In the world of digital marketing, filtering your prospects isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the key to sustainable growth and higher conversions. The reality is that not all leads are created equal. Without a system in place to filter and qualify prospects, your business could be wasting time, energy, and money chasing leads that will never convert.

After analyzing over 400 sales funnels and generating thousands of leads, we’ve identified the most effective strategies for filtering prospects and transforming them into high-quality leads. Here’s how to implement a filtering system that works for your business.

The Impact of Proper Filtering on How to Get More Qualified Leads

The difference between unfiltered and filtered leads is staggering. Let’s take a look at real-world numbers:

• Unfiltered traffic: 1-2% conversion rates
• Basic filtered leads: 4% conversion at a $497 price point
• Well-qualified leads: 30% conversion at a $97 price point
• Strategy session leads: 51% conversion for high-ticket offers

Why does this matter? Because a clear filtering process ensures you’re focusing your efforts on leads who are ready and able to buy. When you filter for intent and readiness, you’re not just increasing conversions; you’re building a more efficient, scalable business.

Proven Filtering Methods for Generating More Qualified Leads

1. Role and Seniority Within the Organization

Understanding a prospect’s decision-making authority is crucial, especially for B2B offers. For example, in our Done For You sales funnels, we ask prospects:

• What is your role in the company?
• Do you have decision-making authority?
• What is your current marketing budget?
• How large is your team?

These questions allow us to filter out leads who aren’t in a position to make purchasing decisions.

2. Level of Social Status

Social status provides another layer of qualification. Here’s how we apply it in practice:

• Requesting LinkedIn profiles for B2B leads to verify their professional background
• Checking business email addresses instead of generic ones like Gmail or Yahoo
• Assessing company domain authority to gauge credibility

This approach helps us focus on leads who are serious and credible.

3. Current Workflows and Systems

Every lead’s current setup tells a story about their needs and challenges. Here are some metrics we evaluate:

• Existing marketing systems and tools
• Current sales processes
• Key pain points in their funnel
• ROI expectations for new strategies

Understanding these elements allows us to tailor our approach and ensure we’re addressing real needs.

4. Product Interest Level

Tracking engagement metrics provides valuable insight into a lead’s level of interest. Key indicators include:

• Email open rates: Should be 40-55% within the first week
• Landing page engagement: Target a 30-40% conversion rate
• Webinar attendance: Aim for a 50% show-up rate

These benchmarks help us identify which leads are ready for immediate action versus those who need nurturing.

Implementing Strategy Sessions To Get More Qualified Leads

For high-ticket products or services ($2,000+), strategy sessions are one of the most effective ways to qualify leads. Here’s a real-world case study that highlights the power of proper filtering:

Case Study: From 15% to 52% Close Rates

A client selling a $997 product struggled with low conversions on their webinar funnel. Here’s how we transformed their results:

Before Filtering:

• 1,000 webinar registrants
• 300 attendees
• 12 sales ($997 product)
• 4% conversion rate

After Implementing Filtering:

• 500 qualified registrants
• 250 attendees
• 38 sales ($997 product)
• 15.2% conversion rate

What Changed? We added a detailed application form to the funnel. Prospects were asked about:

• Monthly revenue and ad spend
• Team size and decision-making authority
• Specific business goals and timelines

This allowed us to pre-qualify leads and ensure strategy sessions were only held with those most likely to convert. By the end of the campaign, close rates soared to 52% for strategy sessions, resulting in a significant boost in ROI.

Automated Filtering Systems

Automation makes it easier to filter prospects without adding extra work. Here’s the process we recommend:

Lead Magnet Delivery:

• Day 0: Welcome email with lead magnet
• Day 1: Consumption check
• Day 2-4: Engagement content
• Day 5-7: Qualification survey

Survey Segmentation: Based on survey responses, prospects are sorted into three categories:

• Ready to buy: Directly sent to the sales page
• Needs nurturing: Entered into an educational sequence
• Not qualified: Added to the general newsletter

This system ensures each lead is handled appropriately based on their level of intent.

Beyond Filtering: Building a Holistic System for Qualified Leads

While filtering is essential, it’s only one part of the equation. A holistic lead generation system also includes:

• Storytelling: Create narratives that resonate with your audience’s pain points and desires.
• Clear Branding: Ensure your branding reflects your values and aligns with the leads you’re targeting.
• Consistent Follow-Up: Nurture leads with email sequences, retargeting ads, and personalized outreach.

Final Thoughts: Take Action Today

Effective filtering is about more than just improving your numbers—it’s about building meaningful connections with the right audience. By implementing these strategies, you can focus your time and energy on prospects who are ready to take action, ultimately driving more sales and sustainable growth.

If you’re ready to get more qualified leads and take your business to the next level, start by refining your filtering process today. The results will speak for themselves.

The post How to Get More Qualified Leads: Why Filtering Your Incoming Prospects Is a MUST 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.

As a business owner, you always aim for higher revenue and profitability. One way to achieve this is by making high ticket sales. High ticket sales refer to products or services that cost a significant amount of money, typically over $1,000. These sales require a different approach than regular sales, and in this blog post, we will share some secrets to unlocking massive high-ticket sales that can skyrocket your revenue.

Understanding High Ticket Sales

Before we delve into the secrets of high ticket sales, let’s understand what it means. High ticket sales are not for every business, and not every customer can afford to make such purchases. Identifying the right audience with the resources and willingness to pay for high-end products or services is crucial. Such customers typically look for exclusivity, quality, and value.

Secrets to Unlocking Massive High Ticket Sales

Here are some secrets that can help you unlock massive high-ticket sales and skyrocket your revenue:

1. Build Trust and Credibility

When it comes to high ticket sales, trust and credibility are everything. Customers need to trust you and your brand before making a significant investment. You can build trust and credibility by providing valuable content, testimonials, case studies, and social proof. Make sure to highlight your expertise and experience in your niche.

2. Offer Exceptional Value

High ticket sales require exceptional value. Customers need to see the value in what you’re offering, and it should be worth the price. Your product or service should solve a critical problem or provide a unique benefit that customers can’t get elsewhere. Make sure to emphasize the benefits and outcomes of your product or service.

3. Create a Sense of Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency can help you close high-ticket sales quickly. You can create urgency by offering limited-time deals, exclusive bonuses, or scarcity. Customers are more likely to take action when they feel they might miss out on something valuable.

4. Provide Excellent Customer Service

Excellent customer service can make all the difference in high ticket sales. Customers need to feel supported and valued throughout the buying process and beyond. Make sure to provide excellent after-sales support, including warranties, return policies, and ongoing customer support.

5. Use a Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is a series of steps that guide potential customers toward purchasing. A high-ticket sales funnel differs from a regular one and requires a more personalized approach. You can use a sales funnel to build relationships, provide value, and nurture leads until they are ready to purchase.

Conclusion

High ticket sales can be an excellent way to boost your revenue and profitability, but it requires a different approach than regular sales. To unlock massive high-ticket sales, you must build trust and credibility, offer exceptional value, create a sense of urgency, provide excellent customer service, and use a sales funnel. By implementing these secrets, you can attract the right audience and close high ticket sales that can skyrocket your revenue.

The post Unlock the Secret to Massive High Ticket Sales and Skyrocket Your Revenue Today! appeared first on Done For You.

Understanding the Basics of Lead Generation

1. Identify your target audience: Who is your ideal customer? What are their pain points and needs? Understanding your target audience is critical in creating a successful lead generation process. This knowledge is essential in creating a lead generation process that resonates with your prospects.
2. Create valuable content: Once you’ve identified your audience, the next step is to create valuable content that addresses their pain points and fulfills their needs. This content can take various forms, such as blog posts, videos, e-books, webinars, etc.
3. Promote your content: Great content deserves an audience. Promote your content on various channels, including social media, email newsletters, and other distribution platforms, to attract potential customers to your brand
4. Capture leads: The heart of the lead generation process is capturing leads. Offer something of value in exchange for contact information, such as a free trial, a newsletter subscription, or exclusive access to valuable resources.
5. Nurture leads: Once you’ve captured leads, nurturing them effectively is essential. This involves creating targeted email campaigns, personalized content, and engagement strategies to build trust and move leads through the sales funnel.

Tips and Strategies for Success

1. Use multiple channels

2. Personalize your content

3. Leverage customer reviews and testimonials

4. Optimize your website for lead capture

5. Use lead scoring

Conclusion

The post The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Your Lead Generation Process: Tips and Strategies for Success! appeared first on Done For You.

What is Funnel Management?

Understanding Your Customers

Creating Compelling Content

Qualifying Leads

Nurturing Leads

Closing the Sale

Tracking Your Results

The post The Art of Funnel Management: Maximizing Sales Efficiency and Revenue Growth 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.

Welcome to today’s Get Shit Done Daily. We’re going to talk about sales funnel management and basically optimizing sales funnels and optimizing sales flows and kind of unleashing the workflows, so that people are able to move through them more effectively. This is all pretty well kind of ripped out of our new free report, master guide actually. It’s 274 pages, so it is a monster of a PDF. Download this, I’m dropping this in the chat there, or in the comments, I should say.

If you are watching this on my profile, then you’re going to want to either get to one of the Facebook groups that we just kind of started. Well, it really kind of officially kicked off this morning. One of them is the DFY Funnels Group. This is a Facebook group. It is entirely dedicated to sales funnel management and building and optimizing and deploying and creating automated sales systems, so these live streams are being streamed to this group every day. Then, what we’re going to do is we’ll kind of follow up with some additional tutorials or some additional tips or tricks or posts or conversation or whatever, so that is there.

You’re going to want to make sure to… It looks like YouTube rejected your comment because it was a Facebook link, which is fine, but everywhere else should be able to get that. I just added this here. Oh, that’s kind of a cool little feature. That is kind of the state of the union.

Today, what we’re going to talk about is sales funnel management. In order to understand sales funnel management and optimizing sales funnels, the first thing we need to do is talk about micro-actions. Micro-actions are the things that you get people to do through your sales funnel. A micro-action, for example, is opening an email or clicking a link inside of an email or clicking an ad or watching a video.

When you’re building a sales funnel, you don’t go from one to sale. You don’t go from zero, which is somebody brand new, somebody learning about you and somebody becoming aware of your brand, to fully qualified, pull the credit card out a buyer in the blink of an eye. There’s a warm-up process that has to happen. The warmup process is when prospects, when customers, go through this step of micro-actions.

Your micro-actions start where somebody first learns about you. They start way, way, way up here in whatever traffic channel you are living in or you’re running from. This might be Google Search, it might be YouTube Ads, it might be Facebook Ads, wherever, whatever vertical this is in.

