When we want to succeed in business, modeling what can work is the fastest approach. It also happens when building sales funnels and funnel hacking helps entrepreneurs like yourself who would like to learn how to sell products online or which type of funnel would be best for success.
Funnel Hacking is an effective technique you should do in the funnel building process. Make sure to read the guide from start to finish then you will understand:
What is Funnel Hacking and why it’s important?
Exactly step by step how you can do it like a pro
Helpful tips and strategy
The drawback of this technique and our best advice
Now let get started!
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What Is Funnel Hacking?
What is FunnelHacking?
Funnel Hacking is a process of analyzing your competitors’ marketing and sales processes. By doing this, you can figure out the type of funnel, sales message, offers, or landing page designs that work for your competitors. Then you can model and test it for your sales funnel or marketing process.
This is what strategic digital marketers may love or hate, but it’s still effective.
The essence of funnel hacking is: Borrowing concepts from the famous funnels, including layouts, typefaces, colors, and elements, to leverage their revenue-generating capabilities.
If you’re a beginner or the first time creating a sales funnel, there is no reason to create everything from scratch.
Most people start with the sales funnel templates. However, it’s not the primary metric to make your funnel work. Instead, Hook, Story, Offer are what you should care about.
"Success leaves clues.” Develop a strategy that works and follow it. Your strategy may be the same as the person you’re modeling, or it may be adjusted for your present circumstances. Tony Robbins
There is no reason to reinvent the wheel; it would be best to model what already works and add your twist.
Funnel Hacking Is Not About?
To be clear, Funnel-Hacking is not about copying everything elements, designs, and sales messages from competitors.
Watch the video below from Neil Patel; he explains what you should be careful about and best practices for funnel hacking.
Why is Funnel Hacking Important?
One of the simplest and most important ways to expand any business is through funnel hacking. You might begin to examine your competitor’s techniques in your firm if you can delve deep into the sales funnel and then reverse-engineer what they are doing.
This step may include everything from email sequences, price points, landing pages, or even retargeting advertisements in the online business.
Split testing different components of your sales funnel might give fantastic results. However, blindly testing seems to be a lengthy and sloppy mechanism, right?
By capitalizing on the funnel hacking’s culture and immersing yourself in your competitor’s procedures, you can truly realize how effective they were and begin to see comparable outcomes in your firm with less effort and expense.
While this will not happen overnight, discovering what is working and what isn’t is ten times quicker than trying some ideas from fresh.
This funneling happens on a few levels, although you do not have purposeful marketing funnel phases. Using a strategic strategy will significantly boost the number of consumers you generate.
Who Started The Term "Funnel Hacking"?
The term and strategy “Funnel Hacking” were first introduced inside a book called DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson. This new way to build your business has changed the face of marketing forever, as it allows for more targeted, cost-effective advertising.
Learn more: Get Dotcom Secrets book for FREE.
Competitors are analyzed by their core business model or value propositions, leading into other aspects like consumers’ pain points (why customers buy). This will allow marketers to create better ad campaigns for reaching out to those specific needs.
It also helps identify what products/services might not work well with your existing offerings to avoid wasting time on projects doomed to fail early before they even start implementing them fully.
Is Funnel Hacking Legal?
Of course, Funnel Hacking is legal. The entire Funnel Hacking process analyzes competitors to find out what works and what doesn’t — then modeling and testing it in your business.
Varying laws of each country prohibit some uses, but the mere act of installing a “funnel” to create leads for marketing purposes has generally been considered fair game. Besides, if landing pages and lead capture forms are used responsibly and ethically, there are no way funnels could be unethical or even unexpected by recipients.
The 8 Simple Steps To Hack Any Funnels
Funnel Hacking Tools
Before we start, here are all our favorite Funnel Hacking software, ready when we are so they can help us accomplish anything in the Funnel Hacking process.
Funnel builder software: Clickfunnels or Systeme (Free)
Webpage screenshot: GofullPage, Nimbus
Traffic analysis: Similarweb, Ahref
1. Identify Your Goal and Target Audience
It’s critical to have such a clear vision before applying any funnel hack. This first step entails understanding who you aim for or how much your target revenue is.
Who are you trying to sell to? Develop your target segments, and keep them as specific as possible. Many companies have failed because they ignored this phase, which might destroy your funnel since you don’t even have a clear picture of who you are serving.
