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I’m Hailey – content strategist and founder here at Your Content Empire where we help you create more profitable, purposeful and productive content — and hopefully enjoy yourself more while doing it too. Learn more about me here >>
Need to optimize your sales funnel? You're in the right place. In this blog post you'll learn 30 different ways you can fix your funnel, focusing on the 3 different parts of the sales funnel.
Have you launched your sales funnel and been less than impressed with the results? It might be time for the optimize funnel checklist!
This post is for anyone who has already built their first sales funnel (or multiple funnels), but is not happy with the results that they’ve gotten, and they're not sure what the cause might be.
Launching your first sales funnel mimics the same feeling that you get when you launch your first website. Maybe, like me, you had some perfectionistic tendencies where you were changing things, tweaking things again and again and then you finally got to a point where you thought, “Okay, it's finally ready. It's finally good enough, and I'm going to launch it.”
Then there was this feeling when you finally hit publish that you were ready to just sit back and watch the traffic come pouring in. “I’ve built it. Here it is. Let’s open the floodgates.”
Only that flood is more like a drought.
It's the same kind of feeling with our sales funnels. Setting it up, building it and launching it is only one-half of the equation. We still have to do all the work of getting people there.
If you’re not sure whether you should be happy with the results or not, sign up to get the Sales Funnel Audit Calculator. It will help you determine how your sales funnel is performing and what to focus on first when it comes to fixing it.
There are three levels of things that we look at when we're analyzing and diagnosing issues with sales funnels. Those three things are traffic, leads, and conversions.
We always start with traffic because that is usually the source of the issue. So we start with traffic, and then if traffic is okay then we look at leads, and then finally if those two are fine then we look at conversions.
So in this post, we’re going to be giving your funnel the TLC treatment and looking at each of these areas to see if they’re the cause of the issue. Then we’ll be going through some tools, tactics, and strategies you can use to improve them.
The number one thing I find with people who have just finished building their sales funnels and they come to me saying, “It's not working. Where did I go wrong?” It usually comes down to the fact that they’ve set some really unrealistic goals for their funnel.
Here’s a recent example:
A student of mine wanted to be selling 10 of her courses per month.
How many funnel freebie sign-ups did she need to make that happen?
Well, if we assume an average conversion rate of 1-3% and go with 1% as a worst-case scenario, then she’ll need 1000 new sign-ups every month.
Then – how many unique leads to the opt-in page will she need to make that happen?
Again, if we assume an average sign-up page conversion rate of 20-30% and go with 20% to be safe, she’ll need 5000 unique visitors to the page.
How does this stack up to what she’s currently getting traffic-wise to her website?
In this case, it was 5x what she was getting each month. So it was a wake-up call about expectations to start with.
The first thing to make sure of is that you’re (a) setting realistic expectations for your funnel that you can grow and increase over time and (b) you’re using the first couple of months with your funnel to establish benchmarks.
Once you have realistic goals for your funnel, then you can start diagnosing and optimizing your funnel through this TLC process.
The first thing to look at is traffic. Are you driving enough traffic to your landing page to reach your goals?
To diagnose if this is the issue, look at the number of unique visitors that are coming to your opt-in page and compare that to the number you need in order to hit your goals. In the example above this would be the 5000 unique visitors.
Traffic Booster #1: Use a Facebook ad to target new audiences or lookalike audiences.
Traffic Booster #2: Experiment with Pinterest ads to bring new audiences to your page.
Traffic Booster #3: Write a new blog post as another entry way into your funnel. Every blog post that’s related to the freebie should have forms within the post and an exit-intent pop-up. Everytime you write a new blog that’s designed to capture leads for your funnel freebie, you’re basically creating another doorway into your funnel. And if you feel like you’re always promoting the funnel freebie directly, you can mix it up and promote these blog posts instead.
Traffic Booster #4: Create a social media campaign around it. Schedule a round of tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram posts around it. Also make sure that a link to the sign-up page is in your bio, your pinned post, and your cover photo.
Traffic Booster #5: Do a live video (Facebook Live, Instagram Live) with the call-to-action to go and download your freebie.
Traffic Booster #6: Send a mini email sequence to your list about your freebie – You can send it to anyone on your list who hasn’t downloaded the freebie yet. And if you have other welcome sequences, consider adding an invitation to the funnel freebie to that sequence.
Traffic Booster #7: Ask your business friends to share.
