Optimizing your sales funnel is important for increasing sales revenue and your marketing ROI. A sales funnel can help you cast a wide net on your target audience. If you are selling a product or service, your objective is to push potential customers down to the bottom of the funnel and make a purchase. When done right, sales funnels can be effective at guiding leads into sales.
Sales funnels can help influence buying decisions without active intervention. However, you cannot leverage the benefits of a sales funnel without optimizing it. A fully configured sales funnel can help with the following goals:
- Identify points of failure and success in the sales process
- Increase conversion rates
- Build customer loyalty and improve customer retention
- Improve content marketing strategy
Whether you sell online, offline, B2B, or B2C, here are the steps on how you can optimize your sales funnel and generate more conversions:
Optimizing Your Sales Funnel
- Define Your Target Audience
- Analyze Your Landing Pages
- Optimize Your Call-to-Action
- Use Email Marketing To Nurture Leads
- Decrease Form Friction
- Incorporate Trust Signals On Your Website
- Be Active on Social Media
- Provide Real-Time Engagement
- Improve Quality of Page Traffic
- Conduct A/B Testing
Optimizing Your Sales Funnel
An optimized sales funnel is key to increasing sales and revenue. The sales funnel can help you qualify your prospects and push them to the next stage until the customer makes a purchase. So if you do not know how to optimize your sales funnel, keep scrolling down to get started with sales funnel optimization.
1. Define Your Target Audience
In the first place, how will you be able to optimize your sales funnel if you do not know your target market? Knowing your customers will help you better market your product or service. You may have the best sales funnel in the industry but if it is not hitting the right audience, it does not mean anything.
The best way to identify your target audience is to create a buyer persona. This way, you will have an overview of who your buyers are, how they think, and their motivation for buying something. By creating a buyer persona, you will be able to effectively target prospects at the top of your funnel.
Utilize data from your Google Analytics, social media, and customer database. You should be focusing on the following demographics:
- Age
- Occupation
- Location
- Occupation
- Preferred Social Media Platform
Use the data you gathered to create an outline of your ideal customer. Be on the lookout for recurring patterns and build multiple personas for your target audience. Sure, you can target a million people as your target audience but how many of them will actually buy your product? Creating a buyer persona will help you target customers aggressively so they become paying customers.
2. Analyze Your Landing Pages
Are your landing pages directed to the right people? Although landing pages can be used to promote your product or service or used as a general source of information on your company and what you can offer them, it should be addressing the needs of your customers. For example, if your customer is looking for a “video conferencing” software, then your landing page should be showing that or they would go somewhere else.
Keep in mind that your landing page is where your customers will find out about your product and service offerings. According to Hubspot, the average landing page conversion rate across all industries is 9.7% so if your landing page is not anywhere near that benchmark, you need a lot of work to convert the prospects in your sales funnel. Addressing buyer fears on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%.
Ensure that your landing page is SEO optimized for both regular and Google Maps results to increase its chance of landing in search queries. Thus you can see that landing pages play a vital role in your marketing strategy.
3. Optimize Your Call-to-Action
The call to action is one of the most important elements of your sales funnel. It guides your customers in the direction you want them to go. Whether you want them to join an email list, subscribe to your newsletter, or purchase something, it has to be clear on your call to action. CTAs help remove friction in moving the prospect down the sales funnel.
While CTAs are vital in increasing conversion rates, you also do not want to bombard them with too many calls to action. It can become overwhelming for them which could lead to confusion and frustration. Not all pages should have a call to action. Some pages need one, others require several, and some may not need one at all.
Proper positioning of the call to action is also crucial in converting a prospect. Placing your CTA above the fold offers a wide range of benefits for your website. Placing your call to action offers more visibility compared to a CTA that is below the fold. Surely, your website visitors would not want to scroll down just to find out what the next step on the customer journey is.
4, Use Email Marketing To Nurture Leads
In order to nurture prospects on your sales funnel, you need to use email marketing to try and win customers. Getting their interest is not enough as you also need to get them interested in your products and services. The best way to do this is through email marketing. In the age of messaging apps like Viber and Messenger, email remains to be one of the best-performing sales channels.
86% of professionals give priority to email connections. Email marketing is more cost-effective than the traditional medium of advertising. For a minimal cost, you can target the right audience, communicate with them, and drive sales whenever possible. When done right, email marketing can help your business with the following:
- Build relationships with customers
- Grow brand awareness and trust
- Convert prospects into loyal customers
- Provide value and education to prospects
Make sure that your email marketing strategy is clearly defined to boost your customer base and achieve maximum sales. It will be a waste of time and money on your part if you will just send out emails without proper planning. In addition, you will also struggle for business and growth.
