A well-optimized sales funnel is the cornerstone of success. Whether you’re selling products, services, or subscriptions, a strategically designed funnel can guide potential customers through the buying journey, nurture leads, and ultimately drive conversions. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the process of optimizing your sales funnel to maximize conversions and boost your bottom line.

Understanding the Sales Funnel

Before we dive into optimization strategies, let’s start by understanding the basic structure of a sales funnel. At its core, a sales funnel is a visual representation of the customer journey, from initial awareness to final purchase. It typically consists of several stages:

1. Awareness: This is the top of the funnel, where potential customers first become aware of your brand, product, or service.
2. Interest: In this stage, prospects express interest in your offering and seek more information.
3. Decision: Here, prospects evaluate their options and decide whether to make a purchase.
4. Action: The final stage is where prospects take action and make a purchase.

By understanding each stage of the funnel and the corresponding customer mindset, you can tailor your marketing efforts to effectively engage and convert prospects at each step.

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

The first step in optimizing your sales funnel is to clearly define your target audience. Who are your ideal customers? What are their needs, pain points, and preferences? By creating detailed buyer personas, you can better understand your audience and tailor your messaging and offers to resonate with their needs and interests.

Step 2: Create Compelling Content

Content is king when it comes to attracting and engaging potential customers. From blog posts and social media updates to videos and podcasts, create content that educates, entertains, and adds value to your audience. Use storytelling techniques to make your brand relatable and memorable, and incorporate relevant keywords to improve visibility and attract organic traffic.

Step 3: Capture Leads with Lead Magnets

Once you’ve attracted potential customers to your website or landing page, it’s essential to capture their contact information so you can continue to nurture the relationship. Offer lead magnets such as e-books, whitepapers, or free trials in exchange for email addresses. Use enticing calls-to-action and opt-in forms to encourage visitors to subscribe to your email list.

Step 4: Nurture Leads with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful tool for nurturing leads and guiding them through the sales funnel. Segment your email list based on demographics, interests, or behavior, and tailor your messaging accordingly. Send targeted, personalized emails that provide valuable content, address customer pain points, and showcase the benefits of your offering.

Step 5: Drive Conversions with Compelling Offers

At the decision stage of the funnel, prospects are evaluating their options and considering whether to make a purchase. This is where compelling offers and incentives can make all the difference. Offer discounts, promotions, or bonuses to incentivize action and create a sense of urgency. Use persuasive copywriting and compelling visuals to highlight the value of your offering and convince prospects to take the next step.

Step 6: Optimize the Checkout Process

The final step in the sales funnel is the action stage, where prospects make a purchase. To maximize conversions at this critical juncture, it’s essential to optimize the checkout process for simplicity and convenience. Streamline the checkout flow, minimize form fields, and offer multiple payment options to reduce friction and increase completion rates. Provide clear, transparent pricing and shipping information to eliminate uncertainty and build trust with customers.

Step 7: Track and Analyze Results

Once your funnel is up and running, it’s crucial to track and analyze key metrics to measure its effectiveness. Monitor metrics such as traffic, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value to identify areas for improvement and optimization. Use A/B testing to experiment with different strategies and tactics and optimize your funnel for maximum results.

Conclusion: Unlock Your Sales Potential

By following these steps and implementing best practices for sales funnel optimization, you can unlock your sales potential and drive more conversions for your business. From defining your target audience and creating compelling content to nurturing leads and optimizing the checkout process, each step plays a critical role in guiding prospects through the buying journey and turning them into satisfied customers. With a well-optimized sales funnel in place, you can attract, engage, and convert prospects more effectively, ultimately driving growth and success for your business.

The post Optimize Your Funnel for Conversions: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making More Sales appeared first on Done For You.

Today is another episode of GSDdaily, our 141st episode and we will talk about building a lead generation system in your business. This is lead generation week, so we are going to talk about creating the lead gen system today. It’s something that we do a lot in a lot of different spaces, most notably real estate. We do a lot of real estate stuff, like Tulum real estate, a lot of financial stuff. From building a lead generation system standpoint, we work with a lot of real estate investors, and we also work with a lot of cash for house kinds of folks, cash for house investors, distressed property investors who are looking for leads of people who are trying to sell their home.

