In This Post:

How do you get more sales from your sales funnel?

The best way to get more sales from your sales funnel is to follow up with the people who didn't buy the first time, since only about 5% of your audience is ready to buy at any given moment. Set up a Second Chance Funnel: an automated flash sale that goes back out to your non-buyers a few weeks later, after a short nurture sequence that rebuilds trust.

There are sales sitting inside your funnel right now that you already earned and never collected. These are people who raised their hand. They went through your whole funnel and they didn't buy. Most business owners write those people off. They look at the conversion rate, feel a little deflated, and move on.

I want to show you what to do with them instead. Because I have  a client who just doubled the sales from her masterclass funnel without spending another dollar on ads or changing her offer. All she added was this: the Second Chance Funnel.

Prefer to watch this video?

Want to listen to this on the go?

So if you’ve ever built a funnel, sent traffic to it, and felt a little let down by what came back, this one is for you. Maybe you made your money back and you were happy with the result, but underneath that there was a bit of resentment too, because it took so much to get people in the door and so few of them (percentage-wise) actually bought.

Because just because someone didn't buy the first time they saw your offer, that doesn't mean they are never going to buy it. It could have been the wrong time for them. They might have needed a little more nurturing and a little more trust. Or it might have slipped through the cracks when life got busy. A non-purchase usually just means not yet.

So today I am going to walk you through the exact system that gets your offer back in front of those people 4 to 6 weeks later and collects the sales you already worked so hard for. We will talk about why your non-buyers are actually your warmest audience, what the Second Chance Funnel is, the nurture bridge most people skip right over, the little scheduling trick that makes an automated sale feel timely and why this becomes the best testing ground in your whole business. Stick with me until the end, because I want to tell you exactly what happened with my client and the numbers behind it ↓

Why a Non-Buyer Isn't a No

Here is what most people get wrong about a funnel. They treat the moment someone reaches the end without buying as the end of the whole relationship. But really, it’s much closer to the beginning.

There’s a piece of research I love for this, and it is called the 95:5 rule. It comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: What they found is that at any given moment, only about 5% of your market is actually ready to buy. The other 95% are just out of market for now, and they move themselves back in when their life and their timing line up. So when your funnel converts a small slice of people and the rest don’t take you up on your offer, that is just the 95% doing exactly what people naturally do. 

Then there is the question of how long buying actually takes, and this is where it gets interesting. Google studied the path to purchase and found that a buyer needs around 7 hours of engagement, across 11 different touchpoints, in 4 separate places before they are ready to buy. Most funnels give someone a handful of touchpoints on a good day. So you are essentially asking a person to decide at hour one, when what they really need is hour seven.

And it is taking people even longer than it used to. 75% of buyers say they take more time to make a purchase decision today than they did just two years ago. People are being more careful with their money and more careful with who they trust. So the smart move is to design your funnel with that in mind and lots of extra nurture baked in.

This is exactly where my client comes in. She was spending real money driving traffic to a masterclass. She made her money back and she was happy with the result. But she was also a little resentful. She’d done everything right, and it still felt like it wasn’t quite enough.

The shift for her was a simple one. These are people, not numbers. That 95% who didn’t buy were still mostly perfect-fit people she’d already paid to build, sitting right there and waiting for the right moment. So we stopped treating the masterclass as the finish line and started treating it as the very first opportunity or invitation.

What Is The Second Chance Funnel?

So let's talk about what the Second Chance Funnel actually is. At its simplest, it's an automated, evergreen flash sale for your paid offer that goes out 4 to 6 weeks after someone finishes your original funnel without buying.

Let me break that down a little. It's a 3 to 5 day flash sale, and it runs on autopilot inside your email service provider. So once you build it one time, it works for every new person who comes through your funnel from then on. It uses the same offer your funnel already used, or a variation (like a different bonus) you want to test out. You already know that offer converts for some people, so this just gets it back in front of everyone it didn't close the first time, at a moment when more of them have naturally moved back into buying mode.

And here's the piece people always forget: the trigger. At the very end of your core funnel follow-up sequence, you add one final step. If the person hasn't purchased yet, you tag them and drop them into the Second Chance Funnel. That little tag is what makes the whole thing run without you having to lift a finger.

The Nurture Bridge

Now there’s a big “secret” to this that almost everyone skips, and it's the part that actually earns you that second yes.