Traffic Booster #8: Add an organic share incentive to the thank you page. This is one of my favourite things to do for launches: allowing people to unlock rewards for sharing it with their friends. So for any friend that signs up, it counts as a point towards unlocking that special reward.
Traffic Booster #9: Create new pins and schedule daily. There's nothing that says you can only have one pin per piece of content. You can have a hundred pins for the same piece of content. So create multiple pins leading to your sign-up page.
Traffic Booster #10: Provide solutions. Look in Facebook groups, on Twitter, on forums for people looking for help with a problem that your freebie solves and offer up a solution (your sign-up page).
If you’ve determined that your traffic is good, the next place to look is your leads. So what percentage of people who visit your sign-up page are actually signing up?
Average conversion rates for sign-up pages are between 20-30% so if yours is falling within that range (and keep in mind that even if it is, you can always do little things to improve it).
Lead Booster #1: Consider adding another freebie or content upgrade that serves a slightly different audience or niche. Like the additional blog posts, this will serve as simply another doorway into your funnel.
Lead Booster #2: Look at market fit. If people are coming to your sign up page but not signing up for your freebie gift, why? Is this something they actually want? Are you maybe targeting the wrong audience?
Lead Booster #3: Tweak the copy on your sign-up page. Go section by section and do split-testing if your opt-in page tool allows it. We don’t want to change everything at once and not be able to pinpoint the reason that the opt-in rates changed.
Lead Booster #4: Add a retargeting Facebook ad to target anyone who’s arrived at the sign-up page but didn’t opt-in yet.
Lead Booster #5: Change the design of your opt-in page. Try different colours, different images, and different mock-ups of the free offer. Like with the copy tweaks, go section by section and do split-testing if your opt-in page tool allows it. We don’t want to change everything at once and not be able to pinpoint the reason that the opt-in rates changed.
Lead Booster #6: Add a retargeting Google ad to target anyone who’s arrived at the sign-up page but didn’t opt-in yet.
Lead Booster #7: Add an exit-intent pop-up to your website and sign-up page.
Lead Booster #8: Add more forms on optimal placements on your website like the homepage, contact page, sidebar and about page. Make sure that your freebie is highly visible in all the important places so you capture traffic going to your website anyways.
Lead Booster #9: Add a retargeting Pinterest ad to target anyone who’s arrived at the sign-up page but didn’t opt-in yet.
Lead Booster #10: Add social proof to the sign-up page like testimonials, media icons where you’ve been featured, and/or notifications to show them which of their friends have signed up.
If your leads and traffic are good, the problem is likely with your conversion rate. So how many people are becoming customers or clients once they’ve entered your funnel?
Conversion Booster #1: Test different subject lines to increase open rates. The more people opening your emails, the more opportunity for them to click and sign up.
Conversion Booster #2: Test different call-to-actions in the emails to increase click-through rates.
Conversion Booster #3: Tweak the copy on your sales page. Go section by section and do split-testing if your sales page tool allows it. We don’t want to change everything at once and not be able to pinpoint the reason that the conversion rates changed.
Conversion Booster #4: Add a retargeting Facebook ad to target anyone who’s arrived at the sales page but didn’t purchase yet.
Conversion Booster #5: Add a retargeting Pinterest ad to target anyone who’s arrived at the sales page but didn’t purchase yet.
Conversion Booster #6: Add a retargeting Google ad to target anyone who’s arrived at the sales page but didn’t purchase yet.
Conversion Booster #7: Add more social proof to your salespage. Like testimonials, media icons where you’ve been featured, notifications to show them which of their friends have signed up.
Conversion Booster #8: Add an affiliate program and have past customers do some of the legwork and sell it for you.
Conversion Booster #9: Add chat support to your salespage, so if potential customers have questions they can get them answered right there.
Conversion Booster #10: Increase the number of ways for people to pay. Like more payment options (credit card and PayPal) and more accessible payment plans.
Just because your funnels aren’t performing well doesn't mean you have to get rid of them completely. You don’t need to start from scratch, but you do want to examine, diagnose, and fix your funnel in a strategic step-by-step way so that you can make room for improvement.
Start by looking at your traffic, analyzing your leads, and then check out whether or not your conversion rate is where it needs to be. Once you diagnose the problem, you can focus on fixing it so that you can start getting better sales funnel results.
Need a calculator that guides you through determining how well your funnel is actually performing? Download the Sales Funnel Audit Calculator and you’ll be guided through plugging in your funnel numbers to calculate how each section of your funnel is performing.
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