Landing Page

So that was the inspiration behind this video series because every building a lead generation system starts with a landing page. And that’s part of the creative piece when you come up with… When you discover that you need to start generating leads for your business, whether it is phone sales, whether it is digital sales, whether it is email lists, whatever, then putting together the system is really pretty straightforward. You need a landing page, and the landing pages, you can build it on your website. You can use a piece of software like ClickFunnels or Leadpages or whatever.

The landing page itself, the specifics of the landing page are pretty much brain dead simple now. It’s not like it was five, six, seven years ago when this idea of a landing page was a new concept. Now everything is landing pages. You see landing pages all around. If you don’t know what a landing page is, you can literally go to Google, type in the landing page, and there are a million examples. Or just click an ad that shows up inside Google, and then you’re going to land on a landing page. That is what a landing page is for. There are landing pages all around you, and every landing page leads to a confirmation page, which is the thank you page after the landing page.

Lead Magnet

Now, the thing about the landing page is to get somebody to give you their email address, you usually need to incentivize them in some way. And the best incentive is a lead magnet. So a lead magnet is a document, a video, a spreadsheet, something that you give away in exchange for somebody’s email address. And that something should have a lot of value. So it should give a prospect or a customer an aha moment in their life or their business or their whatever. They should have an aha moment. You should give them value for the time that they invested in reading your thing or watching your thing. That’s what a lead magnet is.

Now, because we don’t like to leave you hanging too much on these calls on these things, we have a whole guide available here. So the perfect lead magnet. There’s a free blog post on Done For You, you’re going to see it over there in the comments box, but basically, this is… It’s simple formats get big conversions. So really, at the end of the day, every campaign, everything that we build has a lead magnet associated with it. Sometimes that lead magnet, quote-unquote, is an automated webinar. Other times it is a PDF. A lot of times the best performing lead magnets that we create are PDFs, the reports, guides, spreadsheets, something that we give away for free. So let’s see if we just scroll down here a little bit. So the report or the guide is absolutely one of the best lead magnets that we give away. A six to eight-page PDF report that has some sort of material that is going to be of value to your prospect.

They see that they read the features and benefits, they decide that they want to give you their email address in exchange for that report, and now they are on your marketing list and they’re consuming your PDF. A cheat sheet or a process map is another great one. We’ve actually been doing this process map in a multi-video sequence that we’re sending out the email list right now. Software is another really great example. Checklists are awesome. We have a GSD weekly marketing checklist that we give away here and there. So checklists work really nicely for lead magnets.

Any videos, multi-video launch sequences, multi-videos. I would say that for a video to be a really great lead magnet, it has to be highly visual in nature. So some of the videos that we’ve given away as lead magnets that have worked really well are golfing, pets, anything that is outdoor, sports, baseball, really great for video lead generation. But probably not all that awesome in business. If you’re selling a B2B thing, chances are they’re not going to opt-in for a video as quickly as they would opt-in for a report. Typically PDFs get better conversion than just a video. Tutorials are another PDF. Quizzes or surveys are also really great, especially when you’re looking to generate a lead in a regulated market. Something that Facebook doesn’t really like to send traffic to. Health and fitness, financial, anything like that. Facebook or Google. Surveys work really well in those spaces.

So lots of different lead magnets, lead generation ideas here, but every business, every business needs a lead generation system. So it’s something that you’re going to have to look at, and now with browsers doing weird things with cookie tracking and stuff, tracking is going to be even more of an issue than it is already. Tracking a sale all the way to… An ad click or whatever all the way to a sale. So one of the best ways to do that and track is just to get the email lead and have the UTM variable saved in the CRM so you know exactly where that person came from, so you can see down the road where that person came from. You’re going to see lead-generation campaigns be that much more important moving forward.

For Questions and Guide

Now, if there’s anything that we can do, if you would like business help, go to doneforyou.com/start or consultingsession.com, they both go to the same place. And if you would like to learn how to do this on your own, set up lead generation systems and a bunch of other funnel types, go to digitalaccelerator.io and it’ll give you all the information there, but there are two courses there that we’re putting a lot more emphasis on. One of them is a startup accelerator and another one is a funnel accelerator. You’ll hear a lot more of those coming in the next weeks and months.

The post Building A Lead Generation System For Your Website appeared first on Done For You.

There are only so many visitors who’ll actively read your blogs.

