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.

An impeccable landing page with a promising CTA (Call to Action), compelling email marketing efforts and power-packed Facebook advertisements might fail to show results. It is vital to focus on a complete lead generation process, not just a single landing page or campaign.  Today, 66% of business goals emphasize mainly lead generation.

Lead generation is the heart of your business, and it means growth and sustainability. Most companies fail to make it work, and they will continue to fail in lead generation in 2019. This is merely because they look at the tree, not the forest.

What is a lead?

A lead, in digital marketing, is an individual who is interested in a product or requesting a service. A lead becomes a qualified prospect if they explicitly express their interest in your product. In other words, a prospect is a potential customer.

While you nurture a lead, you can understand what your target audience wants. That’s essential to success and successful lead generation in 2019. Growing your pool of leads becomes easier if you focus on what your audience wants and adapt your landing page and all your marketing collateral to address those needs.

Remember, there are no fixed lead generation strategies that are suitable for every online business. It is very important to implement some basic strategies correctly and then update and optimize your lead generation process in 2019.

Lead generation basics for 2019

Simply put, there are five basic strategies, to begin with. At this stage, it is crucial to set up web analytics to determine the source of organic leads. After that, you can start with the following:

1. Email marketing

Email marketing tops the list of the most promising digital marketing technique ROI as much as $44 per $1 spent. With email marketing, you can build trust and credibility with leads by sending relevant emails consistently and maintain rock-solid communication.

Communication is the key to lead generation. You cannot allow your audience to forget you.

The other way is to collect email addresses by offering something – a coupon for instance. It works! You can build a robust customer base with these email addresses and convince them to visit your website repeatedly. Here, you can use our software for a short survey that drives traffic to your website.

2. Cold calling

Running a campaign with mobile numbers for communication is also an in-thing today. If you are doing it, make sure you pick up calls from interested customers; they could be your potential sales. Add multiple phone numbers and be responsive.

3. Responsive landing pages

68% of B2B businesses use strategic landing pages to acquire credible leads.

A landing page is crucial. It is the first impression of your business. In addition, space converts visitors into sales. Create a compelling landing page that would encourage visitors to share information, such as email address and contact number. You can then use these details for sales and marketing purposes.

4. Calls to action

A call-to-action is essential to driving sales. Choose words carefully to make sure visitors know where the link would lead them. A simple line that says – “click here to get your coupon code” is a more personalized pitch than merely writing, “click here.”

You can be creative with CTA. If you are into real estate, CTA could be “Let’s Explore.”

5. Blog consistently

Blogs add value to your business. They provide an insight into your business, which is essential to draw the customer’s attention. Create a responsive blog with a subscriber list so that your potential clients and leads are always informed about new resources, products, and services. Update your blog regularly to share new information and content.

Try our software, Curately to write blog posts. It curates relevant content from all over the web to keep your blog fresh.

What’s new in 2019?

Are you looking at some new lead magnet funnels to capture prudent leads? Are you thinking of getting a fresh and innovative landing page design? What are your plans for lead generation optimization?

Possibilities to play around opportunities that the digital market has to offer while staying rooted in the basics – that’s the mantra.

Here below, we are unveiling the real secrets of lead generation in 2019.

Homepage review – Focus, focus

The homepage of any website is the face of the brand. It receives the first visits. It should be credible, informative, gripping, and definitely surprising. Not to forget, it should have an influential headline with subtitles, images, and a convincing CTA.

Businesses that promote their websites proactively should receive more visitors from relevant sources such as social networking channels, referring sites, search engine results etc.

The key is to have a power-packed headline with a consistent message on the homepage. And make sure that your done for you lead magnet is featured pretty prominently. It’s all about branding, rather ‘branding well’.

Allow users to log in with Google

Most of us use Google. Allowing users to log in with their Google username is a convenient way to rope them in. It also ensures personalized efforts. Moreover, you have to learn to view your customers as individuals, and not a group.

While this one strategy has helped many businesses, it is still the most under-used technique. Google is not just a popular email account resource but also the hub of content marketers, online entrepreneurs, and bloggers. It is one of the largest databanks to explore.

Moreover, social media platforms make it more convenient to connect with people. As a result, you can find a sizeable chunk of people storing their names, addresses, contact numbers, and other details on their trusted sites like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. As a result, marketers can create a simple and flexible flow of signing up new users.

Have a dynamic team for lead generation only

If you are serious about converting visitors into leads, take lead generation to a level higher than usual. Yes, you need a brilliant landing page, but it should include everything that attracts users – a headline, subtitles, headers, bullet points, and CTA. In other words, you have to play with the dynamics of the upcoming strategies and keep updating your landing page regularly. Regular testing shall get you right.

But, an important aspect of this strategy is to divide your teams – a team for marketing and a separate team for lead generation. That’s specialization!

Only a specialized team focused on lead generation can bring home potential leads, nurture them, and run successful strategies.

Invest in webinars

Webinars are the latest inexpensive lead generation tools. Using webinars, you can not only have better reach of your audience but also deliver an entire database of leads. The fastest growing digital marketing technique today, webinars are effective for lead generation and nurturing. With these 100% online (digital) events, you offer an interactive medium to your audience, engage them, and make them feel involved, ask questions, give necessary feedback, and get their undivided attention.

Research shows that you have 75% better chances of your audience watching a video instead of reading a boring text. Likewise, 97% of viewers are happy to give their contact details.

https://youtu.be/9r6TkAfKUZg

Write commanding headlines

The headline of your landing page is the place of all the action. A headline, if written with attention-words can instantly draw user attention.

How to do it?

Focus on the structure, length, keywords, topic, and the action appearing in the headline. Each of these can evoke curiosity, which, in turn, persuades visitors to click.

