For a business owner with a solid funnel in place, it’s easy to look at the number of subscribers at each level of the funnel and predict pretty accurately what the sales will be from day to day or week to week.
If you’ve got a funnel in place, though, and your numbers aren’t looking great, chances are you have a leak somewhere. Your funnel has a hole (or two or three) where subscribers are falling through. There are four common causes for funnel leaks, and once you spot them, they’re pretty easy to fix.
Table of Contents
Not Enough Traffic.
The very heart of your sales funnel is the traffic you bring in. Without visitors to your blog or opt-in pages, you’ll have no subscribers. Then, without subscribers, you’ll have no (or very few) sales. In the end, without sales, you’ll have no business. Yet this is where a lot of people struggle.
How can you get more eyes on your content and more subscribers into your funnel?
Traffic generation is an entire industry of its own, but here are some tips:
- Use good SEO to encourage search engines to rank your content well.
- Be present and active in the places where your ideal reader hangs out, whether that’s on social media, in niche forums, or at live events.
- Use paid ads to drive targeted traffic to highly relevant pages.
- Recruit JV partners and affiliates to promote your offers.
My last eBook gives you 51 ways to bring more eyeballs to your blog posts, offers, sign-up pages, etc…
Click the image below to get my free ebook:
No Follow-up
This is a leaky funnel mistake that a lot of new entrepreneurs make. They spend a lot of time and energy setting up a great squeeze page and driving traffic to it, then they deliver the goods to their subscribers, and then…nothing. I mean, really NOTHING
How do I follow-up?
Before you spend time building that opt-in page or offer, be sure you have a back-end to promote, or those subscribers you so carefully collected will end up costing you money instead of earning it back.
As per Google, in 2019, business needs to engage on average 13 times before someone buys a product. Yes, that’s right, thirteen touch points.
There is a list, non-exhaustive, of email sequences you should have on auto-pilot for your business:
- Welcome sequence: a series of emails you send to people who just sign-up or buy from you
- Nurturing Sequence: it’s usually a minimum of 5 emails where you build a relationship and show your expertise.
- Training sequence: it teaches your subscribers how to get the most value of your services.
- Sell-Upsell sequence: we use it to sell something for the first time or to upsell after a purchase. You know, it’s the “What’s next?”
No Call-To-Action
This happens most typically at the top of the funnel. Your blog posts, social media content, podcasts, YouTube videos—everything you offer for free—must have some kind of call-to-action, or it’s all just wasted energy. Your call-to-action can be as simple as “Subscribe to my YouTube channel” or “Follow me on Facebook for more tips,” but it must be there.
How can I easily fix it?
Every time you write a blog post or an email, as yourself, “What do I want my readers to do when they’re done reading/listening/watching this?” That becomes your call to action.
If you are wondering how you can create call-to-action buttons on your web pages, I wrote a full article about this subject here. I show you how you can do that in less than 20 minutes!
No Product Offers
When you’re just starting out, this can be a problem. You know you need to be building a mailing list, but with nothing to offer them, what’s the point? There are lots of ways to make money in your funnel even if you don’t have a product to sell.
How can I get products?
If you are just starting, you can create a nice pdf and offer it as a free download. This document will detail who you are, what you do, how you can help your audience, and how they can contact you.
It doesn’t need to be fancy or cost money. If you go to Canva, create a free account, you will find editable templates to design what we call a media kit. Et voila!
Another way to get products, it’s to promote affiliate offers. No matter what industry you’re in, there are a variety of tools and products your readers need. Find those tools, sign up for the affiliate programs, and recommend them to your readers. Not only will your readers thank you for pointing them in the right direction, but you’ll earn a little cash, too.
Got a leaky funnel? With a few tweaks and some attention paid to your follow-up sequences, chances are you can fix those holes and increase your profits in no time.
Do you still unsure about how you can create your email sequences, or your call-to-action button or your little media kit? I will gladly jump on a quick call with you and see how I can help. Book here.
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