Today I want to share with you how I doubled sales in my funnel with the exact same number of leads. Because, while yes, you can definitely increase the amount of traffic you’re driving to the top of your funnel—it’s always best to do so once you know your funnel is optimized and you’re prepared to make the most of the traffic coming your way.
If you don’t know who I am, I’m Hailey Dale from Your Content Empire where I’ve been building sales funnel for clients (and myself) for almost 10 years.
The landscape of funnels has CHANGED drastically from 10 years to now. Heck, even from 2023 to now. So in this video, I’m sharing the 3 strategies I’m using RIGHT now to increase conversions without increasing traffic and leads.
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I think this year has been about simplifying and getting back to basics. And in a lot of ways doing more with less.
For example, I have a lot of clients right now who are experiencing a bit of whiplash when it comes to social media marketing—feeling they have to be always on and posting if they’re going to get any traction.
Other clients tell me that selling feels a lot harder right now. Not as easy as prior years. There’s more saturation (a.k.a. competition), potential customers are more discerning than ever (which is a great thing – because I don’t think any of us want people buying our offers if it’s not the right next thing for them) but that discernment means we have provide a better PRE-buying experience than ever. Which means that many of your existing funnels might be dropping the ball and converting even less and less. Even if you are able to increase your traffic or maintain a steady amount of traffic.
But I don’t actually think traffic is the thing to “fix” first for sales, funnels and promotions.
For example, I had a past client who was a stylist. She made a lot of connections with some pretty bigs names in the online course space through styling their photo and video shoots. Through those connections, she was offered an opportunity to get her services in front of their huge audience. Realizing that she couldn’t possibly serve all of the clients she hoped would come her way with 1 on 1 styling, she rushed to create a course, a free challenge and follow-up sales sequence—pretty much all in one fell swoop. Her own client, remember with the huge over 100K audience, generously shared that free challenge for a commission on the sales of the course. And while, off the strength of the recommendation, she was able to grow her list a TON and get people signed up for the free challenge. Converting those leads into sales was more of a challenge especially in subsequent launches. Her follow-up was giving “thrown together” and it was a pretty big wake up call that the pre-buying experience and relationship matters more than the number of leads.
With my own funnel, I recently made some changes that helped double conversions with almost the exact same number of leads.
- See the funnel results in February versus just 3 months later in June.
- Nearly the same leads, but those teeny tiny percentage improvements lead to double the sales.
Which just goes to show that your biggest results often come from small tweaks and improvements. Especially with a funnel, it’s all about those small numbers and doing what we can to improve those.
Double Funnel Conversions Strategy #1: Improved quality of leads
Which brings me to the first strategy I used to double my conversions with the same number of leads… increasing the quality of my leads.
Up until the end of May, I was using my Content Creator Archetype quiz as my primary lead gen. I would say most of last year, what was so great about quizzes is that you could bring in a high number of leads for relatively low cost per lead. The cost per lead has crept up pretty significantly. And the problem, then and now, is that quizzes are FUN, and of course, we love FUN but sometimes you’ll find people are much more interested in figuring the the answer to the question your quiz poses than in finding a solution to that problem. So with my own quiz, I’m still obsessed with it, but the connection to my offer was tenuous—and I really should know better but I admittedly can have a bit of a blindspot with ideas for my own business—and with increasing lead costs, it became glaringly obvious that something had to change.
And so I switched my ad lead magnet to my Monthly Content Planning Kit – I actually gave it a makeover – so if you wanna check it out, grab the link below this video.
And since doing so, the leads the planning kit generates end up buying the offer in the funnel (my $10K Monthly Content Plan ) much more often (just over 2x as often) as the quiz before it.
So the main takeaway is THIS: Even if leads cost you more, it’s better to have a lead magnet that’s practically twinning with your offer (not literally) but you want to be able to answer a big hell yes to the question of: Does it make sense that prospective buyers of your offer would be interested in this freebie?
If it doesn’t – get your butt back to the drawing board.
Double Funnel Conversions Strategy #2: Identify my prospective buyers
The second switcheroo I made with my funnel is building in systems to identify WHO my most engaged leads were. I’m calling this my Hot Leads System.
Here’s how it works:
- Every time someone enters my funnel and clicks on my salespage, they’re run through an automation that updates a custom field in their contact record with numbers 1 through 7.
- These numbers correspond with how many times they’ve clicked through from the email to the salespage.
- Once they hit a certain number, they’re added to groups in MailerLite (because that’s the email service provider I’m using), with one fire emoji meaning they’ve clicked at least 3 times, two fire emojis meaning they’ve clicked at least 5 times or off the charts 3 fire emojis meaning they’ve clicked more than 7 times to that salespage.
- We have a running of the hot leads for personal outreach and connection. And may at some point add in a special automated sequence for those folks.
What’s fascinating is that 48.6% of people who reach 2 fire emojis or more end up signing up for the $10K Monthly Content System (and loving it, I might add!)
Double Funnel Conversions Strategy #3: Optimize funnel systematically
The final change I’ve made with my own funnel is implementing a systematic optimization system which I run on a monthly basis.
The first part of it was setting up a specific funnel measurement system and projection model for my funnel. That way every month I know exactly what’s happening in my funnel and can predict sales based on improvements I make.
Now knowing the numbers is all well and good, but unless you also have a way of implementing slow and intentional changes to your funnel and measuring their impact, they don’t mean a whole lot.
So every month, I look at each touchpoint in my funnel – emails, landing pages, form and decide on 1 thing I want to test out per touchpoint.
For example, my goal is to increase # of opens so I’m currently testing different subject line approaches like curiosity subject lines versus goal focused versus problem solving focused. I don’t test too many things at once so I have a clear idea of WHAT led to the changes whether for better or worse.
I also don’t make changes too often. I wait until either 100 people have gone through the funnel or once a month. I don’t recommend making changes until the previous versions have been fully field tested with enough data to make an informed change.
So to summarize my monthly process involves:
- Measuring the funnel
- Updating my funnel projection funnel
- Choosing 1 thing per landing page, per email that I want to test the next month
- Incorporating those changes
- Choosing 1 traffic source to add in or double down on for the month
- Then waiting until the next month to rinse and repeat the process again
After setting this up and running for the past few months, I turned it into a little kit so if you want to steal my funnel optimization process, you can grab the link to it in the description.
In wrapping up, the question to ask yourself is this: What’s the first area you want to optimize for your funnel?
Want an easier way to create your sales funnel in a weekend? Sign up for my Funnel Mapping Workshop Here:
