Not wanting to waste time and money having to fix errors in your sales funnel after building it?
There are some common mistakes that businesses and marketers suffer from that can be easily avoided.
There is nothing worse than shooting yourself in the foot after working so hard to build a sales funnel or anything else for that matter.
Having to spend time redoing factors or wasting money can be painful for any business or marketer.
The aim of the game, I’m sure you’ll agree, is to avoid as many mistakes as possible which are what I am going to help you do.
Here are a few tips to make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot when building your next sales funnel.
Not Knowing Your Target Market
One of the most important aspects of a sales funnel is knowing the target market.
It would be very hard if not impossible to build a successful sales funnel without knowing exactly who your target market is.
[bctt tweet=”Knowing your target market when building a funnel is critical.” username=”clickfunnels”]
You will shoot yourself in the foot very early on if you fail to take the time to research and understand who you target market is.
When I say to know your target market, this does not mean to know whether they are mainly men or mainly women. You need to be as detailed as possible about who they are such as:
- Age Group
- Job Titles
- Average Salary
- Marriage Status
- Their Interests
- Their Pain Points
- Their Goals
And so on. Knowing exactly who your target market is will help you better plan how you will attract them to your landing pages, how you will convert them and how you will close deals.
Not Having A Strategy To Capture And Entice
Your sales funnel will fail right from the get-go if you don’t strategize how you will drive traffic to it.
It is all very well and good saying that you will use social media and paid search to drive traffic but how are you going to use them to drive traffic?
[bctt tweet=”Because of how many ads people see nowadays, they have almost become blind to them.” username=”clickfunnels”]
You need to have a clear plan as to how your ads are going to stand out from the rest and stop that user from scrolling past your ad.
Not only do you need to have a clear strategy as to how you are going to catch the eye of users, you will also need a clear plan as to how you are going to make them click on your ad.
If you have done your target market research thoroughly, you will have more of an idea as to what pain points to trigger.
Giving Away Junk As Freebies
The one thing that will kill your sales funnel before it even gets started is giving away junk for free to try and generate leads.
People don’t give up their details easily and will certainly not give up their details for anything that they won’t have a use for… even if it is free.
Throwing a few quotes together and calling it a ‘special report’ that your visitors can download if they submit their email address is not going to fool anyone.
To generate leads with freebies, you need to give away some valuable such as an in-depth guide on how to do something specific to your niche or a free trial of your product.
Forget Or Ignoring Your Prospects
Many businesses when building their sales funnel pay most of their attention on how they are going to generate traffic and leads.
These two things are important and do need focus however so does what happens after you have generated leads.
A properly built sales funnel does not stop at generating leads; it will also have an equal amount of focus on lead nurturing.
Think about how you are going to continue communications with leads and prospects when building your sales funnel. Will you invest in auto-responders? Which email software will you invest in?
These are questions you need to answer to have a clear plan on how you will nurture leads into paying customers.
Giving Visitors Too Many Choices
The landing page is the heart and soul of the sales funnel process as it will see visitors coming in and leads going out… hopefully!
When building your sales funnel, think about the design of your landing page and what it will need to convert users into leads.
Some businesses can get a bit over eager when designing their landing page and try to fit all of their best bits in one space.
Offering visitors too many things can deter them from taking action because they will not know which action to take.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t clutter your page with choices, have clear call to actions with clear results” username=”clickfunnels”]
Having one goal and one goal only will make sure that users aren’t confused about what your product is, how it can help then and how they proceed to sign up or buy.
Not Knowing Your Most Valuable Product
You may believe that your most expensive product is the most valuable however it is commonly the middle priced product that is more valuable.
It is important to split your products into different levels so you can use your sales funnel to cross-sell and upsell.
If this is your first attempt at building a sales funnel, then I wouldn’t recommend focusing too much on cross-sells and upsells as it can get a bit complicated however it doesn’t hurt to know which products lead to more lifetime value.
Not Sharing Your Expertise And Know-How
What is one way to short yourself in the foot when building a sales funnel?
Not creating a plan on how you will share your expertise and know-how with your target audience.
What do you do when you need a solution to a problem you’re having?
You ‘Google’ it and find an interesting article that will help solve your problem.
You need to understand what your target audience is having problems with and what questions they have and offer them solutions and answers via your blog.
The more you are blogging and sharing valuable tips, the more you will establish yourself as an influencer in your industry and gain trust from your target audience.
Having Too Many Steps In Your Sales Funnel
Another one of the most common mistakes businesses and marketers make when building their sales funnel is to add too many steps.
This is especially true you’re new or even fairly new to building sales funnels.
Some of the best sales funnels are very simplistic such as CrazyEgg’s sales funnel which comprises of:
- Attract visitors from paid social ads
- Convert visitors into leads using one clear CTA on the homepage
- Nurture leads into paying customers using emails.
Once you have built your basic sales funnel and have mastered it, you can then build on it with cross-sells and upsells.
I just wouldn’t add too many steps to your sales funnel to begin with as it will become hard to focus when it starts to see activity.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket
To get the most of your sales funnel, you need to have more than one campaign to drive traffic to it.
Even if you have found one channel or one campaign that works well for you now, if that channel or campaign goes under, you will be left with nothing.
Even when you have good performing campaigns, it is important to work still on creating and building others so that you don’t have all your eggs in one basket and never suffer from a dramatic drop in traffic to your sales funnel.
You can plan for this when building your sales funnel.
Being Too Scared To Sell
There has been the talk of inbound marketing for so long now that businesses are almost scared to sell.
Selling is a big part of your sales funnel, but it should be used in the right place which is always towards the last stage of the sales funnel.
Starting a sales pitch to strangers will never result in good performance however after leads have found their way to you and have successfully been nurtured, they will be more ready to hear your sales pitch.
Selling is not a bad thing; it just needs to be used in the right places to help close those deals.
Conclusion
There you have it, everything you need to know not to shoot yourself in the foot when building your next sales funnel.
In general, I would say the two most important things to take away from this is to plan carefully and research each step of the sales funnel and also to keep your sales funnel simply.
Building your sales funnel should be exciting as it can lead to bigger and better things so get your whiteboard out and start planning.
What mistakes have you suffered when building sales funnels in the past?
What do you find the most challenging when building sales funnels?
Let me know by leaving your comments below.