Do you know when your funnel's not a funnel?

If you’re in business (any business at all…) you have a sales funnel.  You may not call it as such, but you have a general pipeline of people who you reach, warm up through interaction, and then make sales to.  This is a sales funnel in the most basic format.

In the online space, when you have a business sales funnel, it usually is made up of a way to gather potential buyers (often ads), a way to warm your leads up (often emails, live videos, or social media), and then a way to make the sales (often on the phone, or on a really solid sales page with a payment button).

But sometimes, you think you have a funnel, and it’s not actually a funnel.  How do you know if this is you?

It leaks

Do you regularly track the email-level metrics for your sales funnel?  Or maybe you use Manychat or another chatbot. But do you know how many people come in and how many of those potential clients actually interact with your broadcasts?  If not, start looking at this.

If people come in, and don’t make it through, your funnel is leaking.  (♪♪🎵There’s a hole in the buck-ket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in the buck-ket Dear Liza, a hole...♪♪) So you’ll want to take a look and think about why people are dropping off at the point they are.  Is it because your tone changes? Maybe you changed up your main message inadvertently in the particular broadcast, and people were all, ‘I’m out.’ But there’s a gold nugget in there for you to find, so take a look.  What you’ll find could take your funnel from spilling out to spilling cash.

Next, take a look at the specific emails people are clicking on.  You can see this email by email. If you have a lot of emails with zero clicks, you’ll want to investigate that.  It could be as simple as you forgot to add a CTA (call-to-action, or what you want them to do next) for them to click.  If you do have a link for them to click, do you have ONE specific CTA? If you have multiples, people sometimes can’t decide which direction to go.  Simplify your strategy in this case, and make sure you have a single CTA. If you’ve got only one link for people to click, and you’re still not getting any clicks, you’ll want to do some investigation around the interest of your people in what you’re giving them to click, because there is likely a disconnect.

It’s empty

The second way your funnel isn’t really a funnel is that it’s empty!  Yikes! Hurry and get some people in there! Empty funnels make no sales.  Take a look at how you’re sending people into your funnel. Are you running a Facebook or Google ad?  Are you getting sign-ups at events you attend or present at? Where can these people come from?

So once you’ve got some people coming in - what happens?  Do you have emails written to greet them as they join? Did you publish the emails, or are they sitting in draft mode?  Yes, I see this with clients. They sometimes write beautiful and compelling email copy, and then it sits there in draft.  In draft, it’s not sent, and no one ever gets to read it. :)

If you find you have nothing to greet people when they join, you’ll want to write a short series of welcoming emails to tell people who you are, what you stand for, and what your business actually does.  It’s up to you if you choose to sell things in these emails. (I don’t believe there is a blanket right or wrong answer to anything, you’ll find out by testing your audience.)

One last place to look if you’ve got no one coming through your funnel, is...do you have all of the pieces connected to each other?  Does your subscription form link to the list where you have the emails set up? Are you tagging people the right way so they get the right emails?  These are all pieces that can make or break your funnel. Yes, the devil is often in the details - it is technology afterall. Frankly, if you’re running software, it will do EXACTLY what you tell it to do, especially when you tell it wrong.  One can only hope for AI to catch up and figure this out for us, so that our software will do what we think we want it to do, not what we tell it to do.

It’s not converting

And, thirdly, your funnel is not a funnel if it’s not converting people.  Go back to part one above, and check on your numbers all over the place. Yep, I know data is eye-glazing (when are you going to hire a business manager to do that part for you?), but knowing your numbers is so critical if you want your business to work.

Let’s say you have people coming in, and maybe they stay, but they’re not buying.  What does that mean? You’re either putting people through who aren’t a good fit for you (wasting your ad spend), or you’re not clear on who you serve and how you serve them.  This is the killing blow to most businesses. And, for many people, this is HARD. You started your business to help change the world, right?! Yes, but you can’t change EVERYONE at once.  Start smaller. Narrow down who you talk to. “Women Business Owners” is NOT specific enough. Get into the nitty gritty. Try something more like women business owners between age 30-35 with 2 kids and 2 dogs, whose favorite TV show is Grey’s Anatomy, and they like to exercise.  Feels small, right? But if you can reach them, that’s your gold mine. After you’re good at getting to those women (remember, each year new ladies will come into that age range, and while you may have to choose a different show as pop culture changes, there will always be someone new to talk to), THEN you can broaden your audience.

OK, now that you have three ways to improve your sales funnel conversions, your mission should you choose to accept it is to actually take a look at your process.  If that feels heavy to you, its OK. Book a call with me, and we can do it together.