The 5 Secrets to Knowing Why Your Sales Funnel Fails & How to Fix It
Have you ever wondered why, when you make a sales funnel, just like your favorite guru tells you to, that you don’t get the huge success your favorite guru claimed?
There’s lots of reasons, but there’s a simple process you can follow to figure out why your sales funnel fails to produce like you expected. It’s easier than you think.
Since everyone is pushing their funnel as the answer to massive sales, you might think everyone that copies it should be rich. When you go searching for solutions for why it isn’t so, you find countless reasons. Can you make sense of them all?
Most basically tell you that you used the wrong sales funnel.
Really?
Usually, that’s not the case. If you’re launching your first funnel or your hundredth funnel, you may find there is just simply something wrong in you funnel that it easily corrected.
Where do you begin? First, I will assume you actually did basic market research and know there is a demand already online looking for your solution provided by your product or service. That being the case, here’s where you begin…
Does Your Marketing Channel Actually Target the Right People?
You’ve heard it before, but if you blow this off, your sales funnel is dead out of the starting blocks. Who is your ideal customer? Do you really know?
If so, then does your marketing channel, whatever it is, reach the right people matching your customer profile or avatar?
Despite the “Guru” focus on Facebook, Google display network actually gives you better buying traffic and allows you better targeting of Demographics and Psychographics than Facebook Ads.
This wasn’t the case a few years back, but things change and online “Gurus” keep pushing you toward Facebook because – well, you keep demanding they do, and you don’t know why.
There are many other channels available. In fact, there are hundreds. Click here to have access to our list of hundreds of marketing channels you’ve been ignoring.
Do Your Words Really Deliver the Right Message? Bad Copy Kills Sales Funnels
Let’s say you convinced yourself your audience is targeted accurately.
O.K., now what? I’ll will assume, your funnel tries, in some manner, to capture a lead name and/or email first. You should be using some kind of lead magnet or customer captivation offer that entices the viewer to leave you at least their email address.
If you can’t get the email address or opt in, then it is your message that is wrong. This is why we always split test, because it speeds up the process of finding the right message for cold traffic.
The other aspect about your message to consider – is it a message for cold traffic, warm traffic, or hot traffic?
What does this mean?
Cold traffic doesn’t know you or your offer from dirt. When they land on your page, they meet you and what you do for the first time. Traffic from Google, Facebook, Bing or other ad channels where you reach new people contains mostly cold traffic.
Warm traffic is people that have engaged with you before, but never bought anything. They need a different message than cold traffic. These people may be someone who opted into your list previously, but never purchased from you.
Hot traffic has purchased from you and loves your services or products already. You email list of buyers would be hot traffic.
The bottom line is the language matters. When your sales message doesn’t grab your viewer immediately, you won’t get the opt in, and you certainly won’t get the sale.
Does Your Sales Funnel Have Leaks?
Maybe asking if your sales funnel has leaks seems strange, but if you get the opt in or lead, but you can’t make sales, then somethings wrong.
It’s not your advertising.
It’s not your lead capture message.
So what else could it be?
Your sales or marketing funnel is a compilation of many conversion points. At least it should be.
The first decision or conversion came when the viewer decided to click your ad. Next, that person decided to opt in for your free offer.
But maybe the next step the left.
This is why you must be testing each and every step in your marketing/sales funnel. In most cases, the lead won’t purchase your offer immediately after getting your lead magnet.
Thus, you need to be testing your emails to see if they get opened, and to know when they get clicked.
If your next step in your marketing funnel is to have someone call the lead, then you need to track the calls of your sales people.
Do you see how failing to track every element can lead you to the wrong conclusions about where your lead is leaking out or leaving your sales funnel?
This is why many launches really aren’t the first time the offer has been shown. One method of finding leaks is to do test launches to smaller audiences and find the leaks before the big public launch.
The tool I recommend for tracking your online automation, as of the writing of this article is Conversionfly. There simply isn’t anything more complete on the market today.
Did You Make the Best Offer?
Simply selling something cheap, or offering a lot of bonuses doesn’t make for certain success. In fact, many more costly items outsell their cheap imitators. Why?
Simple, they made a better offer in both words and in what they delivered. The two go together. But there exist many aspects of the offer where you can lose the lead.
First is the overall value of the offer. If the lead doesn’t clearly understand what they get and how it will deliver what they want better than anything they found before, then they will go.
Your lead must understand the value of you offer without question.
Second your call to action must be strong. Using things like scarcity, showing the viewer what they lose by not taking action, or providing additional proof with the call to action adds sales power.
A weak call to action can seriously cut your sales. So once you get people into your funnel, split testing calls to action or using multiple calls to action which you track can ensure you find the best one or best combination.
Third, you may provide points of confusion about how to get the offer and you don’t realize it. Make sure every step is clear, and how you will deliver can’t be questioned in the mind of the lead viewing your offer. You don’t want to lose sales simply from lack of understanding.
Finally, back to where you started. Targeting Your Audience.
When everything else above is working, and you want to get more, then star again with targeting your audience. When you make sales through your funnel, you must have ways to find out more about your audience’s needs, wants, and desires.
To learn more about demographics, take a look at this article University of Wisconsin and what Entrepreneur Magazine has to say.
Sales Funnel Solutions Limiting Your Problems
Our best solutions for creating amazing sales funnels that limit your problems, but have all the automation necessary to make a complete marketing solution remains Clickfunnels. Many platforms, as of this writing, still try to beat it, but Clickfunnels has become the standard.
When you look closely at new funnel building offers, none can truly create the funnels, test them, and market them anywhere near the ability of Clickfunnels. It will remain our top marketing funnel solution for a long time to come.
To round things off, having Clickfunnels and ConversionFly will give you the ability to test every aspect mentioned above without having to know anything about technology. Your marketing funnels or sales funnels will sing when you combine these two tools.
International speaker, author, and entrepreneur. Retired navy officer, former commanding officer. Over 35 years of leading, coaching, mentoring, and speaking.
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