GSD 195: Most Funnels Fail Unless You Have Serious Distribution. This Is How You Win

Welcome to today’s edition of GSD Daily. Now we’re going to talk about something interesting which is what to do when your funnel fails. At the end of the day, every single sales funnel has an element in it that is failing. I mean, that’s really what optimization is, right? So you roll something out, you launch it, you push it out in there, into the universe, and you start running traffic to it. And sometimes there are things about the funnel that just don’t work. Most of the time, I would say 80% of the time in funnels, as you roll them out, there’s just something that doesn’t work the way it should. Now here’s why. It takes 13 steps for somebody to learn about you and then give you money for whatever it is you do or whatever it is you sell. And that’s my unscientific calculation.

But think about it. So for a customer to find you, and you’re different, your business is different, everybody’s business is largely different, but when somebody finds you, they click an ad, then they end up on a website or a landing page. Then on that landing page, they read your content, then click a button to opt-in for a thing or to watch a video, or scroll down and look at the rest of your content, or check out your features and descriptions, and then they click a button or a thing or opt-in or whatever, and they go to the next page. Usually, it’s a confirmation page. In some cases, it’s a shopping cart or an order form or whatever. But basically, people are taking the next step, one after another after another after another with you.

And it might be that all of those steps are taken in four minutes. It might be hacked. It’s an impulse buy. Somebody is moving through the sales process and just click in, pull out their credit card, hits their Apple Pay, whatever, you have a sale in the bank. Or maybe somebody has to talk to you. It’s a complex sale, so high price, and high complexity, and they need to jump on a sales call with you. It’s service-based, or it’s a mastermind, or something like that. Maybe that means there are more touches. That means that it’s a longer buying cycle. I was just on a call the other day, there was a prospect out of the country, she’s over in the European nations, and their buying process is four to six months, and the consulting commitment is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from enterprise-level clients.

So that particular, it takes a long time. It takes buy-in from senior leadership, and it takes budgeting. The company has to go and ask their board for money to work with clients. That’s a very different kind of sale, but still buying psychological triggers. People are going to be moving through the process just a little bit slower. So the funnel never fails. There are always things about a sales funnel that work, and that’s what you have to find. You have to find the things that work in a sales funnel, but you also have to be able to spot the things that don’t. So what I want to do is walk through just a little checklist of what to do when sales funnels fail. All right? So what to do when a sales funnel fails. If we’re looking at this thing, we see that there are a couple of different- the first thing, the first thing that I look for is to click costs.

What are the click costs per traffic? Is it cheap? Are we at $4 CPC or are we at 50 cents CPC? What are our click-through rates? Are we, let’s see, greater than 4%, or are we less than 2%? These are things that let you know whether the ads are working or not. Now, this ad, a $4 cost per click, might be great for that enterprise-level client who is going to be making hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars on a client engagement. Awesome. Now, 50 cents cost per click, that’s high for a physical product, something that needs to maximize customer value from a paid traffic campaign. Now let’s look at the click-through rate. Now, if we’re at a 4% click-through rate, 5%, or 6%, then we know that our campaigns are hitting the right audience. Somebody they’re clicking through that ad, we’re hitting some sort of a hot button for them, or the ad isn’t disqualifying people enough.

So that’s the other thing. If it’s not disqualifying people enough, then it might be a shit ad. There are too many people clicking through. It’s a blind offer. Now, less than 2%, less than 2% might work too. But knowing the numbers and being able to tell the story about the data, that’s first and foremost. Number two is lead conversion. Are people converting on that offer? Now there are a couple of numbers that I look for. Whenever I’m going through campaigns, I want a lead magnet to be greater than 30% conversion. 30% conversion on a lead magnet. That means three out of every 10 people from paid traffic who hit that landing page should be opting in.

If it is a sales page or sales offer, VSL, then I want that to be anywhere between 1 and 3%. Now, this can get as high as 10% on a well-converting offer, something that’s tested and proven. Long-form sales page, that kind of thing. Now oftentimes we couple these two things to hedge our bets. So we get a lead magnet that is converting at 30%, and then we tag it on a confirmation page. So it ends up looking like this lead magnet to a confirmation page that has a VSL. And what happens when you do that is you end up getting a 6% conversion just because people are moving through it like this. So they’re coming in, they’re hitting some paid traffic, they’re moving into a lead magnet, and then they’re jumping in from a confirmation page of VSL. It’s a super slick process.

Another thing we look for is webinar registration. Webinar registration, typically I want it to be 25% or more. A lot of our webinar registration pages end up being 30%. If people are coming in the door and hitting the pages and opting in, then we know our leads are covered. So the next place we go is copied. Is there a copy issue? So for here, we do a lot of page split testing. And what that is is where we have a control page. So if we have a control page, and that is where all of our traffic is going to, so let’s say we have traffic here, and then what we’ll do is we’ll create version one, version two, version three pages, and from there we’ll split test traffic, and we’ll see which one works. And if version two ends up working, then we lock that one in for the control and we continue moving on from there. So then we test some new stuff.

So that’s where we’re looking for copy drop-off. We can test engagement. The biggest thing with copy is they might not necessarily be moving to the checkout page, but if they’re clicking the add to cart button, and they already know of the price, then we know that they are agreeing with the offer but they’re just not pulling a trigger on a credit card. So at this point, it might be the price is the issue. Copy piece is more about being able to tell the story, being able to look at the data and say, okay, where are we being tripped up in the sales funnel, and what can we do to lower those flood gates, if you will? The next piece that we look at, is emails and sequencing. Do we have our webinar promo campaigns up, and our webinar replay? Are people clicking those? Do we have our lead magnets confirmation and promos up? Are people clicking that?

So this is all inside your CRM. Now are people clicking the emails as they’re receiving the emails? Are they opening those emails? So we have some clients, we’ll put in a hundred, 200 leads a day on their list, and we’re able to see that they’re getting 32% open rates and click-through rates of more adequate click-through rates than even when they send a broadcast. So we know that they’re opening the emails, they’re liking the content, and moving through and clicking it. You’re always looking for action. The big action is not necessarily a sale. It would be great if everything that you push out there, people are selling it like hotcakes. It’d be awesome if all you had to do is throw something up and it started selling.

But at the end of the day, we’re looking for the next action. So really the sales funnel isn’t designed to sell the thing. The sales funnel is to move them from step one to two, to three, to four, to five, to six, all the way through to the very end, which is a checkout, and then move right through the checkout into the onboarding process. That’s what a sales funnel does. It doesn’t sell anything. It just moves them through the funnel to the point that they’re making the educated decision to buy your thing. So after emails and sequencing, we get into the last checkout. If people are moving to the checkout and pulling the trigger to the very end, and you’re getting shopping cart abandonment, is it price? Is it something in the offer? Is it risk where you need a money-back guarantee?

You want to be able to look at where you’re getting blocked and be able to unjam that. So break that barrier down. And oftentimes it’s copied. Sometimes it’s pages, sometimes it’s sequencing, sometimes it’s emails, sometimes it’s clicked, sometimes it’s lead magnets. But once you’re able to start pulling those blocks, then you’re able to unjam the funnel. If you have any questions at all, make sure to just leave a comment below and subscribe to this set of videos wherever you are, whether it’s YouTube, Facebook, or whatever. And if you have any questions and you would like to get help, get a handle on what to do with your sales funnel, or what to do with your paid traffic campaigns, go to dunford.com/start. If you like this kind of material, you want to get it in your email inbox, go to dunford.com/gsd. And that’s it. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. All right, thanks. Bye.