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.

The basic concept of sales funnels

Traffic, i.e. website visitors, coming in from social media? From organic search? From paid ads? From direct traffic or referral traffic?

Sales funnels help channel all the relevant, incoming traffic to pre-designed and strategic funnels to help guide them through your buying process.

Your digital sales funnel could start with a free giveaway or a free trial. Either is intended to entice a first-time visitor to give up their email so you can contact them again in the future. With lead nurturing autoresponders smartly laid out, your funnel gets to work automatically with every lead who signs up. Eventually, sales happen.

If you’ve setup your funnel right, this should work like a charm. Sales come in and pipeline fills up automatically.

But wait. Why funnels?

You need a digital sales funnel because 73% of leads don’t even want to be sold to. What they want is to buy what they need to buy when they need to. Until then, your job as a business is to nurture those leads.

Do it right and your sales figures will fly like a bat out of hell. But then, why doesn’t it always work? Why do businesses still struggle to construct sales funnels that work like a charm? If it were that easy, anyone would do it.

How to build sales funnels that convert

It isn’t easy to build sales funnels that work. There’s a lot that goes under the hood. There are best practices you should be aware of when it comes to sales funnels. Here are some of them:

Funnels aren’t silos

Digital sales funnels are much like Lego blocks – you’d have to bring various elements together to make it work.

Usually, funnels start with landing pages where people opt-in for your mailing list. In some cases, you might have multi-step landing pages.

Then, you’d have a thank you page (or a confirmation page). Some marketers and businesses also use intermittent pages for upselling or to make a one-time or special offer.

Once people sign up at the top of the funnel (at the landing page level), you’d have an automatic sequence of emails that go out to every new subscriber. A different email sequence can be sent to subscribers segments, like qualified leads or users. Each of these email sequences is laid out with a dual purpose – to nurture, and to sell.

Your subscribers are led to sales pages or product pages from within your emails to bring about sales. Of course, you could extend that to all sorts of use cases such as using affiliate links to make sales or to have subscribers sign up for something else altogether.

While that’s the basic structure of sales funnels, each of those moving parts has to work together. Connect and integrate to win.

Be wise to use the right mix of tools, applications, products, and services to ensure smooth working for your sales funnels.

One offer per page

One funnel can’t service multiple offers. If you are making multiple offers like “Sign up for the newsletter”, “Download this ebook”, “join our facebook community”, and “Buy Now” – all on the same page, it’s not going to work.

Too many funnels don’t work as well as they should due to these multiple offers for a single funnel. When you add so many offers, visitors normally freeze due to indecisiveness.

Ads, for instance, are made for a specific audience with a single offer per ad. The same ad can’t have two offers, can it?

Similarly, your funnels have to be singularly focused on exactly what you want your potential audience to do.

For every offer, you are making and for every marketing objective, launch a dedicated funnel with the proper series of autoresponders and workflows for that funnel.

Copy, message and design do more than you think

The integrations and the initial setup is relatively easy. The design and copy used on your landing pages, your email subject lines, the email copy, and even the call to action button copy – that’s even more important.

Business owners don’t have the time or patience to think through the minutest of details when it comes to sales funnels. Meanwhile, marketers and entrepreneurs are in too much of a rush to launch campaigns.

As a result, sales funnel design and the copy used across the elements of the funnel aren’t given the importance they deserve. While it’s the combination of design and copy that actually brings in the money, most funnels today suffer from design and copy afterthought.

Copy literally sells. Like trillions and more in sales each year, for the last several decades. Writing sales letters should be one of your favorite tasks!

Fortunes have been made just thanks to copy. Align powerful and yet simple copy with design and that’s when you have a winning funnel.

If you depend on an average developer to help build landing pages, you’ll probably get an average result in terms of design and copy. Developers are not necessarily the best people to create beautiful designs or write high-converting sales letters. On the flip side, if you try to create the landing page yourself using popular tools, you’ll like face problems with design customizations, like aligning elements, and your landing page won’t look professional.

If you’d like an audit or to discuss your marketing strategy or how you can use landing pages and funnels to grow your business, book a call with us.

Data wins. Theories die.

Funnels… All fine and dandy but the fact that you could gather, make decisions, and glean insights from several data points on your funnel is what gives you real power.

When you use data, the decisions you make are not just based on conjecture, whims, fancies, or opinions.

Combined data sets result from regular funnel use, testing, hypotheses, and more. Top marketers and businesses have already caught on with the power of using data to run smart campaigns and smarter businesses. About 90% of top companies are already using and sharing data between departments.

In the case of funnels, most of the data you’ll work with lies in metrics that accumulate at the landing page level and then for your email marketing sequences.

Beyond that, most of the data from the hypothesis you’ll work with comes from the various (and continuous) A/B testing that you’ll do to test out various elements of your funnels such as ads, landing pages, email subject lines, call-to-action buttons, and others.

If you want to find out more about the ingredients in funnels that just work extremely well, download our Funnel Factor Report.

If you’d like to skip the download (or have already downloaded the report!) and want more help, click here to book an Action Plan call!  Or, click the button below…

The post Do You Know These Fundamental Rules Of Digital Sales Funnels? appeared first on Done For You.

What is a Lead Generation Agency?

Why Work with a Lead Generation Agency?

How to Choose the Right Agency

Experience and Expertise

Services Offered

Pricing

Communication and Reporting

Culture Fit

Conclusion

The post The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right Lead Generation Agency – Boost Your Sales Today! appeared first on Done For You.

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.Content has always been the backbone of successful marketing. From the days when word of mouth was the only means to spread awareness about a business to the current digital era where everything is available, literally, at your fingertips; there is nothing quite like engaging content when it comes to converting buyers.

Today, I am going to explore some amazing ways that content marketing can drive buyers through the sales journey…

Discovery – the first point of contact with the buyer

Every buyer out there is on the lookout for a solution for the problems that they’re experiencing right now.

Considering the fact that there are virtually countless options available to them, the only way to capture the buyer’s eye is to provide them with something unique and intriguing.  This is where content comes into the picture.

During the discovery stage, the buyer is completely naïve (i.e. he has a problem does not know the solution). So, he’s trying to figure out what to do to get some satisfaction. And, more importantly, he’s in a place where he’s looking for content that educates, inspires, and most importantly helps him with his problem…  Content that can play a key role in getting him to the next stage in your marketing funnel.

Powerful content, like informative blogs and articles, creates an initial impression with your brand, building a connection and enticing him further into your sales funnel and sales letters.

Consideration – one step further in the relationship

So, now the buyer knows that you have the solution to this problem. What next? He’d want to know how good you are or in other words – are you the best help he can get?

This is again where the power of content marketing can make or break the connection established between your brand and your prospective buyer. Now that the buyer is considering your business as one of the probable solutions to his problem, he will want to explore your products and services more specifically.

Powerful content makes sure that your buyers get to know about your expertise in the field and what makes you the perfect fit for his problem. Content like landing pages and “content upgrades,” therefore, become the key component of content marketing that can drive sales.

Decision – the phase that can make or break your marketing efforts

Now, the client has moved down further in the marketing funnel, but he has is still indecisive on whether you are the best fit for his needs or not… So, how are you going make sure that he makes the decision in your favor?

The one word answer to this question is – CONTENT!  (Notice a trend?)

Content forms like case studies, buyer testimonials, and success stories work towards building faith and confidence within your buyer’s mind. It is a basic human psychology to trust the experience of others. Therefore, by going through content like use cases and success stories, you can give your prospect a taste of what it’s like to finally have their problems solved because of your business!

As a matter of fact, this works as the final push that drives the buyer into the last stage of the buying journey…  Getting converted!

Retention – going above and beyond

Most businesses think that the buyer’s journey is limited to only the intial sale…  This is a big mistake.

Smart businesses know that there is still another important step left on this journey. This step is to retain those buyers AND sell them more stuff. You might be shocked to know that studies reveal that 80% of future sales come from 20% of your existing buyers.

So, continuing to feed your buyer with more information once the sale has been completed becomes key. This is where content elements like email newsletters, product updates, festive greetings and social media posts come into the picture.

Remember, buyer relationships are a journey that you need to keep nurturing or else it becomes stale. After all, building trust is not just a one-time thing. You need to keep the buyer hooked on the fact that you are constantly evolving and doing things to make their life easier, and better.

Content plays a role at every stage of the funnel!

The points mentioned above paint a clear picture of how content plays an integral role to keep buyers hooked at every stage of the marketing funnel. A slight weakness in content at any stage could mean losing the buyer forever.

While there are many businesses that focus too strongly on the top of the funnel, it is quite evident that content plays an inseparable role at every stage. From building buyer’s interest in your business to ensuring that the buyer completes the journey by converting into a customer rather than leaving before they ever get the chance – content is the one decisive factor in conversion.

So, are you putting the right focus on content?

Now the question is – how much importance do you put on creating content and aligning it with your marketing efforts in your sales funnel?

Remember – no matter how good your marketing strategies are – if they are not supplemented with the well-crafted content they will prove to be of no use. That’s why the adage, “Content is King,” has been around forever…

And, in order to get the best out of your marketing efforts, you need to focus on crafting content that leaves an instant impact on your prospects.

Producing content that matches the customer’s psychology, offers help and support, and builds trust can be the key differentiator between your business being a hit or a miss. So, pull up your socks and invest in content if you want to see your business shining brightly in your market.

After all, the ultimate reason for a business is to help customers and create revenue, making sure they stick to you for the long haul. Powerful content can help you do that!

Get an inside look at generating revenue online through a sales funnel.
Register for the free Digital ROI Workshop here!

How Content Marketing Drives Sales Throughout The Buyer Journey

This entire week we’ve been talking about content marketing. Today, in particular, we are going to be covering, how content marketing drives sales throughout the buyer journey.

Content marketing is interesting because all our clients that we run paid traffic experience the first level of awareness. When you’re getting brand exposure – basically throwing your brand, offer out there, and you’re trying to get people to pay attention to you, it always starts with a piece of content. That content, sometimes a Facebook post, social video, you’ve seen all kinds of this stuff from us and our clients.

Basically what we’re trying to do is get awareness.

We’re trying to engage with prospects so that they raise their hand and say “Yes, I’m interested in what it is you do.” That is where the whole sales funnel starts. They raise their hand and say, “I’m interested in what you do. I read a blog post and an article.”. What we’re going to talk about today are blogging and advertorials. “I watched 15 seconds of video,” whatever, basically something triggers where that person is now engaged with our brands. What we want to do is we want to continue putting messages in front of them so that they engage deeper with our brands. That’s the role that content marketing should have. Then your paid traffic kind of exacerbates that. It amplifies that content marketing piece.

Today what we’re going to talk about is, how content marketing drives sales throughout the buyer journey.

Now, so content marketing, it’s always been the backbone of successful marketing. I mean, the saying forever is “content is king.” Way, way back, when I started getting into blogging, I don’t know how many people know kind of where I originally started, but basically, I was a Pepsi truck driver. A lot of you know that. I was driving a Pepsi truck and I ended up stumbling across this PDF one day that was half-finished, and I don’t even remember the author, but it was this 14 or 15-page document on how to become a professional blogger. And I was like, “Well, I can type, I can write. Maybe I’ll try to be a professional blogger.”

This entire PDF was how to be a professional blogger by writing online, and the steps were really pretty simple. You log in, create a Blogspot blog, which for those of you who don’t remember, blogspot.com used to be a free blog. It’s kind of like WordPress.com now. It might even still be around. So this is what I did and I ended up kind of falling in love with the blogging thing.

I had zero visitors and nobody gave a shit. I had very, very little traffic and I blogged every day and I wrote about whatever the hell I wanted to write about it. It wasn’t focused, niched and it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t anything, but it was a start. And so I wrote a couple of hundred blog posts within the course of a couple of years, and in the first check that I got from Google, you would’ve thought it was a million dollars, it was like $104. There’s a picture of it somewhere online. And that was my advertising check because I put Google AdSense the posts.

Then I figured out that if I put text link ads, then I could make a lot more money, just having text links on the website. Those PayPal payments were like six, 700 bucks, and all of a sudden I started making money, and then that made me really, really dig into it. To get more traffic, I started doing research.  How do I get things ranked in Google, I run paid traffic, or how do I make money online?

I started down those rabbit holes, and everything came back to this idea that content is king. And as we talked on Monday, you know that I ended up having some affiliate sites that were making 10, $20,000 a month. Google happened, the Panda update happened, Penguin happened, and all of a sudden those sites disappeared, which is fine. You know, it wasn’t at the time, but that of course led to growth.

Buyer’s Journey

We started running paid traffic, selling our own products and building sales funnels, working with clients, working with folks, and all of that other stuff. So it all ended up being good. But at the end of the day, the journey started with content and it ends with content. There will always be content. If you think you can build an online business without content, then nobody’s going to buy anything. I mean, you’re never going to sell stuff because every business, the only thing you have, the only currency you have, is content. Whether it’s a Facebook ad, a video, a sales copy, or an email copy, everything is content-based, so that’s where we’re at.

1. Awareness Phase

Now, so the first thing, the first time that somebody is probably going to interact with you or your business is this discovery phase, this awareness phase, and this is where people end up kind of jumping down your rabbit hole. It’s the time that somebody Googles something and lands on your website. It is the time that they’re scrolling through something on Facebook and they see your logo, and then there’s a video or there’s a post or there’s something that engages them. It is always that first piece of awareness, that first interaction that somebody gets. The beautiful thing with what we’re able to do with content marketing now is that we can quantify that engagement and we can advertise to that engagement.

If somebody watches more than 10 seconds of a video, we can throw up some banner ads in front of them. If they hit our websites, we can follow them around with banner ads. We could never do that before. Before they always had to buy there, or they have to sign up for an email list. They had to take concrete action. But now we have all these kinds of loose actions that somebody can take to learn more about us. They can follow us, they can like our stuff. Just showing up on a website means that we can retarget them. There are all of these small pieces of commitment that then lead to bigger commitments and it’s all content-based.

2. Consideration Phase

The next step is a consideration, so basically, buyers know that you have the solution for the problem and they’re asking, What’s next, are you a good fit, are you good at what you do, are you going to be around. All of that stuff starts to kind of play into the … or play into the decision, which is the next phase.

3. Decision Phase

The decision really is the make or break for your marketing efforts. You know, it’s that sales copy, the webinar copy, the email that they get that tells them to go do something or to buy something or to book a call with your service-based team, or whatever. That’s the decision, you know? So once you cross that, it might be a decision, it might be desirable, you get them to take action, but once you get them to cross that threshold and sell them, then basically you’re moved into the retention piece.

Now, your content marketing, kind of aids every piece of this journey, because every piece is based on content. It’s just really, really, really important to understand what each piece of content means throughout how content marketing drives the sales funnel. Your blog posts and advertorials are all front side stuff. That’s all front side content marketing, content that you need to have in your funnel, whereas your webinar is kind of like … that’s desire content. I mean, that’s decision content. That is the pivotal piece of content that is going to get somebody to go from, this person has a solution to I want to work with this person and this is how I do it. That’s where, how the content comes into play.

Advertorials

I have a couple of pieces of kind of front-end content that we’re going to talk about. These are advertorials. You already know of this content. You’ve seen them in magazines. You’ve seen them all over the internet, whether you know you’re looking at an advertorial or not. I have one popular blog that a lot of people have ripped off for years for an antiaging skin cream. Basically, it’s kind of the same blog post, same page. You see it all over and they just swap out different CPA offers.

This is an Instagram-worthy anti-aging content marketing post that is a skin cream, called HER, this particular. If you look at the language here we have, “and although they’ve run out of stock,” oh, we’ve got to show that here. They’ve run out of stock a few times over the past month. This is due to a huge spike in demand from women all over the world. They are currently running a special offer that lets you try the entire HER solution booty system for a massive 70% discount for first-time customers. This is obviously a call to action link. So you click this link, you’re going to be able to go buy this.

Now, if this company went defunct or whatever, then they could just swap in another skincare cream. Just run traffic to the same advertorial. This is the pre-framing piece. So this is the piece that pre-frames a buyer to actually purchase the thing. You see this kind of stuff all over the place once you actually learn to look for it. Basically,  advertorials are inserted in newspapers and magazines. This stuff all the time is always present with digital traffic. You click an ad, which oftentimes put you on an advertorial that is going to presell the solution. Then that advertorial then gets the clickthrough to ultimately go through and buy.

Now, I used to think, a long time ago, that why would you put another step in between the ad and the offer? Why would you throw an advertorial in there and make somebody read when you could just go right to how content marketing drives sales copy?  Then I started seeing that all the big media buyers were using advertorials, every single one of them. They basically had this bridge page, which was the page that’s sandwiched between the ad, bridge page, offer. The advertorial is required when you’re driving a tremendous amount of traffic. What it does is it lets you advertise some things that maybe Facebook won’t necessarily want you to advertise straight away or Google.

More than that, it lets you pre-frame the offer. You can standardize how people are going to show up and take in the offer on the next page. Think about this, you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed and you’ve had a really long, hard grueling day. The kids were crying and you’ve worked and all this other stuff. You’re scrolling through your newsfeed, then you hit an ad. It goes right to how content marketing drives the sales page, but you’re not in the frame of mind to actually buy that thing. You are mad and you’re just not in the frame of mind to go get your credit card and purchase something.

Now, compare that to somebody. They’re on vacation and they are sitting in a hotel. They’re on Facebook and they’re just kind of enjoying life for that particular moment of that day. They are scrolling through Facebook. They hit an ad, the same ad as you, then they go to how content marketing drives sales page. Next, they buy because they are in the frame of mind to buy. Now, what a good bridge page, kind of advertorial page does a good piece of content, is it puts both of those people in the different frames of mind on the same page, quite literally, pun intended.

It puts them on the same page so that they’re reading, and then by the time they get to the call to action, by the time they see that link, they are both thinking the same thing. It standardizes it, normalizes their thoughts so that they know exactly what they’re getting into. They’re both reading the same piece of material, and they click the link and then they go buy. So that is what a good bridge page, that’s what a good advertorial, does is it standardizes how content marketing drives sales process.

It allows for a bunch of different people with different emotions and feelings and thoughts and preconceived notions and biases and all that other stuff to hit a page, normalize, and then go to how content marketing drives sales offers. Oftentimes with the right bridge page, the conversions will go up as opposed to just direct linking right to the sales page. So that’s why the big media buyers do it. It takes a lot of testing to make sure that the advertorial is working the way it should. It’s something that you definitely need in your toolkit.

Now, we have a couple of advertorials that we use. I just wanted to kind of throw them up here just for example’s sake. Here’s one sales funnel, “Avoid the needless bottlenecks and maximize output”. It just kind of goes through all the bottlenecks you might have when you have content marketing drives sales funnel. It is like KPIs and metrics that matter. Of course, we have a call to action, which is to watch the video. We’ve been throwing more videos on these things too.  Here are “Three tips to make your sales funnels less complicated”. These are all blog posts. I mean, that’s all of these, are blog posts with calls to action in them.

“Tip number one, strive for simplicity, tip number two, avoid multi-step landing pages”

Then all the way down, so we have a little banner call-out box here, a little feature box. We have a button at the very bottom, a little call to action. Here’s another one, “How to use lead generation to improve your sales funnel. We drive cold traffic to these pages all day long,  and we split test them. We split test the headlines, split test the little banner boxes, all that other stuff.

Here, we’re talking about content marketing and some different things to do. Then we have one here for Facebook. We drive a lot of traffic to this too, so Facebook ads for e-commerce, so people who are running Facebook. I want to run Facebook ads for e-commerce specifically. These are just some of our kind of internal pages that I was kind of going through. Some of the advertorials end up turning a lot of our folks into how content marketing drives sales. Somebody said they still have – “still have those Blogspots”. That’s funny. I think Google bought them? Or maybe Google-owned them way back then. I’m really not sure.

Well, what ended up happening was, when I got into blogging, I went from Blogspot, and then I knew that I was going to try to make money. I wanted more customization over the theme because I knew I was going to want to put in banner ads. I ended up moving to WordPress and it was WordPress 1.2 or 1.3, years and years. That’s really where I started falling in love with WordPress and then web design. Then mucking through FTP servers and web servers, and all of that stuff was very self-taught. So that’s really where I started way back in the day.

For Questions and Guide

For those of you who would like to go through and do kind of a content marketing audit, where we go through, look at your content, plan out some content, look at how content marketing drives sales funnels, look at your traffic sources, all that other stuff, go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little form and then book a call with our team and we’ll go through and put together an action plan for you.

If there’s anything we can do ever, just go to doneforyou.com. In the lower right-hand corner, there’s a little chatbox. Here you can go through, you can learn a little bit more about our services. So if there’s anything we can do ever, just, by all means, let us know, drop us a line.

The post How Content Marketing Will Increase Your Revenue appeared first on Done For You.

Welcome to the Ultimate Sales Funnel Guide... We're going to break down the parts of a sales funnel for you so that you can build one for your following product or service...

Did you know we actively engage in parts of a sales funnel every time we buy a product? Even before we believe?

It doesn't matter whether we are in a brick-and-mortar business or browsing an online store; we, as consumers, have already entered their funnel.

These days, every online marketer and business owner talks about online sales funnels. Search Google News or read any sales or marketing blog, and you'll see that sales funnels and sales psychology are making the news.

Why is that?

Because competition has grown to be so intense and digital business best practices are so commonplace, companies NEED to have an automated sales process to acquire new customers. The fact that we're exposed to thousands of advertising messages daily reinforces that.

So, from a business perspective, how do you stand out?

The answer: Developing an effective, automated sales funnel.

Parts Of A Sales Funnel

This sales funnel guide will explain parts of a sales funnel in plain English. Our goal is to help you not only understand their value -- you probably know already that your business can't survive without a funnel -- but the integral components of a sales funnel.

Let's say you were about to hire a Sales Funnel Expert to build your online sales process. (Notice, I didn't say designer!)

A designer or developer is going to start and stop at your website. The truth is a website is required. It's mandatory. But it's the least important part of the entire sales funnel conversation.

The parts of a sales funnel, or purchase funnel as put in Wikipedia, as you'll see, are a complete system that starts with web pages, including email marketing, multi-media content, order forms, call scheduling, and more... All built custom for you and your business!

The parts of a sales funnel should automate your sales and reinforce your existing processes, not make you reinvent how you and your team work.

A Basic Funnel Breakdown

A primary funnel (and this is our approach to building successful sales funnel development) is comprised of three stages:

• Your Offer – What you're selling.
• Your Follow-up – Your communication with your lead once they're in your sales process.
• Your Traffic – The people coming to your website or landing page.

You get sales when you combine all three – traffic, your offer, and a follow-up process!

These three parts of a sales funnel are the minimum you'd expect to see in an effective funnel. Let's break them down so you know exactly what comes with each.

1. Your Offer

You cannot expect to have sales if you have nothing to sell. It should go without saying, but some small business owners don't realize they get no deals because they have no offers. In these cases, their bottom line won't reflect increased web visitors.

For your sales funnel to work, you need to have a clear, well-defined, branded product (or productized service) to sell.

Video Sales Page

At a minimum, you need one of the most elementary parts of a sales funnel: a page where the potential customer can click the "Add To Cart" button. This would be your "sales page". Also, thanks to our short attention spans, this page should have at least one Sales Video. Many more people would rather watch than read.

Typically, for offers under $100, a sales video is about all you need to sell.

Downsell / Upsell Pages

To maximize your average customer value, you'll also want to create downsells and upsells, another way to say complimentary products. These are products of a lower or higher price than the initial offer. They will be shown to customers of the initial offer accordingly.

So, if a sales page visitor doesn't buy, they might be presented with the down-sell through an exit pop. On the other hand, if they believe, they will see an upsell on the next page before they get access to the product.

Live or Automated Webinars

If your offer is more than a few hundred bucks or is complex, you'll want to sell it through a webinar. The webinar must be scripted, recorded, edited, and set up to play throughout the day.

We've had the best luck with starting webinars every 15 minutes in most markets. Sometimes, though, they test better when they're set to start every night at, say, 9:00 PM or deliver immediately after registration. Each niche is a little different.

Product

Now, what could your offer be? It could be anything from a physical product to a digital service. A pair of shoes, coaching, consulting, an eBook, a DVD, a downloadable training course, a monthly service, or yearly access to a cloud app.

If you create it and there are buyers for it - it's your offer!

Lead magnet

Before the offer, it's best practice to show people a free offer (called a "lead magnet"). Most website visitors won't be familiar with your brand. This is why they won't buy right away. But still, you don't want them to leave empty-handed.

So, instead of driving traffic to a sales page, you'd want an opt-in page where people give up their email to download a freebie. You can add them to your mailing list and contact them again.

(We always split-test a few things when running traffic for our funnel clients. Usually, we promote a lead magnet and a webinar side-by-side to see where our leads are the cheapest!)

2. Follow-up

The reason why sales funnels have gained in popularity is that they can work for you on autopilot.

Parts of a sales funnel are the exact replacement for a sales process in a brick-and-mortar business, plus they can be fully or semi-automated. Funnels are a nearly set-and-forget solution to attract, nurture and convert customers.

Automated Email Sequences

Let's assume someone enters your funnel by filling out a form. Right after that, you need to have an automated lead nurturing process in place.

So, when people subscribe to your email list, an automated email sequence is triggered. Whether Monday morning or Sunday at midnight, computerized workflows will take over and do the heavy lifting for your marketing on autopilot.

Follow-Up Sales Funnel Guide Checklist

To create Email Automation, you will need:

1. Email marketing service with automation (and optional website tracking features)
2. Emails (copy, images)
3. Automated email sequences are set up to serve different goals or segments

In the sales funnels we deploy for clients, we usually write and schedule between 20 and 25 emails before we go live!

This way, every marketing automation contingency is accounted for. If someone registers for the webinar OR doesn't register for the webinar OR buys OR doesn't buy... We have already automated a response specifically for actions that could be taken.

Endless Automation

You might be wondering where the follow-up stage ends. Well, you can stop following up when a prospect becomes a customer. But then why not have them become a repeat buyer? Email automation can be an infinite process you can set up once and have it work for your business 24/7.

Most parts of a sales funnel have a pre-defined marketing term already done... 30 or 45 days is standard for our clients. So, when someone gets into their funnel, all of the marketing is handled for at least 30 days.

Then, after 30 days, they either get added to the next funnel (Funnel Stacking) or weekly broadcast emails and newsletters take over.

That way, there's always continuity in your marketing messages. And if your prospects and customers jump down another rabbit hole for your next offer - that's awesome!

Setting up the CRM and marketing automation can be tricky. Still, it is doable and 100% worth the effort, as it will put you closer to finally achieving your goals of generating a monthly passive income.

3. Traffic

Sometimes, when you approach a web developer or choose to work with a "Funnel Page Building Software," you won't have a plan for getting traffic. Sometimes, this is on purpose. Web developers are paid media experts. And 'funnel software' does integrate with Facebook or Google Ads.

As far as we're concerned - this is a little bit like selling someone an electric car but not including an extension cord to plug it into the outlet in your garage. You can't hope to have an automated sales process without people there to buy your stuff.

In reality, you wouldn't expect to sell without having a way of getting the right people to see your offer.

Organic vs. Paid Media/Ads

Unless your website already has enough organic traffic (from Google search results), you need a traffic method to attract people interested in your offer.

That is why we are advocates of traffic as a significant part of a sales funnel, AND it's also why we start every sales funnel conversation with traffic! Then, once the funnel is built, you've already got ads ready to go live to promote your landing pages. And, if you have assets like an email list or a social media following, we account for those in the rollout phase!

Traffic  Checklist

Parts of a Sales Funnel: Putting It All Together

In short, all of the above elements are essential for a sales funnel. They won't all be needed for every horn, but they should get you a good overview of the things you'll need to have in place before launching.

In the past five years, we've built and launched over 400 sales funnels in almost every niche. The absolute most popular types of sales funnels we've deployed are:

• Automated Webinar Sales Funnels: The Call To Action is a sales call or a purchase through an order form for higher ticket offers.
• Video Sales Funnels: Featuring a one-click upsell and downsell sales process to maximize customer value.
• eCommerce Sales Funnels: Also with upsell and downsell functionality, but for physical products :0)
• Survey Sales Funnels: These work well in highly volatile advertising markets and where you need to segment buyers into buckets before marketing automation.

We'd love to learn more about your business and determine which sales funnel will work best for you!

Plus, our team will manage the whole process (even the product or lead magnet creation) and deliver a complete done-for-you sales funnel customized to your needs -- but still proven to convert because of the tested funnel parts (e.g., opt-in page) that we plugin and optimize.

Our experts can work from square one to create an offer, design and build all pages, write high-converting copy, and set up automated email sequences. We create, test, and deliver sales funnels that operate like clockwork 24/7 without you having to do the work.

If you'd like to learn how to create and launch a digital product for your business, complete with an upsell funnel that helps you sell it, check out the Launchpad Accelerator at DWY!  Click here to learn more...

The post Unlock Explosive Growth: A Sales Funnel Guide Revealing Essential Parts of a Sales Funnel! appeared first on Done For You.

Building a sales pipeline management system and creating a business with customers who flock to you is the point of all marketing.  Whether online or offline, you want to attract, engage, and sell people all day - forever!  There are a lot of tools to use, but the biggest question our agency gets asked is, "What's the difference between Pipeline Pro vs. Clickfunnels.

That's a valid question, too, because both are great tools!

In this video and blog post, we will give you a behind-the-scenes look at building a converting sales funnel.

First, we need to break down what a sales funnel is and isn't...  A sales funnel is much more than individual pages (i.e., landing and sales pages).

A sales funnel requires that email marketing campaigns and automation be set up, that you have traffic campaigns going, and that people are being moved and pushed through the sales funnel from piece to piece.  So when they enter the sales pipeline, they learn about you and your company on autopilot.  And then, they go through the entire sales process, also on autopilot!

Three Pieces To Your Sales Pipeline Management

In setting up sales funnels, there are three pieces to any sales process...  And part of your sales pipeline management should be to create reporting on:

• Traffic
• Offer
• Followup.

We've got an entire book about it - Convert.

What often happens when business owners are marketers is - they begin with traffic.  Then, they back-end into their offer and their follow-up. It's one of the biggest mistakes you can make because you're spending money on traffic without necessarily having a clear path to make that money back to generate revenue from your offers.

Where To Start

When we do sales funnels for clients, we start the project by creating the offer.

Your offer can take lots of different shapes. It can be:

• A consulting offer
• A coaching offer
• A digital product
• A membership course
• Physical products
• Mastermind Programs
• Live events

You name it. There are so many different ways to generate revenue online and so many different kinds of offers that you can make to the world. That's what business is!

Choosing Sales Pipeline Management CRM and Software

Pipeline Pro

PipelinePro is a cloud-based sales CRM platform that helps businesses of all sizes manage their sales pipelines and close more deals. It offers a wide range of features, including:

• Contact management: PipelinePro allows you to store and manage your contact information in one place. You can track contact interactions, create lead-scoring rules, and segment your contacts for targeted marketing campaigns.
• Pipeline management: PipelinePro helps you visualize your sales pipeline and track the progress of each deal. You can create custom sales stages, set deadlines, and assign tasks to team members.
• Opportunity management: PipelinePro helps you manage your sales opportunities from start to finish. You can track leads, qualify prospects, and schedule follow-up activities.
• Sales forecasting: PipelinePro provides you with real-time sales forecasting data. This information can help you make informed decisions about your sales pipeline and strategy.
• Reporting and analytics: PipelinePro offers a variety of reports and analytics that can help you track your sales performance and identify areas for improvement.

PipelinePro is also highly customizable and can be integrated with a variety of other business applications, such as email marketing software, accounting software, and customer support software.

ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is a cloud-based sales funnel platform that helps businesses of all sizes create and manage their sales funnels. A sales funnel is a series of steps a potential customer takes on their journey, from becoming aware of a product or service to making a purchase.

ClickFunnels offers a wide range of features to help businesses create and manage effective sales funnels, including:

• Landing page builder: ClickFunnels includes a drag-and-drop builder that makes creating high-converting landing pages without coding knowledge easy.
• Sales funnel templates: ClickFunnels offers a variety of sales funnel templates that businesses can use to get started quickly and easily.
• Email marketing integration: ClickFunnels integrates with various email marketing platforms so businesses can easily send automated emails to their leads and customers.
• Payment processing integration: ClickFunnels integrates with various payment processing platforms so businesses can easily accept customer payments.
• Analytics and reporting: ClickFunnels provides detailed analytics and reporting that businesses can use to track their sales funnel performance and identify areas for improvement.

ClickFunnels is a powerful tool that can help businesses of all sizes increase their sales. It is particularly well-suited for companies that sell high-ticket products or services, as it can help them create and manage complex sales funnels.

Here are some of the benefits of using ClickFunnels:

• Increased sales: ClickFunnels can help you increase sales by helping you create and manage effective sales funnels. By tracking the progress of each lead and deal, you can ensure that no opportunities fall through the cracks.
• Improved conversion rates: ClickFunnels can help you improve conversion rates by providing various features to help you create high-converting landing pages and sales funnels.
• Reduced costs: ClickFunnels can help you reduce costs by eliminating the need to hire a web developer or designer to create and manage your sales funnels.
• Increased efficiency: ClickFunnels can help you increase efficiency by automating many of the tasks involved in sales funnel management. This can free up your time to focus on other aspects of your business.

Overall, ClickFunnels is a powerful sales funnel platform that can help businesses of all sizes increase sales, improve conversion rates, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.

When To Have A VSL In Your Sales Pipeline

Now, depending on your offer, you need your sales material. That's the point in your sales pipeline management to get prospects to purchase something from you.

If you have an offer under $1,000, you can usually sell it with a video sales letter (VSL) or a multi-video launch process. If you have a video sales letter, you need an upsell and downsell process. You can take a $100 sale and then pitch something that's $300 on the confirmation page.  After that first upsell, you can then create a second upsell.

That, my friend, is how you increase the average customer lifetime value of your buyers!

What About Webinars?

If your offer is over $1,000, you need an automated webinar with some webinar marketing behind it. If you sell something above $2,000, you'll need a consultative sales call in your pipeline.  The call to action you make on your webinar will be, "Click the button to sign up for a call." The sales call will be the thing that does your selling.

Do Long-Form Sales Letters Still Work?

The short answer?  No.  Unless you also combine them with a video sales letter or a video.

Long-form works when it's a heavily graphical page with many images, and you see it selling a lot of SAAS software.  But for the most part, video sales letters and webinars will be your two main pieces of sales pipeline management.

Getting Your Marketing Pages Set Up

Once those are up, then, of course, you need the marketing pages.  Those are the pages that CONTAIN your sales collateral.

Think landing pages, sales pages, confirmation pages, strategy session pages...  Those kinds of things.

Nowadays, they're pretty easy to build with page builder software.  There are lots of options to choose from, including our Axis Page Builder.

Creating Your Followup Campaigns

You get into the follow-up once the pages and sales material are done—your follow-up followup automation campaigns for outbound email marketing, text messages, your CRM, etc.

That's going to handle the marketing automation piece of the sales pipeline.

• You need an email copy for your auto-responders.
• You'll need sales calls if you're selling something high ticket.
• It would be best to have fulfillment sequences when somebody buys something digitally, at least.
• You'll need shopping cart abandonment sequences
• ... And bonding sequences.

There are probably 25 to 35 emails that you will need, all pre-done, ready for when you launch your sales funnel and sales pipeline management initiatives to general traffic.

... Then You Can Start Driving Traffic

Then, and only then, can you start going after traffic?

And your traffic takes many forms depending on the networks your customers hang out on!

It can be:

• Facebook ads
• Google ads
• LinkedIn ads
• Email solo drops
• Organic SEO campaigns
• Blog posts and content marketing

There are tons of different ways of getting traffic.

You Need Your Sales Pipeline Management Set Up First

Here's my point. All you need to do is set up the foundation and infrastructure for your business before you can go out and start finding traffic.

1. You need the sales copy.
2. You need the marketing automation part nailed.
3. You'll need the email copy.
4. You need content, like blog content and videos.
5. You'll need a good nurture campaign so that when somebody opts in, they'll learn more about you.

All this is so your potential buyers start to know, like, and trust you.

They need to know that they will make a good decision if they invest the time in getting to know you better by exploring the idea of giving you money for your products and services.

That's what it is. It's a lot of work to get built and set up initially. Way more than it was two or three years ago when all you needed was a landing page or a webinar registration page and a couple of emails...  Then boom, you could start getting $10,000+ clients.

It's a lot more work than it used to be.

But it's what's required now. You have to be able to put all of this together, launch it, and re-invest your profits back into more advertising!

If you want help putting this stuff together, click the button below to sign up for an action plan call with my team and me. We'll discuss your business, offers, follow-up, automation campaigns, pipeline management, etc.

Whatever you don't have, we can build for you. I like to think of us as the glue that brings your sales pipeline together. We will make whatever you don't have. But first, we need to have a conversation. So, click the button below and watch the short video on sales funnels...

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

This is GSD daily, episode 50. We are halfway to 100, which is fantastic. This morning, I saw that we broke 100 members in our DFY Funnels group, which is amazing. I'll drop the link here, which I'm pretty excited about. I think that is pretty awesome.

Let's see, dropping the link. All right. Here's the link to our funnel group. So make sure to sign up for that, and the stuff we'll talk about today is how to build a sales pipeline. So, this is the original post that we wrote a while ago.

We're going to talk about some tools, strategies, etc.

First, for those who don't know who I am, I am Jason Drohn, creator of doneforyou.com. I've been building funnels for a very long time for many different niches and categories and everything. We specialize in creating offers, automating sales funnels, and clarifying messages. Then, I also set up marketing automation and ran traffic. Making offers and building the sales system that powers the rest is what we are good at, so what we do.

We're capping off the high ticket week. Earlier this week, we talked about selling high-ticket offers. We talked about selling on Zoom presentations, and we were joined by my friend Patch. We talked about marketing.

Yesterday, we discussed doing conditional logic forms so that you are only working with the people and pitching the people who make the most sense for you and your offer. And what you can do then is based on how they answer specific questions. They will see a particular result, like maybe they know a calendar booking, or if they answer a question differently, they go down a different rabbit hole. So, that's kind of the power behind the applications and stuff.

What we're going to do is we're going to talk about the tricks to effective sales pipeline management. Now, I know that sounds like a mouthful, but basically, what it is is there are some rules that I follow when we're looking at putting sales funnels in place and sales pipelines in the area for clients.

There are three pieces in every Sales Pipeline.

Those rules, what it comes down to is that there are three pieces to every sales pipeline out there. The channel itself, the funnel itself, the system itself, whatever you want to call your sales system, you boil it down to traffic, your offer, and your follow-up. Your request is the follow-up you pitch, whether it's a coaching service, consulting, digital product, or whatever.

What offer requires a pipeline that involves follow-ups?

For purposes of followups our offer is above $1,000 because if you're charging something that is more than $1,000, chances are you're going to be getting on a sales call with this person at some point unless there is tremendous bonding and relationship that has happened for a long time through email. Or throughout an extended live stream or a multi-day event. So, an immense relationship needs to be built whenever you sell something over $1,000. So, one thing about the sales pipeline management piece is that the offer is crucial, and if the request is above $1,000, you will have a certain kind of pipeline. That pipeline involves specific follow-ups.

Where to start?

Followups on how to assemble this pipeline, we're looking first at the offer.

• Is it coaching?
• What is it are we selling?
• What are the pieces and components of it?
• Is it consulting?
• Is it a digital product membership site?
• What are the live pieces of it?
• What does our client or the client's team have to fulfill one-on-one like if it's a live event?

We don't have too many; we don't have any live events now. Live physical events, we have, of course, life digital events. If it's a live event, having the creative business owner put on that live event, it needs to be big enough room to make sense for them, and so on.

Offer is lower than $1,000

If your thing is lower than $1,000 or you're pitching a strategy session or a consultative sales call, which is what we've talked about this entire week, then you can have a little application that shows up under a sales page. You saw an example of that. We went through this application system; we call these the fully qualified lead video sales letters. We go through this kind of application system for all of our services. Yesterday, we talked about this conditional.

Do people leave your site without buying at an alarming rate?

That autoplay, we found that out a couple of times yesterday. But, we explored how this conditional logic application works to qualify our prospects. And then, we added a couple of variables here. You could see a couple of different scenarios.

1. Add an application below your sales page

You'll see all that if you go back to yesterday's livestream. We have a sales video, a VSL, with an application below it. They fill out the application, they get sent to our calendar, and they can book a time on our calendar to schedule a call with us. Now, of course, you have a different version of this, which is rather than a sales video, you can put them on a webinar, an automated webinar.

The call to action on that automated webinar to get them into a consultative sales call is to click the button below to sign up for strategy sessions. So, it's very much the same thing. They're going to go and apply. They will click the button below or type a URL into their browser and then use it on a page.

2. Add software to tie into the CRM

Sometimes, we talked about some of the software yesterday for that, too. Typeform, jotform, but ideally, we want to tie that into the CRM, which kicks over into your pipeline. So, that's where it all comes back around.

You have your sales piece, your sales piece is set up upfront, and you have your offer, but then the pipeline is all of it.

The pipeline is how people are moving through, getting to know you.

They're signing up for a call, then they're scheduling a call, then they're getting on the ring, and then they're leaving, or they're being pitched, or they're being proposed. So that's the idea behind this sales pipeline management piece.

Pages of the Sales Funnel

Now, your pages are the pages of the sales funnel. There are many ways to set up pages for the sales funnel. Our preferred method is using WordPress, a plugin, a theme engine, and a template system called an optimized press. That's how most of our clients are set up. There are lots of other ways to do it.

There are lead pages and click funnels. Everybody and their brother has some page builder, a template builder, or a funnel builder. It just depends on whether you want to pay it monthly. Or what kind of proficiency you have in it. But the pages, the marketing pages themselves, they're inconsequential. You have to have them, and they have to convert. So, some pages reverse better than others.

We have our own set of pages that we always use for controls, and they always work well. It's just something you have to think about.

Follow-up Campaigns

Now, the followup campaigns that follow pain, a critical piece of the sales pipeline management is they come in they schedule a call with you; what happens after the call? So, what happens after they receive the proposal? What happens after they don't receive a proposal? They set up a call, and they're not a great fit.

What happens then? Do they get emails in your nurture campaign, and you try to bring them back later when they are probably more qualified, or do you just let them go? So, you have to think about all the follow-up scenarios, too. Your sales guy, followup are pitching this person in your pipeline, then what happens next?

Do they have template emails that go out to this person? Do they drop them in a CRM, and then it goes out afterward with some blog posts, or do you just let the lead die?

1. Continue sending blog posts, podcasts and videos

So, like for us in our pipelines or sales funnels, we continue sending them blog posts, podcasts, and videos like this—the occasional book offer, but we never stop. Sometimes, people will come back and do business with us six years later. So, it would be best not to stop once you start building the list, cultivating the relationship with those prospects, and setting up the sales pipeline that works. Then that's how it should go about. You keep doing it.

2. Start Sending Traffic

Once all that is set up, once you have your sales funnel, webinar, and VSL in the mix of your offer and your system, you can start sending traffic.

Some of the best ways you know, you've heard of them. Facebook ads, fantastic traffic drivers, Google ads. LinkedIn, we've gotten into it a little bit. It's more expensive, but the quality of prospects is just astronomical for a B2B list.

You can do email solo drops; you can do SEO, which we've been doing quite a bit of SEO lately, just in terms of transcribing these GSD dailies and then dropping them as blog posts and ranking for a bunch more keyword phrases.

You need to have the sales pipeline built first.

So, that's kind of the mix of the traffic coming in, but the thing is, you need to have the sales pipeline built first. You have to have the website, the sales funnel, and all that made to build the marketing onto the front side. You have to have the sales funnel building, you create marketing, and then leads start flowing out of the back. Your sales pipeline lights up off out of the backside. So, you need the copy, the sales copy, and all that stuff.

Tools for your Sales Management Pipeline

Now, some tools make the pipeline piece easy. I'm going to show you some of those. So, when somebody comes,d they fill out a form and start the relationship. Often, they hit a sales page, then they come to this page and fill out this form.

1. Zapier

There's a couple of things that we do. The first is whenever somebody fills out this form; we use Zapier to trigger a message to our Slack channel. I'm just going to log in real quick. I want to show you this because it's super cool. If we go into my Zaps, two different kinds of things happen. The first is whenever somebody hits this page, and we know their information, it triggers a Slack message that says, this person is on our page right now.

This is marketing like Ninja-level shit right here. So, hopefully, nobody's watching. Yeah, there's a couple of people watching. So, these are some of my best tricks. So, inside Zapier, basically how it works is Ontraport... When a lead comes in on this page into Ontraport, then a Slack message fires.

This person is on a page in Slack, then it adds it to a spreadsheet in Google Drive, which is super cool because not only does that let us know A, who is on the page, and when they are on the page, but B it also lets us know... It tabulates them in a spreadsheet. So, we can see all our leads and then scroll down and say, okay, cool. Now, let's look at how this is set up. There are three pieces to this. When a form is submitted, and we went through this yesterday. So when we were kicking through the conditional logic of this form, when this form is submitted, then... So, new form submission and that new form submission is, that's my Ontraport account.

Then, the title of that form is FQL VSL, for Fully Qualified Lead Video Sales Letter, Ad Management Application. Then, what it does is send the data. That's just some examples from the data. It sends all that data right over to Slack, and then inside Slack, a message sends a private channel message to Slack. And then there are my accounts here. And then the private channel is this. The news that I received is from the new FQL lead ad management. And then I get a readout of the first name, last name, email, and SMS number.

As soon as that lead hits, I don't even need to wait for the text message that goes out. I don't need to wait for the email that goes out. I don't need to wait for tomorrow's report. It pops up in Slack, and I can pick up the phone, which I probably just screwed up my clarity. But I can pick up the phone and call that person and say, what's up? So, this is the next level of marketing automation 101-level stuff. You know what I mean, so this is Ninja shit.

I haven't seen anybody who does this, maybe some Fortune 500 companies, but I tell people this, and they're like, that's nuts, that's wild. Then, after it sends Slack a message, it tabulates that as a spreadsheet, it sends it to Google Spreadsheet and adds another row, and then boom, that entire contact history is there. And then, we can take notes on that call. So that's how our pipeline works. So, if you remember this form, once they submit it, it goes off to Pipedrive.

2. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is the following tool in this mix. Pipedrive.com and this tool have calendaring; it also has different stages. So, stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four. So, you can see somebody moving through the steps of your sales guys, and everybody's on the same page about where that person is inside the sales pipeline.

Are they in the lead stage, or did they schedule a call, or did they have a call and they're not ready, or are they willing and have been proposed, and we're just waiting on feedback? It also has email marketing so that you can fire emails off to these leads.

3. Pipeline Pro

It's pretty cool stuff. There is another one called Pipeline Pro, which is... I have some of my friends. So, Pipeline Pro is a very similar tool. Pipeline Pro, there we go.

Pipeline Pro is another tool that can be used from a sales letter or a sales pipeline standpoint. Now, the other thing I wanted to show you was that it shows leads when somebody is coming in. I have another folder called VSL page visits. And what this folder does is, if I have data about somebody, if they have signed up as an email address inside my CRM, and we have that person.

4. Ontraport

Ontraport tracks, it keeps hold of... So, when somebody comes to doneforyou.com and enters their email address, it creates a customer record, which is then tagged to them. So, if they come back a day or a week later and haven't cleared their cookies, then Ontraport knows that they came back. And the reason they do that is for recency.

After somebody doesn't do anything with us for... I think it's 60 days; it might be 90 days. But if they don't open an email, they haven't been to the website, they haven't done anything, then they go to an inactive list. So they don't receive our general emails. What that does is it means our sender score and our deliverability is always pretty high. It's higher than the industry average because we cut everybody who hasn't engaged with us.

The new leads are on, and they're on until they spend 60 or 90 days, like I said, where they haven't done anything. They haven't opened an email, they haven't come to the website, and they haven't interacted with us in any way. So, at that point, they go on like a... It's not a blocklist but on a cold list. Every once in a while, we'll email them and try to open them up, get them to open back up, and reengage with us. And sometimes that works, but if they're on the cold list, they'll probably be deleted before long.

It is that Ontraport tracks Infusionsoft tracks and most of the significant CRM track recency. Being that Ontraport recency, when somebody comes to doneforyou.com or any page on doneforyou.com, it fires every time a page loads. If somebody comes to this retargeted sales page and we have their information, then this page will load; Ontraport will know that this page is the one that did it because we already have their information.

What I do is I have that information sent to Slack so I can see who was on the site on the main pages of our site. And if they're coming back a lot, I can email them. If we have their phone number, I could also call them. I've done that a couple of times, where somebody repeatedly returns to the same page, and it pings. It'll ping inside Slack like this guy was here two days ago or this guy was here a day ago.

You can tell me Some email addresses, so I'll pick up the phone and say, "Hey, you're on the sales funnel page." And they're like, "Well, you're spying on me." Well, we're a marketing automation company. It's kind of what we do, sort of. If you've ever gotten a call from me, from just being on the website, that's how.

This is just some marketing automation stuff we get into Pipeline Pro, Pipedrive, and incredible sales tools. You can easily do sales pipeline management without them, but they make it very easy to keep track of your leads. Who's coming in, who's been pitched? And it becomes crucial when you have more than one sales rep. If you are the only person and you're doing three or four calls a week, then it's probably not all that big of a deal, but you start growing to the point where you're doing 10, 15, 20 calls, it's easy to forget who you talked to, what you covered and then where they are in the process.

That is how we do sales pipeline management. Now, it's Friday, and we are 20 minutes in.

For Questions and Guide

I think we're just going to wrap up the shop. If you have any questions, go to doneforyou.com/blog, and we will answer them. If you want to go through and have an action plan done, we will go through your business, talk about your business, traffic sources, and automation, then go to doneforyou.com/start. We will get that up and running, and I will see you soon.

The post Sales Pipeline Management That Will Increase Your Traffic appeared first on Done For You.

Today I want to share a little bit about email marketing campaigns, including the strategy behind setting up effective drip campaigns and some tips on getting every last ounce of conversion out of them.

In email marketing automation, there are triggers, campaigns, and goals.

We talked a little bit about triggers in a previous video (available here). Today though, we’re gonna talk about setting up email marketing campaigns.

The most important thing about a campaign is really that you’re able to set it up the way you want to, and you’re able to set it up easily.

What Makes Up An Email Marketing Campaign?

When you set up an email marketing campaign, there are a few things you need to think about.

First of all, how is somebody going to be getting to that campaign? That’s where the trigger comes in. Are they going to fill out a web form on a landing page? Is a tag going to be applied to their customer record? Are they hitting a website and being tracked through analytics? Did they not do something? Maybe not open an email? Did they open an email? What is the trigger in that piece?

The next step is, “If they do THIS or THAT, then what happens?” What campaign do we put together for that person?

Setting Up A Successful Drip Campaign

Campaigns are largely made up of messages.

A message can take the form of an email, a text message, a phone call, or a direct mail piece.  You could also consider push notifications or other forms of outbound communication like a chatbot.

The second necessary element of an email marketing campaign is what we call a ‘delay.’  The delay makes sure that all of your messages don’t stack up on top of each other. When you send a block of emails (like an email autoresponder), you need to put a delay in between those messages so you space them out, whether it’s hours, days, or weeks.

In short, you need to predefine how often those messages are going to fire and what the content of those messages will be.  If you need a hand in planning all of this out, set up an Action Plan call and we’ll help you!

An Example Email Marketing Campaigns in the Real Estate Niche

There’s a Done For You Sales Funnel client that we just rolled out.  They’re in the real estate business and we’re working with them on getting seller leads.

What our client wants to do with those seller leads is get in touch with them as quickly as possible because they know that if they don’t – the deal will die on the vine quickly.

So, when somebody signs up as a lead on their website:

1. They immediately, within five minutes, get assigned as a phone call task to one of the sales reps.  The task is added to the task management piece of the drip campaign.
2. Then five minutes after that, an email gets sent to the prospect.
3. 30 minutes after that text message gets sent to the prospect.
4. An hour after that, another task gets added to the sales reps dashboard.

This might sound a bit aggressive, and it is…  But this is a hot lead!  Someone ready to sell their house.

Basically, within the first day, this person is receiving one email, one text, and up to three phone calls.

Drip Campaign Phases

All good email marketing campaigns are broken down into phases, or stages, that help the prospect move through the buying cycle.  This is all part of why you need a sales funnel.

If any of the drip campaign messages above land, they connect with the seller, and the seller schedules a site visit or a home visit.  That campaign is then officially completed – it’s considered satisfied.

That, my friend, is a goal.  (And goals are the topic of our next video!)

Oftentimes, goals are identified when a tag is added or an action is taken inside the contact record.  Perhaps someone buys something or schedules an appointment…  The goal is fired and that that moves the prospect out of one email marketing campaign into the next.

Webinar Email Marketing Campaigns

We’ve also set drip campaigns up when somebody signs up for an automated webinar (or live webinar for that matter).  After the webinar is done, the prospect would receive an email from the Webinar Replay Sequence four hours later.  That email automation campaign would contain the link to the webinar replay. If the prospect doesn’t buy, then 20 hours after that they get the next email. Then a day after that they get the next email.

… And you can marry text messages and phone calls up with that campaign if you want!  After all, it’s just another type of message.

Now there’s some cool stuff you can do in campaigns. You have your messages and you have your delays. Those are the two big pieces.

You can also add logic.

Email Marketing Logic

With logic, you can take action on a yes or no answer.

If your prospect does THIS, add a tag.  If they do THAT, add a different tag.  And in adding a tag, you can fire off the next email marketing campaign!

A great example is from an ad management manufacturing client of ours. He calls this email marketing campaign a “Proposal Feedback Loop.”  Basically what he had us build into Axis was the ability to send a proposal to his customers that either gets accepted or rejected.

His customers get an email every day, on autopilot, with the link to the proposal in it.  The copy in the email is written to get to one of two answers – yes or no.

• If they hit the YES button, then route the lead to the sales rep.
• If they hit the NO button, send them to a survey asking them why they didn’t like the proposal. Was it 20% too high, 30% too high, 50% too high, whatever…  Then, our client has a better idea of what they can do in their future to service this particular customer.

Email Marketing Campaigns That Get Results

Lots of really cool stuff you can do in campaigns as they’re built. Messages, delays, task management, logic.

We’re constantly adding stuff into Axis as we see it work for clients and as we’re asked to build custom.

If you want to talk about email campaign structure, what your outbound marketing play is, or if you just want us to dive in and build a campaign for your business…  Fill out this short form and book an action plan call with us.

We’re happy to brainstorm and put together an action plan for you!

GSDdaily Episode 24

Today, we are going to talk about email marketing campaigns. It was funny, my son is watching TV right out there and he was like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “Working.” “What are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m going to talk to my computer.” It’s what I do every morning at 10 o’clock, I talk to my computer. All right, so this session is email marketing campaigns, sequencing, and automation that converts. This is email marketing week and basically what we’ve been doing… Shut my door there. [inaudible 00:00:49] Sebastian decides he wants to bang stuff around.

Basically, this week has been entirely about email marketing. On Monday, we talked about email, basically working with email lists, the software for email lists, CRMs, marketing automation, the whole deal. And then we talked about list building and lead magnets on Tuesday. And then… Water? Is right there, yeah. You can take it out there. Okay. And then Wednesday, we talked about email copy and today we’re going to talk about sequencing. Email copy and sequencing kind of go hand in hand. Email copy is really about sending emails that get opens, that get clicks, the whole deal. When you send an email, you want that email to do something.

You want somebody, the reader, to do something. Click go over to a blog post, to watch a video, buy something, sign up for a webinar, the whole deal. Now, an email marketing campaign, when you think about it, is a collection of emails. Oftentimes one email isn’t enough to get somebody to do the thing you want them to do. You need to send two emails or three emails or four emails. And right now, there is more people opening and reading email than there was a month ago. Open rates and we send a lot of email inside of our CRM and then also for clients on behalf of clients and for ourselves, and we’ve seen 7, 8, 9% better open rate across the board with all of our clients’ email marketing campaigns and with all of our campaigns.

The nice thing about right now is people are engaging with email more, which means email is more effective. It also means that business owners who have an email list are able to pivot faster. They’re able to pivot better in launching new products and launching new services because they have distribution, they have an email list. Today what we’re going to talk about, we’re going to go through email marketing campaigns and I have a number of blog posts that I wrote quite a while ago. We’re going to kind of dig through those a little bit. And then I also have a little presentation. I have created a lot of content around email marketing over the years because of our CRM, because of the software that we’ve generated and created.

What we’re going to do is I’m going to go through a short little presentation that talks about the buyer journey and how people end up moving through your sequences, how they move through your campaigns and how all of that should be automated. And then we’re going to go through some examples of these email marketing campaigns and we’re going to go that way. Let me switch. I’m going to share a different screen. We’re going to go here. All right. And there we go. All right. Email marketing campaigns, sequencing, and automation that converts. By automating email marketing campaigns, what you’re doing is you’re influencing the buyer life cycle. Now it isn’t necessarily just somebody who comes to your website and they either buy or they don’t.

Now what we’re doing is we’re able to send emails based on their visit sometimes using email retargeting. You can do even some retargeting through postcards. You have that additional kind of automated marketing campaign. And then, of course, you have the retargeting ads, but what you’re doing is you’re reaching out to all the people who leave and trying to influence them into your products and services. Email marketing campaigns also let you engage with the buyer after they are opt-in.

I’ve said this many, many, many times. A prospect is never ever, ever, ever more engaged than the second they opt-in. The second after they are opt-in. They opt-in on your landing page. They flip over to that confirmation page, whatever you put there as an offer is going to double in terms of conversion because people are just super engaged the second after they opt-in for something.

They’re waiting, they’re expecting something to be there for them to consume. It might be the PDF that they opted in, but ideally what you want to do is you want to email that PDF to their email inbox and use that opportunity to move them into a webinar, to move them into an offer, to do some sort of a low-end kind of tripwire thing. But the person, the prospect has never more engaged than they are in that second. Email marketing also lets you bond more effectively with your prospects. And this part is super, super important because people don’t… A good conversion rate on a sales page, 2%, 3%, depending. That means 98%, 97% of the people who hit your website, hit your sales pages, they’re not going to buy from you the first time out.

If you can get them onto an email list and then market to them over time, then they’re going to know and trust you. You’re going to be able to bond with them. And email marketing campaigns let you do that because you’re sending them blog posts, you’re sending them videos, you’re sending them live streams, you’re sending them all of the material that you’re creating to grow your business, grow your brand, the whole thing. But you’re also using it to bond with them. And they’re growing in that relationship as they go. Email marketing campaigns help in that manner and it can all be automated, and so it can trigger based on if they open this email, they get this email. It’s really nice in terms of just giving them exactly what they want.

The fourth point is, you can promote the right product at the right time. So last week, we talked about the survey segmentation last Friday. In our Livestream, we talked about survey segmentation, putting people in buckets and then sending them an email. This is kind of a continuation of that because the email that goes out based on how they answer a survey is going to be predetermined by the things they’re interested in. If somebody comes through your marketing funnel and they are interested in, let’s say, HIIT workouts, so they’re interested in HITT workouts and then for the next two weeks you can send them HIIT workouts, high-intensity interval training type of workouts.

And you know that they’re going to be into it because they told you they were into it, but all of that can be automated in the email marketing campaign. It ends up being a super nice way of just automating processes. You can also work with abandonments. The cart abandonment on an order form is typically like 70, 80%, which means you can reclaim up to 70 or 80% of your sales or of your possible sales by putting email marketing campaigns in place. And then you can also re-engage death leads. People who haven’t opened an email in 30 days or 60 days or whatever, typically you can send them through a re-engagement campaign and then pull them back into your process.

In understanding the buyer life cycle, there are five different buckets before they actually buy something from you. The first is they’re brand new to you. They’re brand new, they’re just becoming aware of you, they just signed up for your lead magnet. They’re just learning about you. The second kind of stage is they’re on your email list, but they’re still not really sure what you do or whether your stuff is worthwhile or not. They kind of know that you know what the hell you’re talking about, but they’re not in it yet. They haven’t decided but they’re loosely interested. Then the third step is they’ve opened a few emails, they kind of feel like they’re getting to know you, they like you, they trust you, and now they just kind of need to see some offers.

And they need to see what you’re working on. Is it a product, is a service, whatever. The fourth stage, they’ve watched the sales video and they’ve left without buying for whatever reason. Now, they’re getting warm, so they’re approaching a deal. Then the fifth stage is they’ve clicked an add to cart button and they didn’t complete the order. They hit the button, they went to the order form, they didn’t have their credit, whatever, and they didn’t end up processing the order. They either buy or they don’t. And really this is were most kind of marketers and business owners leave it. They kind of front-load everything so that everything is based around this inbound marketing piece.

But then once it gets to the rubber meets the road, this person is on the fence and they’re just waiting for you or somebody to push them over the edge and buy something, and then they’re going to be a hyper buyer with you. This is really where most marketers and business owners just kind of sit back and let it play out. They assume that if somebody didn’t buy, it’s because they didn’t want the product, they didn’t want the service. When they aren’t right for the offer, they didn’t want the product bad enough to pull out their wallet or the sales copy didn’t quite do enough to sell it or they need to add bonuses, or they need to redesign the page or whatever. When what really happened was the new prospect doesn’t know you or your company well enough to place an order.

They haven’t bonded with you that well yet, or they didn’t have time to go through the whole sales video or to try to understand the offer. This is kind of where the price and complexity thing comes in play. The higher the price, the higher complexity, the more the different things you need to do in order to work through the sales funnel. A low ticket, low complexity offer, it’s going to be great for a sales video. An upper ticket or higher ticket, higher complexity offer is going to need a sales to call like an automated webinar or a sales call. It’s all part of this automation piece. Or they didn’t have their credit card on them. I mean, maybe the credit card was at home or at the office or whatever.

Or they wanted to think about it or sleep on it and see if it really was a good idea. I mean, there are lots of reasons why people don’t buy it. Now, I mean my son just walked in here three times while we started this thing and it’s like, okay. It’s always jarring. If you’re just taken out of your element now, especially with the pandemic, it’s like everybody’s just kind of in a funk. There’s some of that at play.

A notification comes in or they feel like they needed to be checking the news or whatever. There’s a lot of external factors that come into the purchase or non-purchase decision that you have no control over. Now, let’s kind of put this thinking into action. We talked about buyer stages, talked about pieces of the buyer journey and as they relate to email and how you can kind of correspond with some email marketing campaigns for it.

Now, after you get the new lead you, you want to deliver that lead magnet through email, then you want to present an offer of some kind and you want to pay attention to what they’re doing. We use a piece of software called Inspectlet for this, I-N-S-P-E-C-T-L-E-T.com. You can read it on the screen. But basically it records the screen of somebody who is going through your funnel. Another one is Hotjar, a great piece of software. And if they escalate, they go through the buying process and then they can go through your upsells, you want to track them through the process. If they buy or sign up, then you’ve accomplished your mission. You have a new buyer in your mix.

Now, here’s kind of the steps as they play out. We don’t really do a lot of image ads anymore. This is kind of how we ended up putting stuff like this together. Step one is you want to build trust. And how we build trust is we don’t go over directly. Usually, we have a couple of email marketing campaigns that are running really cheap cold traffic leads right now. But typically, you want to send them to a blog post or an advertorial or video or some piece of content that is going to give value without necessarily detracting from value. And I think next week we’re going to do a full week on Facebook ads for this so we can put this together, learn how to do Facebook videos, the whole deal.

Step One: Build Trust

Step one is you want to build trust and this is just an image ad with just an ad. And then that image ad goes to this blog post. Notice we have the same images, so the same images in both scenarios. They go to this page and then there’s a blog post. And the blog post has sub-headlines, there’s a couple of calls to action in there with links and you know what else. Banner on the upper right-hand side, more posts. It is an engagement piece, something that they can just read. They don’t have to do anything, they don’t have to take any action. They can back up, go back to Facebook and whatever. The point is that our email marketing campaigns have already started because now they’re on our retargeting list.

Now whether it’s with AdRoll, whether it’s on Facebook, whatever, we’ve placed the pics where we’re able to get back in front of them with our second ad, which is this, there it is.

Step Two: Get the Lead

In this process is we want to get the lead. They know who we are, what the offer is. They don’t and they don’t know what the offer is, but they know in general what we do. They’ve seen a blog post and now we’re trying to get them back to an opt-in form, a lead magnet form so that they can give us their email address, and that’s what this is doing. This is a free workshop, or it can be a free report or lead magnet or whatever, all the stuff we talked about on Tuesday.

It takes them to a landing page, this landing page. You’ve seen it before because it is one of our best converting landing page styles. We’ve got a text on the left, an image button on the rights, two-step opt-in. They enter their email address here and then we’ve got their email. At this point, we can start bonding and promoting products to them so we can start moving them through some of our processes. We send them the lead magnet fulfillment email, which is, hey, thanks so much for downloading this. Here’s the link to your thing. And then pay attention to your email over the next couple of days.

Goal number one is to get them the lead magnet, the thing they just downloaded. We can also pre-frame the rest of what we need them to do, which is there’s a webinar here, there’s a sales video here, there’s a product, there are blog posts. But you don’t want to jump into deep too earlier so else you can scare them off. It’s like you can’t walk up to a girl and propose to her and then hope that she’s going to say yes. It’s just not going to work that way, but you want to warm up. Do you know what I mean? My wife’s probably watching this laughing right now because it took us 13 years to get married. It was fucking funny.

Step Three: Present an Offer

All right, so step number three is we want to present an offer. After they are opt-in, they get the lead magnet and then step three is we present an offer. The offer itself, we’ve got a headline, we’ve got the video and then an add to cart button below it. Chelsea just laughed, this is my wife. We want to present an offer in step number three. Now here, basically what we’re doing is whether it’s a sales video, whether it’s a full-motion sales video, we want to get that first purchase. In this particular case, it’s a free trial, free 14-day trial for a piece of software. In other cases, it’s a free plus shipping offer for a book, or a $37 digital product, or a 495 digital product, or whatever.

But this is all kind of low-end stuff and what we’re doing is we’re trying to pick off sales at this point, pick off buyers. And once that happens, then we can March them through an upsell path. And if they don’t buy this, which most people don’t, I mean 95, 96% of people don’t buy this offer. Then what we want to do is we want to send them emails to bring them back here. That’s where the email marketing campaigns come in. That’s where the automation comes in and the sequencing comes in because we want to bring them back to this point, have them click the add to cart button, and then move them into the next space. At this point, they either continue signing up or they don’t. They’re at the sales page and they either hit the button or they don’t.

If they don’t, they get product promo emails. If they do, they hit the add to cart. They leave, they get the shopping cart abandonment sequence and they’re removed from the product emails. Basically, send them product emails until they add them to the cart. Then once they add to the cart, we remove them from the promo emails, and then we send them a shopping cart abandonment sequence. We’re stepping them up through the email marketing campaigns to get them into what we need them to at the time we need them to do it. Once they get the shopping cart abandonment sequences and they pull the trigger, they are a new member, then we remove them from all prospect lists unless there’s something else that they’re going to be ascending to. Unless there’s something that they’re going to move to.

And you can also mail them upsell offers. For this campaign, there are some services on the backside. Some of those services and stuff can play out. That’s what email marketing campaigns are really meant to move you through, move a prospect through the buyer journey, understanding that they are going to drop off at some point.

That’s what the email marketing campaigns are 100% all about. Let’s talk about some jumping-off points here. For folks who didn’t buy, you want to make sure that you send them a download link, you want to make sure that they’ve got a way to get back to the sales page. Confirmation pages, a lot of times are hidden so what we’ll do is we’ll end up kind of lopping off the front side of that sales video, which is, hey, thanks so much for downloading the report.

We’ll take the first 30, 45 seconds off and then it just becomes a standalone sales page that you can throw anywhere in your site. That works out nice. You want to make sure to include language on bonuses or discounts if you’re going to offer those. And then you really want to promote that first offer for three or four days. Don’t assume that one email is going to be enough. Most people don’t open their first email. That’s accurate actually. 50, 55, 60% of people open that first lead magnet download email. The other 40% won’t, even though they just opted in for it, they just won’t. Sometimes it’s 70%. Literally, you want to engage them as quickly as possible on that page. I mean, full pattern or up style, you know what I mean.

But after that, you promote the offer for three or four days, if they pull the trigger, awesome, they are in the rest of your sequence. If they don’t, send them bonding emails and eventually try to pull them back into that. That’s how you would end up working email marketing campaigns from that front. If you have any questions on this presentation stuff, we’re going to kick through some blog posts and kind of talk about how it all plays out from a sequencing standpoint too. All right, we good? All right, cool. I’m going to stop sharing that presentation. That presentation has literally been waiting in the wings for four years. I wrote that and performed that a really long time ago. I can’t believe I remembered having it.

This page we’re streaming live on right now, so I’m not going to hit play. For all your content marketing junkies out there. Basically what I did was, I found this old blog post that was already optimized for the keyword phrase, email marketing campaigns and I dropped my new GSD Daily on this page. I’m going to grab the transcript and then I’m going to paste it all the way down here at the bottom of this content. This is broke, whatever. As I said, it’s old, which is going to add about 4,500 words with the keyword phrase, email marketing campaigns all through it. We’re going to be ranking like crazy for this keyword phrase to these old blog posts.

We talked about what makes up an email marketing campaign, setting up a successful drip campaign. We kind of covered on Monday, but just as a quick recap, what you want to do is you want to use a piece of software like Convert or Drip or ActiveCampaign or Hours, which is the access you want to basically drip these emails out based on what somebody does on your website. So what they buy, what they opt-in for, and all of those are triggered. If somebody opts in for a lead magnet, like what we talked about, if they opt-in for a lead magnet, then they’re able to receive the emails, getting them their lead magnet and then moving through the product promotional sequence.

Drip campaign phases, we talked about. Webinar email marketing campaigns and email marketing logic. I talked a little bit about logic. If you have a prospect, like how we do it in an active campaign, they go to this URL. If they go to the shopping cart abandonment page, that URL, then what we do is we turn on in the shopping cart abandonment sequence and we turn off our product promo sequences. That’s the logic that I’ve referred to here. If they go through and they hit a blog post with a certain phrase in the URL, then they’re added into that bucket.

As for us, how we use it is if you go to a blog post that has the phrase, email in it, then you’re put into an email bucket. Your marketing messages are going to be weighted more heavily towards email stuff. Whereas if it goes funnel, it’s going to be weighted more heavily to funnel stuff. That’s how the logic and the triggers end up working out. Some powerful email sequences you can’t afford not to have, so we talked about these. There’s a lot of different ways to kind of cut-up email. You have your email marketing sequences, which is basically anything that’s pre-populated. We always plan for the first 30 days of every client’s. Somebody comes in and we plan the first 30 days worth of client inbound marketing materials.

Usually involves three to four emails on promoting a webinar, six emails on promoting a webinar replay, three to four emails promoting sales videos. They step through those email sequences as they go. That is all pre-populated and that is all written from scratch and custom. They’re RSS email sequences. Every blog has an RSS feed unless you actively turn it off. Every time you publish a blog post, the RSS feed publishes its submits. And then the email marketing camp or the email marketing software will actually take that and send an email out with all of those blog posts in it.

It’s a way of automating your blog posts. The ones that are being sent, which is nice and it works, but you have to be able to format it well in order for it to work. And oftentimes, you’re going to find that not all blog posts are relevant to all people. You might send one to one group and another one to another group, and that’s where the bonding and the nurturing come in, in the play. Then you have your regular broadcasts. Yhat’s like every time I email these live streams out, it’s a broadcast email because I have to create new graphics, I got to create new links and there’s nothing I can pre-populate. I email them as broadcasts every morning.

I pick the audience that those people are going to be mailed to and I write the email, hit send, it’s mailed out as a broadcast. It’s a one-shot deal. I don’t automate it. I will automate the replays of these and throw them into sequences because those links never change. The broadcast is for all the one-off stuff. Transactional emails are anything transactional in nature. So things like order confirmations is a transactional email. Things like password reset emails. They’re usually things you have no control over unless you’re actually building software. So member onboarding emails when somebody signs up for a membership. So there’s lots of this kind of little transactional emails that it’s just important to note that they’re important because they usually get only fire when something good happens.

Well, I guess password changes aren’t really good or bad, but… So there’s that kind of email too. Those you’re going to need to kind of think about and personalize in your marketing mix. And then there are email sequences that are important to just think about and engage with, and when you’re putting together your product promo sequences, there’s a couple in here that I just wanted to highlight. The first is a product sales sequence. Whenever you’re promoting a product, whether it’s a physical product or a digital product, it should usually have three or four emails. They are sent to go out like, email one is day one, email two a day two, and then the last day, send two emails. Always come up with a reason to email them, whether it’s a flash sale or a discount or whatever.

Inside our access CRM, there is a product sales sequence that you can plug into, answer a couple of questions and it will create the emails for you. I think I might need the HTTPS, I’m just throwing it over here in the comments. That’s where the software is. But the email copy, Apple actually copy for you. The ascension sequence is when somebody buys your front end offer and they don’t buy your upsells. When they don’t buy your upsells, you want to bring them back to purchase your upsells and the ascension sequence is going to help you do that.

But basically, if they hit the shopping cart but don’t buy within 30 minutes, then they get three emails. And these are patterned after Amazon. The first email goes out 30 minutes after they don’t buy, the second email is 24 hours after that, the third email is 24 hours after that. What we’re trying to do is to get them to take action on something urgently, like you’re missing out on the discount, maybe that kind of thing. We always use flash sale sequences all the time for a lot of our clients. Basically, if somebody doesn’t buy something the first time out, somebody doesn’t buy your digital course the first time out, then you send them a three email or four email sequence.

And then tomorrow, you send them an email. This is this kind of 80%, buy it in 24 hours. Or buy it at 12 o’clock tonight or whatever. What we’re doing is a timed flash sale countdown and there’s lots of little urgency kind of buying triggers in there that we capitalize on for the flash sale. What this does is it spikes your front-end sales so that you have more people running through the upsell process.

It works out tremendously well. Then we have webinar replay emails, which tend to be some of our best performing emails. The webinar replay emails, it’s a six email sequence. The first two emails promote the webinar replay, the third email promotes the webinar replay and also the offer.

The replay is no more. Then the webinar promotion emails, it’s a four email sequence, they get somebody on to the webinar. You can read about all these. The link for this is in the chatbox, or you can just go sign up for access at our triggers.app and jump in and you can get all these sequences for you and your business right now. That is all I got for you today. I’m going a little bit over. We’re at 10:31. These are informally kind of at 30 minutes. But if you have any questions at all, send me a Facebook message or jump into the DFY funnels group, ask in there. Want to start getting some conversation going in there and if you have anything at all, just let me know, all right? Thanks.

For Questions and Guide

If you have questions for a future episode, go to doneforyou.com/gsd. Then if you want us to go through and put together a custom funnel for you, then book an action plan called, doneforyou.com/start.

The post Sequencing And Automation Of Email Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Done For You.

Maximizing Conversions with a VSL Funnel: A Guide for Digital Marketers

Introduction to VSL Funnel

Welcome to the world of digital marketing, where video sales letters (VSLs) and funnels are revolutionizing how products are promoted online. A VSL Funnel, an acronym for Video Sales Letter Funnel, is a strategic marketing approach designed to convert viewers into buyers through videos and upsells. This powerful tool, especially useful in direct response marketing, can be instrumental in escalating a low-ticket item to higher-value offers.

Understanding the Upsell VSL Funnel

An Upsell VSL Funnel is structured to guide a customer from an initial, often low-cost, product to higher-priced offerings. This journey begins with an engaging sales video, leading viewers through various upsell opportunities. The ultimate goal? To maximize customer value and increase revenue per buyer.

The Power of Video Sales Letters

The core of a VSL Funnel is the Video Sales Letter itself. This is not just a video; it’s a compelling, persuasive piece designed to connect with the viewer and motivate them to act. The effectiveness of a VSL lies in its ability to narrate a story, address pain points, present a solution, and persuade the viewer to purchase. The entire funnel’s success largely depends on this video’s conversion rate.

Video Sales Letter (VSL) funnels are versatile and can be effectively used for various products, especially in digital marketing. Here’s a comprehensive list of product types that work well with VSL funnels:

1. Ebooks:
   • Ideal for authors and educators.
   • Topics can range from self-help business strategies to niche hobbies.
   • Easy to pair with upsells like complete courses or exclusive webinars.
2. Digital Products:
   • Includes software, apps, and digital tools.
   • Suitable for offering free trials followed by subscription upsells.
   • It can include additional features or premium versions as upsells.
3. Memberships:
   • Perfect for online communities, educational platforms, or exclusive content sites.
   • Start with a trial period or a low-cost introductory membership.
   • Upsell to longer-term or more comprehensive membership tiers.
4. Online Courses:
   • Ranges from academic subjects to hobbyist interests.
   • Start with a mini-course or a particular introductory module.
   • Upsell to a complete course or advanced learning modules.
5. Physical Books:
   • Suitable for authors promoting their latest work.
   • Use a low-cost book offer or a free-plus-shipping model.
   • Upsell to bundled book collections, audiobooks, or related merchandise.
6. Health and Wellness Programs:
   • Includes diet plans, workout regimes, or wellness guides.
   • Start with a teaser program or a basic plan.
   • Upsell to more comprehensive or personalized programs.
7. Subscription Boxes:
   • It can be for gourmet foods, beauty products, or hobbyist items.
   • Offer a sample box or a special first-month discount.
   • Upsell to longer-term subscriptions or premium boxes.
8. Event Tickets and Webinars:
   • Suitable for seminars, workshops, or exclusive online events.
   • Offer discounted or early-bird access.
   • Upsell to VIP experiences, backstage access, or additional events.
9. Software Tools and Plugins:
   • For specialized software or website plugins.
   • Offer a basic version or a trial period.
   • Upsell to full versions or additional feature-rich tools.
10. Craft and DIY Kits:
    • Ideal for hobbies like knitting, woodworking, or gardening.
    • Start with a basic kit.
    • Upsell to more advanced or comprehensive kits.
11. Photography and Video Services:
    • For professional photographers or videographers.
    • Offer a mini-session or basic package.
    • Upsell to extended sessions or premium packages.

Each of these product types can effectively leverage the power of a VSL funnel to engage potential customers, address their needs, and guide them toward higher-value purchases. Remember, the key to a successful VSL funnel is a compelling video that resonates with your target audience and strategically placed upsells that offer increasing value.

Mapping the Journey: From Low to High Ticket Offers

Picture this: a customer enters your funnel through a low-ticket offer, say a digital book priced at $4.95. This is just the beginning. After their initial purchase, they are presented with upsell offers – each providing additional value and addressing more specific needs. This could range from a comprehensive course to exclusive membership access. The beauty of the VSL Funnel is its ability to create a seamless journey from a low-cost entry point to high-value purchases.

Incorporating Different Variations and Offers

A VSL Funnel isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. It allows for various adaptations like free plus shipping offers, free trials, or low-cost entry products (often called tripwires). A classic example is a free product offer, where the customer only pays for shipping. Once they’ve entered their credit card details for the shipping fee, they’re seamlessly transitioned into the upsell sequence.

The Tripwire: A Gateway to Higher Sales

The concept of a tripwire in digital marketing is intriguing. It’s a low-cost product that serves as an entry point, leading the customer into the funnel. Once they’ve made this nominal purchase, they are more likely to invest in higher-priced offers, making the tripwire an effective tool for customer acquisition and revenue generation.

Structuring Your VSL Funnel

The structure of a VSL Funnel typically includes a series of upsells and potentially down-sells. Each upsell offers additional value, often at an increased price. On the other hand, down-sells are offered to customers who decline the upsell, providing them with a less expensive alternative. This strategy ensures that every customer is presented with an offer that aligns with their needs and budget.

Compelling Sales Copy and Video Creation

The success of a VSL Funnel heavily relies on the quality of the sales copy and the video content. A solid and persuasive sales video is essential to convert viewers into buyers. Following this, each upsell and down-sell must have a brief, compelling video encouraging additional purchases. The language used in these videos should be direct, benefits-focused, and create a sense of urgency.

Real-World Applications of VSL Funnels

VSL Funnels are versatile and can be applied across various domains. They work exceptionally well for digital products, membership sites, and software. For instance, a software company might offer a 14-day free trial as an entry point, followed by an upsell to an annual subscription. Similarly, a membership site could start with a low-cost trial period, leading to a full membership upsell.

Conclusion: Why VSL Funnels Are a Game-Changer

In conclusion, VSL Funnels are a potent tool in the arsenal of digital marketers. They not only help in effectively selling products but also ensure a higher customer lifetime value. Businesses can significantly boost their revenue by starting with a low-ticket offer and strategically guiding the customer through a series of upsells. As a digital marketer, mastering the art of creating and optimizing VSL Funnels can be a crucial differentiator in the competitive online marketplace.

Remember, the effectiveness of a VSL Funnel lies in its ability to engage, persuade, and convert. By harnessing the power of video sales letters and strategically structured offers, you can transform how you promote products and skyrocket your sales. Welcome to the future of digital marketing, where the VSL Funnel reigns supreme!

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The post From Zero to Hero: How VSL Funnels Can Make You a Digital Marketing Superstar! appeared first on Done For You.

Sales and marketing teams love inbound marketing funnels. Do you? It takes all of the hard work of prospecting off your plate.

You are putting your best efforts into capturing leads through inbound marketing, but the results are disappointing.

Well, you are not alone; Numbers show that more than 32% of marketers believe they are going nowhere with their inbound marketing campaigns.

So, what can you do to make the most out of your inbound marketing efforts?

There is one recommended solution to this problem: funnels. Sales or marketing funnels can help you deal with your inbound marketing frustration.

What are funnels? How are they related to inbound marketing? What kind of success can you experience using funnels? Why are funnels your best option compared to other inbound tools and tactics?

By the end of this post, you will have the answer to all these questions. We'll also link to related inbound marketing and sales funnel resources to help you get a complete picture. So, let's look at how marketers use funnels as part of their inbound marketing strategy.

The 3-part Inbound Marketing Funnel Formula

To sell stuff online and successfully architect a profitable sales funnel, there are three pieces of the puzzle:

1. Your Offer – What you're selling.
2. The Follow-up – Your communication with your prospect once they're in your sales process.
3. Traffic – The people coming to your website or landing page.

The sales funnel is the first thing you need to set up, even if it's just a standalone sales page… Driving traffic to a sales page without a funnel wastes resources.

You want to ensure you get an ROI from your inbound marketing budget and consistently stoke the fire with new prospects to keep growing your business!

You get sales when you combine all three – traffic, your offer, and a follow-up process!

Read more about our exact sales funnel formula to drive tons of targeted, high-converting traffic to our business and clients' business in our brand-new version of the Funnel Factor report. No time to read? Please register for our on-demand Sales Funnel webinar. You can watch it anytime from home.

ToFu: Top of the Inbound Marketing Funnel

If you have a basic understanding of sales funnels, you would know that a top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) priority is to capture your audience's attention. This is the first step and most crucial part of the funnel structure. Therefore, top-of-the-inbound marketing funnel actions can bring in the most significant number of quality leads for your sales team to nurture and convert.

So, what does ToFu relate to your inbound marketing efforts?

You need to step up the game and invest more resources towards getting as many relevant leads as possible as part of your inbound strategy.

Optimized content

One of the best ways to achieve this is by focusing on content marketing. Create epic content that provides value and helps readers connect with your brand. Use search-engine-optimized content to attract many users through organic search.

Social media

Build a solid social media presence so that when you make an announcement, you get a higher chance of it spreading like wildfire!

Your content won't become viral from the get-go. You must first grow your audience, understand them, and create exciting content.

Customer experience

You will be amazed to know that more than 70% of all social media users will likely recommend a brand to their network if they have had a good experience.

This figure makes it quite evident how important it is to build strong content marketing and social media strategy to increase customers as part of the funnel strategy for your inbound marketing efforts.

MoFu: Middle of the Inbound Marketing Funnel

The Middle of the funnel (MoFu) is where you get to know different kinds of audiences through the ToFu.

However, this is part of your inbound marketing funnel process, where you qualify different lead segments based on their interests and readiness to buy. The leads closer to converting are often called MQLs or Marketing Qualified Leads.

Nurture and convert

After you've spotted the most qualified leads, you must nurture them until they convert into paying customers. This is done partly through automated marketing workflows but also through the active involvement of your sales team.

There are different marketing strategies that you can employ to nurture these leads. Here's an example:

Suppose a user has subscribed to your newsletter. Instead of just sending a welcome email, why not pair it up with a welcome offer or discount coupon? Or maybe add a free eBook download to your welcome email? Click here to get more ideas on how you can build automated email sequences that bring results.

BoFu: Bottom of the Inbound Marketing Funnel

This is the phase where the saying 'strike while the iron is hot' holds entirely true.

The customer has already gone through the basic steps of your funnel. They have shown interest in your product or service at the top of the funnel. They have gained all the relevant knowledge they need about the service, have been qualified and nurtured thoroughly, and are about to convert into paying customers. This is the most significant opportunity for your sales team to close the sale.

So, how can they do it?

Present an offer

Tempt the BoFu customer with an offer they cannot resist. You might have the best product for the user's needs, but – unless you can make an irresistible offer and present it in a compelling light before you lose the sale.

This is where the power of content, as part of your inbound marketing strategy, comes into the picture. By content, we mean all elements, such as graphics, copy, design, and everything in your marketing material.

Read this highly relevant article about how to create content for every stage of the buyer's journey as your incoming leads move through your marketing funnel.

Content is still King!

You may agree that creating a sales funnel that works for your inbound marketing strategy requires planning and effort. User-friendly content is not enough; you need to make a conscious effort to take action tightly related to the buyer's journey.

From creating compelling landing pages to writing effective web copy and posting on social media, every step you take must be part of a plan, your sales funnel, and an inbound marketing plan.

Don't forget – that marketing efforts generate three times as many leads at a 62% lower cost.

Creating A Funnel To Solve Inbound Marketing And Lead Generation

All we have to say is that succeeding in the game of inbound marketing requires sincere efforts, just like in any other field.

Creating an inbound marketing funnel could be just the piece you were looking for to solve the inbound marketing puzzle. Now, it is up to you to create a strategy in which you add a funnel that complements your marketing efforts and enhances your sales numbers.

Inbound Marketing Funnels: The Video Recap

What is an Inbound Marketing Funnel?

In the vast ocean of sales strategies, inbound marketing funnels have started to distinguish themselves as a unique force. While they might seem synonymous with sales funnels, they serve a different purpose. The essence of a marketing funnel is to engage with potential clients based on their familiarity and comfort with your brand.

The Three Market Temperature Levels

• Cold Market:
  • You will typically see generalized ads.
  • Promotions like downloading a lead magnet or signing up for a webinar will resonate with them.
• Warm Market:
  • Presented with slightly more direct promotions.
  • Engagements may involve signing up for sales calls, reading advertorials, or delving into specific blog posts.
• Hot Market:
  • These are the prospects ready to make a purchase. They will be presented with direct purchasing options and pitches.

Retargeting: A Game-Changer

With the rise of digital platforms, retargeting has become invaluable. For instance, if a visitor explores one page on your website but not another, this behavior can dictate the type of ads they see next. Similarly, email triggers can be set up based on which web pages they visited.

Our company's marketing automation is so advanced that we even receive Slack notifications detailing which page a user views. This immediate data can be a powerful tool. For instance, when I noticed that a potential client had visited the same pages multiple times without taking action, I occasionally called them to address any questions directly. This level of attention can make all the difference in the conversion process.

The Funnel Components

1. Your Offer:

This is the product or service you're offering, whether a coaching program, a digital product, a physical item, or something else entirely.

2. Follow-Up:

Initially, this was just email correspondence. Now, with retargeting, this follow-up includes ads on various platforms based on a prospect's interaction with your brand.

3. Traffic:

The potential clients who visit your web page and hopefully take the desired action.

ADA and The Funnel

The ADA model, which stands for Awareness, Desire, and Action, perfectly complements a marketing funnel's top, middle, and bottom stages.

• Top of the Funnel (Awareness): The goal is for prospects to become familiar with your brand, almost as if they're getting to know a friend.
• Middle of the Funnel: This stage involves multiple interactions. Prospects recognize your brand, engage with your content, and, ideally, join a nurturing database. They might sign up for more information, begin to trust your brand more, or even schedule a time to discuss a potential purchase.
• Bottom of the Funnel: This is where the offer is presented, and a prospect ideally becomes a client.

Remember, while some might navigate this funnel in hours, others might take years. Regardless of the duration, consistency in marketing is crucial. If you slack off, you risk being forgotten.

Crafting the Ideal Funnel

To create an effective inbound marketing funnel, focus on:

• Optimized Content at the Top: Content remains King. Engage with optimized content and maintain active social media interactions.
• Nurturing in the Middle: Convert prospects into leads, eventually leading them to the final stage.
• Presenting Offers at the Bottom: Lay out your offers clearly and compellingly.

To conclude, perfecting your inbound marketing funnel is the key if you aim for a strategy where potential clients come to you willingly.

The post Triple Your Sales Overnight with this Inbound Marketing Funnel Strategy! appeared first on Done For You.

Business success is all about the process. Your automated sales funnel is no different. Everything from lead generation to sales and marketing involves having streamlined processes to turn traffic and visitors into sales and revenue.

Today, I will discuss one of the most important aspects of converting customers—using an automated sales funnel.

Before we get into the details, we need to have a clear understanding of the basic terminology or what a sales funnel is. If you're curious how to set up a sales funnel for your business, check out this Funnel Factor report!

What is a sales funnel?

In the simplest of words, marketing can be defined as the series of steps a customer has to go through before they end up converting into a sale.

Though sales funnels and systems have been around forever, both online and off, in this fast-paced world with the internet and technology, it has become easier for a business owner to create an automated sales funnel and convert customers than ever.

So, how do sales funnels work?

First of all, you need to understand that the goal of a sales funnel is to make it easy for someone to understand what you do, find out how you do it, and ultimately take action on an offer—in other words, convert it into a sale.

Typical stages of the sales funnel  

Now that you know how a sales funnel is laid out, let's shift the conversation toward the different stages a customer must go through.

And believe me, this isn't a newfangled marketing tactic.  Automated sales funnels follow the time-tested and age-old A.I.D.A. Principle. AIDA and the overall approach are commonly attributed to American advertising and sales pioneer E. St. Elmo Lewis. They can be found in almost every marketing textbook on the planet.

Awareness

Like a toddler learning language by becoming familiar with the alphabet, the first step of the prospect's journey in this funnel begins with the letter A... i.e., Awareness.

To bring people into the automated sales funnel, you need to make them aware that you have the solution to a problem they are facing. For example, you are selling a car. You need to target the audience—someone who commutes on the local bus and who would rather drive themselves.

So, initially, you must inform them you have a car for them.

Interest

Now that the customer knows you have a solution to their problem, you need to build their interest.

Answer the question – why should they choose your product?

Continuing from the above example – why should they consider buying the car you're selling?

This is where building interest comes into the picture. It would be best to let the customer know about features of your product like affordability, low maintenance, better convenience, higher social status, and other things that'll help your prospect consider purchasing the vehicle...

Desire

Once the customer passes through the second stage and is considering your offer, it's time to increase their desire. This can be done through a demo, a free trial, an explanation of the benefits they'll experience once they purchase, etc.

In the car example, offering a test drive is the classic move that increases desire.  Once they sit behind the wheel and take the car out for a spin, they immediately feel a sense of ownership...  What would it be like taking the kids to school in this car?  How awesome would it be if I didn't have to wake up 60 minutes early every day to catch the bus...  At this point, the only stage left is to take action and purchase the vehicle!

Action

This is the final stage of the sales process. The prospect is now all set to buy your product/service, usually through a sales letter, be it a video sales letter or a traditional sales letter. To see how all of this works in your business, book an Action Plan call, and we'll diagram a funnel for you!

Once the customer is satisfied with all the information gathered in the previous funnel steps, it's time for them to decide and purchase your product or service.

Content and content marketing plays a massive role throughout this process. After all, that’s how the customer moves through the different stages of the funnel. Your prospect doesn't stay connected or hooked to the offer without engaging content.

Don’t forget that in today's marketplace, your competitors are outside like hungry wolves waiting to pounce on your prospect. So, you cannot afford to let your customers go once they are in the automated sales funnel.  You need to keep them engaged even once they're through your funnel!

Now, throughout this automated sales funnel, the customer journey can be divided itointo different phases based on their stage. Here’s a look into those phases.

Prospect

At this stage, the customer is naïve —he or she is looking for information about your brand or about a solution to their problem, but they're unaware of what you do and definitely don't have the information to make a decision yet. Often, we get them to raise their hand at this point by downloading a lead magnet or signing up for a webinar.

Qualified lead

When a customer begins digging into your products and services, either by filling out a contact form or signing up for a piece of marketing collateral you offer, they move from the prospect stage to the qualified lead stage.

Interested

This is the stage where the customer starts to show real interest in what you are selling by exploring your products/services in detail. Usually, this happens after attending a webinar, watching a sales video, or filling out a form for a strategy session with you.

Decided

When the customer decides to buy what you are selling, he or she will contact your salesperson or click an Add To Cart button on your website to take action.

Won / Lost

The last stage, when the customer is satisfied with the information you have to offer, is after they purchase.  At that point, you're fulfilling your product or service, and they're getting what they paid for!

Conclusion

In conclusion, this is the simplest and clearest way to describe how a marketing funnel works and the different stages that a customer goes through while in it.

Getting prospects to enter this funnel is pretty straightforward. Usually, you give a download, webinar registration, or something they opt-in for...  After that, though, the real work begins.

To keep your prospects moving through the funnel stages, you must give them what they need to progress through the automated sales funnel as quickly as possible.  Sometimes, a buyer decides in 5 minutes...  Other times, it could take months.

Remember: Content is your best friend when it comes to conversion. Focus on creating awesome content that can keep potential customers learning and moving through your process, and you'll be well on your way to setting up an automated sales funnel that converts day and night!

If you're interested in a Done For You Sales Funnel, schedule a call, and we'll chat about it!

Video Transcript:

In today's video, we will discuss how sales funnels work from top to bottom.

Now, this is loaded. I mean, it's a loaded question because there are so many different kinds of sales funnels. There are three foundational sales funnels that we build for most of our clients, and they are largely determined based on price and complexity.

The more expensive an offer is, the more high-touch it will end up being. So, your low-touch sales funnels are automated sales funnels that are like VSL upsell sequences, like a video sales letter followed by an upsell sequence.

Above that is a multi-video launch sequence, usually three or four sales videos that walk through a specific sales process. That bond is engaged, and basically, you know, you sell a prospect.

So you know, turn them into a customer. And then you have your automated webinars and auto-made webinars with two different kinds of calls, two distinct calls to action.

One is an order form, so it's straight-up added to the cart, and the other one is to book a call with a sales rep. So that's generally the framework that we follow. The more complex, the more high-ticket, you know, we tend to skew towards an automated webinar with a sales call.

Now, that process can be shortcutted with a fully qualified lead sales video, which we have been testing and doing recently because people want something done quickly. That's one of the reasons why these FTL VSL funnels work really, really well.

But to talk about a sales funnel is really to understand how a prospect warms up to you. So there is an age-old marketing acronym, Ada Ada, that we learned in college, you know, in a marketing class. It was one of those things that was in the textbook. I remember being on a quiz, and I was like, I'm never going to use this.

This is wild. It's 130 years old.

But here's the thing like, it doesn't matter whether it is 100 years or 50 years or 20 years, businesses business you know, so, whether somebody is bonding with you and progressing through a sales cycle in person, or whether they are bonding with you and progressing through a sales cycle, digitally through an automated funnel, the same process is happening.

The same, the same four-step, you know, the thing is going on, they are being attracted into your world, your silo, your business, your brand. They are increasingly interested, so they're becoming increasingly interested in you and what you're doing in your offer; they are growing in desire.

So the more they learn about you, the more they see, they watch the video, they read your sales copy, they visit your blog, they attend webinars, they open your email, the more desire they have for the thing, that the offer that you were making the thing that you are going to be selling them, which leads to the fourth step, which is taking action.

So taking action is the last piece of the puzzle where they pull out their credit card, and they buy whether that or they, you know, you agree to have an invoice sent to them, and they purchase no matter how it works. Those are four primary cycles or the four pieces of the sales process now; when you apply those principles to a sales funnel, you can see them playing out like this.

So, let's say we have an automated webinar selling a high-ticket coaching program or some high-ticket service. So let's say it's a 20 $500 a-month coaching program that is three months long, let's say. So all in all, you know, it's 2500 a month for three months, and there's some fast action discount that drops 1500 dollars off the price, so we set up an automated webinar that plays immediately on-demand after somebody signs up for it.

We also set up a lead magnet and 2025 emails that move them through from a marketing automation standpoint. That's what we do for all of our clients.

When that funnel is up and running, we have a Facebook ad invite you to know; it's a video that invites them to sign up for the webinar or the lead magnet; 20 3050 100 200 500,000 people see that video. It is, it isn't.

It's casting a net. It is inviting people. If you know anybody attracted to this thing, click the link and click the button you know to watch the video. That is the purpose of, you know, that net, and you can do retargeting. You can do content videos, live streams, and everything just to cast a vast net so that people become attracted to you, where you can attract your ideal target market through the words you use and the modalities. You create whatever.

Now, they hit your landing page. They signed up for your webinar and opted in. They receive your webinar content, their lead magnet, emails, blogtheirts, and the things that increase their interest and ultimately into a desire for the thing you're selling.

This process happens because they are receiving stuff from you. After all, they're receiving content.

Then, finally, you make an offer that resonates with them, and they turn that into a pitch. So, the attractiveness piece is everything outside. You know, like that.

First, a is everything that happens outside of your wheelhouse outside of your silo to pull them in. Once you pull them in, and they are, they have opted in for your stuff. Then you work at increasing their desire and ultimately turning, turning, you know, converting them into that action for your offer.

Those steps can play out in as little as two hours, as little as 15 minutes, or it might take six years. I find people who have been on my list for six years, and then they just now have signed up for a sales funnel, or we're running traffic for them, or whatever. You know, they have just made the decision, and then it's time for them to jump and move forward.

You know, so there's always that. So that is this: the sales funnel process and how everything works from top to bottom. Now, your sales funnel is going to be a little bit different. Just purely because your offers are other, your business is distinct.

The post Automated Sales Funnels: Why They Work From Top To Bottom appeared first on Done For You.

TRANSCRIPT:  Hey, what's up? This is Jason Drohn. So I just got off the phone with a client who is going to... Our conversation was, "Should you create a mid-tier digital product course or should you create a membership? And if you create a membership, how do you sell said membership?" Now we've been working together for like four years now, so he has wanted to have a membership for a really long time and I've been encouraging him to have a membership. But will the membership make more money than the mid-tier digital course? That's really the question. So one of the things that we're talking about was this idea of urgency. So his question was, "Do I have a membership that I leave open forever, like for all year long? Or should I close up the membership and create the urgency because the membership is closing? And then relaunch the membership twice a year?"

So this snippet that you're about to see, I ripped it out of our course called funnel formula. And it's going to walk you through this idea of creating urgency in product launches. Then we're going to come back and we're going to relate this back to the membership site.

So if you have a product that you launch once a year or maybe twice a year, then these launches work tremendously well for that, this type of product. You can create evergreen product launch formula funnels, you can absolutely do that. But oftentimes being that they're evergreen like you can even have an expiring countdown, but being that they're evergreen, they just kind of lose some of their luster. So oftentimes what you do is you build the list in the time that this product is not for sale and then you create the event and just blast everybody to this multi-video launch sequence when you open it up to the public. But no matter what you do, you really want to expire this launch because it just creates urgency. You know people, they fear the loss of it closing down or they fear the loss of a price hike or whatever. So you expiring the sale creates the urgency in the buyer and then you're going to have a spike of sales the day that it launches and the day that it closes down. And sometimes you can do what is called the waiting list relaunch where a couple of days later say, "Well there were some duplicate orders or whatever, I'm clearing them out." And then open it up again for 48 hours. That is also pretty popular in this product launch mix.

All right, that was awesome, right? So urgency in product launches, now most of these multi-video product launches, which is what we're talking about in that funnel formula video, the product launches themselves you kind of go through this multi-video launch sequence and then you close down the offer at the end. Well, in relation to the membership sites or the membership content, there's a lot of different schools of thought about membership. So there is a guy who, he was a co-founder of Wishlist Member, his name is Stu McLaren, he actually created a membership site, a membership course, that teachers how to sell memberships. And his big thing was you launch this thing twice a year. So you launch this product and then you basically close it down and then because every membership has churn, then you're going to lose some of your members at like month three, month four, month five. And he had like a waiting list formula that he would invite people in from the waiting list just so he didn't lose a bunch of money through churn. But then there was a big public opening again a couple of months later.

So we were talking about this urgency thing and you're always going to get a spike of sales the first day that something is opened and then the last day it's open. So the day right before it closes down. It's when most of your sales are going to come in. You can put like a waiting list relaunch after the offer closes. That's up to you. Some people, including myself, think it's kind of a douchebag move, so we don't necessarily do that, although we have had clients do it before. But if you're going to close something, just close it and be done with it, and then open it up again five or six months down the road. That's typically what we like to see happen. But the urgency is a model that you absolutely have to employ one way or the other. Whether it is an urgency that your membership is closing down or it's urgency that your bonus is expiring or urgency that the price is going up. There needs to be some sort of urgency to close out any promotion.

So if you would like to learn more about multi-video product launch sequences, or any of the other eight types of sales funnels that we have, just exhaustively taught inside funnel formula, click here to check out Funnel Formula.

And if you would like us to map out and build your sales funnel, run your traffic, or at least give you an idea about how it call comes together - click here to watch the Sales Funnel Build video and book a call with us!

The post How To Create Urgency In Your Next Product Launch appeared first on Done For You.

TRANSCRIPT: In this video, we're going to take a look at a Direct Response eCommerce Sales Funnel.  Now, this is a sales funnel with sales pages and upsells as opposed to a traditional shopping cart like Shopify or Magento...

There are two ways that you can go about dialing in an eCommerce sales funnel for a physical product. So the first is going the traditional route and doing a Shopify store or a WooCommerce store or Magento, depending on whatever your poison is or direct linking right to Amazon, totally up to you. But that's more the traditional route.

If you are a fan of direct response marketing like we are, then you can sell physical products using a more traditional kind of sales funnel where you have a... you drive paid traffic to a sales page. Sales page sells, usually, are free plus shipping offer or a front end offer and then you march them through an upsell funnel. So this is a video that we ripped out of our course Funnel Formula and it's going to walk you through this direct response type of eCom sales funnel. And we're going to show you how all the emails, the exit pops, the upsells, the physical products tie into it. And then how everything is all... it flows together. So we're going to jump over to that snippet.

Now if you're going after a direct response architecture for your eCommerce Sales Funnel, which you're not using Shopify, you're using like a WordPress install with OptimizePress or some sort of direct response sales page with a video sales letter or you're using ClickFunnels, then we go Google Ads, into the item sales page. This item sales page has a video sales letter on it and then add to cart button right underneath and perhaps some long-form sales copy. You go from Facebook to the item sales page and this is usually a Facebook video ad. We're going to talk more about that in the traffic section and then we also send banner retargeting back into the item sales page. So they purchase, they get added to the cart, they go into Upsell One, Upsell Two, Upsell Three and we also send them to an ascension sequence to get them back into the upsells and downsells. And whatever they purchase goes into fulfillment.

Typically, we also try to do an exit pop and the exit pop usually has a free plus shipping offer or some sort of a lower ticket offer. Maybe if the quantity of the original sales item is eight, then we'll have a one-pack or a two-pack as an exit pop for free plus shipping offer or just a reduced fee. We're just trying to get that sale. We're just trying to liquidate some of those ad costs into a buyer because we know the buyer is going to bring back more revenue as they go. So we send them to an exit pop and maybe that exit pop is an opt-in or maybe it sends them to another offer that they purchase and then they would get kicked into the upsell. But we always try to exit pop something. And if they don't buy we send them into additional offers.

All right, wasn't it awesome? So you just got an inside look in my brain. Whenever I'm thinking about sales funnels, that is the kind of stuff that I geek out about. So if you would like to learn how to put these sales funnels together for your business or for your clients, click here to dig into the Funnel Formula course.

Or, if you'd like us to map out a sales funnel for your business, click here to schedule a call with us!

The post How A Direct Response eCommerce Sales Funnel Works appeared first on Done For You.

Having a Mobile App Funnel that converts is similar in some ways to a more traditional Done For You Sales Funnel...  But, there are some notable differences due to App Stores.

According to MarketingLand, by the year 2019, 72% of the entire digital ad spending in the US is going to be on mobile advertisements.

Another exciting statistic making waves in the industry is that almost half of customers start their search for a product or service from a search engine while one third go the website directly.

Newer metrics indicate that there are 1 million new Internet users per DAY, due largely to smartphones.

Looking at all these numbers, it becomes quite evident that investing in mobile app marketing is the smartest thing a business can do at the moment. And, when it comes to marketing the first thing that instantly pops up into the head is marketing funnels.

In today’s post, we will share information on mobile app marketing funnels and how they differ from the usual marketing funnels. Plus, we will also touch upon the topic of how marketers can leverage marketing funnels for their business to good effect.

So, let us begin.

Mobile App Marketing Funnels

A mobile app conversion funnel is similar to a traditional marketing funnel; the entire process is divided into 5 stages in the mobile app marketing funnel, as well.

Stage 1 – Exposure and Discovery: Making the Customer Reach Your Business

The biggest difference between a traditional marketing funnel and the mobile app marketing funnel lies in the first stage. The reason for this is simple.

In mobile app marketing, downloading a paid app is the ultimate purchase decision that the user has to make, whereas in traditional marketing the final purchase decision is buying the product or service. Time taken in the former is much less when compared to the latter, usually.

However, there is no denying that the next stages, i.e. the exposure and discovery stages, hold prominence in the mobile marketing funnel.

Now, the one question that lurks around in the case of the mobile app conversion funnel is: How do the users find the apps? Here’s a graph that gives you all the numbers:

So, you can see that app store searches are the number one way for people to search and find an app they are looking for.

Strategies for Stage 1

Both paid and organic marketing strategies can work great to get your app to reach a greater number of people. Some of the strategies that marketers can use here include:

Organic strategies

• Word of mouth publicity
• App store optimization
• Social media marketing
• Social bookmarking, internet forums and more

Paid strategies

• Affiliate marketing tactics
• Retargeting
• App advertising

Stage 2 - Consideration: Building Trust Signals

How does a business build trust signals? By showcasing its achievements and customer satisfaction, right?

The same thing rings true for mobile apps, as well.

For a mobile app, app ratings are the best way to showcase how good it is. Ratings build social proof, and studies show that social proofs go a long way in enticing the customer to download the app.

Studies show that more than 85% of customers won’t download an app from the app store if it is rated 2 or below.

Strategies for Stage 2

Build an app page

App stores allow you to add information about your mobile app by creating a dedicated page. You can even add a video. So, use it to your best possible advantage.

Ratings and reviews

As stated above, getting your user rating to 4 stars or above can serve as the biggest trust factor. You need to work towards achieving this goal.

Stage 3 – Conversion: Getting Them to Finally Download the App

Although the primary goal of conversion in mobile app marketing is to get the customer to download the app, its meaning may vary depending on business needs.

For some conversion might be an in-app purchase while for others it could be a subscription to the app.

Based on what the definition of conversion is for your business, you need to work on the strategies for mobile app marketing.

Strategies for Stage 3

Here are some of the tactics you can employ to build a better conversion rate –

• Smooth onboarding – create a meaningful flow so that the user can download the app as smoothly and effortlessly as possible
• Visual design elements – close to 40% of the users part ways with an app because of poor user-interface. So, you know what to do

Stage 4 –Relationships: Providing Value in the Long Run

Just like traditional marketing, the mobile app conversion funnel also revolves around building relationships. The only thing is that you get a little less opportunity to interact with the customer.

As an app marketer, you need to make the best use of whatever little you get.

Strategies for Stage 4

• Finding the right moment – whenever and wherever possible, ask for feedback. Focus on customer service and the users' experience with using the app.
• Personalize communication – use customer data to personalize your mobile app communication, and you can easily win the customer over.
• In-app messaging – in-app feedback, message center options, and similar other strategies can work great for the success of your app. So, make good use of them!

Stage 5 – Customer Retention: Offering Them a Great Experience

It is an age-old fact that, in the world of marketing, acquiring a new customer can cost a business many times more than retaining a customer.

The same is the case here.

Great customer service and making sure that you are in constant touch with your customers are great ways to achieve this.

Strategies for Stage 5

To master Stage 5, here are some strategies you can try.

Ask for feedback – studies show that 98% of users respond positively when asked for feedback. By asking for feedback, you are staying in constant touch with the customer, and also getting to know how you can improve.

Reward programs – another great way to keep your customers using your mobile app for the long haul is by offering special reward programs for mobile users; for instance, encourage them to use mobile apps to make a purchase and, in return, give them a great discount.

Building & Launching a Mobile App Funnel

An app funnel is a kind of like a traditional marketing funnel in a lot of ways.  The main notable difference is your reliance on the app stores to fulfill your app and, in a lot of cases, bring in new users.

Now we've worked with a couple of different mobile app publishers and Android/iOS development organizations that create apps for companies as a service. Because of that, we know that mobile app funnels are very different beasts than a traditional marketing funnel with trigger marketing and marketing automation. One thing is for sure, you'll need a lot of email marketing to pull it off!

At the end of the day, you have a bunch of people who are downloading your app from a marketplace.  Then, you have a smaller subset of people who are buying something through in-app purchases. They are paying money for the app, functionality, or something delivered within the app itself.

So what is the mobile app funnel?

The Mobile App Funnel

The difference with app marketing is that marketplaces are the biggest traffic sources originally.  You can drive your traffic, which we'll talk about, but a lot of app developers are simply hoping that their app takes off in the app store itself.

Here's what I mean.

Most mobile apps are going to be installed on either Google Play or from the iOS app store. That's where the apps are going to physically be located and fulfilled.  When you're promoting your service or product, you are responsible for setting up your fulfillment.  With an app, the platform syncs it with the mobile device.

The marketplace has a LOT of traffic. People go to the marketplace in search of apps. However, I was just reading a study the other day that only 12% of people go and install a new app on their phone every 30 days. So the number of people who are installing apps on their mobile devices is drastically decreasing!

Unless a mobile user is looking for additional functionality a new way of doing something, your app will fall by the wayside if you rely exclusively on the App Store for your users and traffic.  People aren't playing around in the App Store trying to figure out what else they can put on their device, which puts some of the responsibility on the publisher in terms of driving traffic.

Driving Traffic To Your Mobile App

It never used to be that way - where you had to drive your traffic to your mobile app.

It used to be as simple as putting an app in the app store and all of a sudden you were getting downloads and installs!  People were coming through the front door, and you could monetize them through in-app purchases.

Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. You need a mobile app funnel.

Your app funnel is comprised of a couple of things...

You have mobile app advertising. With Facebook and Google, you can drive traffic from those ad platforms specifically to your app marketplace listings. And sometimes that conversion goal can be an app install, which means you are paying per app install.

The bad part though is that now you have real money at stake in promoting your app...  This means that your app needs to start generating cashflow!

Simplify Your Mobile App Onboarding As Much As Possible

There were a few clients that we worked with who was driving good traffic and getting great downloads...  We were spending money to promote their app. They were getting lots of signups (ie. leads), but they had these long terms of service page that needed to be agreed to before they could get in...

Immediately after you put your email address, you were redirected to a page that made you read through the Terms.  It was quite a few scrolls down!  You can guess what happened.  People jump ship, never to open the app again.

All these app downloads were coming in and then these users just never clicked through to even create their first session!

So what we ended up having to do was retool the app to be a single opt-in and a quick TOS checkbox.  From the user setup standpoint, it helped bypass the chokepoint that the terms of service were presenting, and folks were able to download the app and get into it faster!

You, for sure, will see something similar in your app funnel.  When there's a bottleneck, it's up to you and your app development team to optimize the app funnel and the sales process. You want people to download the app, install the app, use the app, love the app, and then ultimately process in-app upgrades that end up generating revenue for you.

And then once you figure that out and you've put together some data, you can go to some of these other app ad platforms to start driving traffic!  With the new traffic and optimization, your app funnel is positioned to take off and a bevy of new users will flood through the platform.

In short, though, don't rely on ONLY the marketplaces anymore!

Conclusion

To sum it up, all we have to say is that an app marketing funnel, whether it be traditional marketing or mobile app marketing, involves a similar set of strategies, yet is different to quite a large extent.

To master the mobile app marketing funnel, you need to think of a mobile app from a user-only perspective. And, that’s where the difference lies.

Everything mentioned above paints a clear picture of how you can master mobile app marketing funnels and bring great results for your business.

So, are you up for it?

The 3-part Sales Funnel Formula

Are you looking to develop a highly-profitable sales funnel?

Read more about the exact sales funnel formula that we use to drive tons of targeted, high-converting traffic to our business and our clients’ business in our brand new version of the Funnel Factor report.

No time to read? Register for our on-demand Sales Funnels webinar that you can watch at any time from the comfort of your home.

The post Mobile App Marketing Funnel: Tips For Generating Sales From App Downloads appeared first on Done For You.

Though this is how marketing leads convert into sales, very few managers and business owners get it right. That’s when conversion rate optimization is needed.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a process that enables people to take action upon visiting a website. Businesses can augment their chances of converting visitors into leads and customers by modifying and designing certain elements.

Websites are designed with the purpose of converting visitors into customers. Conversions can happen all over the site – the landing page, homepage, price page, blog, etc. You can optimize all these pages to increase your chances of conversion. Conversion rate optimization is all about optimizing the process and conversions.

The conversion rate is also a metric, a percentage, displaying the number of website and/or app visitors completing an action out of the total number of guests visiting your website.

Hence, improving your conversion rate demands selective and specific ROI-focused strategies targeting different stages of marketing as well as the sales funnel.

The average ROI of CRO tools is 223%.

There is no one optimal conversion rate for business. It varies across channels and industries.

Important marketing channels for effective conversion

In marketing, you have to master the art of moving potential users through the funnel and converting them into customers. To do that, you need to select the appropriate marketing channels and target specific stages of the sales funnel. However, the conversion rate of the channel may differ across the many stages.

Source: blog.hubspot.com

Here’s an example: Say you want more visitors to your website and your conversion goal is to increase views. In this case, you can leverage guest blog posts and add backlinks to your site. Tools like Curately can help with blogging. Likewise, you can also consider pages on social media and paid Google AdWords ads.

However, if you want to convert your visitors into qualified leads, which mean lead generation is your conversion goal, you can use chatbots, demo forms on websites, CTAs in blog posts, etc.

Newbies – How to achieve a good conversion rate

All web elements and stages of the funnel are useful when it comes to CRO. Here’s how different pages play a different role in the process.

Homepage

CRO benefits homepages. Besides creating the first impression on guests, the homepage should be used as an opportunity to retain visitors and further guide them into the website. To do this, you can emphasize links to your offerings, product information, a free signup button, a chatbot, or some feature that can help visitors with the browsing experience.

Landing page

A landing page is crucial because it conveys your business values, gains trust, and converts website visitors into leads. In fact, these are inherently created for visitors to take action. However, most marketers are still struggling to understand the performance and benefits of a landing page.

Source: blog.hubspot.com

According to Unbounce research, the best landing page conversion rate varies across industries. Similarly, the median conversion rate was in the range of 3% to 5.5%.

To improve, convey the value proposition of your business. Reduce page loading time. Leverage scarcity and urgency in the copy of the landing page. Reduce the risks of distraction and friction.  Test all the elements of the landing page.

Wordstream research shows that adding videos on the landing page can increase conversions by up to 86%.

Blog

Blogs are saviors with mammoth conversion opportunities for business websites. Besides publishing thought-provoking blogs and informative content on your niche, you can also use blogging as CRO and convert your readers into leads.

Adding call-to-actions (CTAs) to your blogs is important. It invites readers to click and learn more about your products by giving their email address in exchange for an industry report or offer.

Pricing page

Being transparent about the pricing of your products is the key to win your leads. It is a make-or-break point for visitors. Conversion rate optimization helps pricing pages convert visitors and leads into customers.

If you simply modify the pricing page, add pricing intervals month and year wise, it can make a difference. However, you must also explain the product features responsible for the pricing difference.

How to calculate CRO

To calculate CRO, divide the total number of conversions generated by a website by the number of people visiting the page. With this, marketers can easily find out the conversion rates of blog posts, ad clicks, landing pages, and websites.

Once you’ve gauged your customer demands, you can figure out how to get maximum returns from the existing website traffic.

Here’s a little help with calculation:

#1: Revenue goal / average sales price = total number of new customers

#2: Total number of new customers / lead-to-customer close rate percentage = lead goal

#3: Leads generated / website traffic X 100 =- Percentage conversion rate

Takeaway: It is not necessary to generate more traffic, though you may want to. Changing your approach towards the goal can make a difference. CRO is all about getting more from what you have and making it your route to improvement.

Tips for beginners: How to get started with CRO

1. Set your goal

• Traffic
• Analytics
• Strategy

Assuming you have good traffic move ahead to data collection. However, on this path, there are a few obstacles:

• Bounce rate
• Exit rate
• Time on page
• Time on site
• Pages visited
• Loading speed

These metrics are crucial to diagnosing problems on a website. For instance, if a page has a low conversion rate with a high bounce rate and slow loading time, you know what to do.

2. CRO tests

Running tests is crucial to see the performance of pages. Some pages would be unique to visitors, whereas others may not. Filtering out the non-performing pages would allow you to work on them, optimize them, and deliver the brilliant result.

Choose pages generating huge traffic, as there is always a scope of improvement. All conversions are valuable to the brand. Hence, traffic should not be the only consideration. You have to identify your conversion goals and choose pages to test.

3. Check incoming traffic

If the important pages of a website are not generating traffic as expected, your CRO strategies are not going to have a great impact. You should aim to get enough visitors to the major parts of your website.

Traffic to landing pages come from search results, both organic as well as paid traffic. Thus, you have to put in more efforts into your SEO endeavor and refine paid advertising strategies to get more traffic.

However, not all conversions may take place on the landing page or the first page users’ visit. In fact, visitors may not be reaching the most important pages after landing on the site. In such cases, you have to optimize those pages to increase clicks through rate.

Use advanced analytics software such as Axis to measure ROI

4. Call to action

CTAs are basic to any page that goes online. With CTAs, you are telling your users to buy products, sign up for newsletters, request a quote, and take action to achieve your conversion goal.

A compelling call to action is an art. You have to test it and optimize on all the pages. Instead of being carried away with minute details like font style or color, focus on testing the changes of the CTA. It should have a genuine impact.

The most important part of CTA is words. How compelling you can make them for users to act!

Placing CTAs at the right place on a page can also have a dramatic impact on your conversions.

CTA included in the content, or surrounded by content, is crucial to prim users to take action.

Most importantly, if users cannot see them, it is useless. So, make your CTAs visible.

5. Forms

Almost every conversion involves filling up web forms. Do not hesitate to use forms for CRO. You can choose Statly to create web forms and get brilliant results.

Research clearly shows that multi-step forms can increase the rate of conversions by up to 300%. It can also improve the quality of leads to pages.

This is a crucial fact because it is not just the number of conversions adding value but also the quality that matters. A lower percentage or rate of conversions from potential customers likely to turn into paid customers is more profitable.

6. Page loading time

Countless studies have proven the negative impact of slow pages. Consider this as the topmost priority.

Though some research shows that page speed is the last on the priority list of marketers, it should be either way. You have to put in all your efforts to boost page speed and stand out in the competitive market. The best place to start is on mobile. Boost your conversion rates with high-speed pages.

7. Offer signs of trust

Make your business trustworthy. There are ways to show that users can invest in your business safely. Before adding detailed trust signals, ensure your site design is topnotch.

Compare the site to the competitor brands in the industry. You would know what your visitors are expecting from the site. You may want a sleeker, modern and professional website that gives you the look of a leader.

Along with that, including customer reviews, expert reviews, influencer reviews, testimonials, awards, and statistics on the website. It essentially builds trust as people’s opinions matter.

Conclusion

Take your optimization strategy to the next level. When you think beyond the pages and optimize the sales funnel, it creates a win-win scenario. Highly optimized web pages improve the buying process.

Get real-time, easy-to-understand, and meaningful marketing analytics that help reduce bottlenecks, increase sales, capitalize on potential opportunities. Book a demo for the new Axis today.

The post CRO: The Complete Newbie’s Guide To Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on Done For You.

Your ability to create and manage a healthy sales pipeline depends on your proficiency in three diverse aspects: inflow, visibility, and execution. Mastering the pipeline is an integral component of the sales process, and an effective way to increase your revenues. Effectively creating and managing a sales pipeline that works best for your company helps improve productivity, efficiency, and ROI. Your sales representatives will have a clear understanding of every step, and they can visualize where each of their prospects stands and how difficult it is for them to close.

This article will help you understand the following aspects:

• What is a sales pipeline
• How to build your sales pipeline
• What are the areas of sales pipeline management
• Tips to optimize your pipeline to boost your ROI

What is a sales pipeline?

A sales pipeline is an overview of your entire sales process. It is broken down into several steps that provide a clear view of what actions your sales team should take to convert leads into customers. It helps organize and track your prospects, quota, and goals – as well as understand whether or not certain areas need special attention.

A quick view of your pipeline reveals whether your sales team is on the right track to achieve their quota, which stage the deal is in, how much investment is tied up in the process, and whether you have enough leads on board to reach your goals.

Done For You provides you with a custom sales funnel that helps you scale your business to a broader audience. We build and manage a sales funnel for the business that helps you get more leads, and sell more to your customers.

How to build and structure your sales pipeline

While the stages may vary depending on your product, sales process, and industry, there are five steps to follow when creating your pipeline:

1. Setting up initial contact

When prospects enter your pipeline, they are just your leads that may or may not eventually turn into customers. So, you first have to open up the lines of communication. To streamline the process, you can use advanced tools to automatically create leads in your sales pipeline.

Once you have the list of opportunities that you want to target, you next have to make contact. Typically, this involves cold calling or cold emailing the leads to see whether or not they are interested in your business, products or services.

Good sales pipeline management tools help you build, execute, and track the entire campaign seamlessly.

2. Qualifying your leads

Once you have made contact with your leads, it is essential to determine which ones are worth following up with.

Qualifying your prospects involves identifying how likely one is to make a purchase. Find out at what stage your lead is – just browsing? Interested in knowing more? Currently looking for a product like yours? Waiting for budget approval? Not interested at all?

Create a lead scoring system for your business that allows you to identify prospects interested in buying or are, at least, ready to talk to your sales representatives. Leads who are keen to speak to your sales team, respond to your email or spend much time on your pricing page may be considered qualified sales leads or SQLs. At this point, it is vital to take them to the next stage: scheduling and meeting.

3. Scheduling and meeting

Once a prospect becomes a qualified sales lead, they are likely to hear more about your solution from your sales representatives. At this stage, schedule a demo or meeting to talk to your leads one-on-one about how your products or how your services fit their needs. The objective is to push the unique selling proposition of your solution and delve into the negotiation process.

The key to presenting a winning sales meeting depends on tailoring the solution to fit the needs of the lead to whom you are pitching.

4. Create a proposal

At this stage of your sales pipeline, you have a better understanding of what a given prospect is like, and how much ROI you can earn. Leads have either received your sales proposal or you are preparing to send one very soon. You can use Done For You. Sales funnel to create automated, ROI-based sales copy that can convert a higher number of leads into sales.

Often prospects get stuck at this stage. This may be due to several reasons – perhaps the lead is awaiting approval, or he is still looking around for other solutions. Whatever be the case, it is better to have activity attributes integrated into your sales pipeline to see how long the prospects remain in each stage, and when is the last time you have made contact with them. This will help you identify bottlenecks if any, and brainstorm unique ways to optimize the sales process.

5. Closing

 It is not surprising that your prospects need a number of follow-ups before you can close the deal. In most cases, it takes more than five follow-ups to close. This means that your opportunities can get stuck at any stage if you are not persistent and unique.

By the end of your sales pipeline, every lead is either closed won or lost. If everything goes well as planned, the deal is closed, and you have a new customer. If the sales process fails, move to the closed-lost stage and clear out the dead prospects from your pipeline.

3 ways to manage your sales pipeline

There are three different aspects of effective sales pipeline management – inflow, visibility, and execution.

We will now discuss the challenges of each stage, and how to overcome the same to streamline the sales process, and increase revenues.

Image credit: pipedrive.com

1. Build a consistent lead inflow

Often sales reps miss their quotas because they do not have enough prospects down their pipeline. They are also not clear of how many opportunities they actually need to hit their number. To overcome the challenge, it is vital to monitor the trends in your lead inflow. Keep a comprehensive track record of your sales team’s pipeline, including both opportunity count and value. Take a bigger picture into count so that you can stay ahead of product, market, and seasonal trends.

It is also important to analyze what actions drive pipeline inflow. New product launches? Out-of-the-box marketing campaigns? Does the period of higher opportunity inflow correspond with higher sales rep activity? Getting answers to these questions will help match input with output.

Next, understand the opportunity coverage needs for each of your sales representatives. What is your sales rep workload? How many leads are they expected to generate? How many leads do they need to be successful? Finally, create a sales process that helps you have a consistent supply of leads through every stage of your sales pipeline.

2. Develop pipeline visibility

The challenges of your sales team do not end with having a steady inflow of opportunities. They continue to face the same in cases where the numbers do not reflect reality, or no one knows what a good sales engagement process involves.

Lack of consistency is one of the biggest roadblocks to pipeline visibility. To overcome this and attain better visibility through your sales pipeline, it is crucial to define quality. Compare all closed-won and closed-lost prospects, and track the patterns from opening to closing a deal.

Use these patterns to develop a framework for your sales representatives to determine the quality of an opportunity when it hits the pipeline.

Once you have defined the characteristics of good-quality prospects, it is vital to develop guidelines for how the leads should be dealt with. These guidelines should be incorporated into the daily routine of the sales reps, which will help solidify the sales process as well as aid in monitoring and analyzing performance.

3. Execute and seize opportunities

 Now that you have resolved the challenges of pipeline inflow and visibility, you should start seeing a boost in sales when your sales reps are able to seize opportunities and execute them well.

They should know how to prioritize opportunities, and likewise, make opportunities often and early. Better execution on the pipeline will not only help improve overall productivity but will also give you more free time to focus on what you are best at.

Tips to optimize your sales pipeline

Once you have successfully set up your sales pipeline, it is important to optimize it and clean it often to ensure improved opportunity inflow, better pipeline visibility, and smart execution for higher closed-won deals. Here are some valuable tips for you:

• Make sure your entire sales team has a clear understanding of your pipeline stages
• Set reminders for regular and timely follow-ups
• Communicate your expectations and actions for all stages
• Automate tasks to streamline and save time
• Perform regular sales pipeline reviews

No matter what are you are selling, having a sales pipeline can help increase your revenue. A well-designed sales funnel can help boost customer engagement and maximize profitability.

The post Ultimate Guide To Effectively Creating And Managing A Sales Pipeline appeared first on Done For You.

Are you searching for a done-for-you sales funnel for your online business? Are you wondering why you need a DFY sales funnel and why you should choose it over a do-it-yourself funnel? This article explains the advantages of done-for-you sales funnels and will help you decide whether it is the best choice for your business.

A sales funnel (or many) on your website can help you convert web traffic and visitors into customers. Random website visitors can make a buying decision because of your influence and consistent engagement with them through a sales funnel.

Influencing a purchase decision throughout the buyer's journey involves multiple-level conversations with visitors. A sales funnel offers precisely that; it is step-by-step guidance to turn visitors into customers.

A DFY sales funnel begins with creating curiosity among the visitors about a problem and a possible solution that your product or service can offer.

Once curiosity is generated, your sales funnel will take your leads to the next stage. It will offer more information and detail on how your product or service can solve the potential customer's problem.

This leads to a call to action, where the leads who have become warm prospects are finally invited to buy your offering.
This entire process happens through pages and elements on your website, with the assistance of third-party services, like autoresponders or, otherwise called, email marketing platforms.

Setting up a sales funnel and keeping it live and updated requires a good deal of planning and domain expertise that businesses often do not have and shouldn't have because this is not their core product.

Here comes the picture: pre-made or done-for-you sales funnels.

