As humans, we tend to overcomplicate things, when creating sales funnels. We see this everywhere and that’s why simplicity is rare.
When it comes to building sales funnels that work, our goals are straightforward and clear: we need relevant top-of-funnel traffic to come through an elaborate content marketing or paid traffic strategy (say Google Adwords or Facebook Ads).
When visitors come to your website, you ideally want them to sign up for a lead magnet, i.e. something free that you give away. When that happens, you can then nurture them using email marketing autoresponders.
Eventually, you’ll make offers to them to allow them to make purchases (when they want to, and when they are ready).
All of that is an elaborate process. It takes time, energy, investment, and plenty of testing to ensure that your funnels work well.
If your funnels have bloat (anything in excess or any sort of complications), you aren’t going to cut it. Your funnels won’t work as well as they should and you’ll miss out on a lot if you allow your funnels to stay fat and lazy.
So, what can you do about fat and lazy funnels? Here are a few tips:
Tip #1: Strive for simplicity
Too much of anything is bad, and that applies to every aspect of your sales funnels.
Designing a landing page like it’s a website; writing copy as if it’s a blog post; creating long landing pages hoping to “hook” your visitors for a $29 product; adding two or three landing pages (or steps) to accomplish something as straightforward as “getting a lead” — all of these are examples of complicating what should have been simple.
To keep your sales funnels simple, it takes work. The kind of work where you cut out three lines of your headline to a single one; deleting half of your subheading, and then deleting another of the half that’s left; using one image instead of three (or six); using a single landing page instead of three (unless you absolutely have to use landing pages that way), etc.
It’s easy to build a mess that you can call a funnel; you’d have to turn the world upside down to build a sales funnel that’s simple and still works.
PRO TIP: If your funnel doesn't seem clear to you - it's DEFINITELY not going to be clear to your visitors! Click here to book a call and we'll take a look at your sales funnel with you (or design one from scratch!)
Tip #2: Avoid multi-step landing pages and funnels
For a few use cases, multi-step landing pages can explode your conversion rate.
Img Credit: Kissmetrics
But for a lot of businesses, it’s not even needed. Just because something exists doesn’t mean you have to use it.
Ever see any of those Clickfunnels or Samcart templates? There’s a landing page. Sign up and then you’ll be sent to a thank you page.
The thank you page won’t just thank you. It also has a one-time cross-sell that you won’t ever see again.
Let’s say you won’t sign up for this “one-time” offer and you decide to avoid it. You click through to see another page with a “Wait! Don’t go Just yet! Here’s an offer you can’t refuse” offer.
You decide to let off that too. Then, you’ll finally get the actual “thank you” page which thankfully “thanks you”. Now, you are told to check your email and confirm your sign up.
It’s only after your leads check email and confirm sign up (also called as double opt-in), will they receive anything you promised.
That’s a long, complicated process. There is a time and place for upsells and cross-selling. You don’t have to do it with someone who just happened to land on your landing pages for the first time.
Stop complicating your sales funnels! This has to stop!
RESOURCE: One of my favorite SIMPLE techniques here is what we call Confirmation Page Selling. Here's a video on how to do it!
Tip #3: Revert back to a single offer
You’ve heard about content upgrades and they are a great way to generate leads. Content upgrades — for the uninitiated — is a downloadable piece of content that holds a lot more information about the topic that your readers just happened to read.
For instance, if your visitor just read a blog post on facebook ads, your content upgrade could be a simple checklist to ensure flawless campaign launch.
But the trouble with content upgrades (no one tells you this) is that it’s just way too complicated strategy to manage and execute.
Many bloggers, marketers, and businesses that try the content upgrade strategy or multiple offer strategy usually fail to make the best of all the leads pouring in (each for a different type of content suggesting that their interests are relevant to that piece of content that they downloaded).
Most businesses don’t need the complication that content upgrades bring.
All you need is:
- A strong offer,
- A landing page that converts,
- And an autoresponder sequence that’s strategically sent to each lead.
Are you complicating your sales funnels at a time when it’s only getting harder to generate leads online?
If you’d like to have us look at your sales funnel to optimize conversions OR design and build one from scratch, click here to book a free Action Plan call with us!