The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

The Funnel Formula That’s Made Coaches Millions (Step by Step)

• Louise McDonnell • Season 1 • Episode 65

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In this episode of The Social Media Takeaway, I chat with Ellen Finkelstein, internationally renowned trainer, coach, and founder of Change the World Marketing. She shares how she built her online business from the ground up, why funnels are essential for service-based businesses, and the simple steps to set up a profitable email funnel.

Ellen offers straightforward advice on how to grow your list, nurture subscribers, and turn followers into paying clients.

You’ll learn:
 ✅ The must-have components of a simple but powerful funnel
 ✅ How to move people from social media to your email list
 ✅ What to include in your welcome email sequence
 ✅ Tips for promoting your funnel consistently without overwhelm
 ✅ How to use free offers and low-ticket products to start generating sales

If you’re a coach or consultant who wants a consistent flow of leads and clients from your social media, this episode is for you!

SHOW CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
01:00 Ellen’s Start in Online Business
03:00 The Power of Email Lists vs Followers
04:00 What a Funnel Really Is
06:00 First Steps to Building Your Funnel
08:00 Tools and Tech You Need
11:00 How to Keep Emails Valuable and Human
13:00 Promoting Your Funnel on Social Media
15:00 Why You Should Partner and Freebie Swap
17:00 Funnel Pricing Tips
19:00 How to Measure if Your Funnel is Working
21:00 Building Trust Through Consistent Emails
22:00 Ellen’s Free Workbook: Build Your First Funnel
24:00 Final Takeaways

She also shares a brilliant free resource called Build Your First Funnel, a step-by-step workbook to map out your audience, freebie, upsell, and sales sequence.

GRAB IT HERE! 

Connect with Ellen:

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If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to my podcast because more like this is on the way!

If you'd like to book a call to see how I can support you head over to my website here. www.sellonsocialmedia.academy/hello

My 2025 Social Media Content Planner & Guide is now available! Packed with 400 content prompts, expert tips, and $377 worth of free resources to help you save time and get results in 2025.

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Louise McDonnell:

So today, I'm very delighted to welcome Ellen Finkelstein to the show. She is an internationally renowned trainer, coach, and writer, serving presenters and small business owners. She works with small businesses and experts to help them grow their income with profitable email marketing and clear, powerful presentations. You're very welcome.

Elen Finkelstein:

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Louise McDonnell:

I know I probably haven't done your justice there in your bio, 'cause I know that bookshelf behind you is full of all your books. Do you wanna tell us a little bit more about what you've done there in the past up until now?

Elen Finkelstein:

Sure. I actually started my online business when my kids were really little and I needed something to do at home and writing. First I was doing technical editing for computer books, and then I got to actually write them. And so I wrote books on AutoCAD and PowerPoint and flash. Flash doesn't exist anymore, and they were very successful actually. I was writing them in starting like maybe 1997 and , around then through the early two thousands when it was at a time when authors were just starting to be expected to have what you called a platform and author platform. Part of the reason for this was because publishers were not very good at marketing. their concept of marketing was buying shelf space in a bookstore. Basically that was what it was, and maybe now, for a long time they were not good at online marketing at all. So I created a website and I created an email list and I started blogging and sending out newsletters. And then I started teaching other people how to do that. I live in a small town and there weren't a lot of job opportunities and people, that was a way for people to make a living was to create their own platform for whatever they wanted to teach. And so I taught people how to create a website and how to create an email list and how to blog and how to create products. And my first products that I sold myself were eBooks. And I remember that. Book on my top shelf, the AutoCAD Bible. The last edition of it was 1,297 pages, something like that. It's just this humongous book. The full price was $50, but on Amazon it was $30, but my royalty was 10% of the wholesale price, which was half. So half of 30 is 15. And so I would get a dollar 50 or if it was$50, I would get two 2050. That's per book. Now that book, a lot of my books sold really well, and eventually they paid the down payment of my house. I'm not complaining about it, but I also realized that, hey, I have a list. I can write an ebook, like a PDF, and sell it off my website and just all I have to do is pay the PayPal fee. And so if I sell the book for $19 and 99 cents, I can keep $18 of it or something like that, per book instead of a dollar 50 or 2 50. It was such a big difference. And so that was how I switched over to creating all my own products and not depending on publishers.

