Is Your Funnel Working? Repair Your Funnel Today!

A marketing funnel is a process that leads a prospective customer through several stages on their way toward purchasing your product. It goes something like this: A lead becomes an opportunity, who becomes a customer, who becomes (if you’re lucky) a repeat customer. The entire thing probably sounds daunting, and it quite is: Sales funnels are around for a very long time, but they will still cause modern, technologically savvy businesses trouble.

We’re getting to discuss seven basic suggestions for fixing sales and marketing funnel issues and recommend some tools to assist you to streamline and improve your own conversion process. With a touch of patience and a little attention to the finer details, you’ll have your conversion process humming along with sort of a well-oiled machine in no time.

Strategy 1: Target the proper Leads

Any concerted effort toward building a far better sales funnel must begin with building better leads. You would like to pursue the people presumably to reply to your product or service.

If you haven’t already, it’s probably time to be serious about learning (and possibly earning your certification for) Google Analytics. This free service will assist you to drill down into the nitty-gritty of how people are finding you in the first place—whether it’s social channels like Facebook and Pinterest, or whether they’re more likely to seek out you through organic search results.

If your leads come from Facebook, you’ll want to double down on your Facebook strategies or borrow from your Facebook success and supply similar content on other channels to maximize your success.

Strategy 2: Make Your Funnel as Simple as Possible

Almost everyone has abandoned a cart or turned tail halfway through a signup process. If you’re hoping to iron out the kinks in your own marketing and sales funnels, you’ll have to eliminate as many bottlenecks and sources of customer consternation as possible.

One of the best examples of an easy sales funnel is the company formerly referred to as 37signals, which is now referred to as Basecamp—the name of their most successful product. This venerable company’s sales funnel is merely three steps long:

Prospects reach the Basecamp homepage from various media channels, like blogs and social websites.

Prospects check-in, which needs no credit card information and only basic personal information.

Prospects are offered a generous 60-day trial for signing up, no strings attached.

That’s it! Basecamp has been around for some time, and it will have the advantage of name recognition and countless testimonials, but it’s still a shining example of what’s possible when companies get serious about eliminating bottlenecks from their signup process.

Strategy 3: Collect Real-World Data About Your Sales Process

In order to seek out and fix issues with your sales and marketing funnel, and ultimately come up with how to enhance your bottom line, you’ll need a baseline against which to draw comparisons. Which means collecting data—lots of it.

You couldn’t diagnose an illness without knowing what “healthy” seems like, and you won’t be ready to grow your revenue stream before you've got strong, historical data from which to draw a comparison.

Strategy 4: Adjust Your Sales and Promotions Schedule

We’ve already touched briefly on the importance of collecting data about your existing sales process so as to diagnose potential problems. Now, let’s get a bit more specific. It’s time to dive into your traffic by the day of the week.

We can defer once more to Google Analytics, but you'll even as easily see actual usage data from your own website’s backend—particularly if you try something like WordPress or Medium to publish online. Does much of the traffic on your site come your way on Sundays? How about on national holidays? If you’re starting to see patterns emerging, it’s time to maximize them.

Apple, Inc. has made an art of targeting customers during peak shopping times. Especially, their Back to School promotions brings the house down annually, because of bundles and other promotions for people buying personal computers during this important time in their lives.

You may not have the audience or the reach that Apple does, but you'll still react to periods of high traffic by offering discounts or special offers of your own when traffic is booming.

Strategy 5: Create an Editorial Calendar

Impressions from social channels like Instagram and Twitter became very important. Almost one-third of the world’s population uses social media, so confirm you’re not leaving these valuable prospects on the table by leaving your publishing schedule to happenstance.

Social media schedulers like HootSuite, Buffer, etc. have built their business models around helping online retailers schedule their social media contributions beforehand. It’s an ideal technique to make sure you never fall behind, never fail to exploit the advantage of peak traffic hours, and never need to scramble to publish a time-sensitive piece of marketing.

You should build a web presence that needs as little micromanagement as possible, so you'll develop a gentle stream of incoming prospects. By scheduling these dispatches beforehand, you'll specialize in the content itself instead of on nailing the timing.

Strategy 6: Offer More Substantial Content

Clever and witty Twitter dispatches are all well and good, but if you actually want to interact with your best prospects, it'd be time to require your content offerings to a higher level.

A successful, up-and-coming provider of customer support called Help Scout is grabbing market share from their better-known competitors by following this precise formula. They know their ideal customers are both technologically savvy and very particular about the services they engage with. As a result, they’ve built a high-quality library of eBooks, white papers, and other in-depth resources that their customers can access free of charge. These aren’t throwaway freebies—they’re substantial, informative, and legit sources of valuable information.

In other words, they’ve positioned themselves as an idea leader in their industry. Have you?

Strategy 7: Set Concrete Growth Goals

We’ve already mentioned the importance of gathering benchmarks so as to appraise your success (or lack thereof), but it’s equally as important to line concrete growth goals, so you'll see how well you’re measuring up within the future.

Successful resolutions (of the New Years’ variety and otherwise) depend on clear goals. A Harvard University study tells us why: Humans need a heady mixture of motivation and achievement so as to succeed. Online businesses are not any different.

Sometimes, the simplest approach is the best. There are other methods out there for keeping tabs on your performance and goals, but an Excel spreadsheet could be the easiest and best tool at your disposal. A spreadsheet allows you to set goals on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and allows you to effortlessly track how well you’re doing. You'll record the amount of emails you’ve sent, the amount of phone calls you’ve had, and the number of successful follow-ups you’ve secured. At an interval of your choosing, you'll compare this “real” data with the goals you’ve set.

Achieving steady growth requires something to compare it against—and during this case, your goals can point the way. It’s healthy to let your hopes and ambitions take the wheel, but it’s still important to have realistic expectations.

Sometimes success is about little more than smoothing out speed bumps. You don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel when it involves improving your marketing funnel.

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