Get more specific. You will need the fundamentals, such as marital status, age, children, income level, job, hobbies, and more details.
You can attain funnel greatness if you process this stage carefully and design your optimum customer avatars.
2. Make A List Of Funnel Hacking Competition
Make a shortlist of your top competing companies before you plan to do anything else. It would be best if you began with the ones that you believe will out-earning you.
Identify the major companies in your sector that have outweighed brand recognition on the Internet. Remember that we’re interested in seeing what products or services they’re providing and strongly marketing online.
Make two separate lists of your competitors:
Direct Competition
Direct competition occurs when two or more companies offer identical goods or services; businesses compete for similar potential markets.
Apple and Microsoft are examples of direct competitors as they provide identical items to similar customers.
Indirect Competition
Indirect competition is a disagreement between suppliers whose goods or services aren’t identical but may satisfy similar consumer needs.
This competition type necessitates some further thoughts. A great example of an indirect competitor is group exercise classes versus one-on-one personal training lessons.
They compete directly on the issue they solve (assisting people in getting it into better condition), but indirectly since they serve distinct markets – Individuals that prefer one-on-one training versus those who favor group exercise.
They are, after all, successful for a reason. Those companies do not all must always be direct competitors; they might even be in similar niches.
In any case, their funnels must contain useful principles that you may use somehow.
If you want to learn more about how to find your competitors’ funnels, watch the video of Trey Bearor below!
3. Buy Their Products
The process of going through and purchasing their stuff is at the heart of your funnel hacking. The only way to learn the keys of high-performing funnels is to open your wallet, then put the money wherever your study is.
Sell Like Crazy book sales page
One Time Offer Box
Order confirmation email
The initial step with online products is to connect to their order page within the platform. Therefore, it will be your primary step.
Watch all of their sales funnel films, read all their sales funnel emails, then purchase every variation of their cross-sells, down sells, upsells, and whatever else you may get your hands on.
4. Save the URL & Screenshot Everything
Begin by checking each of your competitor’s funnels:
Back-end Funnel
Front-end Funnel
Downsells
Upsells
Order Pages
Take complete screenshots of each page you visit, as well as every advertisement or retarget advertising you see. While you’re walking through your competitors’ funnel, record a video to analyze later.
Note: Remember to preserve the URLs of those landing pages since they may be helpful in the future.
5. Analyze Their Traffic Sources
It makes no difference how good your funnel is if you can’t get traffic to it.
For two primary reasons, the top-earning funnels are smashing it:
Reason 1: Their funnels are fantastic.
Reason 2: They understand how to discover and engage with their target audience, which you need to focus on right now.
There are numerous excellent tools available for investigating your competition, including:
SimilarWeb
It is among the best analytics sites for spying on competitors. The free site provides a wealth of information on your competitors’ website keyword analysis, referral sources, traffic volume, and much more in its paid edition.
Facebook Ad Library
The Ad Library on Facebook promotes marketing transparency by providing a complete, searchable collection of all present ads appearing across Facebook Products.
Anybody with/without a Facebook account is welcome to browse the Library.
Powerful Ad Spy
When talking about spying on competitors, PowerAdSpy stands second-to-none.
Over 6 million Facebook advertising from 15 countries is stored in a database.
Has the most recent Facebook advertisements.
Keep track of every landing page, creative, and advertising.
Track successful initiatives only and show their engagement.
SpyFu
It’s a wonderful idea to utilize SpyFu to look up any rival and collect your competitor’s keywords. It will analyze your competitors’ PPC & SEO strategies and prevent their blunders.
Screenshot Retargeting Ads & Their Landing Pages
It is a fairly all-around funnel hack that can be used in a variety of businesses. Most likely, one of your competitors utilizes some retargeting (on Facebook, Google, etc.).
If you notice these adverts, take a screenshot of the ad and the landing page with which they are connected. It might break down an offer they are making to you and the action they want you to take.
It could be in the bonuses form for taking something previously provided in a webinar, after email sequences, after VSLs, or other activities that you did not finish to the end.
Depending on this, you may re-create a similar landing page in your funnel and receive ideas for retargeting designs to present to your customers.
6. Look At Backend - Email Sequences
This phase in funnel hacking entails reading all of the backend email sequences automatically delivered from your competitors’ sales funnels.
You might receive automatic promotional respondents from your competition if you join in their email campaigns. It enables you to observe how your competitors market to potential clients.
