Why Your Funnels Leak—And What To Do About It
For a business owner with
a solid funnel in place, it’s easy to take a look at the number of subscribers
at each level of the funnel and predict pretty accurately what the sales are
going to 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.
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. Without subscribers, you’ll have no (or very few) sales. 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?
How to fix it: 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. Buy solo ads in related email newsletters.
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. No follow-up emails. No offers to buy more. No related services
or products. Nothing.
How to fix it: 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.
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 to 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.
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? The truth is, there are lots of ways to make
money in your funnel even if you don’t have a product to sell.
How to fix it: 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.
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