Basically, the goal of advertising is to get somebody to take some sort of action. In this case, we’re going to be posting ads or advertising to prospects that we think fit our demographic based on their interests, based on their search phrases, based on all of the things that we do as marketers to kind of connect an offer to an ad. We do our best to kind of make sure that as many people there as possible, we get some sort of action from. Now, they don’t go from zero over here all the way to purchase in the blink of an eye. It just doesn’t work that way. What they do is they go through steps.

They’re going to end up going from being cold to warm up a little bit to doing something else, to watching a video, to maybe booking a call or clicking the add to cart button, and then ultimately putting their credit card in an order form. Then, they go to the fulfillment page, which is where you make your money. Now, all in all, there ends up usually being 14 or 15 steps in between learning about you and putting your credit card in at a minimum.

Now, here’s what I mean. Let’s say we’re running YouTube Ads and those YouTube Ads are… They click on the YouTube Ad and then they go to the page. Now, so this is going to be a lander. Now that lander, there are actually quite a few little micro-actions in that lander that have to be met and fulfilled in order for anything to happen.

First of all, they need to wait for the page to load, which is three, four seconds. Ideally, the page loads in under two seconds, but they need to wait for the page to load. Then, they need to usually click play on a video or they need to enable audio, so they need to do something else so they have to wait for the page load. Then, they need to click play and actually watch the video.

Now, let’s say, then they need to stay on the video. I mean they actually need to be on the video and consume the video up until the point where they actually see a call to action usually. Sometimes there’s a call to action below the page or in the copy or whatever. Then, the next step is they need to hit a button for an opt-in. Then, they actually need to enter their email address.

Now, this might be belaboring the point of what it takes to get somebody to opt-in, but still, every single one of these micro-actions, every single one of these things is a conscious choice by the prospect to actually do what you want them to do. Then, if and when they opt-in, then they go to a confirmation page. They need to wait for the page to load or the video to load and hit the play button. Also, they need to hit the add to cart button that is underneath that video. Then, they need to go up to an order form.

On that order form, they need to enter all of their information, which is sometimes a pain in the ass, their address, their phone number, all of that stuff, which is why the fewer fields you’ve included in your order form the better. They need to enter their info, they need to find their credit card, they need to enter their credit card. Then, they need to hit the submit button. Then, and only then, do you get paid?

Is this a worthwhile discussion? I mean because what happens is, as advertisers, we love to think that we go from YouTube Ads to making money like that. The simple fact is we don’t. Anyone of these bottlenecks, whether it’s a lander, whether it’s a page load, whether it’s the video, whether it’s the button, a wrong button color if the opt-in box isn’t working correctly, each one of these things is a potential bottleneck that needs to be released in order for them to move from here all the way through to here. Makes sense? Cool.

In thinking about sales funnel management and thinking about optimizing sales funnels, you need to understand that the optimization process is action by action by action by action, page by page by page by page. Sales funnel management, we finally get to it. I’m just going to switch back over here to the live stream. Does anybody have any questions so far? We’re pretty good with this?

We’ve got some folks coming in. Hello. How are you doing? Very nice to see you here. All right, so micro-actions, good? Good? Okay? When it comes to optimizing and working through sales funnel management, what we have to do is we have to consider that each of these micro-actions that somebody is taking as they’re moving through the process is a voluntary action.

They are literally, every time they do something that we want them to do, they are raising their hand and saying, “Yes, I’m invested. Yes, I’m interested. Yes, I want more.” We try to remove as much risk as possible in each of those actions, so we try to make it as easy to opt-in. We try to make it as easy for the video to play, like by triggering autoplay. Also, we try to help them get as far as they can by making a few decisions on their own as possible.

We try to alleviate all of those burdens along the way. That’s one of the reasons why automated video sales letters worked so well back in the day. Then, the browsers have lately been getting smarter, so they don’t necessarily have any… They don’t let you play audio anymore, or some of them don’t.

There’s some general weirdness as it comes to how technology is helping us move through this process. Again, retargeting even so they come to a page and then they leave without buying, then we can retarget. We can trigger CRM marketing rules, which is what we talked about yesterday. There are lots of things we can do to kind of bring them back into the fold when they don’t do that micro-action, that thing that we want them to do.

In every instance, what we’re trying to do is optimize this process, so we take as few decisions. We take a few of the bottlenecks away from this sales funnel system, this process as possible. We’re going to kick back over to the iPad here and then I’m going to walk through what sales funnel management looks like, and then we’re going to talk about some of the bottlenecks as we go through. The first thing I want to do is I want to cover a piece of software that I really, really like. This is the Sales Funnel Management Group. If you haven’t asked or if you haven’t joined yet, make sure you do.

I’m just going to drop this link in here again for our new folks, so here we go. All right, boom. All right, so that is being posted too. Wow, that’s a great face right there, but anyway. This is a piece of software that I have found and I really, really, really like it, Inspectlet.com.

Now Inspectlet, there are two primary things that it does. I first kind of learning of Inspectlet probably four years ago and they do these screen recordings, which is really, really interesting stuff. Basically you can watch… It takes a screen recording of somebody going through your sales funnel, so you can see where their mouse is and you actually see the recording of them moving through your funnel.

Now, this has been really interesting because… So Inspectlet, it was always pretty good, but they just added split testing, A/B testing, into the mix and it has become a phenomenal tool. Not only do you get this screen captures, which is super cool, but now with so much mobile traffic and stuff going on, there was actually… Just a week ago, we put this on a client campaign.

What we saw was that they were getting a lot of iPhone traffic. The iPhone traffic, because of the bigger resolution on the Pro, the 11 Pro, what was happening was it was pushing the call to action button all the way down past the bottom so there was actually no call to action on the first swipe. Below the fold, which would be on the mobile device, it was pushed down quite a ways.

What we did was we saw that on these other screens, and we were able to correct it by shortening up the subtitle and some of the padding and we were able to start getting some conversions that way. Plus, we were able to split test between two different versions, two with video, one without. It even does some multivariate, not multivariate testing, but HTML embeds kind of testing, which is super, super cool. It’s literally free for, I think, 30 sessions a day or something, so really, really, really nice software. I highly, highly recommend it for seeing how people are interacting with your sales funnel.

Then, what you’re able to do is you’re able to start spinning off tests and start seeing how people are interacting with your pages so you’re not guessing, which is a huge deal. Now, we’re going to go back to the iPad here, so going to stop this screen. We’re going to share the next screen.

All right, so you should be seeing this. Okay, cool. Right now, we are going to talk about sales funnel management. I’m going to go through and diagram some of the sales, we don’t want the highlighter, what do we want? We want the pen, sales funnel management, all right. Now, when it comes to sales funnel management, we talked about the micro-actions here. At every step, we’re moving somebody through the process. Now, for sales funnel management, again, we start over here with our traffic and then we get into our landers. Then, we get into our confirmation pages, and then we get into our order forms.

The way this whole thing kind of unfolds is we’re trying to get from here, where somebody is becoming aware of us, all the way through to increase their interest and then increasing their desire and then actually making an optimization or making some sort of a buying choice with us.

This is the age-old acronym, AIDA, which stands for attracting, interest, desire, and action. Now, the attraction phase, this is going to be most typically anymore your Facebook video ads. We have been using a lot of Facebook video ads at least. If it’s on Google, it’s going to be a keyword-based ad that fires when there’s a keyword phrase that is being triggered. Otherwise, there is something that fires when a certain interest is met.

Google, we’re going to end up having text-based contextual ads based. Facebook, we’re going to have most likely video ads, and we usually start with Facebook. The video ads are typically 45 seconds to 90 seconds long. Then, they kick over into some sort of a landing page and the landing page, the goal of that landing page is to get the opt-in.

Sometimes there’s a video, sometimes there’s not. What we want to do is, from here, the primary metrics that we’re looking for are cost per click. How much is it per click? Then, if the cost per click is too high, then it is an ad problem because they don’t know what’s on the landing page. It’s an ad problem, in that the ad itself is not resonating with the prospect.

It’s not triggering them to click through, to explore, to discover, any of that stuff. Now, if it is a landing page problem… So let’s say the cost per click is good and we’re happy with the cost per click. Then, the next thing we’re looking at is our opt-ins, so this is the number of leads.

Now, if we’re unhappy with the number of leads, then it is a landing page problem. The landing page problem can be addressed with split testing, so this is the A/B split testing, and also the screen record and heat maps. Those are the three issues.

Sometimes you need to add a video for the landing page, like a welcome webinar video or something like that. There’s usually some stuff like that that you can kind of add. All of that stuff, you’re going to want to end up split testing and it’s helpful to be able to see the screen as people are going through. It’s helpful to see the heat maps and seeing where they are coming through.

Forgot some of the colors I was adding, this one’s going to be purple. Once the leads are coming through okay, then the next thing we want to do is we have our confirmation pages.

The confirmation pages take a number of different kinds of forms. We have our webinars, which is a sort of confirmation page because they’re opting in and then they are seeing the webinar, whether it’s on-demand or live or in 15 minutes or whatever. There is also the thank you page, so that is like a straight-up confirmation. Thanks so much for downloading the report. While I have you here, there’s something I want to run by you or there’s a question that we often get asked, that kind of thing. It’s like literally a straight-up confirmation page.

In both cases, we’re trying to flip them into a sale of some sort. Sometimes that sale is booking a sales call, booking a consultative strategy session kind of thing. Sometimes it is clicking the button, add this thing to the order form and then go buy it. That is going to be your CTA. Now, your CTA, you don’t have enough people hitting your CTA button, your call to action, it is a confirmation page problem or a sales problem.

You are going to be looking at A/B splits, recordings, heat maps, any of those kinds of things. However, there’s one additional element here that is probably a much, much bigger determinant of how well it’s going to be converting and that is your sales copy. Your sales copy is going to be responsible for how many people are hitting the CTA.

Now, sales copy, again, it might be a thank you video, it might be the webinar, it could be a straight-up sales video. By and large, all of this stuff drives to the CTA. That CTA, we haven’t done the hard work yet. I mean we’ve done a lot of the hard work, but we haven’t done the thing that kind of pushes people over the edge. The thing that pushes people over the edge is when they add that offer to their shopping cart and they go to make the order.

Now, typically 80% of people are going to bounce off of your shopping cart. Sometimes it’s 70%, sometimes it’s 95%, it really just depends. Every order form has a very, very high abandonment, which is why there are things like shopping cart abandonment sequences and which is why you have retargeting and retargeting ends up…

Retargeting banner ads end up dropping people back into the order form based on kind of where they left. There are lots of ways to up that shopping cart abandonment or lower the shopping cart abandonment percentage and increase sales. At the end of the day, we have the revenue here. If there is a revenue problem, it is a problem with the order form and there are lots… So order forms are order forms.

By and large, there are lots of different versions. I mean you have like an Infusionsoft order form, which is ugly by nature, which is why you can use third-party software to pretty it up. We use Ontraport, we use SamCart. SamCart has great features and functionality in terms of shopping cart abandonment.

Shopify has great features and functionality in terms of shopping cart abandonment, especially when you tie it through a Zapier integration in your CRM. There are lots of different ways to play this shopping cart order form deal. If you’re getting great click-through rates but you’re not getting great dollars, then it is an order form problem or it is an abandonment problem.

What we’ve seen happen in the past is people click the order form. When the sales copy doesn’t disclose the price, what happens is is people then click through, then they jump over to the order form and then they don’t buy because they don’t know what the price is. When you see on Target, they say price revealed in the shopping cart, things like that, there’s going to be…

How many times have you done it? I know I’ve done it. You see a TV at Best Buy and you’re like, “Oh shit, that looks pretty cool. Okay, cool. We’re going to add it to shopping cart to see how much it is,” and then realize that it’s not a great deal. Then, you just delete it out. That’s shopping cart abandonment, that’s what that is. Your customers are doing it when you’re selling something online.

Now, the other side of the call to action is if they don’t necessarily go to the order form, they go to a consultative call. Oops, I got my pen again. They go to the consultative sales call. Then, you have some other situations. Your consultative sales call, again, you want money, you want to sell something on that call. Here, there’s the human factor of it all. We have human intervention, which means sales reps on the phone, are they good? Are they bad? There’s something in play there.

Then, there are processes. Do they send out proposals? What is the language in the proposals? Do they send out invoices? What is the language in the invoices? Do they send out order form links? In which case, it kind of pushes them back up into this side after a call. There are lots of things to think about and kind of bottlenecks that should end up easing once you identify where the hurdle is.

That is how you will unlock and optimize your sales funnel as it pertains to the sales funnel. Now, webinars, sales videos, fully qualified lead sales funnels, affiliate funnels, all of them have these barriers that unlock based on micro-actions. Sometimes it takes a trained eye to kind of look through this and says, “Okay. Were you good up? What happens when they hit this stage and then why aren’t they moving any further?”

If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start. This is foryou.com/start, and then we can go through an action plan with you. I’m going to jump back over here to the live stream.

Jeez, we’ve talked about that thing for 30 minutes. Wow. All right, I got a bunch of likes. That’s awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that. Then, we got… Looks like my camera went walkie in the middle of that little riff, oh well, whatever. We’re almost done anyway. Did you guys like that? Andy jumped in. What’s up, Andy? Yeah, Andy has been in this office. Yes, he has. Yeah.

First of all, thank you so much for joining me today. Really, the sales funnel management piece and the optimization of a sales funnel, really it’s about unlocking the bottleneck, from bottleneck to bottleneck to bottleneck. The truth is you don’t know what’s kind of broken down the way until you unlock the first one. That’s one of the biggest kind of hurdles you got to get through.

Once they’re unlocked, literally the traffic just flows through and then you’re able to generate revenue. You’re generating sales calls, you’re generating everything as they go on the fly. If you have any questions at all, go to… Any questions, if you want us to go through and put together an action plan for you, for your traffic, for your sales funnels, whatever, go to doneforyou.com. Or if you want to just go ahead and book a call, go to doneforyou.com/start and we will get you all taken care of there.

For tomorrow, if you have any questions that you want us to kind of get through, then, by all means, go to doneforyou.com/GSD. That’s where you’re going to be able to ask questions for tomorrow’s show. We do these Monday through Friday at 10:00 AM Eastern.

If it’s waking up a little early for you, then you can catch the replay. Also, where we’re going to be delivering a lot of this sales funnel like material, where we’re going to follow up after these live streams and all of that stuff, is going to be on our Facebook group. If you go to, I just threw that in the comments, so DFY Funnels Facebook Group.

This is going to be streamed there. We also are sending… I’m posting articles and stuff that I see, kind of things going around. Right now, traffic is really cheap because advertisers are pulling out so CPM, CPA, everything is dropping really, really quickly. Stuff like that, anything that is pertinent to sales, funnels, traffic, all of that, so if you have any questions at all, let me know. Happy to help. Happy to answer. I will see you tomorrow at 10:00 AM Eastern.

If you’d like to dig deeper into building and optimizing a sales funnel, make sure you check out the ProAccelerator!

The post Best Automated Sales Funnel For your Website 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.

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.

Today, we're going to learn about CRM setup, namely how to get your email automation tools in place so your outbound marketing strategy can be automated. We'll be talking about setting up marketing automation campaigns and the two levels that you and your team need to think about when setting up your CRM.

Inside that CRM, you'll have your contact records (customers, prospects, etc), your messages (drip campaigns), your messages, and task management.

When it comes to CRM Setup, there are two different schools of thought, mostly based on who's driving the need for the CRM.

CRM Setup On The Macro Level (ie. CEO's & Managers)

The first is the macro level thought process.  Macro level CRM thinking tends to include a general explanation of how your buying sequence progresses.

Here's what I mean... When you walk into a grocery store, you usually walk in the front door, you go to the right, you go through produce, then you proceed through the outer wall of the store.  Next, you get into the aisles and then you end up at the cash registers.

That's a macro level view of grocery shopping.

CRM Setup On The Micro Level (ie. Marketers & Sales Managers)

Then you have your micro level automation.

Your micro level automation includes the things that happen in each of your email marketing campaigns. So somebody goes to your landing page, they fill in the opt-in form, they download your lead magnet.

Now what happens?

Like specifically... what happens?

What is the text of the email that they are getting sent?

What is the text of the text message that they are being sent?

Are they getting a phone call, and if they are getting a phone call, who is making it?

Are they getting a postcard if we have their physical mailing address?

How many emails are they getting before they either do something or not? And of each of those emails, what is the content of those emails?

That is the micro campaign level that you need to think about.

The Buyer Journey Understood As A 4-Year Old

So we have a four-year-old, and he loves this show on YouTube called Mighty Machines. It's really a cool show. We've learned a lot about how tractors operate, how front loaders work, and all kinds of other crazy stuff.

One of the episodes was this semi truck assembly line. (If anybody is familiar with my story, I used to drive a semi truck 14 years ago, and then I went off to start digital marketing.)

In the assembly line, way off in some distant corner of the factory, they start by building the frame of the tractor-trailer. Then, the undercarriage starts taking shape when the airbags for the suspension are added, the transmission is bolted on, and the engine is added.  It goes from stage to stage to stage, until you have this freshly-painted, polished, beautiful truck rolling off of the assembly line, ready to go to market.

Now if that frame was to skip a bunch of steps and then go right over to the paint booth, there's nothing to paint because the cab isn't put on it.

Or if it was to skip the engine loading phase, there's no engine in the semi. It can't drive off the assembly line when it's done.

Your CRM setup can't skip stages either.  Your email marketing campaigns need to have a framework applied.

CRM Setup - You Need Macro And Micro Level Automation

When a prospect comes to see you, they're all over the place. They bounce from one campaign to the next to the next, and if they drop off, your automation system moves them to some sort of a nurturing campaign.

Now we've worked with a lot of Done For You sales funnel clients over the years.  Oftentimes, when we're setting up marketing automation, we're setting up campaigns for them. What they give us is very different than what we actually need to get the job done.

Oftentimes, they explain their business processes - the buyer journey - and they say setup a CRM for us.  Now, that's usually fine because we write email copy and text messages and put all of those things in place. But with email automation tools, you need to have much more than a macro-level view of marketing to get it set up correctly.

Then you have the micro level view of email automation.  The micro level consists of these emails that go out, these text messages that go out, these tags that need to be applied, these forms that need to be filled out. That is the stuff that makes up the campaign.  That's what gets the job done in an email automation tool.

So if you have the macro level without the micro level it won't work because you have a lot of idea and strategy around the general framework without the individual components of the campaign...  The stuff that actually sells a prospect.

Without the individual components in your CRM setup (like emails, text messages, phone calls, tasks, etc), the whole thing falls apart and you aren't able to go to market with it.

Your Campaign Collateral Will Take Time

That's really what I wanted to get at in terms of building marketing automation campaigns inside your CRM.  You need to understand that there is a high-level campaign that needs to be built out with the right framework. Then, you also need to know that it's going to take a bunch of time to write the emails and the text messages and all collateral to get your email automation tools firing the right way.

Oftentimes, somebody downloads a lead magnet, they might get three or four pieces of marketing before they engage. That marketing could be emails, texts, or phone calls. So moving through those campaigns, you have a lot of different collateral that needs to be written.

When Traffic Comes In, What Happens?

In talking through this macro and micro level campaign layout, imagine you have traffic.

Traffic comes in, and a new lead gets added to your email list. What do you want them to do?  Book a sales call?  Assign a rep to actually call them?  Go through a sales sequence?

On the micro level, they'll start being sent emails, texts, calls, and other email automation-type material.  Those all need to go out. Then the next campaign would fire if they're interested in what it is you have to offer.

When they get on a sales call and say yes, you send them a proposal.

Or if they're not interested, you still want to keep them engaged, so we add them to a nurture sequence. The nurture sequence would consist a selection of blog posts or emails to keep them engaged.

If they are interested, then of course they become a buyer. They pay you money, they become a customer, and they're added to a fulfillment sequence. After they're added to the fulfillment sequence, they get a welcome call, log into their member's area, or have their materials mailed.

Each of these macro-level campaign elements, need to be backed up by the actual creative that fires with the micro level campaign content.

What setting up a CRM, how often should creative go out?

Follow-ups should to be broken down into days, because not everybody checks their email every single day.  You should think about your campaign in terms of what someone will receive from you on each day AFTER they become a lead.

For example:

• Day one, you're sending an email, text and a call.  (3 pieces of collateral that need material for).
• Day two, email, text, call.
• Day three, email, text, call.
• And so on...

If there isn't a response, you put them in the nurture sequence.

You'll be sending a LOT of campaign material from your email automation tools.  You don't want them to forget about you or what it is you're doing. All of that campaign material is really focused on getting somebody to schedule a call. Then, after they schedule the call, you need to be reminded about the call... After the reminders, we break the campaign in the CRM down into a logic switch...  Did they attend the call or didn't they attend the call?  Are they are they interested in what you're selling or are they not interested?

Need Help With Your CRM Setup?

What ends up happening is to get all this done, you need a lot of content...  Specifically, a lot of email to get your CRM setup. Plus you need the sales material, lead magnets, marketing, and all the marketing pages.

There's so much that goes into this marketing automation sales funnel, and we are happy to help work with you through it, starting with an action plan call.

Click here to sign up for an action plan call with us. We will get on, talk about your business, figure out where you're looking to go and what it is you want to build, and we will put together an action plan for that,

The post CRM Setup: Email Automation Tools And Startup Tips appeared first on Done For You.

Today, we're going to talk about trigger marketing... Namely, how to drip email campaigns out based on what prospects and visitors do!

With marketing automation, there are lots of different things that you can do in terms of outbound marketing. You can send emails, text messages, fire out outbound calls... You can even send postcards and letters depending on the platform.

At the root of marketing automation, though, are three things that you need to be familiar with:

• Triggers
• Campaigns
• Goals

Look at any campaign builder, MarTech or AdTech tool, and you find that they're all based around those three fundamental components.

We'll be doing individual videos on each component.  Today we're going to talk about triggers and how they are used in trigger marketing and email automation as a whole.

What is a Trigger?

A trigger, sometimes named a rule, is any action that causes another action to happen.

Think of an if-then statement. If someone does this, then that happens.

There's a really, really popular app called IFTTT. It stands for If This Then That.  If you take a photo, then it'll automatically upload it to Facebook for you.  If a sale comes in, then it'll send a notification to your email address or send you a push notification.  It'll add a string of text to a Google Drive doc...  It's infinitely configurable and it brings two pieces of software together.

In trigger-based marketing, when the "IF" statement is fired, there's a "THEN."

What makes a Trigger fire?

Marketing automation triggers can take on a few different forms.  One of the most common is when someone fills out a form on a landing page (for, let's say, a lead magnet).  When someone opts in, it then triggers them to be added to a campaign.

Another type of trigger is a tag.  When a tag is applied to a customer record, it triggers the campaign.

A third form of trigger in marketing: if a person visits a website.  That page visit can actually be a trigger that'll send a drip email campaign.

Automatically adding someone to a email promotion sequence

One of my absolute favorite things to do with marketing automation is firing a trigger based on a page view.

Inside Axis, we have an advanced analytics tool that tracks page views.  When a page is visited AND we have the email record on file, then we add them into the promo campaign.

I've been doing this for a really long time in our software sales pages and for clients.

So, what happens is, the prospect is clicking around...  Maybe they go over to the sales page to watch the sales video...  Then a day later they get Email #1 of the Product Promo Sequence.  Two days later they get Email #2.  Three days later, they get Email #3.

We set this whole trigger marketing / drip email automatoin up with little blocks of five and six emails for all of the major sales pages...

If they added that product to a cart, but didn't buy it within 30 minutes, we would send them a shopping cart abandonment email. And then a day later, another shopping cart abandonment email.

One of the most effective things to do is think about what actions my prospect will take, and what needs to happen because of those actions.

In terms of trigger marketing, page views, opt-ins, and tags are great ways to kick off an email automation campaign.

If you want to talk a little bit more about how trigger marketing and drip email campaigns can be used in your business, make sure to book an action plan call here.  It's free, we'll dig into your business and what you need to do to optimize your sales and marketing campaigns, and give you an action plan to get it done.

The post Trigger Marketing: Drip Email Based On What Prospects Do 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.

Even some of the most reasoned experts miss out on specific aspects of conversion optimization; it almost feels like it’s an overkill to worry about nitty-gritty of every single element of your campaigns. These elements include ads, funnels, landing pages, headlines, copy, images, videos, email subject lines, and CTA buttons.

Often, conversion optimization is misunderstood.

Businesses and marketers who are on the good side of marketing best practices often think that conversion optimization is just A/B testing (or split testing) or it’s about changing button colors on a website.

Conversion optimization is more than that, of course. It goes a lot deeper and demands a lot more attention, blood, sweat and tears.

While you shouldn’t be allocating your precious business resources big time into conversion optimization without getting other basics sorted out such as landing pages and funnels, you should at least know that there’s a thing called CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) and that you’d have to get there sooner or later.

You need what you need

Practically speaking, to even get anywhere near conversion rate optimization, you’d have to have the basics in place:

• A systematic way to test your headlines, copy, and content.
• Landing pages (always in pairs such as version A & Version B)
• Sales Funnels (usually multiple landing pages, each linked to another). For instance, Funnel A grabs an email address leading to an upsell page (Funnel B), which then leads to a humble “thank you” page thanking your lead for their interest (Funnel C).
• Email autoresponders and other marketing automation sequences and/or tools.
• Proper setup with Google Analytics, advanced analytics tools, and other integrations with your marketing stack (such as proper connections between landing pages and autoresponders, sales pages and lead magnet delivery, etc.,).

These are basics. If you don’t have this, get it all set up.

No traffic, no CRO

When will I make sales?

When do you think I can break even with my ad spend?

Those are just a few of the many questions we get every time we onboard clients for our paid traffic management services. Having worked with several hundreds of clients now, it’s one of the most common things they ask.

But almost everyone forgets this: you need traffic to your landing pages and funnels for them to work.

You don’t make sales without anyone visiting your pages in the first place (also applies to your other objectives — depending on your business — such as scheduling appointments, filling up your contact forms, etc.)

You need relevant, interested, engaged, and a hungry audience to sign up for what you offer on your landing pages.

Not everyone should do conversion optimization

If you are starting out, you should ideally be trying something else like getting high-quality traffic by using:

• Blogging high-quality content, with a scheduled publishing effort regularly.
• Spreading your wings on social media, with an emphasis on not just driving traffic but also to boost your brand image while maintaining micro-conversations.
• Grow your email list using lead magnets and an array of elements such as pop-ups, slide-ins, welcome gates, and landing pages
• Run Google ads or Facebook ads with the objective of “driving traffic” to your websites.

You need traffic first.

Without that, in most cases, you won’t even be able to achieve what you finally need (Read: results)

Did you know that you try to launch Facebook ads, you will not able to choose “conversions” as an objective unless you have several pixel events — between 500 to 10,000 and above pixel events for 30 days?

So, if you are just starting out with Facebook ads, you’ll have to go for “reach and traffic” centric campaigns such as optimizing for “link clicks” or “landing page views”.

What does that tell you?

You won’t even qualify for running result-oriented campaigns like “conversions” and “website purchases” unless you get enough traffic first.

No amount of work involving conversion optimization for your website, landing pages, pop-ups, and funnels is worth it if you don’t do what you need to do before you get to CRO.

Conversion rate optimization is not just about best practices

For one, “best practices” are not going to be a constant set of pointers for us to follow. Just as with everything else, they are bound to change as time changes and new ideologies replace the old ones.

Your business is unique. How your potential audience reacts to your marketing efforts is also contextual — often depending on culture, consumer behavior, and specific spending habits in the particular geographic location you normally target in.

The conversion rate optimization process is mostly science with a wee bit of creative freedom thrown in. It’s an exact, repeatable, and scientific process built to remove human complexity but rely more on data and processes.

Without enough traffic, there’s just no point getting into meaningless exercises such as split testing, for instance.

Conversion rate optimization is hard

If you are a marketer trying to get your management’s nod to proceed with full-fledged conversion optimization, it’s going to be hard.

Are you an entrepreneur trying to do conversion rate optimization for your own business? It’s even harder.

According to Lindy Tolbert of ConversionXL, you’d have to be:

• An expert at many things, including marketing, analytics, statistics, UX/UI, IT, design, and photography (and this isn’t the complete list)
• The scene is constantly changing. Desktop gives way to mobile, which gives way to what now?
• You have to unlearn what you know or believe. On top of that, you’d have to constantly challenge your own assumptions, hypothesis, and beliefs.
• You can’t let your ego get in the way while keeping your goals customer-centric.

In a nutshell, don’t just get carried away by post titles and triggers like “Start Conversion Optimization Now”.

Do what you can to bring in enough traffic to your websites or landing pages. Only when you have enough, you can then move on to conversion rate optimization which helps squeeze more out of what you have and get more for less.

If you’d like to use the right marketing strategy to generate traffic, leads, conversions and sales, fill out this form and our team will get in touch with you.

The post A Beginner’s Guide To CRO: What Is Conversion Optimization? 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.

Once you are all set with the basic task of setting up landing and other funnel pages, you’ll then move on to creating advertising campaigns and email marketing autoresponder sequences. Then, you’ll have the ongoing task of landing page optimization, A/B testing, and making tweaks to ensure that all parts of the funnel are contributing towards higher conversions.

By the way, a prerequisite for sales funnel optimization is having sufficient and meaningful data. If you don’t track your sales funnels the right way, you won’t be able to extract all the important information you need. Statly is an advances analytics app that helps you track every visitor moving through your sales funnel and website while it delivers customized alerts to increase conversions, reduce bottlenecks and capitalize on hidden opportunities! Would you like to try Statly for free?

Part of that ongoing optimization work you have to do revolves around trying to achieve the maximum conversion rate of your landing pages.

But how do you do that? What can you possibly increase your landing page conversions even more?

Here’s what you can do:

Remove distractions

We are so used to designing landing pages the way we design websites that we think landing pages work exactly like websites do. Partly yes, but mostly no.

Elements that might look and feel naturally at home on a website are an absolute no-no on landing pages.

For instance, you’d use live chat or a Facebook Messenger prompt on your website – and that’s fine.

The same prompts on your landing page would probably distract your visitors from taking that all-too-important action that your CTA is working hard to accomplish.

Navigation menus, links, social media buttons, or any other element that is clickable (everything except the call to action) shouldn’t be used on landing pages – period.

Often, you’d design your landing page and sales funnels without these distractions in the first place, right from the go, even before you launch your campaigns.

But if you did, it’s time to start removing these distractions one by one.

Keep testing

Split testing is not a one-time thing; it’s an ongoing process to pit one variant against another to reach a point when you arrive at a collection of ads, landing pages, and email marketing sequences that get you the best possible results.

To get to that point, however, you’d have to continuously and diligently work with your split testing process.

You can’t stop. You can’t sit back and relax if you want the best results.

Split test your ads, your landing pages, the subject line of your email autoresponders, and all applicable parts of your sales funnels to get the best possible results. You’d need sufficient data, enough time, and an ongoing effort to make your split tests work.

Add geo-targeting

About 74% of online customers get fed up and frustrated when they land on web pages that are irrelevant to them or when the information they see doesn’t pertain to their interests. More than 84% of online shoppers claim that personalization impacts their purchase decisions.

Geo-targeting helps resolve these issues by making it possible to show more relevant content to your visitors while helping you personalize their user experience and content.

You can also use Geo-targeting to hyper-personalize your pop-ups or slide ins, launch hyper-local promotions to boost in-store revenue, launch local events, and more.

Utilize dynamic text replacement

One of the most important aspects of matching your ad with a message-matching landing page is relevance and continuity. It so happens that most ads don’t “connect”. If an ad says something or promises something, that story doesn’t extend to the landing page where your potential visitors are bound to arrive.

That’s the basics, anyway.

You could take this to another level with dynamic text replacement where a certain keyword automatically shows up on the landing page making it more relevant. You could use dynamic text replacement to dynamically show location names, specific keywords, or any other items you’d specify such as Pin codes, for instance.

In essence, DTR (Dynamic Text Replacement) swaps out a piece of text on your landing page with whatever keyword (or another valid element) your prospect might have searched for before arriving on your page.

Does DTR really work? You bet.

In a simple A/B test, Campaign Monitor found that using DTR helped with 31.4% lift in conversions.

How do you plan to optimize your landing pages?

What kind of ongoing work do you foresee with your landing pages and funnels? What are you trying to do continuously to inch towards better conversions?

If you need help designing high-converting landing pages and funnels or if you’d like to discuss your marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to get on a scheduled call with us.

The post CRO: How To Make The Most Of Your Landing Pages (When You Thought You Couldn’t) 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.

Sadly, most businesses aren’t anywhere close to creating landing pages and using them for their campaigns. Those businesses that actually use landing pages don’t seem to get it right by leaving out crucial work that goes into making high-performing landing pages.

Here are a few mistakes businesses and marketers do when it comes to landing pages, and we are hoping that you’ll avoid these.

Mistake #1: Hiring developers

Way too many businesses still do landing pages the old fashioned way by using HTML/CSS or by employing PHP developers to help create landing pages. There are plenty of problems with this approach:

• Developers don’t know about conversion-centric design, copywriting and calls to action.
• It takes a ridiculous amount of time to get a single PHP-based or HTML-based landing page designed. When you are launching campaigns and when you need multiple landing pages for testing, waiting on the developer (even for making changes slight changes) just won’t work.
• It’s difficult to do split testing for your landing pages to know which one performs better. Your best options if you use HTML pages is to use Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer — both of which are expensive to begin with.

Given that this is the age of software and the availability of DIY landing page building tools, you don’t need to depend on your IT staff to get your landing pages ready.

Just in case you need help to plan your landing page strategy, get on a scheduled call with us to see how we can be of help to you.

Mistake #2: One page won’t do

You can’t just send traffic to a single landing page and hope to get conversions. Even if you got conversions

(or leads), you’d never know if that’s the absolute best your landing page can perform.

Almost any business might have multiple offers to make or multiple products or services to promote. Creating a single landing page can rarely do any good for a business, regardless of the size.

Prepare to create multiple landing pages for each service, product, or other offers that you have. In fact, the more landing pages you have, the higher the volume of leads you’ll generate, according to Pamela Vaughan of Hubspot.

Mistake #3: No tests, no progress

If you had 1,000 visitors to a specific landing page and if your conversion rate was 20% (which means you’d get 200 leads), is that the best you could do given the exact same budget spend?

The answer: You wouldn’t know until you split test your landing pages.

Landing pages, especially when you use DIY landing page builders or when you hire us, lend themselves well for A/B testing and optimization on a continuous basis. When one variant performs better than the other (and you’d know that after you have enough data), you can pit the champion against a new variant and run a new test altogether.

Eventually, you’ll arrive at the best possible combinations of ads, landing pages, and email autoresponder sequences, i.e. the best possible funnel.

Mistake #4: No nurturing sequences

It’s not all well with the average Joe who did put up funnels and funnel pages but nothing ever happens for a person who signed up as a lead. It so happens that generating leads is only half the story. The real magic happens when email marketing autoresponders are triggered or workflows through your chatbots are triggered.

It’s the nurturing that leads to sales, and most businesses miss out on the nurturing aspect of a sales funnel. Learn more about funnels from our Funnel Blueprint Video Series.

Lead nurturing helps your potential customers trust you more and makes your products or services available to them when they are ready to buy.

Connect your landing pages to an email autoresponder of your choice or your Facebook Messenger chatbot, be sure to create your nurturing sequences in a way that your business can attract, engage, and profit from these interactions, and that’s when you can call your funnels complete.

What kind of mistakes are you doing with your funnels, opt-in and sales pages? If you need help figuring out how to create a high-conversion sales funnel, feel free to schedule a call with us.

The post Landing Pages: If You’re Doing This, It’s A Mistake 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.

Now in this article, we want to get deeper into some technical aspects of creating an optimized landing page.

Some businesses are in a rush to launch paid campaigns or start sending some traffic to landing pages to start generating leads. Other businesses tend to build complicated funnels trying to reach perfection before they start driving traffic to the top of the funnel.

The palpable excitement and rush are understandable. The tendency for perfection as well. But without due diligence and a well-thought-out plan, you are likely yo end up wasting time and money.

While there are a lot of success factors that are out of your control when launching a campaign, it’s inexcusable to be clumsy with the essential aspects of a landing page that you are indeed control of.

To help you build a solid foundation for a successful lead generation campaign, and before you start changing creatives, optimizing, and engaging in on-going split testing), here’s a simple landing page checklist.

Unmissable landing page elements

Be sure to have some of those design best practices, conversion optimization hacks, and insert appropriate landing page elements:

• Use a singular form and a button (one Call to Action per page)
• Have as few form fields as possible.
• Be sure to have a clear and large headline. Learn more about writing headlines that work.
• If possible, put some real faces on the landing page (like team photos, headshots of the founding members, images of previous customers), etc.
• Add social proof in the form of client logos or testimonials or both.
• Ensure that your landing page is mobile responsive (there’s just no excuse for leaving this one out).

Collect and insert tracking tags and scripts

Depending on the traffic source, there are various tracking tags or scripts that you need to inject into your landing page code to facilitate website tracking. Website tracking, by the way, can help you monitor the behavior of the visitors to your site.

Let’s say you choose to run Facebook ads. You’ll need the base Facebook Pixel code to go on every page that visitors are likely to visit. Such pages are: the main landing page, the form lightbox modal, the thank-you page, and interstitial pages if any.

Then, you’ll have to add the “event” code of the Facebook Pixel to your “thank you” page or the page that shows up after leads sign up. this way you’ll be able to track successful conversions (opt-ins in this example).

If you choose to use Google Adwords, you’ll need to insert the Google remarketing tag. With remarketing,  you are able to run campaigns that target people who have already visited your site at least once.

Are you using third-party services such as Adroll or Perfect Audience for retargeting? You’ll then have to add these tracking pixels to your landing page code too, as advised.

For Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, and for third-party services like Adroll, you’d also want to attribute a numerical value to your leads and sales “event codes” so that you have an accurate record of leads and sales.

It also makes sense to add Google Analytics — while using UTM tracking — to track each of your landing pages so you have a holistic view of traffic being sent to your landing pages.

One URL, two versions

If you had only one landing page for your campaign, and let’s say you got a 20% conversion rate at the landing page level, how would you know this is the best result you can get? You couldn’t know.

That’s precisely why you need to run split tests for your landing pages. By doing A/B testing or split testing, you can test and compare two variations of the same page.

Every landing page will have a single URL but this URL will show different content to each visitor at random. For example, 50% of the visitors will see “CTA A” and the rest will see “CTA B.” Then you will be able to tell which CTA (and landing page variation) performed better in terms of conversion.  This is can be accomplished with A/B testing.

Start by testing a single element of your landing page (such as the headline, the CTA button, or the CTA button color, or a background image).

Gather data and make an informed decision to continue with the champion while discarding the losing versions.

Connect with your email service provider

One of the most important aspects of your sales funnels is the series of autoresponders that you’ll send out to new subscribers or segments of your email list.

Your autoresponders trigger immediately after leads sign up, and they continue to nurture your new subscribers with automated messages, like a simple welcome email, a strategic autoresponder created for sales, or a full-fledged customer onboarding series.

To set up and connect your landing pages with your email marketing platform you can either use some integration plugin or a piece of code that the platform will provide. This is a case-based scenario and the difficulty of implementing such an integration depends on the technology you choose. So please think about this factor before you decide on the exact software you will use for building landing pages and sending marketing emails.

Once you connect, sign up on your own landing page to test if everything fires up alright and that if you are receiving your email messages, notifications, etc.

Trace the path from traffic source to email

You’d want a complete picture of everything that happens in your sales funnel for every user that has your cookie in their browser. What you want to track is every aspect of the user behavior throughout their journey from the source of the click all the way to your email autoresponder, and the users’ reactions to your messages.

For instance, after a click on the ad, you’d want to check whether or not your Google Audiences is building up. You’d also want to see if your Facebook Pixel is firing correctly and is recording conversions for your Facebook and Instagram ads.

Is your landing page loading fast enough? Are all the interstitial pages and the final thank you page loading? Are your email marketing workflows triggering correctly?

Get to active optimization, after the campaign goes live

Soon after your campaign launches, you’ll start getting all sorts of feedback. Your landing pages might seem to not convert at all. Is it because have missed one of the steps on this landing page checklist? Revisit the tips we listed in this post, go right into your setup, deep dive, and fix what’s not properly configured.

You’d want to tweak headlines, copy, CTA button copy, replace images, add tracking codes or maybe work on the mobile version of your landing page.

If one of the steps on the landing page checklist is missing altogether, it is advised that you stop your campaigns and go build what’s not there.

If everything is working fine, gather enough data to fine-tune your campaigns; Get busy with optimizing, A/B testing, and using the numbers you have to optimize every stage of your sales funnel.

Taking care of these steps will ensure that you don’t miss out on any of the necessary due diligence.

How are your campaigns performing? If you’d like to talk to us about your funnels, landing pages, marketing campaigns or strategy, get on a strategy call with us. We’ll be happy to discuss how we can put together a Done For You Lead Generation System for you or help deploy a high-converting Done For You Sales Funnel.

The post Landing Page Checklist: Get Your Landing Pages Ready For Lead Generation appeared first on Done For You.

What if you could help your customers decide 94% better than otherwise?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could boost your landing page conversions by 80% or more?

How do you do that?

That’s how you use video in your sales funnels.

Video is a high-impact, high-engagement marketing channel, and it’s the next best thing to show up next to your potential customer in person.

Video is vocal and visual, and it engages your audience. For your funnels to work, you need the engagement and impact that videos bring in.