Louise McDonnell:

And I don't think, you probably realized at the time, Ellen, that, what you were doing in the late nineties was laying the foundation for really what's, I think, the biggest opportunity to make money on the internet right now. Especially if you're a coach or a consultant. I have this mantra that I say all the time and people are fed up of me saying it, but I'm going to say it again. The people that make the most money in general from social media are not the people with the most followers. They're the people with the biggest email lists. And I think that people miss that point, time, and time again. So what we're gonna chat about this evening are marketing funnels. Do you wanna take the stage and tell us?

Elen Finkelstein:

Yes, I could talk about this all day and all night. So it's true that. On social media or on your website or whatever it might be, people see you, but they don't necessarily stay there. Social media is a very evanescent kind of thing, and not everybody's just gonna say, oh yeah, I wanna buy from her right now. And so you need a way to capture people for the long term. And the way you do that very often is offering something that's for free. I call it a freebie but some people call it a lead. Magnet, whatever, but I just call it a freebie. And you give them a link and it takes 'em to a page where they have to put in their name and their email address. And in the process of doing that, they get on your email list, they become your subscriber. Now, there's a bit of technology there to do it, but it's actually not very hard at. You just have to know what it is. And when you do that, then you can follow up with emails forever. As long as you send out interesting content to them they're likely to stay. And at some point they will become buyers. And that's the idea. So a funnel is just a series of offers. Even two offers will be a funnel. So if I give you something for free and you fill out that little form with your name and your email address, and then I send you some follow up emails that say, if you were interested in this, I think you'll also be interested in this other thing, but you have to pay for it. That's a funnel because it's just pretty much automated . You can also put an upsell you might call it, that's your funnel. Once you have the upsell it's a funnel and you can put it on the thank you page. You can have lots of levels on your funnel, but a simple funnel is just a free offer with an upsell.

Louise McDonnell:

But I actually think that, the funnel is the missing part of people's social media. I know that's something that I also help people with as well, building their funnels If you're on social media and you're very active on social media, you could be doing a number of things wrong, but if you're not getting leads, it's possibly because you don't have the right funnel. So for somebody sitting here who's thinking, gosh, I need to create a funnel, what are the steps that they should be thinking of?

Elen Finkelstein:

So the first thing is, you have to realize that a lot of this is about email marketing. So if you have a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group or you have, whatever, or you're just trying to like, engage them, you can sell that way, but not very much because as I was saying before, it's all very evanescent and people are very hesitant to actually buy on social media. So you wanna. Bring people into your email list, which is something that you own. You can't have that account canceled on you. Lots of people have had Facebook accounts canceled. But this is something that you own and so you can create a long-term relationship with people and it's the very beginning of the funnel. So you start the funnel by creating something for free. Usually that's the freebie. And so you have to figure out what do my people want? You have to know your audience, what their problem is from their perspective, and then what your solution is, and you have to provide a kind of quickie solution in the sense I know that makes it sound, that denigrates it a little bit, but something that people can get, see that you know your stuff and see that they can get a benefit from fairly quickly. Good examples are a checklist or a worksheet or something like that where people can really start to solve their problem. And that's what you offer on social media. Now that doesn't mean you don't offer other things as well, but you also wanna get people onto your email list. And so you create this free offer and at the end of the free offer, you have something that says, take the next step. Would you like to go further? And then you offer them some kind of fee. And it could be something low priced or it could be your coaching. you can go from that freebie to almost anything that works. And it depends a lot on your niche and the type of people that you have and so on, like that. If your target market is CEOs, you're not gonna go to something really low price necessarily. Maybe they're ready for consulting, so that might be your next step, You just start by offering that would you like me to go into a little bit more of the technology behind creating that free offer and making it work?

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah, that sounds great. Go for it.

