels for this step.

Book Funnel - Landing page for free book
  1. Include an opt-in form where prospects can input their names and emails to claim the free book.
Optin for free book

Step 4 – Create the Sales Funnel for Your Core Offer

  1. Prepare a bundle that includes the three eBooks we intend to offer the prospects.
  1. Devise a 3-step funnel with a Landing page, a Checkout page, and a Thank you page.

Use WPFunnels to create a 3-step funnel.

Book Funnel - sales funnel for selling more books
  1. On the Landing page, make sure to write a compelling copy on why they should get this bundle, the savings they will make, and what great stuff they will learn from these books.
  1. Create a distraction-free Checkout page using a multi-step checkout form.
  1. Design a Thank you page with the purchase summary, and a CTA to join your Facebook group, like your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter.
  1. Once you have these pages ready, go to the first funnel, and in the opt-in set up a redirection after submission into this funnel.
    So, once a prospect opts in, he will get a message to check his email, and then he will be redirected to this funnel, the main offer on your product bundles.

Step 5 – Prepare the Downsell Funnel for Less Interested Buyers

  1. Prepare a funnel with the core offer, but with a 20% discount on its initial offer price. In this funnel, design a landing page with a short sales pitch to take the offer at this special discount.

    **You may take the one-time offer approach to make it more attractive.
  1. Leave the Checkout page and the Thank you page designs the same.

Step 6 – Setup Automation to Reach the Opted In Prospects

  1. In your opt-in form, set up an integration whoever submits the optin form, will be added to your automation tool in a specific list, let’s say, List: Book funnel.

    Then in your core offer funnel, set up an integration where whoever takes the core offer, will be added to your automation tool in the same list with a tag.
    Let’s say, List: Book funnel, Tag: offer_taken.
Assign list & tag for automation
  1. Set up a series of 5 emails at 36 hours intervals to be sent to the ones who don’t have the tag ‘offer_taken’. This means they haven’t taken the bundle offer yet.

    **This is a nurturing campaign.
  2. On the same email sequence, include a 6th email which will be a sales pitch for your book bundle. And there, include a CTA to bring them to your main funnel where you made the core offer. (Refer to Step 4)
  3. Set up another automation email campaign to be launched on the 4th week, to leads that do not have the tag, ‘offer_taken’.
    This means people who did not take your core offer even after the first email sequence, will be part of this email campaign. In this email, include a CTA to bring them to your downsell funnel where you made the core offer at a discount.

Step 7 – Start Promoting Your Free Book

  1. Not that you have the whole funnel set up, start promoting it to your target audience, maybe via paid Ads, or social media.
  1. Set up retargeting Ads for the ones who visit your funnel but do not take the free book or purchase the core offer. This campaign should be continued for at least two months to convert as many of them as possible.

That’s it. Your book funnel is ready. Now it will start getting more buyers to purchase the eBook bundle of the 3 books thanks to the initial free book, and a well-planned funnel journey.

Final Thoughts

As you saw, a book sales funnel is a unique approach but it is one that can land more targeted clients and help to establish a long-term trust in your prospects.

Plus, this is the only funnel strategy that can help authors sell more of their books without too much effort over time. So if you have the scope of writing books, then this is a great strategy you can start planning to use.

If you use a WordPress site, then try using WPFunnels and build your own book funnels now!

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Rifat Ara Chowdhury

About Author

Rifat Ara Chowdhury

Rifat is a young WordPress enthusiast with a passion for Digital Marketing. She writes about marketing funnel, sales funnel & buyer's journey. Find her on Twitter @Rifat2104

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