So, here’s why you should create videos for your sales funnels: Video Sales Letters and Full-Motion Sales Videos.

What’s Your Story? Let Videos Talk

Videos for sales funnels are fantastic for showcasing your business, narrating your brand story, and showing your true business culture. It’s much like how it would have been if you had a retail store or an office, and customers could just walk in and listen to what you have to share.

Video as part of your sales funnels can help you surpass the regular sales pitch. Instead of relying on landing page copy and images to do the hard work, let videos reach deeper into your customers’ psyches.

You can connect with your customers on an emotional level, getting closer to them one video at a time.

In fact, according to Vidyard, you’ll need a dedicated video strategy to cater to customers along their buyer’s journey:

• top-of-the-funnel videos (introduction videos, branding videos, video ads), and
• mid-funnel videos (customized product demos, case studies).

If you are doing something your potential customers can connect with, you’ll be on your way to growing a tribe for your business.

Video Gets Results

It is often observed that, out of every 100 people visiting the top of your funnel, a landing page, or a web page, only 20% or less will read the whole page. People scroll and vanish.

However, if you use video for sales funnels, you can make your visitors consume about 80% of your content.

80% on a regular web page or a landing page is a lot.

According to Sam Selders of Webpagefx.com, your visitors are ten times more likely to watch videos than to read a text block.

Want a quick boost to your SEO efforts? Use optimized video and raise the search rankings by more than 53 times than you’d otherwise.

About 36% of online users trust video ads. More than 75% of people are more likely to check out your products or services if they happen to watch a video first.

The video works. There’s no need to get a second opinion.

Honest Efforts Will Pay Off

Anyone can write (almost); not everyone can create videos. Although there are plenty of tools to help you create videos quickly and easily, video is still one of the most brutal mediums available.

Brutal? Why?

Because if you were scheming and conniving, your video would let people know. If you were lying, your visitors would know.

On video, people can see through you. Period.

So you either behave and do good for others, or you’ll vanish or go viral (in the wrong way) on YouTube, Facebook, or other social networks.

Videos For Sales Funnels Let You Show and Tell

Show us a giant wall of text, and we have no idea what’s on the other end of the wall. Getting depth and meaning from a paragraph that takes 5 minutes to read is hard.

On the other hand, a five-minute video could do a lot more.

Videos allow you to show and tell instead of just writing. From instructions to showing how something works, videos are unbeatable.

Depending on your business, videos allow you to let customers see you in person (or your cool office, the restaurant, or the actual behind-the-scenes activity of your business).

BONUS TIP: Platforms like Veed offer an efficient way to create engaging videos using their AI text to video feature. It’s a great tool for turning written content into dynamic visuals. As one of the leading CapCut alternatives, it can help you stand out with polished, professional video content for your sales funnel.

Solve Problems With Video

The better you solve your customers’ problems, the more profitable you are. Do it consistently and you will have a thriving business.

How does a small business solve customers’ issues, educate, or teach customers at scale without expending resources? With video.

As far as your business is concerned, you can use videos to demonstrate how to use an app or to solve problems your customers have, or even to share tips on how to get things done.

Solving problems or teaching your customers how to do something using video for your sales funnels is an authoritative and high-impact method to ensure the longevity of your customers’ loyalty.

How do you intend to use videos to make your sales funnels work harder?

If you’d like to put your sales funnels into high gear talk to us about designing your sales funnel strategy, get on a scheduled call with us.  We’ve built hundreds of sales video funnels and can get one launched quicker than it’d probably take you to record a video :0)

The post Video For Sales Funnels: Skyrocket Your Conversions appeared first on Done For You.

There’s no doubt about a few things that you’ll absolutely need if you are looking to generate leads and make sales (regardless of how you drive traffic to your funnels):

• You’ll need to make an offer — an enticing, exciting, valuable, relevant, and timely offer that makes your website visitors or landing page visitors want to sign up right away. Read up on our Funnel Factor report to get up to speed on funnels.
• You’ll need landing pages and funnels to make it all work. Aim for Sales Funnels Simplicity. Generically sending traffic to your website is a sin. Don’t ever get caught doing that.
• You’ll need an email service provider to help with lead magnet or offer delivery and effective, highly-engaging lead nurturing. Then, there’s the art of creating autoresponders and drip emails that work magic. Catch up with our Email marketing handbook which lays out exactly how to do this.
• Some degree of marketing automation is highly recommended.
• There are hundreds of tools and services to help you build sales funnels, email autoresponders, regular sales pages, video sales letters, marketing automation, and also for analytics. You’ll have to make choices fast and run with it (you can change anything you want later).

With that out of the way, let’s look at a few sales funnels related questions you should stop asking forever after reading this article:

Why do we need a sales funnel?

If you have a business, you need a sales funnel.

Sales funnels are the digital equivalent of everything that happens the moment a customer walks into your physical store (if you had one) and then leaves (hopefully, after purchasing).

For a physical retail store, it’s not as straightforward as one would think, is it?

Say hello to customer behavior and a mind-boggling array of possibilities when it comes to sales attribution.

Most people search, check you out on social media, read reviews — all before even entering the store.

Not all customers who enter a store buy right away — some come in just to “look around” and others are “accompanying friends and family.”

Others come in but just leave. A few others arrive and ask questions (they already did some research online) and they leave making mental notes (consciously and subconsciously) on what they’d like to buy.

Physical retail store owners would do well to collect all the information and data about all customers arriving. Doing so may enable some sort of follow up to be get back the customers who left without buying (most retailers don’t do this).

At least digitally, say with an ecommerce store, sales funnels can do all of the above, almost automatically, without you ever lifting a finger.

You have different categories: visitors, subscribers or leads, customers, and repeat customers. Then, you can also segment each of those categories based on what they are most interested in, types of products they like, and also based on specific problems they want solutions for.

Only well-crafted, intelligent, and optimized sales funnels can do this.

What’s a well-crafted, intelligent, and optimized sales funnel?

There are sales funnels and then there are sales funnels that work.

Sales funnels that truly work well don’t happen because of pure luck or because a genius marketer was behind it.

The best sales funnels are simple. Plus, the reason why they work is because a lot of work goes into the funnel — enticing offers made to targeted audiences, simplistic design, and a marketing approach that puts the customer first (and not the business).

Well-crafted, intelligent and optimized sales funnels are all that, plus they have a certain degree of marketing automation built-in. These sales funnels also make use of proper segmentation practices, split testing various elements of the funnels, and are almost always personalized.

How do you build the perfect sales funnel?

You have a few options to build a great sales funnel:

1. Build the sales funnels yourself and take the DIY sales funnel approach, with the help of tools available today.
2. Have an expert build your sales funnels, customized specifically for your business.
   • Hire an in-house team of various talents, including copywriters, designers, and marketers to build sales funnels for your business.
   • Work with an accomplished agency that specializes in making sales funnels to save on costs otherwise incurred with an in-house team.
   • Hire an assortment of freelancers, consultants, and remote staff to help build your sales funnels.

In-house teams are hard to build. If you do manage to do that, it’s ridiculously expensive to keep them all under one-roof. Unless you have deep pockets to pay for all this, it’s not an option.

Finding freelancers and consultants is a trial-and-error approach which demands time, investments, and are mostly a hit-or-miss arrangement.

Agencies, like DoneForYou, on the other hand, are a much better choice since they come with experience and they can hit the ground running.

What are the essential components of a sales funnel?

Sales funnels always start with an aggregate of your traffic sources. You could drive traffic using SEO (includes general SEO as well as guest blogging), advertising, social media, etc.

All that traffic normally points to landing pages (single or multi-page setup) to gather leads for an offer you’ll make. Landing pages are singularly-focused, highly-targeted, and distraction-free web pages with only one goal: to generate leads.

After potential visitors sign up as leads on your landing page(s), email autoresponders are triggered to welcome them or to deliver what you promised as an offer (an eBook, details about your product, a free course, etc.).

Following that first email, you’ll send out more emails — one after the other — with more information exclusively created for each of these leads (this is called “lead nurturing”).

It’s beacause of these emails that sales finally happen.

Is my sales funnel is the best it can be?

Let’s say about 1,000 visitors got to your page from a particular traffic source. About 10% of those people converted. This got you 100 leads.

Now, is 100 leads the best your sales funnels can do? No, because it can do more.

How would you know? You’ll know when you test out a few elements or components of the sales funnel. For instance, you could test:

• The Ad copy or the angles you take for ads (If you use ads as your traffic source)
• Ad images (If you use Facebook ads or Google Display Network ads as traffic sources)
• Your offers (Is 20% better than 30%? — don’t just assume)
• Landing page headlines
• Landing page Calls to Action
• Email autoresponder subject lines

Split-testing opens up the gates of opportunity, and market-driven insights allow you to make necessary changes and give your potential customers exactly what they want.

When do sales funnels fail?

Sales funnels often fail. Just because you took the trouble to setup a sales funnel doesn’t automatically guarantee success. There are a lot of factors that contribute to the failure of sales funnels, but here are a few basic ones:

• When your offer isn’t tempting enough
• The entire focus of the funnel is on “getting leads and sales” and not solving the real problem your customers have
• When you overdo sales pitches, cross-sells, and upsells — like making pitches at every stage of the funnel such as Interstitial pages, thank you pages
• Forgetting that it’s people that you are selling to
• Abusing the power of email autoresponders and trying to sell within every single email that goes out
• Ignoring the importance of split-testing all aspects of your sales funnels.
• Trying to “fix and forget” ad campaigns, sales funnels, marketing automation, or your email marketing setup

What other questions do you have for us on sales funnels? Feel free to ask us anytime!

The post 6 Reasons Why You’re Missing Out If You Don’t Have A Sales Funnel appeared first on Done For You.

When you get down to doing it, however, it can literally break your back, make your mind numb, and it can make you run in circles.

Add information overdose to this and soon you have every reason in the world to quit thinking about digital marketing.

But you can’t afford to quit. Can you? No. The answer is no.

Google search accounts for 1.2 trillion monthly searches worldwide. Your customers are all on Facebook (over 2 billion of them in total, and counting) engaging, sharing, commenting, or maybe silently checking their newsfeeds while they are on mobile (at least 80% of Facebook users are on mobile).

We see many individuals and small business owners bogged for a variety of reasons: ranging from laziness all the way to information overwhelm or just a general breakdown of the ability to make decisions and take action.

Information overload is real. It does take a lot of research to get effective digital marketing done. Also, it takes a long time to get all the moving parts working to the point where you start seeing results.

All of this is understandable.

However, information overload and distractions shouldn’t stop you from focusing on the digital marketing actions that are important and meaningful for your business.

