Holes in Your Sales Funnel? Stop Purchasers from Falling Through
Business owner: do you use sales funnels to compound your income online? For those who mostly focus on offering hourly services, it may be time to take a good, hard look at what people are willing to open their wallets for these days. A series of products that go from free, to low-priced, to high-ticket, will ensure that your sales funnel has no holes, so you won't miss a potential sale.
Here's what's cool about sales funnels, assuming you're funnel-savvy and many coaches and online biz owners are. Your sales funnel can be a pretty reliable gauge for knowing how much you're going to make on any given week. However, there's one red flag of sales funnels, and that is that you may have some holes where potential sales are leaking and subscribers are falling through.
What Causes Leaks in Your Sales Funnel?
Lack of traffic.
As mentioned in our earlier article covering sales funnels basics, traffic is the first step in creating a sales funnel. You get traffic by publishing content. This is something that can happen organically on the web simply by publishing a lot of content for a long time. The way to speed up the traffic, of course, is to pay for it. But remember that once your traffic arrives on your site for certain searchable terms, your visitors have to go somewhere. You can either capture their info by offering a freebie to sign up for… or you can let them slip away.
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Smart marketer's Funnel fix: Good, solid search engine optimization, or SEO.
Try to think of the search engines as a mirror that reflects back at you exactly what you publish, and then sends matched-up seekers your way. Plus, there are other side channels for your targeted seekers to come through, including social media, niche forums, and even live events. Use paid ads to drive targeted traffic to highly relevant pages. Recruit JV partners and affiliates to promote your offers. Buy solo ads in related email newsletters.
Lack of follow-up.
Your sales funnel cannot rely on people to just arbitrarily go from your sign-up page to your freebie offer and then back to your paid products without a helping hand of guidance from you. If you imagine that your readers are thinking about you, and about to head directly to your paid product, that's probably not what's happening. This is why follow-up is so critical to your sales funnel success. It doesn't stop at your freebie, or your first-level paid product.
Smart marketer's Funnel fix: boost the back end.
Before you spend time building that opt-in page or offer, be sure you have a back-end to promote, or those subscribers you so carefully collected will end up costing you money instead of earning it back.
No call-to-action
This happens most typically at the top of the funnel. Your blog posts, social media content, podcasts, YouTube videos—everything you offer for free—must have some kind of call-to-action, or it's all just wasted energy. Your call-to-action can be as simple as "Subscribe to my YouTube channel" or "Follow me on Facebook for more tips," but it must be there.
Smart marketer's funnel fix:
Every time you write a blog post or an email, as yourself, "What do I want my readers to do when they're done reading/listening/watching this?" That becomes your call to action.
Few or no info product offers. It just isn't enough to put up a subscriber form on your site and think people are going to voluntarily sign up to hear from you without an immediate-gratification type of incentive. Why is this? Because competition is pretty steep nowadays, and if you're not offering
Smart marketer's funnel fix: Promote affiliate offers.
No matter what industry you're in, there are a variety of tools and products your readers need. Find those tools, sign up for the affiliate programs, and recommend them to your readers. Not only will your readers thank you for pointing them in the right direction, but you'll earn a little cash, too.
Got a leaky funnel? With a few tweaks and some attention paid to your follow-up sequences, chances are you can fix those holes and increase your profits in no time.
Cindy puts the FUN back in Funnels
Learn more from the sales funnel master, Cindy Bidar. The Funnel Advantage is a great first step for you to begin profiting from your own, expertly crafted sales funnels.
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