Please take note of how frequently and how quickly they send you their emails. Read everything you can and pay attention to how they reveal their sales.
As a funnel hacker, once again, analyze their sales copy and take copious notes. It will demonstrate how they attract sales funnel traffic to their company.
7. Rebuild Your Own Sales Funnel
If you completed the strategy stated above, you should’ve put those pieces together and be ready to design your Funnel using what you learned from your rivals. Here are five easy stages to building your Funnel:
Launch your preferred funnel designer and begin creating your pages. Build them conceptually comparable but distinct from your competitors. Utilize a variety of vocabulary and graphics, and inject a little of yourself into the mix.
Next, access your autoresponder and begin writing your emails to save time.
Try your best to grasp the sequencing, then polish them for incoming traffic.
Create the advertisements and distribute them on social platforms that have shown to be the most useful for your niche.
Make a splash and start your Funnel.
Indeed, this seems to be a considerable amount of labor taken to create this work. Only because you Funnel Hack your competitors doesn’t imply that you have a viable business.
There’s also a lot more to running a business, but we’ll reserve that for the next time.
Download free share funnel: Template 1, template 2, template 3
Drawback Of Funnel Hacking
Sometimes Funnel Hacking Provides Unreliable Information
Just because that company has a strong funnel does not indicate it is lucrative. Without grasping the intricacies of competitors’ business models, you’re essentially establishing your brand on shaky ground.
For example, suppose you would like to open a supplement business and decide to funnel hacking a well-known competing brand that offers fantastic initial supplement items for only $9.99.
You purchase the item to test the cross, and up sales, then you say to yourself, “Sweet, I would’ve never imagined constructing a funnel such as this one!” and you replicate it to the letter.
The difficulty is that you are not sure whether or not this introductory product is truly working for them; and even when it is, you might be ignorant that their entire objective in promoting that product is to break even so that they can push those consumers further up the value ladder to purchase things with high ROI.
If you choose to exactly replicate their business but lack the financial funding to sustain it, you could be setting yourself up for an imminent self-destruct. What would you do if you’ve exhausted all of your resources on a plan that was too expensive for your business to maintain in its first place?
Our advice: Drive your concentration to your own business rather than focusing too much on what other firms are doing. Examine all of your resources, create a strategy that is within budget and connected with your company goals, then execute, examine, optimize, expand, and repeat.
And that’s the growth trick that guarantees success.
Funnel Hacking Results In You Missing The Mark On Your Target Audience
“It’s another thing to improve on what presently exists; it’s quite another to create the next generation,” said Vincent Bastien in The Luxury Strategy.
When the famous car brand, Toyota, chose to build Lexus, they only had a purpose in mind: reduce Mercedes’ share of the market by developing a vehicle that competed with their e-class.
Toyota invested thousands and thousands of dollars studying the e-class during the stages of development of the first Lexus to repeat what customers liked best and keep improving on what their customers disliked.
It’s reasonable to say that now the Lexus must have been a success after 30 years, but it wasn’t.
Toyota’s goal was to create a strong line of cars, which might compete with other luxury brands in general, not only a competitive car that only competes with Mercedes e-class.
“But I do see Lexus automobiles everywhere; surely they accomplished something right,” you could be thinking.
Toyota believed that by creating a new improved (and considerably less costly) model of the e-class, they might enter into the high-end car market. But they fail to understand that high-end customers opt for luxury brand names over the price tag or features.
So at the end of the day, Lexus still can neither enter the e-class market nor build up its differentiation.
Best Tips For Funnel Hacking
1. Don't Copy, Should Modelling
First and foremost, do not simply replicate the competitor’s funnel. You need to look at their funnel and figure out why they built it that way.
Do they experience ups or downs in sales? What are the downs and ups in sales? Do they assist customers in obtaining outcomes more quickly?
If they do not, you’ll want to ensure your funnel features down and up sales to help individuals obtain results faster.
You may better know what people need before you offer them by knowing the funnel or the trip you are leading them through.
Unless you do not even know what consumers want, whatever funnel you mimic, you will fail.
2. Customize The Message That Relevant To Your Audience
The second thing you should consider is how relevant the readers and traffic are in comparison to theirs. Make sure that their visitors are somewhat relevant to yours.
There is a better probability that replicating that funnel will succeed when you two share the same or related visitor base. If these two factors aren’t that closely linked, duplicating that funnel doesn’t guarantee that this will work for you.
