3 Backend Strategies For High Converting Sales Funnels

Are you looking for more ways to increase the performance of your sales funnel?

Do you spend enough time on backend strategies as you do on frontend strategies?

If not, you may have missed opportunities.

It is most common for businesses to focus on their front end strategies such as a social media content plan, email designs and ad copy for PPC.

While this is great, many businesses aren’t seeing a high converting sales funnel because they tend to forget about their backend strategies.

I know it doesn’t seem as exciting or creative as content plans, but you’ll soon feel the excitement when you start seeing increased revenue as all the smart marketers know, the profits made on the backend.

Here are three backend strategies that you should be focusing on to have a high converting sales funnel:

1. Retargeting

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Think of retargeting as capturing those window shoppers who come to your website to browse but do not buy or take any converting action.

Retargeting allows you to put your brand in front of these window shoppers as they browse the internet or social media.

According to Adroll, only 2% of customers convert when they first land on a website.

Retargeting helps to claw back some of the 98% of customers who didn’t buy the first time.

Retargeting can be as clever as to display products the customer added to their basket and abandoned, a hotel they last looked it but didn’t book, a service they were engaged with but didn’t sign up for a free trial and more.

Why Does Retargeting Work

Retargeting works so well because it attracts users back to your website by not letting them forget about you.

For example, a user visits your site because they are looking for your product however they are not ready to buy because they want to wait for the year end to calculate a budget.

By the time it gets to the year end, that user might forget about you and end up looking for the product and clicking through to a competitor and converting.

With retargeting, this user would not have forgotten you and your name would be the first that popped into their head when they are ready to buy.

How Does Retargeting Work

Some online tools make retargeting very easily such as Adroll.

All you need to do to start retargeting is to place a small JavaScript tag in the footer of your website.

This will then capture cookies from each visitor to your site.

Adroll then uses these visitor cookies to track what they do on your site and will display relevant ads to those who did not buy as they browse through other sites.

If you are advertising with Facebook and Google AdWords, then you can also easily set up retargeting campaigns with these too.

Retargeting Best Practices

To get the most out of your retargeting, it is crucial to segment your website visitors correctly.

To get people back to your website, you must need to create ads that have high click-through-rates and to that, they have to be as relevant to the visitor as possible.

For example, a visitor looking at social media training wouldn’t click on an ad offering them a free SEO training course.

They would be more likely to click on an ad for a free social media training course.

You will only be able to send out highly relevant ads to website visitors by segmenting them as narrowly as possible.

We go into more detail on how to dominate your retargeting here so you can get your warmest leads converting.

2. Segmented Lists And Tailored Follow Ups

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While I’m on the subject of segmenting, the second backend strategy you need to focus in how you segment your email contacts.

You probably don’t need me to tell you how important email marketing is and why you should be doing it because you already know.

What you may not know or may not understand, is the importance of how segmenting your email list will improve your email performance.

Segmenting is a crucial email marketing best practice and even though it is not as fun as designing emails, it is just crucial.

Here are a few reasons why you should be segmenting your email list:

Not All Your Contacts Are The Same

Not all your contacts have the same goals, have the same pain points, took the same journey or are at the same stage of the buying cycle.

Because not all contacts are the same, it is important not to send the same email to all.

For example, which of these emails do you believe would get a better response?

1. An email offering a free social media training teaser sent to all contacts in your email list which includes contacts who have already bought a full training course and contacts that have shown interest in SEO training courses.
2. An email offering a free social media training teaser sent to a contact who have shown interest in social media training and who have not yet purchased a course.

Contacts Will Be At Different Stages Of The Sales Funnel

To improve how people travel through your sales funnel, you must segment your email list by what stages they are at in the sales funnel.

Those who are yet to buy from you will need to be nurtured a lot differently to those who have already bought.

As well segmenting what stages users are at, you can also segment based on the urgency of pain points.

This is something you can do if you if you have already created your buying personas.

If not, you can read our blog post on how to do so.

You’ll Get Better Results

Segmenting your email list will guarantee better results because each of your emails will be focused on almost each lead.

Because you are sending an email to the right people at the right time with the right message, users will be more inclined to not only open your emails but also to click through and buy.

According to Hubspot, segmenting your email list will result in a huge 39% increase in open rates, 28% decrease in opt-outs, 24% increase in sales leads and 24% increase in revenue.

You can’t argue with these results.

3. Knowing Your Numbers Inside Out

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Last but certainly not least is to know your numbers inside out. To better tailor your strategies and maximise return, you need to know some important numbers.

For example, you can set a maximum CPC or daily budget in your AdWords account to make sure you don’t go over your target acquisition cost.

As well as being to improve your ROI, knowing your numbers will also help you benchmark growth and performance.

Here are some important numbers to know inside out and to keep track of:

Conversion Numbers

One of the first numbers you need to know is your conversions numbers.

As well as how many conversions, you need to know conversion rates and cost per conversion.

You can use a competitor analysis tool to benchmark your figures against your industry to determine how well your website is performing.

It is important also to know these numbers when segmented too.

This means knowing the conversion rates of each medium, each source, each device, each location and more.

The more you segment your numbers, the more you will come to understand which areas need improving or scaling.

While it might not be appropriate to start learning all these metrics from the “get-go” it’s important to realize that if you want to find where your hottest prospects and the customers that spend the most money with are, these are some of the numbers you’ll need to crunch.

Upsell Numbers

Another number you need to know is your upsells.

Do you know the percentage of upsells that have come directly as a result of email marketing?

Do you know the percentage of upsells that have come directly as a result of social media offers?

The best way for you to increase the percentage of upsells is to know which areas are leading to the higher rate.

Once you know this then you can scale to maximise further upsell opportunities.

When Do You Break Even

Knowing your break-even point is important to all aspects of your digital marketing.

To know when you break even you must determine your costs and prices, calculate contribution margin and when you break even and calculate profits and losses.

This comes in very handy again when determining advertising budgets because will know how many units you need to sell to at least break even.

You know more than anyone that you don’t want to make any losses so know your break even point.

Conclusion

These are just three backend strategies that you should be focusing on. However, they are all imperative.

As a recap, here they are again:

1. Retargeting – claw back lost conversions from visitors who do not convert.
2. Segmentation – spend time segmenting your email list to increase revenue 24%.
3. Metrics – make sure you know and understand all relevant numbers always to make a return.

Do you use these strategies in your sales funnel? Leave all your ideas and questions in the comments section below.