Do marketing funnels right, and you have your business growing on steroids.
Seth Godin once said,
“Why Waste a Sentence Saying Nothing?”
I say,
“Why bother running a business without a sales funnel?”
Without proper marketing funnels, you are trying to “sell” and no one likes being sold to. The sooner you let that sink in, the fast you’ll come around to appreciate the true power of sales funnels.
Why?
With marketing funnels, you don’t sell. You nurture.
Instead of screaming “buy” “buy”, you let your customers decide when to buy.
You almost spend nothing on running effective sales funnels compared to advertising on newspapers, for instance.
Marketing funnels work better than anyone who sits on their ass all day long.
If you don’t have a sales or marketing funnel yet, I’d highly recommend you stop doing everything you are doing right now and start your first funnel. You can even buy an Unbounce Landing Page or Download one for free.
Also, read
5 Steps to The Sales Funnel Your Business Needs
7 Stunning Examples of Sales Funnels That Work
The Anatomy of Best Landing Page Design
Assuming you do have marketing funnels in place of any kind or if are looking to build the right kind of sales funnels, here are seven correction actions for you to do right now:
Designers are Not Marketers
Designers and developers for landing pages & marketing funnels? No, thank you.
You’ll have multiple offers to make. You’ll need a landing page or a funnel for every single offer.
Plus, you’ll need multiple variants of each funnel for testing. If you are using Facebook ads or Google AdWords, there’s this Message match that’s required for optimum performance of your funnels.
Given all that — and the fact that designers and developers don’t know a thing about marketing — how do you possibly stand to gain from hiring someone from a design or development skill set to build your funnels?
Further, designers or developers are expensive, and they take their time. Who has time?
Plus, with landing page builders such as Unbounce, Leadpages, and many others available, why would you want any help at all?
Case closed.
Also read:
Clickfunnels Non-affiliate Review: Is it Overhyped Or Really Good?
Don’t Make a Fuss
Should I use this tool or that one? Which landing page builder or funnel builder should I use? Should I use a CTA button with green color or red (or orange)? How about we use this image instead of that? I like this headline better than the other one.
You are way too fussy, aren’t you? Save your time. Stop fussing over digital marketing tools. You get your answers from rigorous, long-term A/B testing.
Also read:
Building Funnels? Use These Awesome Tools
No Offer. No Funnel
I’ll write this out again (and I won’t stop): If you don’t have an offer to make, don’t create a funnel. No, asking people to sign up for your newsletter is not an offer.
Also, offer doesn’t automatically imply a “discount” — since I know many business owners don’t like to play the “price wars”. I agree. I am not a big fan of discounts too.
An offer could be anything. Some awesome examples are like how Sumo does with their “ecommerce package for life” how Studiopress has this handy Genesis Guide for Absolute Beginners
Don’t waste your time with funnels with an offer you can make.
Also Read:
Funnel Setup: The Loss-making Habit You Should Avoid
Keep it Simple, Please?
“I want to use ____ . Then, that should Integrate with____, so that data is passed to _____ and then someone will upload data to ____ so we finally get this. We’ll then…… ”
“I know that Drip is for Email marketing automation. But I want it to work like a proper CRM too”
“Can MailChimp work as a CRM?”
“I want to use Unbounce to build a complete website”
Guess what? You are complicating the heck out of what can be really simple.
I get it. Simplicity is hard to achieve.
In the case of funnels, however, making them complicated loses you money. Or it makes you put precious resources to do monkey jobs that you could have avoided.
Or you’d screw up the entire purpose of using a particular marketing tool, an email marketing automation software, or a landing page builder, or a tool with which you build funnels.
Stay on Brand
It’s horrible to see some landing pages and funnels that don’t remotely look anywhere consistent with the brand or company that owns these landing pages or funnels.
It takes less than 15 minutes to ensure that your landing pages stay on brand. Take your primary colors, logos, and fonts and apply those to your landing pages too.
How hard is that?
Simplify What you have
Steve Krug puts it best:
“Remove 50% of the Copy on your page, then remove half of what’s left”
I’d say apply that to the whole funnel (including ads, landing pages, email autoresponder copy, subject lines, graphics, logos, and everything else you might use on your landing pages)
Too many landing pages have way too much out there. Landing pages are not websites; they aren’t built to inform as much as they exist to get you just one thing: leads.
To get leads, you’d just have to say just the right kind of things and nudge your visitors enough to get them to sign up. The rest of the information can be delivered using your automated email responders.
Don’t pollute your landing pages with unnecessary crap.
Make One offer. Run Multiple Tests
What offer are you likely to make?
You could give away a free ebook, a free download (PDF, checklists, eBooks, reports, white papers), a free trial, a paid trial, or a discount coupon.
Whatever you decide to give away sits right at the mouth of the funnel — this is where it all starts. What you offer is also the main message of your ad (be it Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, or any other paid to advertise or even organic links you’ll use to bring in traffic).
The simple rule is this: one offer per funnel.
If you want to test more offers, duplicate your funnel and use another offer. With Unbounce landing pages, you could just use another variant to test another offer too.
While you can only have so many offers, you can absolutely do unlimited tests.
Run your tests for a predefined period of time. Stop your tests. Analyze results. Pick your champions. Start testing against the previous champions again.
Your digital marketing funnels. How well are they working for you?