There are many reasons why you may consider quitting, when it comes to digital marketing. Here are some of the most common excuses people make, and the reasons they are wrong.

Digital Marketing Channels? Daunting!

There are distinct channels, techniques, tactics, strategies that make digital marketing work for your business. There’s no one channel that trumps the other. To promote your brand, website, products, and services — you could possibly take an endless array of paths to reach the same goals.

The digital marketing channels you pick, the efforts you put in, and the exact pathways you’d take depend a lot on the type of business you run, your goals, resource (or lack of any), budgets (or the lack of it), and so much more.

None of that means that digital marketing has to be daunting or “undoable”.

Pick any traditional business (like retail) and you’ll end up doing more in a traditional business than an online business.

The web doesn’t make things easier, just gives a smarter way.

SEO is dead

You always hear one think or another that goes something like this: “SEO is dead.”

It’s not; it’s just changing. Everyday. For the better.

Google will keep making new updates only to make the web a better place and to reward publishers and businesses who take the trouble to create content that adds real value.

There are only a few legitimate ways to make SEO work for your business:

• Focus on exceptional content, all the time, every time. Insert a keyword or two but don’t overdo it and don’t write for search engines. Write for people instead.
• Don’t try to get links. Instead, earn those links. If you follow the previous point regularly, you’ll soon get there. You can also earn links legitimately by offering to do high-quality guest posting.
• Content curation is an exceptional way to earn links too. Make that a part of your content marketing strategy using easy to use tools like Curately.

Facebook is Evil; Google Adwords is expensive

Facebook won’t be the same anymore. Yes, Google Adwords is expensive if you don’t know what you are doing.

None of these statements should affect the work you’d need to put in, each day.

Facebook will fight “the fight” about data privacy laws and will release new features to make advertising well worth each advertising dollar spent while still respecting users’ privacy.

As more advertisers take to paid advertising on Google, a few keywords will always be more expensive than others.

When you manage your paid advertising properly (and by doing all the right things), the cost per acquisition (CPA) of your ads will come down.

You’ll spend less than your competition does and you’ll be able to get a return on your investment.

Funnels will take care of themselves

We said this before, and it bears repeating: Funnels are not “set it and forget it” miracles. They don’t work on their own without any work at all. For funnels to work, you’ll need continuous optimization and A/B testing.

You need to work on your funnels before your funnels work for you. Do the work now and then allow your sales funnels work miracles on autopilot.

Sales funnels are also not a choice; they are a mandate. They are necessary. Your business doesn’t exist if they don’t.

Marketing automation is hard

You might not be able to execute the level of automation that Amazon does but you can emulate their results, on a smaller scale, without the huge budget they expend.

You can choose a marketing stack that helps you accomplish certain levels of automation or you can have marketing automation experts or funnel specialists to build, manage, and make marketing automation work for your business.

Anything of the above things that you spend time worrying about needlessly takes time away from what you should be doing instead.

What’s stopping you from proper digital marketing execution? If you’d like to get on a scheduled strategy call, we’ll be happy to talk.

The post Digital Marketing: Don’t Let Any Of These Stop You 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.

• First, don’t manipulate visitors into signing up for your offers.
• Second, avoid confirming shaming—making people feel bad for not accepting your offer.

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s move on to effectively using pop-ups and slide-ins.

The Role of Pop-ups and Slide-ins in Your Sales Funnel

It would help if you generated leads to nurture them through your sales funnel until they convert into lifelong customers. Pop-ups, slide-ins, and landing pages are the tools that help in this initial lead capture. Then, your autoresponder sequences nurture these leads, setting the stage for conversion. But how will you get tips in the first place without using pop-ups or slide-ins?

Why Exit-Intent Pop-ups are a Game-Changer

Are you concerned about annoying your visitors or getting penalized by Google for intrusive pop-ups? Enter exit-intent pop-ups. These pop-ups utilize technology to sense when visitors are about to leave your site and present them with a timely and relevant offer.

The Most Used Exit-Intent Pop-Up Software

OptinMonster

• Pros:
  • Wide range of popup types and templates
  • Advanced targeting and segmentation options
  • A/B testing and analytics
  • Easy to use drag-and-drop editor
  • Integrations with popular email marketing platforms
• Cons:
  • It can be expensive for small businesses
  • Some features can be overwhelming for beginners

Sumo

• Pros:
  • Free plan with limited features
  • Wide range of popup types and templates
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Integrations with popular email marketing platforms
• Cons:
  • Limited features on the free plan
  • Some popups can be intrusive

Privy

• Pros:
  • Wide range of popup types and templates
  • Advanced targeting and segmentation options
  • A/B testing and analytics
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Integrations with popular email marketing platforms
• Cons:
  • It can be expensive for small businesses

Picreel

• Pros:
  • Wide range of popup types and templates
  • Advanced targeting and segmentation options
  • A/B testing and analytics
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Integrations with popular email marketing platforms
• Cons:
  • It can be expensive for small businesses

Hello Bar

• Pros:
  • Free plan with limited features
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Integrations with popular email marketing platforms
• Cons:
  • Limited features on the free plan
  • Not as many popup types as some other options

Email List Building with Exit-Intent Software

Exit-intent pop-ups are particularly useful for building your email list. As a visitor navigates away, a pop-up with a compelling lead magnet can capture their email. This sets the stage for future interactions and potential conversions. Using exit-intent software increases your lead generation and allows you to segment your audience based on their behavior, offering them highly targeted and timely content.

Implement Pop-ups Based on User Behavior: Scroll or Time Delay

Another effective tactic is to show the pop-ups or slide-ins after a specific scroll percentage or time delay. If someone scrolls 60% of your page or spends a minute on your site, you can assume they are engaged. This is the perfect time to make an offer through a pop-up or slide-in.

Leverage Page-Level Targeting for Contextual Offers

Modern lead generation tools allow for page-level targeting, meaning you can display specific pop-ups or slide-ins depending on the webpage your visitors are on. For example, if someone is looking at your pricing page, an exclusive one-day discount pop-up might be just the push they need to convert.

Capitalize on Intent-Driven Click Triggers

Click-triggered pop-ups and slide-ins only appear when a user clicks a specific link, button, or image. These are highly effective as they are purely intent-driven. Tools like Sumo and Sleeknote allow you to create sophisticated click-triggered forms that add to the user experience rather than detract from it.

How Effective Are Your Pop-ups and Slide-ins?

Pop-ups and slide-ins are valuable tools for lead generation and email list building, especially exit-intent pop-ups. They must be strategically implemented and carefully crafted to add value to the user experience.

If you’d like to learn more about funnels that work, sign up for our Funnel Factor report. Would you prefer a webinar instead? Check out our sales funnel webinar.

The post How to Use Exit Intent Pop-ups to Skyrocket Your Email List and Generate More Leads appeared first on Done For You.

When it comes to building sales funnels that work, our goals are straightforward and clear: we need relevant top-of-funnel traffic to come through an elaborate content marketing or paid traffic strategy (say Google Adwords or Facebook Ads).

When visitors come to your website, you ideally want them to sign up for a lead magnet, i.e. something free that you give away. When that happens, you can then nurture them using email marketing autoresponders.

Eventually, you’ll make offers to them to allow them to make purchases (when they want to, and when they are ready).

All of that is an elaborate process. It takes time, energy, investment, and plenty of testing to ensure that your funnels work well.

If your funnels have bloat (anything in excess or any sort of complications), you aren’t going to cut it. Your funnels won’t work as well as they should and you’ll miss out on a lot if you allow your funnels to stay fat and lazy.

So, what can you do about fat and lazy funnels? Here are a few tips:

Tip #1: Strive for simplicity

Too much of anything is bad, and that applies to every aspect of your sales funnels.

Designing a landing page like it’s a website; writing copy as if it’s a blog post; creating long landing pages hoping to “hook” your visitors for a $29 product; adding two or three landing pages (or steps) to accomplish something as straightforward as “getting a lead” — all of these are examples of complicating what should have been simple.

To keep your sales funnels simple, it takes work. The kind of work where you cut out three lines of your headline to a single one; deleting half of your subheading, and then deleting another of the half that’s left; using one image instead of three (or six); using a single landing page instead of three (unless you absolutely have to use landing pages that way), etc.

It’s easy to build a mess that you can call a funnel; you’d have to turn the world upside down to build a sales funnel that’s simple and still works.

Tip #2: Avoid multi-step landing pages and funnels

For a few use cases, multi-step landing pages can explode your conversion rate.

Img Credit: Kissmetrics

But for a lot of businesses, it’s not even needed. Just because something exists doesn’t mean you have to use it.

Ever see any of those Clickfunnels or Samcart templates? There’s a landing page. Sign up and then you’ll be sent to a thank you page.

The thank you page won’t just thank you. It also has a one-time cross-sell that you won’t ever see again.

Let’s say you won’t sign up for this “one-time” offer and you decide to avoid it. You click through to see another page with a “Wait! Don’t go Just yet! Here’s an offer you can’t refuse” offer.

You decide to let off that too. Then, you’ll finally get the actual “thank you” page which thankfully “thanks you”. Now, you are told to check your email and confirm your sign up.

It’s only after your leads check email and confirm sign up (also called as double opt-in), will they receive anything you promised.

That’s a long, complicated process. There is a time and place for upsells and cross-selling. You don’t have to do it with someone who just happened to land on your landing pages for the first time.

Stop complicating your sales funnels! This has to stop!

Tip #3: Revert back to a single offer

You’ve heard about content upgrades and they are a great way to generate leads. Content upgrades — for the uninitiated — is a downloadable piece of content that holds a lot more information about the topic that your readers just happened to read.

For instance, if your visitor just read a blog post on facebook ads, your content upgrade could be a simple checklist to ensure flawless campaign launch.

But the trouble with content upgrades (no one tells you this) is that it’s just way too complicated strategy to manage and execute.

Many bloggers, marketers, and businesses that try the content upgrade strategy or multiple offer strategy usually fail to make the best of all the leads pouring in (each for a different type of content suggesting that their interests are relevant to that piece of content that they downloaded).

Most businesses don’t need the complication that content upgrades bring.

All you need is:

• A strong offer,
• A landing page that converts,
• And an autoresponder sequence that’s strategically sent to each lead.

Are you complicating your sales funnels at a time when it’s only getting harder to generate leads online?

If you’d like to have us look at your sales funnel to optimize conversions OR design and build one from scratch, click here to book a free Action Plan call with us!

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

A Lenskold Group report states that about 63% of companies outgrow their competition thanks only to marketing automation.