Elen Finkelstein:

Okay. So thank you because I think that's where some people get stuck and in order to do this properly and legally, you need something called an email service provider. And examples are a Weber, an active campaign. So you have to have one of those and that's because you're sending out bulk mail and there are some rules. Both in Europe and in the United States for what you need to do to send out bulk mail to multiple people and these. Companies, they take care of it for you. They create forms. That form we were talking about that opt-in form, that you people put their name and email address so they make that form for you. Okay? and you set up the settings so that when someone fills out the form and clicks, yes, I want it. That person automatically gets on your list so that makes that connection. They create what we call broadcast emails, which are just emails you send out whenever you want to your subscribers. It's very complicated and confusing because different email service providers use different terminology for the same thing, and some people just use auto, the word auto for an email service provider that does anything. But I try to use the generic terms as much as possible, but the autoresponders are the emails that people get. Automatically when they sign up. everybody listening has probably signed up for something and gotten this autoresponder that says, thanks for requesting such and such, here's the link for it. And that is the first autoresponder. But you wanna do more than that because those auto responders are the emails that you send out that have the highest open rate.'cause the people just indicated their interest right now. And so you can make an upsell. which means creating a funnel. And you can tell people what you do and you can engage them and you should engage them Obviously you wanna make it look nice or whatever, but that's really all there is. You take the code, they give you and you set this form up so that It puts people on a specific list with a certain tag and what, thank you. They get right afterwards so that they know to look for the email. You just have these settings that set it up, but that's really all it is. It's just the form and the auto responders and your broadcast emails and that's how it's done.

Louise McDonnell:

So if you're listening in and you have never done this before, it might sound a bit complicated 'cause it's new but the whole thing about it is that once you set it up. And once you kinda map out, okay, when somebody fills in this form, they're gonna get this email automatically, it's gonna happen in the background, and they're going to get the freebie. And then after that, two days later, they're gonna get another email and two days later they're gonna get another email. And once you set it up and let it play, it'll just play. And you don't have to do anything more except. Track it and make sure that it's working effectively for you. What do you say to the people?'cause I know Ellen, there are people sitting, listening, going, oh, but I hate when I get all those emails. What do you say to those people?

Elen Finkelstein:

So there are two kinds of emails. Those are the auto responders and the broadcast emails you just set out whenever you want, like once a week. You need to find people who have a problem that you solve and therefore really want your emails. You know what I'm saying? People will unsubscribe. Don't worry about that. You need to write emails that are valuable to people, and that's really the key thing. if your emails. Really help people. You're giving, let's say each time you're giving people a tip on how to lose weight or a tip on how to improve their health, or a tip on, whatever it might be to build their business then people are going to love it. So you have to pull away from the idea that. I'm just trying to make money. The idea is that I'm trying to solve their problems. I'm trying to give them the resources they need. And when you do it like that, then yes, you can make money.

Louise McDonnell:

But I suppose at the end of the day, people, especially, if you're selling a service, it's a little bit harder because you can't see the service and you can't touch the service. And the service is delivered by individuals. The likelihood of let's say you have a coaching program where you're selling, some kind of a consultancy. People are never going to go on your website or on your social media if they don't know you and they don't like you and they don't trust you, they're just never gonna rock up and give you a few thousands dollars.

Elen Finkelstein:

Exactly.

Louise McDonnell:

So email marketing and funnel building becomes part of what you have to do because people have to get to know you first.

Elen Finkelstein:

It's your long-term way of building trust and showing your expertise so that people can get to the point of hiring you. You have to give people little tidbits of things and so on that , I guess people sometimes think, how can I think of all these things? But today, especially with ai, with all your own knowledge, you could easily put together 50 tips in a few minutes, really, with a combination of you and AI and, okay, that's your tip for the next year for a weekly newsletter. And yeah it's really not that hard.

Louise McDonnell:

I think possibly you just need to, want to do it and you need to be focused.

Elen Finkelstein:

Yes. You need to be I like to say consistent and persistent. You need to show that. And by the way when you have that, then people respect that and start to trust you. Just that they know that you're always showing up. And that's really a good sales technique in and of itself.

Louise McDonnell:

And so once you've built this funnel, how have you got any tips for promoting it?

Elen Finkelstein:

So I do, and I guess let's start with social media. Technique in a systematic way, consistent and persistent way. And that is to find groups that let you post. So on Facebook for example, in my Change the World Marketing Group, there's a thread there called Monday messages and people can post their offers, whatever it be. And so I have a list of other people's groups that I post in and I've systematized it. So I have more than one free offer, so we have the cycle and. it's all laid out in a spreadsheet. You need to find groups that contain your target market, that are appropriate for you and that will let you do this. And you want some variety. If you haven't, a couple of things that you can offer that's helpful. I would recommend not sticking only with facebook. So LinkedIn has groups that let you post. They don't tend to have this thing of a specific day. So usually if you can post, you can just post on any day you want. I don't know why LinkedIn people don't do that, but they don't'cause I think it's a good idea. Reddit has subreddits. Some of them let you post, and it's a very engaged community. the traditional internet marketing community often doesn't even think about Reddit. So wherever you can find places to post and have a schedule and just do it that will pretty much automate you getting new people on your list every day, really and it's not a lot every day, but it adds up. That's one great way of doing it. So that's social media And I guess the whole thing about systematizing it is so important. I can't imagine having to wake up in the morning and manually try to figure out where I'm gonna post today every single day. It's just overwhelming. So it needs to be a schedule and copy needs to all be there, so you just go and do it. plus we all know it's easy to get absorbed into Facebook. you go into your social media, put in what you're going to do, you post what you're gonna post, even if it's on your timeline, and then don't look at anything else. So That's one way of doing it. speaking on podcasts or on virtual summits, or live, with associations or wherever you can get a place to speak. Any kind of speaking is great because people get to know you. They hear you speaking and they see you and there's a lot of trust built up like that compared to. Social media, although I do say that you could use video on social media, which would try to bridge that a little bit. But speaking is a great way of doing it. And then you can write articles. And then finally, I guess I would say partnering with people. So there's a thing called a freebie swap basically that means I'm going to promote your free thing and you're gonna promote my free thing. And we just take turns doing it. We agree to do it and we might say, we're gonna get so many clicks, we'll do it. Or we might say, we'll do so many emails, or we'll do it this week. Whatever it might be you partner with other people when you promote me, it's like people who trust you that referral gets transferred over to me a little bit and vice versa, of course. And so I think people don't do enough partnering or don't do enough freebie swaps and it is really valuable.

Louise McDonnell:

And actually I would add to that in terms of promoting your funnel, like every social media channel you have has a LinkedIn bio. So the LinkedIn bio, it should be some kind of a free, somebody to opt onto your list or some kind of a freebie. So you can use paid ads as well, especially if you have an upsell or a downsell, because even if you're gonna make money on the back of it sometimes very worthwhile just paying to get in front of people. Also worth looking at. So what kind of price points are popular at the moment, Ellen? And if people are thinking about having different levels to their funnel.

Elen Finkelstein:

I think it's really variable and really depends on what you really offer and who you're offering it to. So in the traditional internet marketing world where nothing is ever more than $97, then your trip wire is going to be very low. Even a dollar or $7 or$27, that's going to be your next offer, and there's gonna be a fairly. A good amount of value in that. And only then are you going to go up to other levels after that. And some people will have a funnel of, free and maybe$7, and then $47 and $97 and then, 197, whatever it is, they have a lot of levels and doesn't go that's like the traditional internet marketing. That's like where I started, my coach was like that. And I don't think he ever sold anything for more than a hundred dollars. And I know somebody who's making seven figures doing that, but certainly lots of people who were making multiple six figures, never selling something for more. I don't know, maybe $97 or$147, something like that. They might be using a membership, so some of them, have recurring income that way, but, it's just one way of doing it. And, the people, their clients Who are also doing things on that level.

Louise McDonnell:

How do you know When your funnel is being profitable, like, how do you know? Okay, this is really good. I'm gonna let it take over. Or I'm gonna start pushing this out.

Elen Finkelstein:

So you have to do, some calculations that you have to do but if you feel like you're getting a reasonable response, like a reasonable upsell. Then you can see, okay, so if I get a hundred people and, 10% of that pay $27 for my upsell, and so that's $270, then I can spend$270 a month on ads and break. even, you can do something like that. So I think that's just a matter of looking at your stats and figuring out when to scale.

Louise McDonnell:

So what would be, let's say, what's considered a good conversion rate on a landing page?

Elen Finkelstein:

If it's free and if it's paid is gonna be different.\ 'Cause obviously more people are gonna sign up for something for free than for something that's paid which is one of the values of a funnel is that. If you hit somebody with something paid right off the bat and they don't know who you are, it's hard. It's called cold traffic. They just come there, it's like you were saying, it's like people aren't just gonna, buy from you just on social media so easily, but if they already have been getting emails from you and they know who you are, then you give them the upsell based on that. your conversion rate is going to be higher. So a good conversion rate for a free offer. In general, I would say anything above 50% is going to be good. And sometimes 25% is okay. If I explain something for free it could be an event also. It could be a free webinar, it could be a free PDF. They download whatever it is because I made sure that I give people all the information they need to know and then they like they don't sign up. And I go like, why? Like you clicked 'cause you were interested, why not complete it? And that's the conversion rate. So they've gotten to that page, but it didn't convert. They didn't do it. And sometimes they say, I got busy and I forgot about it. and I say to them, you're wasting your time. because I think this is a thing that one of the characteristics of a successful business person is being able to be decisive. And I don't know, it's like you're just wasting time there.