As the name suggests, a done-for-you funnel is a turnkey solution delivered live and working on your website or blog. A DFY funnel can also be a template you can use to build your funnel - but that may require some marketing or technical expertise.

As businesses and busy executives do not have the knowledge or time to set up funnels and keep them active and optimized, the work is often outsourced to a DFY sales funnel agency.

Here below are the top reasons why you should consider using a done-for-you funnel instead of building one yourself:

Lack of time and expertise

Most businesses often do not have people for advanced technical tasks unless it is their crucial business area. Also, marketers and those responsible for driving sales and growth often lack the technical knowledge to build an online sales funnel.
What's more, IT staff wouldn't be expected to understand how funnels work or what can make them produce better results. Since copywriting and the step-by-step funnel process are the pillars of a good sales funnel, your technical staff wouldn't be the right people to turn to.

It is not only website design that gives visitors a soothing, welcoming feel when they land on your pages. Compelling and engaging content is critical to the success of funnels. The concept is to turn a random visitor into a qualified prospect and, eventually, a paying customer.

A funnel stays with the visitor throughout the buying process. That's why funnels you need to tackle design, development, copywriting, and comprehensive process planning.

A done-for-you funnel is a one-stop solution to all your needs that can convert your website from an excellent place of information about your company or brand into a robust system that generates leads, sees a conversion point, and closes the sale.

Done For You Sales Funnels are tested and optimized.

Unlike when it is done in-house, done-for-you funnels undergo rigorous tests during their development to produce optimum results. They are created by experts who understand the nuances and technicalities of the business. They know the common pitfalls in setting up a funnel and how to tackle them, while the same task can be too much for your IT department.

It is not about setting up a funnel; it is about a horn that does the job and does it repeatedly with a greater degree of success. One of the critical tasks of the website is to generate leads and help the visitors decide to purchase. This task cannot be completed if the website lacks a sales funnel geared up to convert visitors into customers.

Outsourcing helps

Setting up a funnel is part of the website designing process where necessary care is taken to provide all relevant information to the visitors that can help them make a buying decision about the product or services on offer. Since this involves a process in which many people work together and create necessary IT processes to promote the company's sales offerings, it needs its ecosystem to work efficiently and productively.

So, outsourcing the funnel to a service provider can be a good option for companies and their promoters to optimize the gains from it.

Imitate successful funnels

Professional agencies that prepare DFY sales funnels conduct required research to determine what is in trend and what other competitors are doing. They can identify the best and winning features on the competitors' funnels, improvise, and implement them on your funnel to make it trendy and practical.

Keeping a close watch on what the competitors are doing concerning their funnel may not be possible for a company, but this is not much of a task for a service provider, which develops hundreds of such horns yearly and maintains them daily. However, taking professional help or opting for a a done-for-you funnel can turn the tide in your favor.

You may or may not know how much keeping an eye on your competitors helps you improve your systems and processes. But the service provider who creates a done-for-you funnel for you has a reason to make it better than your competitors. So, allow your service provider to give you. Let analysis of your competitors' funnels help you make appropriate decisions about where and how you want your funnel to differ from your competitors.

DFY funnels can be unique

Done-for-you funnels come in various designs and templates that ensure your funnel never looks outdated or the same as your competitor's. Done For You sales funnels don't have to look ordinary. DFY funnels are designed and developed by experts who take care of every detail to make their products superior and unique. If a DFY funnel template is what you're buying, you will have the liberty to choose themes, color combinations, and features you wish to implement. You can duplicate the templates and design as many funnels as you need.

What is essential to keep in mind is that funnels work through a series of conversations conducted through content. So, it is the content that makes your DFY funnels unique. Can you trust the yIf funnel provider to create such content? If they are not content creation experts, they may know people who can undertake such tasks on your behalf.

However, content is an area that would always require serious attention because you know the product and the brand in its complete personality. With your content and your service provider's technical expertise in setting up a funnel, you can create a unique funnel that wins customers effortlessly.

Tailor-made to your needs

Done-for-you funnels are designed to meet your needs and serve the primary purpose of converting ordinary visitors to the website or blog into customers. The funnel stays with the visitors through the entire process until they arrive at a purchase decision, giving appropriate answers and explanations to their queries and making it easy for them to make an informed decision. So, DFY funnels are the best option to drive sales and revenue and make your site succeed.

DFYnels are tailor-made and take care of your needs most efficiently. Even if your agency uses a template, they will completely adjust it to serve your leads' unique path to becoming customers. It will be adjusted to your needs and incorporate any extra steps that help your prospects convert into customers.

Different businesses have different needs; Done For You sales funnels are made for any business, ranging from large e-commerce stores to solopreneur websites.

Make sure your agency understands the critical points where attention, interest, and desire are triggered for your business leads. Then, the agency will ensure that the sales funnel enhances those trigger points and entices web visitors to take the appropriate next step.

DFY sales funnels are built faster

Time is money, and since DFY funnels are developed by experts who have repeatedly completed similar projects, you can expect a fast turnaround time. It is in your interest to finish the DFY sales funnel project quickly so it can start delivering the results instantly.

If the same work is done in-house by the company, the process can take longer due to the lack of domain expertise and competence.
So, engaging a service provider and getting a DFY funnel designed and built makes more sense.

Of course, you need to brief the service provider about the products and services being offered, the key features, pricing, target market, etc., so that they have a complete picture of your offerings and can design a more presentable form of a funnel that wins the visitors hands down. You will transfer your offline experience to the agency, and they will re-create that to facilitate online sales.

Done For You Sales Funnels & Services Can Include Maintenance And Support

Setting up a high-conversion funnel is one thing; maintaining it is another. Although building your one-off project, it is highly recommended that you keep track of what's happening and optimize elements contributing to a higher conversion rate.

So, as the funnel goes live, you should start tracking results. For example, the number of visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate per stage, autoresponder open and click-through rates, and more. Then, ideally, you should optimize to improve those KPIs. To do this, you use a combination of intuition and split testing. The agency you'd be working with should have the experience and split testing tools to improve your funnel continuously.

Although a DFY sales funnel works for you even when you sleep, it is recommended that you analyze and optimize it to make the most out of your investment and ad spend. Also, as with all things online, tech-based elements of your funnel might break, so you need to ensure that someone keeps an eye on your funnel pages. You wouldn't want to send paid traffic to a 404-error page, would you?

Sales funnel ownership rests with your business.

Once you purchase a DFY sales funnel, it is yours. The agency will set up the horn on your domain, give you passwords and access details, and show you how the funnel works. Then, the ownership of the sales funnel rests with your business.

You can modify it as you wish, although, as we explained earlier, it is recommended that you have an expert manage the funnel so that you don't break something.

Conclusion

We hope this article gives you a complete picture of DFY sales funnels. Funnels are an essential aspect of building and growing a successful online business. After all, why have a website or a blog if it doesn't create curiosity among the visitors and convert them into customers? A website shouldn't just be used to display your products or services but to promote and sell them.

Websites and blogs are excellent mediums to provide information about your products and services. However, if your website's goal is only to provide information, you leave a lot of money on the table.

A website should be built to operate as a complete Done For You sales funnel, meaning that all pages should contribute to converting visitors into customers. This might happen instantly or within a defined period. Once a done-for-you sales funnel goes live, your website is transformed into a marketing and selling tool, precisely as it should be.

If you already have a website, then a DFY sales funnel is a vital addition to it, and it can help you instantly increase overall sales and revenue.

The post Unleash the Power of Done-For-You Sales Funnels: Discover the Hidden Secrets to Automated Sales and Revenue Growth appeared first on Done For You.

Profitable sales funnels are a real asset to your business. Once you have one (or more!) going, your sales funnels can continuously bring in sales, revenue, and profits without you having to lift a finger.

That’s the pipe dream at least. To get there, you’d need funnels that work really smart. There’s ongoing work just to keep those sales funnels working the way they should.

You need the right team, the right tools, and speed of execution.

Businesses — small and large — lose out on a lot just by doing various things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, chances are that you are killing the potential of your landing pages without even knowing it.

Here’s how:

Dependence on developers for landing pages

Your designers and developers are not marketers.

Good sales funnels demand skills from varied functions. You need decent design (see below), great copy, minimalistic approach, and the right technology (including tracking, analytics, and A/B testing) to power your sales funnels.

Plus, with all those campaigns waiting to be launched, you can’t afford to wait for months for your designers and developers to send in the completed funnels and landing pages.

None of that has anything to do with your IT department. They won’t be able to do it, they are expensive, and even if they did (while you don’t mind the cost), they won’t do justice to your sales funnels.

Fussing over design

Joshua Brewer once quoted:

“Socrates said, “Know thyself.” I say, “Know thy users.”

And guess what? They don’t think like you do.”

You can fuss all you want over the design aspect of your landing pages and funnels. You could spend millions (and we pray that you don’t, at least not yet) on design. Maybe you’d wait for a full year’s worth of back and forth with your designers, marketing team, and stakeholders.

All this fussing over designing, moving buttons and graphics a few millimeters here and there, worrying about background images, won’t bring you any results.

Good design can make serious money, there’s no denying that. However, given the task at hand and the inane urgency of a need for sales funnels that work, you should aim for decent design but maximum results (like leads and sales).

Making your opinions count too much

The big trouble with digital marketing? Everyone has an opinion about it (or aspects of it). Some believe that it’s SEO that we all should be focusing on.

Others swear by content marketing, content curation, and the good old inbound marketing. There are still others who spend years doing link building, guest posting, and what have you.

Having strong opinions on sales funnels can hurt your funnels so much that they are as good as dead.

Don’t waste time with opinions on your sales funnels when data tells you something else entirely. Let your campaigns run for a while, gather relevant data (with continuous testing), and then make decisions. It’s called data-driven decision making.

It’s brutal, but it’s the truth.

Focus on KPIs that really matter

Too many people focus (if at all) on metrics that don’t even matter.

How much traffic do I get to my sales funnels?
What are the number of impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and the Cost per Click (CPC) of your ads?

While each metric has a story to tell, they aren’t the ultimate metrics you should be concerned about. Focusing on metrics that don’t matter puts you on a path that only leads to a dead-end (or is it several dead ends?). These are metrics that don’t do you any good.

The kind of metrics you should really be concerned about — as far as sales funnels are concerned — are

• The CPA (Cost of Acquiring a lead).
• Number of leads at the landing page level
• The conversion rate of your landing pages
• The lead-to-sale ratio (how many of your leads convert into customers?).
• The average sale value, Lifetime Value (LTV) of each customer.

Those are the kind of metrics that give you the brutal truth about how well your sales funnels are performing. Everything else is fancy.

No business runs on fancy, ego-inflating metrics.

Sometimes we don’t realize that we are the main culprits for your dysfunctional or underperforming sales funnels or landing pages. Need a reality check? Get on a scheduled call with us, show us your sales funnels, and we’ll talk about how you can make your sales funnels work the way they should.

The post Sales Funnels: Avoid These Needless Bottlenecks (And Maximize Output) appeared first on Done For You.

Go to any e-commerce store and the store owners expect you to take action in this sequence (might not be in this order):

• Visit site
• Browse products
• Make a purchase

Bad news: You’ll make some sales, but it’s not a predictable occurrence and you’d never be able to tell just how much you’d make in sales or revenue in any given month (unless you are Jeff Bezos or his team reading this).

We see e-commerce stores making this mistake over and over where there’s just a store and products available for potential customers to browse.

We get it. You want to make sales. You want your e-commerce store’s revenue to soar. And, you want to profit from your business.

E-commerce store mistakes

You won’t make anything happen with the predictability and sustainability in revenue if you take that “show up expecting to sell” approach.

Here’s a simple fact:

People don’t sit with their credit cards in hand looking for something to buy. Even if they did, it’s not going to be your e-commerce store that they’ll be coming to.

You need a sales funnel for your e-commerce store

But why bother with a funnel for your e-commerce store?

Your customers go through this pattern before they actually buy:

• Visit store
• Browse products
• Read blog
• Follow you on Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram
• Wait
• Wait some more – for the right time to buy or until they really have a need.
• One fine day, they buy

You don’t know when they’ll make a purchase and you have simple ways to be ready for them when they are ready. This process, from visiting the store for the first time till the customers buy, is called a pipeline or buyer’s journey or sales funnel.

That’s why you need sales, even for an e-commerce site. Here’s a simple, three-step process to get a sales funnel up and running for your e-commerce store:

Prepare to make an offer

You’ll need to make an offer to your potential customers when they visit your e-commerce store to make a purchase. Your customers need a compelling offer to consider a purchase. They have options so they need to be sure that they are likely to get a bargain (or much more value) if they purchase your products.

When we say “offer,” we don’t always suggest giving away “discounts.” We don’t even suggest coupon codes, deep discounting, or cutting costs as a way to do business or promotions.

But you can consider coupons if you have to.

Other kinds of offers could be a handy guide on how to use your product better, or a guide for your customers so they can solve a particular problem with the help of your product.

Deliver on your promise

For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that you are giving a discount coupon for the visitors of your e-commerce store. Using popups, links, or slide-ins on your e-commerce site, you’ll make that offer.

Some of your potential customers will sign up for these offers through one of the many opt-in forms.

At this point, you’ll need a way to deliver this coupon code to your leads and the easiest way to do that is with email.

Use an autoresponder sequence to send out the coupon immediately on sign up, and you can choose to have a complete onboarding series (email messages) to nurture your e-commerce store leads later on (see below).

Following a lead sign up on your e-commerce site, you can choose to take multiple routes in addition to your autoresponder sequence.

One example of that is a flash sale email sequence.

Follow up and nurture e-commerce store leads

Even after your potential e-commerce store customers express interest by signing up for a coupon code, there’s no guarantee that they’ll buy right away (some will, most won’t).

That’s why you need to grow your email list — a full list of potential customers who signed up for your offers on your e-commerce store. The longer the list, the more predictable the sales figures of your e-commerce business are going to be.

How well you make this happen depends on:

• The way you generate leads
• How your autoresponder sequences are setup and how you do email marketing
• The strategies you use to attract, engage, and profit by using sales funnels, email nurturing sequences, etc.
• How you re-engage non-responsive subscribers, non-responsive previous customers, etc.

What’s your focus on your e-commerce store, right now? To generate sales right away or to generate leads for more predictable sales and revenue?

The post E-commerce Stores: You Can’t Sell By Just Showing Up appeared first on Done For You.

You see websites full of content. Some of them are designed beautifully. Heck, check out any website featured on Awwwards, and we guarantee that you’ll love the designs.

The problem is this: “Likeability” and “pretty-looking” isn’t anywhere close to what a business really wants: profitability. Of course, high-performance websites need to come with a beautiful design, but that’s not what will make them profitable.

So you have the most beautiful website in the world but that’s not enough. Good design is important for branding and grabbing the user’s interest. What’s more important though is high performance. Here’s what that means:

• How many leads do you generate from your website every month?
• What volume of annual sales can you attribute to your website?
• Do you have at least one sales funnel in place working for you 24/7?
• Does your website load fast, ideally within 3 seconds or less?

Funny thing is that most businesses don’t have answers to these questions at all. If they do, the answers are vague. All that is because the entire approach to website design and set up has been wrong from the start.

Businesses focus on design, structure and content but they neglect elements and systems that would make a website perform best in turning traffic into buyers.

The right way to go about creating high-performance websites is this:

High-performance websites are built to convert

It doesn’t matter if you use a pure HTML/CSS or if you use WordPress to build your website. When you launch an e-commerce site, it won’t matter if you use Shopify or Magento. What really matters is whether or not your website gets you the results you seek.

For common types of business websites, the sought after results can look like this:

• Blog or online publication? Number of regular readers and email subscribers.
• Company blog? Number of leads generated and then sales attributed to those leads.
• SaaS application website: Number of free trials leading to monthly paid users with MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).

It’s possible to generate results for any level of traffic that’s coming to your website. Even if you’re attracting only a couple of hundreds of visitors per month, you should be able to convert at least a small number of them into customers.

When you develop a website, develop it from a marketing angle. If not, don’t even bother building a website, only to have a web presence.

No matter the type of website, you need to have at least one sales funnel in place. In other words, you need to push random incoming visitors towards a path of actions, that you have planned in advance, with the ultimate goal of turning some of those random visitors into paying customers.

See the difference? Instead of just counting on luck, wishing website visitors would buy more of your product, you come prepared; You create a well-thought sales strategy, and all of the pages, elements and systems behind it, to facilitate sales on auto-pilot. This is just another way to describe a digital sales funnel.

Use lead-generation elements on web pages

In the short time that you have to make that good first impression to your visitors, it’s hard to get your visitors to give you a vote of confidence, to build trust, or to convince them to buy.

To enable sales you need more time. The only way to have more time with your web visitors is to get them to engage with your brand long-term. The best way to achieve that is to use email marketing. Using one or several sets of well-written autoresponder messages, you can nurture leads and convert them into sales.

But how do you even get email subscribers in the first place? You do that by creating lead-generation elements such as pop-ups, slide-ins, welcome gates, in-line opt-in forms, or opt-in forms on your blog’s sidebar. The purpose of these lead-generation elements is to grab the user’s email address, so you can contact them again.

How do you attract more email subscribers? Make a valuable offer. Give away something of value to help your visitors go one level up on your relationship, and further convince them that you have the solution to their problems.

Websites are hubs; Landing pages are for focused lead generation

Your website is a central hub with oodles of information to keep your visitors informed, engaged, and to help them make well-informed decisions. Websites can work as knowledge hubs where you offer content, blogs, resources, tools, and access to your primary products and services.

Make a sitewide, all-purpose offer on your website for all your visitors to see. This offer is usually your flagship offer and also an evergreen one so that you don’t have to keep making changes to that offer.

However, you need to use landing pages to present specific offers based on different criteria, such as:

• a person’s location or country,
• important referral sources, like Facebook, or
• topic-specific or interest-based offers for particular audiences.

Landing pages are focused and specific, and visitors dig that sort of relevance.

High-performance websites: Use analytics, for everything

Use Google Analytics to ensure that you have a way to track visitors to your website (and every single page within, including each of your blog posts).

When you track visitors, you also get a glimpse of their behavior, along with several other data points such as locations, devices, countries, bounce rates, time spent on your site, and website page loading time, etc.

Click here to register for an upcoming webinar where we’ll learn:

• how you can track visitor behavior and visualize web paths with the click of a button,
• what metrics you need to analyze and how you can get instant access to them, and
• how you can learn how to fix and optimize sales funnels using one dashboard.

One of the most popular tools, Google Analytics, gives you a wealth of data to let you know what digital marketing efforts contribute to acquiring leads and ultimately to generating sales. If you need more handy features, consider using Statly for bringing in very specific numbers pertaining to your sales funnels. Statly allows you to visualize complete sales funnels, and find funnel pages or elements that facilitate conversions.

Plus, you can use Hotjar or Mouseflow to also get access to video sessions of users, heatmaps, form analytics, and click behavior on your website and landing pages.

While you are at it, be sure to keep track of the right metrics, the ones that help reach informed business decisions.

Your website should be built for a reason. Whatever your reasons are, it’s certainly not for “looking good” or for satiating your ego. Make your website work!

If you need help setting up the right strategy for high-performance websites, if you need to get on a profitable path to digital marketing, sales funnels, and lead generation, get on a scheduled strategy session with us.

The post 4 Requirements For High-performance Websites appeared first on Done For You.

You’ll get approvals, licenses, and necessary permits. You’ll put in a huge corpus of cash as capital and you’ll borrow some more funds from leading banks and other corporations to start your venture. Then, you’ll then put all kinds of teams in place — for research & development; design; manufacturing plants; human resources and so much more.

At every step of the way, you’ll need help when you launch a major corporation – incorporation, taxes, manufacturing setup, research, design, etc.

There are processes and there are laws. There are certain ways to do things (depending on where in the world you are located). Even within the United States, each state has its own laws for business incorporation, taxation, labor laws, and others.

That’s how complicated it gets and yes, it’s serious business.

Underperforming funnels and campaigns

Doing digital marketing — for a completely online business or for a traditional business going online — is absolutely anyone’s game. There are hundreds of theories, thousands of different ways to achieve a singular goal, and varying levels of skill sets (depending on who you hire).

No matter how you are going to get to digital marketing in general, or your paid advertising campaigns or funnels specifically, you are bound to do those based on what you think, know, feel, or the advice you get. While not all of that is bad, there are a few myths that result in ineffective funnels and campaigns that bleed money.

Here are some of the mistakes that lead to underperforming funnels and campaigns.

Overdoing design

Countless funnels sit half-finished and many funnels are underperforming because of over-insistence on design. Looks might matter but what most people forget is that looks only matter up to a certain point.

Too many businesses fuss, waste time, and raise opportunity cost worrying so much about whether or not this ad looks pretty, or whether the landing page was designed well that they freeze to the point that they don’t even launch campaigns.

You need good design coupled with great copy to make your campaigns work. Overdoing it and wasting too much time, however, makes it even harder than it should be for you.

Too many cooks

The bigger the businesses the more people you see getting involved in a campaign and the more the chances are that the campaign won’t ever work as well as it could.

Too many people and too many ideas can only choke the progress of a campaign. While this is a problem everywhere, it takes on a whole new avatar when too many people become part of a digital marketing campaign. We don’t know what it’s about online marketing, but everyone seems to be an expert.

Even if people have a false sense of expertise, their suggestions (when implemented) can be disastrous for your campaigns.

Solution? Only work with proven experts.

Marketing stack? Anything goes

The marketing stack — or the set of tools you use — can’t be taken for granted. Some of the best businesses depend on tools only after using them, working with them, and testing them out. It’s, at best, a trial and error method. A chosen stack of tools (or a combination of tools) is unique for each business.