3. Take Your Budget Into Account
The final factor to consider is whether or not the ad expense can be sustained. Most people who use funnels use YouTube and Facebook advertisements, and you can run Facebook and Youtube ads or even spy on their ads.
However, if you check on their advertising and make similar ones, there’s no assurance that they’ll work straight immediately.
They might have Lookalike Audiences that you haven’t submitted. These factors impact their ROY and could make it more difficult for you to create a similar ROY from adverts.
It doesn’t imply you cannot get there; rather, it means: do you have enough cash flow to support it? It might take several months to get through, and replicating their funnel doesn’t work in most circumstances if you can’t afford it.
4. Test Segments
Last but not least, blatantly copying someone is a terrible idea because it takes a lot of work and time to imitate someone.
You should look at their marketing processes, and sales funnel, then start testing little segments of it in your firm. If you discover that it works, you know that you can do more of it and imitate them more.
It’s all about adding up sales and down sales, and if they have that and you know it works for them, that may be the first thing you test. If you discover that they are using webinars and are effective, the first thing you may try is simply hosting a simple webinar.
It doesn’t have to be as sophisticated as theirs, and it doesn’t have to convert as well. But if you discover that your audience enjoys webinars and that they convert, you now know that approach works for your audience as well.
[Bonus] Free Funnel Hacking Course
You’re about to discover the secret sauce that top marketers use to create funnels that convert.
Now, we know that Funnel Hacking is a powerful technique used by top marketers around the world. It allows you to take an existing funnel and clone it, making it your own. This means you can take any proven sales process and make it work for your business with just a few tweaks here and there.
Once you know how this works, the best part is that you can do this yourself in minutes. If you want to learn more about this technique deeply, I highly recommend you join the Funnel Hacking Secrets Webinar (free).
Through one hour webinar, you will learn:
How to ETHICALLY steal over $1,000,000 worth of Funnel Hacks from your competitor… for under $100
How to clone your competitor’s proven Funnel (inside of ClickFunnels) in less than 10 minutes
How to get the same customers, who are going to your competitor’s websites, to go to YOUR Funnel instead
Frequently Asked Questions
Growth Hacking vs. Marketing Funnel Hacking
Growth hacking seems to be a catch-all word for developing repeatable sales funnel and marketing processes that accelerate an organization’s growth. It addresses the product and the marketing aspects of the company.
The term “funnel hacking” refers to the “marketing” of the equation component.
They both conduct extensive experimentation across various distribution and marketing channels to determine what works and what’s not.
Growth hackers may seek to develop the firm in terms of downloads, users, and revenue, with profits as a side metric. On the other hand, funnel hackers are fascinated with the amount of profit that the funnel generates.
For instance, if the marketing funnel generates $3 in sales for each $2 in advertising costs, a funnel hacker will have no trouble injecting $2,000,000 into the funnel. They can be confident that they will make another $3,000,000 at least.
On the contrary, a growth hacker may focus on attracting the most people with the least money, despite how much bottom-line income the funnels generate.
Lead Generation vs. Marketing Funnel Hacking
Funnel hacking and lead generation are complementary methods of expanding an online/offline business.
Lead generation is the voluntary collection of information such as a location, email address, job title, phone number, business size, and so on that can be used to market to individuals later.
Funnel hacking assists you in determining what has succeeded for your competition and applying it to your organization.
The landing page is the front-end of your company’s marketing funnel for lead generation: initial impression and access point.
Email Marketing vs. Marketing Funnel Hacking
If lead generation seems to be the “face” of the marketing funnel, email marketing would be the “backend.”
When you have your visitor’s contact info, email must be their primary if you can’t afford a communication channel throughout the process. Compared to lead generation and growth hacking, you may learn from competitors and then hack your way to an effective email marketing strategy.
Email plays the same supporting role as well. Rather than being a separate approach, your email funnel can function as one funnel within one funnel, particularly focusing on bringing subscribers from demand to action.
Conclusion
Funnel hacking is among the most critical processes that any company must go through to expand. You can find new ideas to help your own business expand by examining what other successful firms are doing.
Use the resources, tools, and techniques we’ve provided you with to funnel hack into your competitors.
Note that getting overwhelmed is natural at first, but you will gain confidence in hacking and even develop your high-converting funnels as you grow.
We hope that our guidelines will be useful in offering additional information to you in creating your personal brand and helping it get off the ground soon.
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