Louise McDonnell:

And like for all the reasons you said above, sometimes somebody can click through and get distracted or click through and they're not quite sure. So all these things can affect your conversion rate.

Elen Finkelstein:

If you are a coach who isn't getting enough clients, said that at the top. One of the main problems you might have would be that your messaging isn't clear enough so that people know that you can help them. So this, will show you how to clarify your messaging, that kind of thing. You just have to be really focused on their problem and who they are and so you could certainly increase the conversion rate by being precise and concrete about what you're giving people.

Louise McDonnell:

And I suppose just to reiterate something that you said from earlier on, like the example that you gave at the very beginning, Ellen, which was, your $50 book and you were getting like $2 50 outta this and that is not unusual to this day, especially if you're published author and you're selling books in stores, like what the author gets from the book is just absolutely cents and pennies rather than lots of, and lots of money. So if you can crack this and you can grow your email list, this is really a solid foundation for growing your business. And again, as I said earlier on, if you're selling a service, you have to do this because otherwise you're never gonna have a true putt of new clients. And if you're selling products exactly the same thing. You need to have your email list, you need to be nurturing, you need to be continually growing it. So I know you have a lovely freebie for everybody here this evening. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about it?

Elen Finkelstein:

Sure, I would love to tell you about it. So it's called building your First Funnel. And I would call it a workbook. So you're going to work through a lot of the things that we talked about today. So you're going to work through who your target market is, what problem of theirs you solve, and how you solve it. And then you write it out into a freebie. You make the, main points that's gonna go into a freebie or lead magnet, that kind of thing. A PDF is very common. It could be a template, it could be a video. There lots of possibilities. So I mentioned some of those as well, the different possible structures in it. And then I talk about naming it. And by the way, chat GPT is. Really good place to go for names or naming things. Then I have an offer to meet with me just for 15 minutes to nail your path to income, take the next step, what am I gonna do next? How am I gonna take this freebie and actually implement it kind of thing. And then the next section after that is the upsell. So you're making a funnel, so you have a freebie and you have one product, in this case a low price product.'cause I think it's easiest for most people If you haven't done this at all. It's just helpful to go through the simplest, way of doing it. And then you might change it afterwards, but something simple like that and pricing it, I do talk about pricing it and then the freebie just has an opt-in page, which I just described, but the product has a sales page, so it's a little bit more of a description to try to get people to. Pay you some money, so you're going to make it a little bit longer. And then I talk about how you put them together to make the funnel, how you make it automatic. And I have all the different steps so that you have the opt-in form and a thank you page and an auto responder email, and then there's a download page where they download and then you know, where they, you put the upsell and how they go to the sales page. Then I have a diagram, then I write them all out, and then I make my offer again for a short little consultation and I talk about different kinds of tools that you might need to use. and then I also talk about testing it and launching it. So that's it. That's the whole thing. It's pretty complete for something for free. I think it could make or break a business.

Louise McDonnell:

Fantastic. And if you're tuning in, do you have the link.

Elen Finkelstein:

Oh, Yeah. So I have a basic link for it. Change the world marketing.com/and your first funnel with hyphens between each word.

Louise McDonnell:

So where would people find this wonderful free resource then Ellen?

Elen Finkelstein:

So I have a short link for you. It's www.ellenhelps.me. Ellen helps me slash first funnel written out. No spaces, no hiding, so Ellen helps.me is a website that I use for the sole purpose of creating short. And there's nothing on that website, no content at all. But so it'll redirect to my Change the World Marketing. So it's www.ellenhelps.me/first funnel written out.

Louise McDonnell:

That's so clever. And I think that about sums up you as well you're so clever as well. And I'm not surprised that you're such a success. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed our conversation. and final message, the people that make the most money, you're not the people with the most followers, they're the people with the biggest Gmail list. Thank you so much, Ellen.