Most people, despite their love for what you do or the information you produce, leave your website without doing anything.

Usually, the audience you are trying to attract (and eventually sell to) is a cold audience. Cold audiences don’t know you, they aren’t aware, and they are resistant.

Madeline Blasberg of LeadPages helpfully created a simple table that helps you identify the kind of lead magnets that work with the degree of engagement your audiences have had with your brand.

Why create lead magnets?

Lead magnets help you build your email list.

Why bother building an email list? Because email marketing still rules and gets you the best ROI for your business.

At the time of writing this, it is impossible to grow your email list with that ubiquitous rallying call which goes something like “Sign up for our newsletter”. You still see this on many websites — and it’s certainly better than no call to action, of course).

Lead magnets are free giveaways that are highly relevant to your business and something that your visitors would absolutely love and benefit from.

Types of lead magnets that work

Some businesses like SaaS businesses are automatically positioned to generate leads with a free trial of the software.This is also called “freemium model.”

Most other businesses have to depend on usually giving away information packaged in the form of eBooks, Reports, Videos etc.

Contrary to what most people think, lead magnets do not need days or weeks to create. In fact, some of the most popular lead magnets don’t even take a day or two to create. For instance, HubSpot’s most popular lead magnets have been simple videos, ebooks, templates, and resource kits.

Curated lists also make for great resources you can give away, apart from membership access, lookbooks, swipe files, and many others.

Use free videos

If you wanted to maintain a regular Youtube Channel for branding (and possible traffic), it’s a good strategy that can have long-term dividends (and you must do it) if you can. A much better way of putting videos to good use is to use a couple of high-value videos as free giveaways. In fact, you could actually do both.

Here’s Ramit Sethi of Iwillteachyoutoberich.com who uses a video (Hosted on Youtube) right in the middle of a blog post (allows for more stickiness, higher average time spent on the blog, and engagement).

But Ramit also gives away frees video to grow his email list, right at the bottom of every relevant blog post with an opt-in form and using video as a content upgrade.

Checklists

Of all the types of lead magnets here on this list, checklists are the easiest to create.

Neither they do they require the kind of upfront effort that eBooks, online courses, or membership sites need nor are they hard to produce as videos are.

Based on your topics or your niche, you could create simple checklists for absolutely anything.

Here’s one of the checklists Leadpages creates and gives away:

Most checklists are not more than one (and two pages is stretching it a bit). Create a checklist using one of the many ways available for you to create them.

For instance, you could just create an actual checklist on Evernote and save it as a PDF to make it downloadable. Or have someone professionally create a checklist with some design goodness thrown in.

If you like to do it yourself (and save time and resources), try using tools like Canva, Beacon, or even software that you already use such as Keynote, Apple Pages, Microsoft Word, etc.

Online courses

Online courses have a high perceived value. But they require sequential production of content. People love online courses because of the structured formats which enables better comprehension of the subject you are trying to teach.

Teaching is an authoritarian approach to engaging with your potential audience. If you teach, you are seen as a mentor and guru and that goes a long way to make others trust and believe you.

As a result, online courses make for an excellent giveaway. There are also other benefits like making an effective first contact, building authority, establishing thought leadership and to keep your audience highly engaged.

If courses are structured in a way that a person can go from zero to the “aha moment”, your lead magnet is doing more than just collect leads; it’s paving the path for a relationship that has dividends.

Here’s Brennan Dunn of doubleyourfreelancing.com who’s seen massive success with his free course on freelancing:

Build free helpful tools

If you had the ability to create handy, effective, and easy-to-use tools like Hubspot does with its Website Grader, you’d be generating thousands of leads in absolutely no time.

Creating simple tools, scripts, or applications however demand allocation of resources upfront and it’d be almost as if you were about to launch a SaaS startup (except that the tool or application is not going to be sold; it’s only going to be shared for the pure value that it offers).

Adespresso is a tool that helps marketers and businesses manage their Facebook ad campaigns.

The cool folks at Adespresso, however, use tools like Pixel Caffeine (makes it easy to deploy the Facebook Pixel for Facebook ad campaigns) and Compass (Facebook Campaign Reporting made easy).

Resource kits or bundled giveaways

Many always seems better than just one, and more is good that less.