Marketing automation aims to make your business seem available 24/7. It’d make your customers feel that you are instantly available, quick to respond, and more. On the management and marketing end, automating workflows helps reduce your efforts, automate your funnels, help systemize your operations, and give you more wings to fly.

Given all the benefits that automation can have for your business, there are a few things it won’t do for you. As such, setting your expectations right and understanding the principles of marketing automation give you a good start.

Marketing automation doesn’t mean your business is now bound to get lazier; it only means your business now gets smarter.

Here’s what marketing automation won’t do for you.

Marketing automation doesn’t relieve you of work

Sales funnels need work – even our Done For You Sales Funnels. Automation of any kind needs plenty of work upfront, and continued work in the form of testing, analysis, tweaking, or even redoing from scratch.

Even for workflow setups that are successful, you’ll still have plenty of work to do. Duplicating funnels for new offers, optimizing your existing automation setup, working on integrations, deployment and testing of technology, and a lot more.

Marketing automation isn’t a way to get lazy; it’s only a way to improve efficiency.

It’s not a “set it and forget it” task

Say “marketing automation” and people tend to jump several steps ahead and think “So, I’d never have to do this manually ever again”.

Agreed that there are a lot of things marketing automation can do. For instance, there are CRM systems that eliminate the need for you to fill in gory details about every new customer you’d enter into your CRM.

There are bots powered by artificial intelligence that can chat with your potential customers who visit your website.

But marketing automation isn’t “set it and forget it”. Take the simple case of sending out an email digest with your latest blog posts to your email subscribers.

Normally, RSS-to-email campaigns work on auto-pilot. But you can’t just sit there and let it run.

You’d have to test subject lines, you’d have to stay on top of your open rates, and track whether or not your subscribers are reading your emails at all.

It won’t replace you or your team

You could bring in all the marketing automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and bots across various functions of your business, but we aren’t at the stage where all this technology will replace you or your team.

You could have an artificial intelligence powered bot to man your live chat, but if customers actually need to connect with someone real, you’ll have to show up. You could have machine learning glean insights from data, but you’ll finally have to make decisions based on that data.

Marketing automation simplifies your business, but it won’t replace you (or your team).

Marketing automation is no secret sauce

By the time you read this, almost everyone else would have hard about marketing automation too. They’d be reading all about how to make sales funnels that work by themselves leading to a powerful sales setup or they’d be learning all about building lead funnels that help businesses automate lead generation.

Marketing automation—and any resultant stack of technology used—is no longer secret sauce.

What can work in your favor is your strategy, how you intend to use marketing automation, and how committed you are when it comes to tinkering, experimenting, failing, and learning from implementing your strategy.

It’s unlikely to save you money

I’ll be upfront and honest about the state of affairs with marketing and with marketing automation: most small businesses and individuals don’t get to execute regular digital marketing the right way, let alone getting marketing automation right.

There are a lot of moving parts, testing, experimentation, and implementation when it comes to setting your marketing on auto-pilot. Business owners also have to take a leap of faith and get many things in line (including their thoughts, beliefs, and actions) just to stay on the winning path.

Because of this, workflow automation will only cost you more—in time, efforts, and resources—instead of less (which is the usual premise).

If you do get it right, however, automating your workflows easily saves you money. It’s no accident that about 68% of small businesses are using marketing automation today if it weren’t for all the benefits and significant cost savings.

Done-for-you inbound marketing automation

If you need a done-for-you inbound marketing system that with automate your lead generation, lead nurturing and sales conversion, DoneForYou.com is the place to start. Click here to schedule a call with one of our sales funnel experts to see the true value of having a team do the heavy lifting for you.

The post 5 Things Marketing Automation Won’t Do For You appeared first on Done For You.

As a small business owner, you understand how important it is to do email marketing, as it is one of the marketing channels with the highest Return On Investment (ROI). In fact, the ROI that comes from email is arguably the highest compared to other marketing efforts. So, low cost and high ROI make email marketing the best method for small business marketing.

As if that isn’t enough, a survey revealed that 80% of professionals state email marketing is the driving force behind their customer acquisition and retention.

In this guide, we’re going to dive into five email marketing tips for small businesses. These are the top email marketing best practices that will help you grow your email list and sales this year and next.

Tip #1 — Be strategic with your funnel

You could spend days planning and creating a compelling email series that illustrates the amazing features and benefits of your product. But if you send your campaign to a list of people who aren’t quite there yet, you’re wasting your time.   That’s one of the reasons having a compelling lead magnet is so important in your sales funnel.

Simply put, your subscribers might not be ready to buy your product yet.

To avoid ineffective email marketing campaigns, you need to understand the notion of sales funnels.

The marketing or sales funnel is a model that helps you conceive the buyer’s journey, which in turn is the path a prospect takes as they become familiar with your brand up to the moment when they decide to buy.

The right sales funnel can mean the difference between converting a flood of customers and clients in your business or listening to the crickets chirp in the background…

Click here to get instant access to a free sales funnel course, one that will give you a proven formula to crafting winning sales funnels no matter what industry your in, what product you’re selling, or you current level of expertise!

To advance your leads down the sales funnel, you need to have an appropriate email and conversion strategy for each stage of your funnel. What are the stages of the typical marketing funnel for a small business?

There are five:

• Awareness,
• Consideration,
• Conversion,
• Loyalty, and
• Advocacy.

And the best thing about the sales funnel? You can capitalize on email marketing during every stage.

Unlike paid ads or other less customizable mass marketing actions, with small business email marketing, you are in full command of when and how you engage with your list throughout the buyer’s journey.

So, instead of sending bulk emails to everyone on your list, be fully aware of where people are on their buyer’s journey, and customize your email campaigns accordingly.

Tip #2 — Make it easy to subscribe

This email marketing tip for small businesses seems pretty obvious. If you want to grow your list as quickly as possible you need to make it easy for new prospects to subscribe. However, you’d be surprised by how many websites bury their opt-in form in the footer, or some rarely-visited page.

Making it simple for visitors to subscribe to your mailing list means that you place the opt-in form where it’s clearly visible. And that is in multiple locations on your site.

• As a general rule, you need an opt-in form above the fold, which is the upper half of a page, the part that is visible without scrolling down.  That’s what landing pages do…
• You need an opt-in form at the top of the sidebar on your blog.
• You can create opt-in forms that are placed in the middle of your content, which can deliver a freebie or an interest-specific content upgrade.

Also, you make it easy for people to subscribe to your small business newsletter when you provide incentives, like a discount or a free report.

Now, if you expect to get too much information per subscriber, you might prevent some people from signing up. On the flip side, when you ask for one simple piece of information, like an email address, your conversion rate goes up.

In short, remember to place a short opt-in form on several places on your site and give prospects a reason to join your email list.  Also, make sure you do some A/B testing to see what placement gets you the most leads!

Tip #3 — Make it easy to read

Email marketing is a tricky endeavor for entrepreneurs and small business owners with no expert marketers in their staff.

Even if you serve great content, there’s no guarantee that you follow best practices and that recipients will read your email. There are, however, some simple tricks to improve open rates and reader engagement.

Most consumers read their email on mobile devices. Some professionals—if not just as many—also use mobile devices to access their inbox. With this in mind, one of the best email marketing tips is to write emails that are optimized for mobile devices. You can do that by keeping your content short, simple and ideally readable with minimal scrolling.

Present content in bite-sized pieces, utilizing bullet points and clear headings. Say what you have to say in a few sentences, and include a clear call to action to make it easy for people to learn more.

Always stick to one message/subject matter per email. Include gifs, video placeholders or other images to maintain interest and get your subscribers to keep reading.

In case you don’t know already, most email marketing platforms have a mobile responsive newsletter editor so you can easily build email layouts that automatically adapt to small screens.

Another way to have more people read your content is to use a consistent email template with your logo. Readers should be able to recognize your branding instantly.

Why bother to write clickable email copy when people don’t even open your emails? Your first priority should be to put together a good subject line that will get your subscriber to want to read more.

Download this curated collection of 100 subject lines. Use it to discover which subject lines work best so you can formulate your strategy and get better results.

Follow these readability tips to skyrocket the effectiveness of email marketing for your small business.

And now let’s move on to a tip that is less self-explanatory and often arouses controversy.

Tip #4 — Make it easy to unsubscribe

Yes, this tip is counter-intuitive, and we get it; you hate it when folks unsubscribe from your mailing list, especially when you’ve spent dollars to get them on your list.

You’ve also spent dozens of hours strategizing on your email sequences and cultivating your content, and you want people to see your work. But, unfortunately, at the end of the day, you just have to let your subscribers go.

If they’re not interested in what you have to say they’re probably never going to buy your product anyways. You should just let them go and, in fact, you should make the process simple—just one click.

For starters, by making it easy to unsubscribe, you leave the former subscriber with a positive impression of your brand. There’s no point spamming unsubscribed recipients who don’t open your emails anyway. Most popular email marketing services for small businesses will automatically include an one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom of your emails.

More importantly, you can see things differently and realize that every unsubscribe is an opportunity. Every time someone leaves the email list of your small business, it’s a chance to learn and improve your email marketing.

For example, you can automatically present outgoing subscribers with a quick survey. Your email marketing platform probably has a built-in way to do that automatically. With a survey, you can learn why they left.

For a customized survey solution, try the Askly Quiz Builder. With Askly, it is easy to ask the right questions and find out what your customers struggle with.

With a quick survey, you can spot a trend and reach to conclusions regarding email content and list segmentation.

Here’s an example of MailChimp’s default unsubscribe survey:

Tip #5 — Automate your email marketing

Small business owners often do email marketing 100% manually. However, no matter how hard you try, email marketing is time-consuming and, you can’t do it all. The good news is that some of the manual email marketing work can be “delegated” to modern marketing automation for efficiency.

You’ve likely heard people talking about “email marketing automation” and “drip campaigns” a lot recently. Email marketing automation is quickly becoming an integral part of small businesses.

You need marketing automation for a dozen of reasons. Contrary to how it sounds, email automation can actually contribute to campaign personalization and customization—if you do it right.

By automating your email marketing, you make your sales funnel more efficient. Remember when we explained in the beginning of this post how important it is to be conscious of the buyer’s journey?

With the email marketing automation, you can send the right content to the right people at the right time. You also free up your sales people’s time so that they can focus on nurturing qualified leads.

Ultimately, you need email marketing automation for small business to nurture incoming leads, close additional sales and turn your new customers into repeat buyers.

Email marketing tips for small business

There you have it. Our top email marketing tips and tricks to help small business owners improve their marketing game.  If you’d like a hand in getting an email marketing campaign or a sales funnel set up, schedule a call and we can work through it!

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