Building landing pages, funnels, lead generation elements, and doing all the work to get results is a back-breaking, endless, and a tiring job. Building and optimizing sales funnels are a full-time endeavor, a proper business function (like human resources management, operations, and finance) and a task best handled by professionals.
Profitable sales funnels are a real asset to your business. Once you have one (or more!) going, your sales funnels can continuously bring in sales, revenue, and profits without you having to lift a finger.
That’s the pipe dream at least. To get there, you’d need funnels that work really smart. There’s ongoing work just to keep those sales funnels working the way they should.
You need the right team, the right tools, and speed of execution.
Businesses — small and large — lose out on a lot just by doing various things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, chances are that you are killing the potential of your landing pages without even knowing it.
Here’s how:
Dependence on developers for landing pages
Your designers and developers are not marketers.
Good sales funnels demand skills from varied functions. You need decent design (see below), great copy, minimalistic approach, and the right technology (including tracking, analytics, and A/B testing) to power your sales funnels.
Plus, with all those campaigns waiting to be launched, you can’t afford to wait for months for your designers and developers to send in the completed funnels and landing pages.
None of that has anything to do with your IT department. They won’t be able to do it, they are expensive, and even if they did (while you don’t mind the cost), they won’t do justice to your sales funnels.
Fussing over design
Joshua Brewer once quoted:
“Socrates said, “Know thyself.” I say, “Know thy users.”
And guess what? They don’t think like you do.”
You can fuss all you want over the design aspect of your landing pages and funnels. You could spend millions (and we pray that you don’t, at least not yet) on design. Maybe you’d wait for a full year’s worth of back and forth with your designers, marketing team, and stakeholders.
All this fussing over designing, moving buttons and graphics a few millimeters here and there, worrying about background images, won’t bring you any results.
Good design can make serious money, there’s no denying that. However, given the task at hand and the inane urgency of a need for sales funnels that work, you should aim for decent design but maximum results (like leads and sales).
Making your opinions count too much
The big trouble with digital marketing? Everyone has an opinion about it (or aspects of it). Some believe that it’s SEO that we all should be focusing on.
Others swear by content marketing, content curation, and the good old inbound marketing. There are still others who spend years doing link building, guest posting, and what have you.
Having strong opinions on sales funnels can hurt your funnels so much that they are as good as dead.
Don’t waste time with opinions on your sales funnels when data tells you something else entirely. Let your campaigns run for a while, gather relevant data (with continuous testing), and then make decisions. It’s called data-driven decision making.
It’s brutal, but it’s the truth.
Focus on KPIs that really matter
Too many people focus (if at all) on metrics that don’t even matter.
How much traffic do I get to my sales funnels?
What are the number of impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and the Cost per Click (CPC) of your ads?
While each metric has a story to tell, they aren’t the ultimate metrics you should be concerned about. Focusing on metrics that don’t matter puts you on a path that only leads to a dead-end (or is it several dead ends?). These are metrics that don’t do you any good.
The kind of metrics you should really be concerned about — as far as sales funnels are concerned — are
- The CPA (Cost of Acquiring a lead).
- Number of leads at the landing page level
- The conversion rate of your landing pages
- The lead-to-sale ratio (how many of your leads convert into customers?).
- The average sale value, Lifetime Value (LTV) of each customer.
Those are the kind of metrics that give you the brutal truth about how well your sales funnels are performing. Everything else is fancy.
No business runs on fancy, ego-inflating metrics.
Sometimes we don’t realize that we are the main culprits for your dysfunctional or underperforming sales funnels or landing pages. Need a reality check? Get on a scheduled call with us, show us your sales funnels, and we’ll talk about how you can make your sales funnels work the way they should.