There is another reward of creating a credible and powerful headline – it improves search engine ranking tremendously by lowering the bounce rate. In fact, a Tech Nicholas research shows that people make 73% of all buying decisions depending on the headline.

Regardless of the platform, you have to create a headline that drives leads. The only way to do it is by adding strong action words in the headline. When you use a strong verb, it replaces useless adverbs, passive voice, and wordiness.

Some verbs that work are – increase, improve, boost, expand, nurture, attack, engage, drive and similar.

Make your business irresistible with offers for no reason

How do you convince people to visit your website, stay, and look, stay further and purchase? Only by giving them irresistible offers.

Marketers just want a “yes” from their audience. The route to that is through offers having high value and spiced with persuasion. All you want is a “yes” in action and that’s how you can attract potential clients as well as retain them.

Now, an offer does not have to be a 50% discount all the time, though percentage discounts attract better attention. In some cases, you can just have a clause like, for example, Domino’s Pizza – delivery in 30 minutes or free. That attracted more and more customers. It wasn’t a discount or a coupon code, but the idea that worked. And, it saved a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Similarly, some SEO services provide lower rates compared to the rest, which definitely grabs attention. While the difference is often unclear to novices, this idea works and eventually, you can save big bucks.

An offer with a call-to-action is definitely the road to success.

Final thoughts on lead generation in 2019

With a plethora of lead generation tools and techniques available, you might tend to feel overwhelmed. But you don’t need to because not every tool will for your business. To build a successful online empire, it takes time, proper lead nurturing, and a compelling presence on social media, effective email marketing, content, and much more. Start by developing a data-driven lead generation campaign. With consistency, hard work, and focus, you can certainly achieve your lead generation goals.

The post The Secrets Of Lead Generation In 2019 appeared first on Done For You.

Customers are constantly bombarded with an onslaught of advertising all day long. The average online visitor has an endless stream of marketing messages and ads to contend with for as long as they are on the internet (both on desktop and on mobile).

Banner ads, contextual links, pop-ups, pop-unders, dynamic opt-in forms, exit intent pop-ups, slide-ins — all these are things that the average visitor to your website puts up with. The whole aspect of whether or not you should take marketing to extremes is something that’s debatable.

We are marketers. We get it. But we don’t want every website to blast sound horns or pop-ups either.

But then, there are certainly more unintrusive ways to acquire leads on your website without being pushy, greedy, or plaster pop-ups all over your website.

Let’s explore a few low-key lead generation tactics.

Know what you are up against & scale Back

The global average of conversions on your mobile pages is around 1.43% while it’s 3.89% for the desktop, according to Madeline Blasberg of Leadpages.

As you can see, conversion rates are not that high. It’s an uphill task for every business to generate leads assuming they are hitting all the best practices and doing great with their website and overall web presence.

If you have to do better, you’d need to beat those global averages. You’d either have to up your game with lead generation or get more traffic to your sites, or both. One of the ways you can really stand out is when you keep it all minimalistic and simple.

Instead of opting for more lead generation elements such as opt-ins and forms, reduce them and use a strategic approach to have them show up.

For instance:

• Everyone uses a blog sidebar. Remove it and provide for a full screen experience.
• Instead of using a generic pop-up site wide, use specially-crafted, content-specific opt-in forms within each blog post (for blog content upgrades).
• Don’t use any pop-up. Use only exit-intent pop-ups.

Everything points to a single landing page

If you follow any of the content marketing best practices such as content upgrades, for instance, you’ll find that your website becomes a complete mess with all sorts of opt-in forms and pop-ups plastered all over your website and your blog posts.

Instead of using pop-ups, slide-ins, and opt-in forms for lead generation all over your website, create a single landing page and use links to point to that landing page.

Be sure to make this single landing page a complete entity by itself focused on lead generation by using a compelling offer — a free course, a free membership, an information-packed report, or a free video (or a set of videos).

Use only links

Links are clean, and a web page with content is a natural habitat for a link. If your website or blog had nothing on it except text, videos, and links, it’d be the cleanest user experience you’d ever manage to get for your visitors.

A website without any of those annoying pop-ups but only strategically placed links is a breather — an oasis, really.

Also, because of lack of anything else to click on, there are now more possibilities for your links to be clicked on while your visitors read and consume your content. Plus, by using just links instead of opt-in forms or pop-ups, only the most interested visitors will end up clicking on those links to sign up.

Clicking on links leading to a sign up shows high-intent on the part of your visitors. This leads to a much higher quality of leads than you’d otherwise.

It’s all about timing

The above two approaches for only for those who dare (or those who can get away with experimenting a little). Most businesses don’t have the time to experiment and they can’t afford to let go of potential leads, just like that.

In other words, for some businesses, there’s just no way you can afford not to have pop-ups and other lead generational elements.

In such cases, the next best thing to do with lead generational elements is to use “timing”. Use only highly-relevant offers on appropriate pages.

Use exit-intent with relevant and timely offers. Or make those slide-ins come out only after your visitors pass certain rules such as “spent X minutes on site” or “visited X pages”.

If you have to use your lead generation elements, make sure to time them properly. Get deep with page level elements or timed events so as to make them more relevant to your visitors.

Are you going full on with your lead generation elements or are you scaling up? In either of the cases, how have your results been like?

If you’d like to learn more about lead generation, running full-fledged organic or paid campaigns, building sales funnels or landing pages, get on a scheduled call with us now.

We can also build Done For You Lead Generation Campaigns for you and manage the traffic!  Click here to read more about it.

The post Lead Generation: Low-key Ways To Acquire Leads On Your Website 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.