Some SaaS marketing tools have certain features that others don’t. Some will work well for your business and others won’t. A few tools — despite the hype — aren’t even good enough to start with.

You’ll arrive at the right marketing stack only after experimentation. Use first and decide later.

Build funnels and it’s over

Too many business owners and marketers tend to think that once a working sales funnel is up and running, the job is done.

In fact, work just begins at that stage. Funnels don’t always work the way they were designed to.

You might find out that your newly-built sales funnels are underperforming. Plus, there are a hundred variables that you’d need to look into to ensure smooth running sales funnels and ad campaigns.

• Ad campaigns themselves are never static. A/B testing and optimization is continuous work (even if you want to do it weekly). Multiply testing and optimization with the number of campaigns you run and you can very well imagine why it’s full-time agency work.
• With Facebook Ads, there’s the real problem of “frequency.” High frequency of ads would mean that way too many people are looking at your ad a lot more frequently. You will have embarked on Google Adwords Ad testing too. Plus, there’s the ongoing testing of ads on all traffic sources.
• Regarding your email marketing sequences or autoresponders, is the first email message going out immediately, consistently, and fast enough? If not, you’d have to work out the kinks either in your funnel, your landing page, or the email marketing provider itself.

Your funnels can never be “set it up and forget.” Ever.

How do your funnels look? Want to share them with us?

The post Top 4 Mistakes That Lead To Underperforming Funnels And Campaigns appeared first on Done For You.

It also demands that you make the right offer, create multiple variations for each of the elements of your funnel for split testing, and tracking the performance of each element of the funnel.

Typically, creating effective funnels is so much work that most businesses don’t bother. Because they don’t, they lose out on opportunity every day.

The simple guide to funnels

If that’s you, then:

• You might not be leveraging sources of traffic to generate relevant, high-interested, potential buyers.
• You could be generating qualified leads from your website’s organic traffic, but you are not.
• You could be making appealing offers to grow your email list fast, but you’re missing out on growth.
• You would be converting some of your leads into customers, but without a funnel you can’t.
• Every single day that goes by without you having a funnel (or some kind of lead acquisition and conversion strategy in place) is money going down the drain.

Fortunately, thanks to Facebook Ads and Google Adwords, even lazy business owners can do just as well as hyperactive entrepreneurs, when it comes to generating quality leads to feed their funnels.

With the help of tools, experts, and information on the web about lead generation and building sales funnels, there are really no excuses.

Content marketing, SEO, blogging, social media — all of these take way too much time, money and other resources. That route of using multiple marketing channels to grow your business might not be for you if you can’t commit to such demanding work.

If this is the case, then your best option is paid advertising campaigns and funnels. Here’s how you can make paid traffic and funnels work for your business:

Make an offer

Depending on your business, think of a strong offer you can make with your ads.

Consider how most ads are like:

“Check us out”
“Buy now”
“Sign up”

If your ads are like that, it won’t work.

Consumers today have a lot to choose from so you’ll have to make an offer that can stand out, tease, entertain, amuse, or you give away something so appealing that your prospective customers would have been thrilled to pay you for it.

Learn to master the art of making irresistible offers. Prepare to give away some to get some. There’s no point in launching a campaign or building a funnel until you are sure you have something of value to give away.

Setup your funnel

For the offer you’ll make above, you’ll need a sales funnel. After clicking on an ad, they’ll go straight to a landing page where you continue with more information and supporting graphics to make your offer that much more compelling.

Be sure to carry the same message on your landing page that you also communicate with your ad. When you build a landing page that helps support your ad, it’s called a message-matching landing page. Message matching landing pages help keep your potential customers hooked, enable trust, and boost your conversions.

If your ad says “30% off”, your landing page should also say “30% off” and some more.

If your ad promises something for free, your landing page should compel your visitors to download (or get) that little freebie.

While you are at it, create a set of dedicated landing pages for the sole purpose of retargeting

Trigger automated email sequences (or SMS?)

As a business, you won’t be online all the time (even if you have a 100% online business). You’d also not be able to manually send in emails or SMS messages every time someone signs up for your offer (above).

That’s when marketing automation comes to the rescue. By triggering automated email responders each time someone signs up for your offer, you bail yourself out of endless firefighting scenarios and mind-numbing administrative work.

Plus, you can rest assured that every person who signs up for your offer on your landing page (or at the top of your funnel) is nurtured diligently by your reliable email autoresponder.

Analytics and tracking

You wouldn’t know where you are going, how you are doing, and just how effective your funnels are without proper analytics, tracking, and attribution.

Before you read anything else, know what you are going to track and the KPIs that really matter. Don’t chase vanity metrics of any kind that don’t add to your bottom line).

Depending on the traffic source you’ll use to bring in traffic (see ‘launch campaigns’ below), you’ll have some more work to do. At the minimum, here’s what you’ll have to do:

• Use Statly, our new software for real-time tracking on visitors through your sales funnel and website which helps you improve conversions and optimize the sales experience dramatically, and help you discover where your opportunities and bottlenecks are in your website.
• Add specific conversion snippets and Javascript codes for respective traffic sources to every landing page (including variants). Even if you were to opt-out of a traffic source, it still makes sense to add these codes to build your audiences (for launching campaigns later). For instance, you’ll have to setup the Facebook Pixel for Facebook Advertising and Google’s Adwords remarketing code and Google Adwords Conversion Code for each landing page and variants.
• Use UTM variables appended to your URLs to help you track and attribute traffic sources with conversions, leads, and sales.  (The Statly Plugin automatically adds them to all of your blog links for easy tracking!)

Launch campaigns

By the time you get to this point, each of the above steps should be tested. Make sure that all systems are go.

Finally, choose your traffic source.

Are you going to use Google Adwords? Facebook ads maybe? How about Instagram advertising? Regardless of the traffic source you pick, all of the steps above are going to remain the same.

Launch your campaigns.

After your campaigns run for a while, wait for data to populate and then set about doing A/B tests to know exactly what works and what doesn’t. You can then take a call on making changes to your ads, landing pages, or even entire funnels based on the data you get.

Need help with your funnels?

Does that sound too much even for a lazy marketer or business owner? We get it.

Here’s some help:

Get access to our Funnel Factor Report, Sales funnel webinar, or our Funnel Blueprint Video Series.

Need specific help with funnels or marketing for your business? Get on a scheduled call with us.

The post The Lazy Entrepreneur’s Guide To Funnels appeared first on Done For You.

Sales funnels are where marketing meets sales for every business, virtually. But what exactly are sales funnels and how do you create a sales funnel for your business online?

Digital sales funnels or online marketing funnels are an elaborate arrangement of different tools and elements.

Typically, when you create a sales funnel you will need to include the components of a complete inbound marketing system, like traffic sources, ads, offers, landing pages, email marketing, split testing. All of these marketing elements are combined and streamlined with the goal to help leads get into your sales pipeline and convert into customers.

In other words, when you set up a sales funnel, you have a complete online marketing system that allows you to attract people who are interested in your product and, with the right tactics and strategies, lead them to develop a lifetime of relationship with your business.

How to build a high-conversion sales funnel

Sales funnels, when you build them the right way, help you lay down a path for your visitors to follow, with the precise goal of turning those visitors into customers for life.

Without a marketing funnel, your web properties (websites and landing pages to be more precise) tend to be out there in the wild, without a purpose. When visitors come to check you out, they don’t know what to do next (or you can at least assume that they don’t).

By setting out a path for them to follow, you control your visitor experiences in a way that ends up adding value to your customers while you pull in revenue and profits.

Good, non-pushy, and high-engagement sales funnels that provide value upfront also make for a fantastic user experience (and hence a possibility of word of mouth, more sales, and referrals).

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to build your high-conversion sales funnels:

How to create a sales funnel: Start with an offer

All successful sales funnels and inbound marketing systems start with an offer of one kind or the other.

Product-based businesses give away free samples or offer discount coupons.

Service businesses give away eBooks or free online courses (often called lead magnets) to allow their respective clients to get a taste of what might be involved while working with a business.

SaaS businesses or apps might give away a free trial (for 14 days or 30 days) to allow users to “use, play, and fall in love” with products before they decide to buy.

Some technology businesses and software companies (or their resellers) also give away free white papers, research findings, and other kinds of products packaged and bundled together.

You’ll need a way to convince, persuade, and invoke an action from your visitors in order for them to sign up as a lead first.

All of this is done to get leads for respective businesses because making offers like these is a low-friction way to build your leads pipeline.

Why you need an offer in your sales funnel

Also, when you make an offer, you are creating some sort of value upfront.

Three things happen when you sign up a lead for your business (at the top of the sales funnel):

• You just got a lead for your business (that’s straight forward enough)
• You got a vote of confidence from visitors, who now trust you enough to learn from you or to use your product. These are captive, high-intent leads who can very well be your customers tomorrow.
• You now have a way to educate, teach, inspire, and motivate your customers to enrich their lives. Of course, you could sell your products or services too (and you own this audience completely).

You can’t have a funnel without an offer, so it’s imperative that you get that right.

Need some more help to create the best offer for your marketing funnel? We wrote a blog post about how to create the perfect lead magnet. Also, Mark Joyner has an entire book on The Irresistible Offer and you can download it for free.

Build single or multi-step landing pages

A focused way of presenting your offer, so as to ensure that your visitors don’t get distracted and pay attention to your message, is to build a landing page. A landing page is a standalone, dedicated page built exclusively to communicate your offer to your visitors.

Landing pages are built to ensure that you have your visitors’ attention, free of the regular distractions found on a typical website. Usually then, your landing pages don’t have a navigation menu or any links at all.

All that your landing page has are exactly the only elements you need (headline, subheadings, images, copy, and a call to action) to get people to sign up for what you offer.

As part of a high-conversion sales funnel, your landing page could be just a single page with just one offer. Alternatively, you could make different landing pages for multiple offers or if you want to test out various landing pages for the same offer.

In some cases, businesses also create multi-step landing pages which make the whole sign up process in “steps”.

For instance, for a real estate landing page, Page 1 takes only the Pin code of the visitor. Page 2 asks for the address, and page 3 for the email.

Determine and establish your traffic sources

You have an offer now, but you’d need people to see that offer. You want the whole world to know about your business, your offer, and your product. How do you do that? How do you get traffic to your landing pages?

To set up a perfect sales funnel is not enough if you don’t attract the right type of traffic.  

Organic Traffic: When you get everything right with your blogging, content marketing strategy (including content curation, podcasting, video, and other forms of content), and social media, you’ll start acquiring visitors organically through all of these sources combined.

Visitors find your website off of a search on search engines. Or they check out one or many of your updates on social media. Maybe they find one of your slides on Slideshare interesting and then come to check your business out.

Organic traffic also includes all kinds of referral traffic — people clicking through links on other sites that mention your business.

All of us at doneforyou firmly believe that if there’s one kind of traffic that you hope for in the long run, it’s organic traffic.

As you keep producing content, the number of visitors coming in through your content strategy increases continuously, slowly, and consistently.

Paid Traffic: If you need traffic to your marketing funnel way sooner than the time it takes for your organic traffic to kick in, you’d choose paid advertising on various platforms available to you. Such platforms are: Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter ads, LinkedIn ads, Pinterest ads, and mobile advertising.

Paid traffic is also a great way to generate leads quickly and hence make sales sooner.

The best part about getting traffic to your online sales funnels is that you’ll always know what works and what doesn’t. Based on the data available to you, make decisions and tweak your traffic generation strategy accordingly.

When designing your funnels, picking the right source of traffic can be a major cause of confusion. We’ve recently published an article where we answer all of your traffic questions extensively.

Cross-sells and upsells (Optional step to building your sales funnel)

Between the point on the landing page(s) where visitors submit their information to sign up for your offer and the “thank you” page that shows up “after” someone signs up, you could have an additional page that makes a “one-time” offer — something that you won’t offer again and that which still holds great value.

Another alternative is to obviate the need for an extra page and use the “thank you” itself as the cross-sell or upsell page while you still say “thank you”.

The only reason why cross-sells and upsells are optional is because you’ll try to “sell” something to apparently “cold traffic” — this is a little too early in the funnel to make sales pitches.

Making sales pitches early in the funnel (or at the top of the funnel, when they sign up for something free) makes it all a little too aggressive, pushy, and demanding.

If and when it’s done right, however, it works like a charm. See what Spotify does as soon as you sign up for a free account.

Now, whether or not this strategy works for you is something you’d need to test.

However, making upsells is one incredibly awesome way to boost your sales and bring in the cash flow.

Setup email marketing autoresponder sequences

Soon after visitors sign up for an offer you make, the need for engagement kicks in. Emails are the default (but you could also use modern ways such as live chat, using Intercom, or by using Drift).

But we’ll stick to email autoresponder sequences for now. When you’re looking to create a sales funnel that actually generates sales you don’t want to skip this part.

The first email that goes out to leads after they sign up is the welcome email, onboarding email, an email that packs instructions in, or just an email that delivers the actual offer you promised (coupons, PDF documents, videos, links to resources, etc.).

Here’s how the sequence is roughly laid out (and set up in a way that everyone who signs up gets the emails in the same sequence):

1. Email 1: The welcome email, lead magnet delivery, offer delivery, onboarding email, instructional email
2. Email 2: Follow up email
3. Email 3: Feedback email for Email 1
4. Email 4: Subscriber-exclusive information
5. Email 5: More value packed in
6. Email 6: Soft pitch to a paid product or service
7. Email 7: Continue with Informational emails
8. And so on…

Here’s the first email Airbnb “hosts” get when they express interest to host their homes (or part of their homes) for guests on Airbnb:

Create retargeting workflows

More than 90% of your visitors leave without doing anything on your website. Maybe they browse, read your blog posts, and they just leave. Life comes in between and they forget about you altogether.

The advanced (and painful) version of this behavior is seen with ecommerce shopping cart abandonment (where shoppers add items to their cart but leave without buying).

If you want to create a sales funnel you need to address the issue of abandoned cart properly.

The real money in paid advertising (where your hard earned dollars truly go to work) is when you do retargeting.

Also, retargeting campaigns turn out to be considerably cheaper with a much lower CPA (Cost per Acquisition) than regular campaigns.

For visitors who visit and leave without doing anything, you could do retargeting (across platforms or on any specific platform).

Do shoppers leave without buying anything and after leaving items on their respective shopping carts? You could use retargeting emails or automated abandoned shopping cart email campaigns.

Here’s how a shopping cart abandonment email looks like (Courtesy: Peel):

Depending on your situation and the way you have created your sales funnel, you’ll have to develop retargeting workflows to make those visitors who did show some interest come back and complete their respective actions.

Casual blog visitors who read and exit your site? Use retargeting on Facebook or on Web to bring them back to sign up for your free offer (top of funnel)

Are high-intent visitors browsing your products or pricing page? Use retargeting ads showcasing those products to have them sign up.

Are shoppers leaving items in the cart and abandoning their shopping midway? Use retargeting emails to nudge them to buy.

How to optimize your funnel with split testing

You have inbound marketing funnels set up for each of your offers, products, or services. You have an email marketing system working for you on auto-pilot.

You are doing everything right. Or are you? You never know until you test.

By doing A/B testing for all elements within your funnel (ads, landing pages, email subject links, calls to action, copy, headings, subheadings), etc., you have a data-driven approach to making your sales funnels work harder than they normally do.

Instead of accepting status quo on how ads, landing pages, or entire funnels perform. You could test elements out (one against the other, and doing one test between two similar assets at a time) and pluck out real champions.

Here’s an example of A/B Testing is Done, by Dustin Sparks of Unbounce

Analytics and tracking

A major advantage of using sales funnels on the web (and this also applies to your website in general and other web properties) is analytics.

With analytics, you can get a bird’s eye view of every single visitor, their history of browsing, sources of traffic, time spent on your website, number of leads who signed up, lead scores assigned to leads, full video recordings of what visitors do on your pages, heat maps, scroll rates, and pretty much everything you ever wanted to know.

While Google Analytics is the default tool you’ll use to track and record visits and all kinds of numbers important for you, your sales funnels will have separate analytics associated with them.

Your analytics can be simple or complex (often requiring more than one tool) depending on how you setup your funnels.

Let’s assume a scenario where you are using Facebook ads to drive traffic to landing pages created with Leadpages. Let’s also assume that you use Adroll for retargeting. Finally, all your email marketing is managed through MailChimp.

This is how your analytics will be like:

Facebook Ads — KPIs related to Ad impressions, reach, frequency, clicks, conversions, CPA, CTR, and all other ad related analytics are shown inside Facebook’s own ad analytics dashboard.

Landing Page Analytics — Leadpages will show you analytics at the page-level. Numbers such as visitors to either versions of your landing page (A & B), conversions on either of the landing pages, total number of conversions, etc.

Retargeting audiences — If you use Adroll for retargeting, you’ll get data on audience size, retargeting campaign level analytics (including clicks on ads, conversions, cost per conversions, ad budget for retargeting, etc.).

Bring it all together

When you bring it all in, and work with each of these steps inside your sales funnel, that’s when you have a sales funnel that works efficiently leading to a predictable marketing machine.

Each of the moving parts within a sales funnel (ads, landing pages, emails, retargeting audiences, analytics, tracking and reporting) has to be managed all the while your campaigns are on or when you get a regular stream of traffic from your organic campaigns.

As you can see, building sales funnels is one thing; managing them well enough is something else altogether.

The point?

You don’t just create a sales funnel. You also manage those funnels effectively, keep making tweaks to ensure that your funnels work for you, and use data continuously to make decisions to improve how your sales funnels perform.

How does your sales funnel look like? What’s the most difficult part when you create a sales funnel?

The post How To Create A Sales Funnel appeared first on Done For You.

Also, the best idea is to come up only with some little changes. You don’t want those changes to be way too significant. So, things like adjusting the sending time, modifying the content a little bit or choosing the subject line can be extremely important and valuable for the A/B test.

Why do you need email A/B testing?

The reason is simple; you just can’t know how your audience will react to your campaign.

Sure, you can conduct a few studies beforehand, but the idea is still the same, results can vary. The only way to get amazing results is to opt for A/B testing.

As you can imagine, no two A/B tests are equal. Some of them are more comprehensive; others tend to be lengthy and so on. There’s no need to create multiple A/B tests that are identical to one another.

The idea is to come up with various types of tests that will make it clear how customers react and what they expect from you.

Identify the campaign goal.

Each campaign type will come with some unique requirements and benefits. Some of these campaigns are focused specifically on driving traffic to your site, in which case you have to focus on clicks. With some campaigns we want to accomplish a higher open rate, while with others we want to focus on generating direct sales.

The waiting time can differ based on each one of the winning metrics you want to focus on. According to MailChimp, the best waiting time for around 80% accuracy in the case of clicks is around 1 hour. For opens is 2 hours and for revenue focused emails is 12 hours.

But that doesn’t mean it will be the ultimate waiting time. Each business has a variety of clients. They pertain to various industries, work at different times and don’t care about being online all the time. In this case, you have to figure out what campaign goal works for you and how you need to adapt it based on the company specifics.

Also, some CEOs who focus on revenue and don’t care about testing will just use software to define this. And while A/B Testing software is pretty good, it can’t bring you the desired results. That’s why you need to put your knowledge and attention to work. Fulfilling this will be quite a challenge for a lot of people, but then again it will also be worth it.

Is a higher waiting time the best option?

It comes down to what metric you are focused on. But yes, if you wait a bit more, you may be able to get information that is a bit more comprehensive. A lot more people will open up the email, which means you have more accuracy and data to go through.

On the other hand, you don’t want the A/B Testing to last for a very long time. This is a test, not a full-fledged campaign. So, the focus has to be on identifying metrics as quickly as possible. Then, you will adjust the campaign and see which one works for you.

Criteria you have to focus on for A/B testing.

First, you need to take into account the size of that sample and the representativeness of it. Then you have the test period and the devices that you are testing. You also need to consider things like the statistical confidence level of that sample too.

The confidence level shows how certain readers are when they act on your desired system. The sample size is all about seeing how much the conversion rate will be affected based on the sample size, baseline conversion rate, and the detectable effects.

Business representativeness includes things like traffic sources and business cycles too, among others. The devices used for that test and timing can also be an important factor that you need to take into consideration. Again, patience is key, so you have to consider that.

Understanding the A/B test hypotheses.

You have two components here, the null hypothesis and the alternate hypothesis. The null one states the status quo so that you will get a null result. The alternate one is designed to challenge the null hypothesis, and it will show if there are variations and if those particular variations will bring in a much better conversion rate when compared to the original.

Here you have to take into account things like the P-Value, which is a statistical measure designed to figure out if the null hypothesis is correct or not. In case this P-Value is less than .05 or equal to that shows that the results shouldn’t be dismissed due to sampling error.

So, how much time should you wait?

That’s up to the type of metric you follow. Ideally, you should wait at least two hours if you want to find the right campaign for opens, one hour for finding out the winning idea when it comes to targeting clicks and twelve hours if you want to see which one delivers the utmost revenue.

The idea here is to be fair and to bring in front a great, professional approach. Who knows, maybe the A/B test that you don’t trust will end up being the winner. That’s why A/B test exists, to show you facts and to bring you a great insight into the reality of your customer’s needs and choices.

Set up your A/B test and then try to experiment as much as possible.

Trying out various ideas and approaches will work well here. Don’t rush, instead take your time and you will be quite impressed with the unique range of benefits that would be delivered. Once you have all the metrics in place, identify which ones work best for you.

Of course, you can try to pick two of the best tests and then run them again. You should always try to opt for A/B testing, as it’s quite helpful for your business and it does offer a lot of important information for your business!

The post How Long Should You Run Email A/B Tests? appeared first on Done For You.