5. Decrease Form Friction
An overly complicated sign-up form can be another component that could be stopping your sales funnel from converting prospects to customers. You want your forms to be as simple as possible. The simpler your form, the more leads it will generate. Your visitors may already have decided to buy from you but if they have to sign up several forms, frustration may set in.
So how many form fields should you have to convert customers visits into sales? Several studies have revealed that forms with a limited amount of fields have a higher conversion rate. Limit your form fields to less than four. Stick to the most important information only. You would not need a phone number if you are only asking the customer to sign up for a newsletter.
To remove friction, you need to make sure that your form is clear and easy to understand. Instead of having them input both the username and email address, use the latter as the username. This would help shorten the number of fields the form would have.
6. Incorporate Trust Signals On Your Website
One reason prospects may not convert is that they do not trust your website that much. It’s either they do not trust your sales team or they find your offer too good to be true. You can remedy this situation by adding trust signals and social proof to your website. Trust signals can help boost the credibility of your website.
Online consumers rely on their intuition more than on logic and rule-based processes when making decisions involving risks. So if the customer does not trust your brand, they would not engage with you. Trust signals give customers the confidence to do business with you. Thus, you need to make sure that your trust signals are prominently displayed on your website.
But just like your CTAs, trust signals are only effective when placed strategically on your website. It will not only help increase your credibility but also boost the customer’s confidence that they made the right decision in buying from you.
7. Be Active on Social Media
In today’s digital age, not being on social media is a huge mistake for any business. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, having a social media presence can help boost your sales funnel. 72% of customers use at least one social media account daily. Social media can help you target prospects at the top of your funnel but is ideal with prospects at every stage.
Social media covers every stage of your sales funnel. It helps you achieve goals such as building brand awareness, drumming up the interest of competitors, achieving direct followers to your website, and directly selling from your shop with an app. You can use social media for launching a remarketing campaign and winning back customers. Social media can be instrumental in reaching out to potential customers through engaging content.
Social media can also help in your data collection efforts. By using the data you collected, you will be able to discover what you can do to influence your customers at every stage of the funnel. Overall, incorporating social media into your sales funnel can make the customer journey much easier. Ultimately, it will help build trust and relationships with your customer.
8. Provide Real-Time Engagement
Being present on social media is not enough if you don’t engage with your prospects. Studies reveal that investing in customer engagement can help increase average revenue by 70%. Investment in customer engagement is expected to double by 2025 so if you are not investing in it yet, you could be losing out on potential customers.
How do you increase customer engagement? Just always be available to help out your customers. If you are not able to do that, then make it easy for your customers to reach out to you if they have questions. For instance, you can use Facebook Messenger to create a digital community where they can interact with you or other customers.
Customers expect brands to listen and understand them. Providing real-time engagement gives them a feeling that you care about what matters to them. They expect fast and timely responses from your end. If they cannot get it from you, they are likely to find it somewhere else.
9. Improve Quality of Page Traffic
If your sales funnel is not converting, then there must be something wrong with the traffic that is being generated by your sales channels. Improving page traffic is important because it could lead to more customers and more sales. When it comes to page traffic, you want to make sure that you get quality visitors. You may have invested in the best website but if it is not generating traffic, then it will not mean anything.
Quality website traffic is important for maximum results. However, you cannot just target anyone who comes to your website. You should be directing your efforts toward customers who will find your product benefits them. When done right, you can build an online presence and look forward to achieving business success. Drive quality traffic to your website to increase your revenue.
Optimize your website with related keywords to help ensure that only the customers who are looking for your products or services will be the ones to visit your website. Knowing the keywords that people used to search for your website will help ensure that more people who truly want your products or service will be the ones to buy.
10. Conduct A/B Testing
There is no such thing as a perfect sales funnel. While it may be currently working at one time, it may not be the case at other times. That is why you need to constantly subject your sales funnel to A/B testing. This will allow you to determine which is working and which is not. Here are some parts of your sales funnel that you can test include:
- Headline/sub-title. This is the first thing people will see and read when they land on a page. Just a little change in the headline can have a huge impact on conversion rates.
- Sales copy. Use and test different features and benefits. Changing the way you share the features can make a difference. For bullet point listing, the first and last bullet are the most important.
- Call to action. Instead of using the old CTAs like “Learn More,” replace them with more unique ones like “Get Started” and others.
- Main image/video. This is another important element that needs to be tested regularly. Change the style of your image and video to see which one performs better. For example, changing photos shot by a camera phone with stock or professional photos.
An optimized sales funnel can go a long way in increasing the conversion rate and growing your potential revenue. Improving your sales funnel can have a huge impact on your overall campaign and business.
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