The perceived value of getting a lot for nothing at all (well, ok, a name and an email address maybe?) is, let’s admit it, attractive.

Here’s what Steli Efti of Close.io does with his Startup Sales Resource Bundle

Depending on your business, you could curate various related resources to be given away as a kit or as a bundled download. When you do that, you are letting your subscribers know that they are getting value just for being a subscriber.

If you wanted to, you could drip out the content using email autoresponder sequences. Or you could have your new subscribers down all of the content at once.

While it’s a bit more work upfront, maybe you can even have membership access thrown open for your subscribers to view, watch, or read your content anytime they want to from their own membership area

eBooks

EBooks have always been the staple when it comes to lead magnets. While it is not to say that they don’t work, they take a longer time to create and hence it may not be worth the time and effort it takes to create one.

Thankfully, with tools like Canva and Beacon, it’s incredibly easy to make one if you wanted to.

Here’s what Kaloyan Yankulov does at Headreach with their “Champions Guide To Outreach Marketing”

Now, eBooks don’t mean fluff thrown in together. eBooks — unlike checklists — are harder to create because they carry detail.

The more value you can add to your read (writing almost as if you were writing a small book) with enough research and valuable information, the more impact and more effective your eBook is going to be as not just a lead magnet but also to create the right impression for your subscribers.

You can’t skip the task of building a lead magnet, but that does not mean you would need days or weeks to create one.

Hopefully, you might be able to create a lead magnet out of the popular formats (as above) to build your Email list effectively.

What does your lead magnet look like? How is the top of your funnel set up? If you need help, please don’t hesitate to get on a strategy call with us. You can also choose to attend our Attract. Engage. Profit Webinar

The post How To Create Lead Magnets That Convert appeared first on Done For You.

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.

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!

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!

The post 3 Tips To Make Your Sales Funnels Less Complicated appeared first on Done For You.

What your list does is insulate you from a lot of the changes that happen online, from ad networks not playing nice to Google deciding to update and algorithm and stop sending all that traffic to you.

By learning how to get folks to raise their hands and say, “I want to learn more from you,” you’re adopting one of the most tried and true business building strategies online, and you can market to them anytime you like!

That means, you can send out product promotions, webinar promotions, and flash sales…  All, at the drop of a hat!

Take a few minutes and really go through these 5 insights.  They’ll be key in really scaling your business.

1: 6 Steps to Your First 100 Email Subscribers (The Easy Way)

If you want to maximize your business’ profit, there’s one thing you need to know: email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) that beats any alternative—by a lot. I mention it fairly often, so you might already know that. But then why haven’t you started?

Click here to read more about generating your first 100 subscribers >>

2: 13 Tantalizing Incentives that Will Build Your Email List

Need a quick way to entice someone to join your email list or register for your website? Give away something for free. By giving away something site visitors can download or access instantly, you can break through your readers’ hesitations about handing over their email addresses.

Click here to read more about which lead magnets you should be giving away >>

3: How to Use the Word “Free” in Your Marketing Without Losing Credibility

Marketers use the word “free” so often that it has nearly lost its power. Free is a word that has enormous psychological appeal. But when it’s overused or used incorrectly, it can ruin your marketing efforts. Here’s how to use the word free for conversion power, marketing advantage, and increased revenue.

Click here to read more about using the word ‘free’ >>

4: 10 Design Principles That Will Increase Your Email Newsletter Conversions

Seven years ago, Seth Godin introduced a groundbreaking, yet startlingly obvious concept called “permission marketing.” “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” Nowhere is this concept more apparent than in email marketing.

Click here to learn how design influences conversions >>

5: 7 Insightful Questions to Boost Your Conversions

Do you struggle with writing features and benefits?  Things that are really telling about what you’re offering or what you want someone to opt-in for?  Here’s your inspiration, in the form of questions that you should be asking yourself…

Click here to learn more about the 7 questions >>

The post 5 Powerful Insights On Why Your Traffic Isn’t Converting appeared first on Done For You.

In the next few days, count the number of times you hear the word “test” or “testing” as it related to marketing, and it’ll shock you! I know I say it all that time and I hear it from a lot of different people in their podcasts, webinars and blog posts…

The thing about A/B testing is, by being diligent about the pages that you include in your tests, you can test to a winning campaign if you have the patience and a traffic source.

