Funnel Design Library · Playbook #1
Pre-Sold Funnel
The ad sells; the lander confirms a decision already made.
Measured in the wild — 5 crawled funnels carry this play:
Playbook #1 — The Pre-Sold Funnel
Paid social → confirmation lander → checkout
Thesis: within this flow, the sale happens in the ad. Everything after the click confirms a decision already made — it doesn't make one.
WHAT: A full-flow strategy for paid social DTC — not a design style. The ad sells through story (Mirror → Name → Bridge → After), the lander confirms the decision (5 C's), the offer carries the impulse across the price, the checkout clears the path. Each stage has exactly one psychological job; every section within a stage has exactly one job too.
WHEN: Paid social traffic, a problem-aware audience, an impulse-range price, one use-case user per campaign. (Full boundary conditions in Scope below — check them before applying, this flow fails hard outside them.)
WHY: Generic funnels ask the lander to do the ad's job — sell to a stranger — and it can't do both selling and converting well. Splitting the psychological work across stages lets every asset be short, specific, and visual, and makes failures diagnosable: when the numbers drop, you know which job wasn't done.
KPIs (by stage — measure the stage's job, not the funnel's):
| Stage | Job | Watch |
|---|---|---|
| Ad | Sell | Hook rate (3-sec views), hold/completion rate, CTR, comment resonance ("this is me") |
| Lander | Confirm | Exit-without-CTA rate (instrument the CTA click — a fast click into checkout is a success, not a bounce), scroll depth, add-to-cart |
| Offer + checkout | Clear | Checkout initiation → completion, abandonment, AOV |
| Whole flow | — | CVR, CAC, ROAS (LTV lives in Playbook #6 — The Second Sale) |
Expected outcomes: a tighter audience means lower reach and higher CTR/resonance per impression — that trade is the point. Scent-matched landers convert clicked traffic better than generic PDPs. Diagnosis gets faster because stage KPIs isolate the failure. No promised multipliers: benchmarks vary wildly by vertical, so the honest baseline is your own funnel before the change.
Cheat sheet
- Scope first: paid social, problem-aware, impulse-range. Otherwise, different playbook.
- Ad sells (Mirror → Name → Bridge → After), lander confirms (5 C's), offer carries the impulse across the price, checkout clears.
- Target a use-case user, never a demographic. One asset per user.
- Three Laws: one job per section · 3-second skim · the competitor-paste test.
- Audit qualitatively; fix the weakest stage first — stage order is causation order.
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