You don't want to go straight from the end of your funnel into the flash sale. In between, you send a short nurture sequence. My favorite version of this is 2 to 3 weeks of automated weekly emails, and each one promotes a free piece of content that relates back to your paid offer. A blog post, a podcast episode, a video you've already made. You're pulling from content you already have sitting there, so it's really low lift for you.

Think back to Google's 7 hours across 11 touchpoints. The nurture bridge is where you get to rack up a bunch of those touchpoints and time. Every single email is another deposit into that engagement bank and another reminder that you're the person who helps with this specific problem. So by the time the flash sale actually shows up in their inbox, you're someone who's been showing up and helping them for weeks. That's the difference between a flash sale that feels like a cash grab and one that feels like really good timing.

The Stupid Simple Trick That Makes Evergreen Feel Timely

Okay, this next one is a tiny move but I really want you to save it, because it doesn’t cost anything but completely changes how the whole sale feels.

When your flash sale is evergreen, it's really tempting to write something like “this ends in 3 days” or “you've got 48 hours left.” The problem is that kind of countdown language tends to give away that the whole thing is automated. It could end any day, for anyone, at any time, and people can feel that.

So instead, run your sale on real calendar days. Stick to a Monday to Friday schedule, or just pick a set start day and a set end day. That way you get to say something like “the doors close on Monday” instead of “the doors close in 3 days.” It's the exact same automation running behind the scenes. A specific day feels like a real event happening on a real calendar, and a vague countdown feels a lot more like a script. It's a little detail, but it makes a big difference in how timely and real your sale feels.

Your Best Testing Ground

And once this whole thing is up and running, you've actually built yourself the best testing ground in your entire business. 

Here's why. Your second-chance audience already knows you. They've been through your funnel and your nurture bridge, so they're warm and they're pretty forgiving. That makes them the perfect group to experiment on. You can test a different angle on the same offer. You can test a new bonus and watch what moves the needle. You can test your subject lines, your hooks and even the order of your emails.

Every time the sale runs, you learn something new, and you get to fold that learning right back in. So the best part is that this doesn't just run in the background and stay exactly the same. It's a system that actually makes your whole funnel a little better every single month without adding anything extra to your plate.

What’s Next?

So let me tell you how it actually turned out for my client. We added the nurture bridge and the second-chance sale onto the end of her masterclass funnel, and we didn't change a single thing about her traffic or her core offer. She ended up making roughly the same number of sales from the Second Chance Funnel that she made from the original masterclass. She basically doubled her results, purely because people got a longer runway with her. This became one of my all-time favorite funnel optimizations.

So if you're not doing this yet, you really are leaving a lot of sales and a lot of money on the table. Go build it. Map out your sequence, set your trigger tag, write your nurture bridge and turn on your Monday to Friday flash sale.

And if you're sitting here feeling a little disappointed with what your sales systems are doing for your business right now, let's take a look at it together. This is exactly the kind of work I do with my clients inside the Scaling Partnership. You book a call, we walk through all the pieces you already have in place, and we optimize them so more of that 95% actually turns into buyers. That's how we get you scaling over the next 3 to 9 months, without pouring more money into ads or burning yourself out trying to make even more content. Check out the link down below to book a call to see whether The Scaling Partnership is the right next move for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Why don't people buy the first time they go through your funnel?

Most people who go through your funnel aren't ready to buy yet, and that's normal. Google's research found buyers need around 7 hours of engagement, across 11 touchpoints, in 4 places before they purchase, and a single funnel rarely gives them that. So one of the simplest ways to get more sales from your sales funnel is to keep showing up for those people until they're ready.

How long should you wait before re-selling to people who didn't buy?

About 4 to 6 weeks after someone finishes your funnel without buying. In that window you send a short nurture bridge, roughly one email a week pointing to free content that ties back to your offer, then an automated flash sale. This gap is a big part of how to get more sales from your sales funnel, because it gives people the extra time and trust they need to decide.

How do you make an automated flash sale feel timely instead of evergreen?

Run it on real calendar days rather than a countdown. Instead of saying “ends in 3 days,” schedule the sale Monday to Friday so you can say “doors close Monday,” which feels like a real event even though it's automated. It's a small trick that helps you get more sales from your sales funnel without any extra ad spend.