What I mean by that is most marketing fails.  It’s a fact of business.  Product offers, startups, ad campaigns; the deck is stacked against us most of the time…  But, byA/B testing your marketing and sales material, you can make iterative improvements on the messaging, target markets, images and design, all adding up to a dramatically improved campaign over time.

That’s the trick to landing page optimization…  It’s not one test – oftentimes it’s multiple!

What I want to share with you today is what I call the “Split Test Evolution.”

In this iterative A/B testing process, you’ll see how we test one thing first, find the winner, and then start a second test based on that one control.

After Test 2, Test 3, and so on; you start to truly zero in on your ideal conversion because your landing pages are as closed to optimized as possible…

Most of the time when you get started with A/B testing, you put up a few variations of a page and figure out which one converts best…  Maybe there’s a method to your madness – maybe there isn’t.  But then what?  What happens after you find a winner?

What you DO with the results is what matters in your hunt for landing page optimization.

First, let’s establish some ground rules:

• Split testing takes patience and practice.  You should only be testing out ONE thing per page, per test.  That might be colors, buttons, headlines or images.
• For every additional variation you add, you need to send that much MORE traffic!  If you're testing 2 variations, you might need 200 clicks.  3 variations, 300 clicks.  8 variations, 800 or 1000 clicks.
• Disable the losers when you think they're losing - not when the software tells you they are.  You can always re-enable variations as the apparent winners start to drop (and they always do!)
• Expect pretty high conversions right after you start a campaign.  The true test of your variations is what they do when you start to scale them...  From 20 clicks to 200 and 500 clicks or more!

Now, to do split testing, you need to have split testing software.  My pick is Visual Website Optimizer because you can test any page you have online, and it’s super easy to use.

Click here to check out VWO >>

Now, let’s look at some tests…

Here’s a landing page optimization campaign that we’ve been running for quite a while.  The traffic source is Facebook Ads driven directly to an opt-in page.  From Facebook Ads Manager, this is a website clicks campaign to a cold audience.

As you can see, Variation 2 is the clear winner with 37.74% conversions after we finished the test.  We discovered that pretty early so the majority of traffic went to that page…

This is actually where the A/B testing started out though…

Our very first test, we were getting 24.47% conversions from cold, paid traffic.

Here’s what that page looked like:

From there, we tested different headlines to see which one resonated with our audience…

The headlines were:

• 100 "Plug & Play" Subject Lines
• 100 "Most-Opened" Subject Lines
• "Tested For You" Subject Lines
• Subject Lines That Get Your Emails Opened

And as a refresher, here were our stats at the beginning of the A/B testing:

As you can see, Version 1 was our winner.  The one that said “100 Most-Opened Subject Lines.”

Now, a 2% bump doesn’t sound like a lot (and it’s not!), but it did give us some very valuable intel…

We knew which headline to use on our next test!

For Test 2, we used the winning variation, Variation 2, and changed the look of the landing page itself.  Now, if you’re familiar with our Scriptly Page Builder, one of these examples is inside Scriptly for you to use…  Largely because of this A/B test!

The text is the same – the headline, body copy, book image and top headline.

What we changed were the colors of the background, the button and the button location.

• In Control and Variation 1 - the difference is the primary background color.
• In Variation 2 and Variation 3 - we moved the button to the other side of the page.
• And in Variation 3, we changed the button color.

Here are the results:

As you can see, Variation 2 was the HUGE winner of the A/B test, at 37.74%!

Here’s the winning landing page:

That’s a 13% bump in optin conversions and landing page optimization that rivals most other landing pages out there, consider this traffic was cold Facebook Ads…  All from two simple tests…

That’s some pretty impressive performance testing for only a few weeks worth of time!  Please take notice too – a 13% bump in conversions means 13 MORE people out of 100 who hit that page optin for the lead magnet…  Meaning, my lead cost dropped and my ad budget is going further for building our list.

Now, the next thing I need to do after this A/B test is test subheadlines to see if there’s a noticeable bump in conversion from them.  I’m guessing that there isn’t, but I’ve been wrong in the past :0)

At the end of the day, make small changes, see what’s working, and use that data to keep improving your conversions!  If you need help with performance testing and landing page optimization, make sure to book a call with us here!

The post A/B Testing: Performance Testing And Landing Page Optimization appeared first on Done For You.