Are you having difficulties in converting your prospects to your customers?
You are not alone.
Even the most successful companies continuously work to increase the rate of their conversion and fall short at times. Therefore, it is necessary to discover the mistakes in your sales funnel. However, this is not easy as it involves admitting the mistakes in your marketing methods and improving them.
Here are some of the most significant sales funnel mistakes that businesses make:
1. Failure to Give Your Target Audience a Clear Understanding of Your Business
You have to always remember that first impression matters.
Ensure that your target audience gets a clear understanding of your business, your products and services. They also need to know the benefits that your products and services can provide for them.
You will need great landing pages, that are clearly structured and creates a great impression for your company.
This step alone can generate a massive impact on the way that your target audience gets converted to paying customers.
Researches have shown that most marketers, a massive 92% of them, see landing pages as effective.
Also, as the number of landing page increases, the leads generated increases.
Websites that had more than 30 landing pages generated 7x more leads when compared with sites that had less than 10. Also, Websites that had over 40 landing pages had 12x more leads than those that had less than 10 landing pages.
Users must have a problem-free experience on their arrival to your site. When your website is comfortable, your visitors will stay long enough to get the relevant information on your products and then get converted to paying customers.
Therefore, you should streamline the experience of users on your site so that they can navigate without any hassle.
You should also optimize your website so that your visitors will have a great and enjoyable experience on your site.
Your conversion can be reduced by 7% by as little as a single second’s delay in the loading time for your website.
There are different ways to ensure that your website visitors have a great experience on their arrival to your site. They include:
- Regular A/B testing.
- Regular website optimization. Regular landing page optimization.
These actions will aid in giving your site visitors a solid introduction that will impress them.
2. Not Putting Out a Call to Action or Putting out Weak Calls to Action
If you want to convince your site visitors to buy from you, you will have to tell them clearly.
If you do not write clear instructions for your users to follow, very few users will be inspired by your website.
Therefore, if your sales funnel has no reliable call to action, you will miss a lot of potential prospects.
Giving your target audience a definite and clear call to action is of great importance. However, it is an aspect that is ignored in web design.
How does an excellent call to action encourages user engagement?
It creates urgency, persuading the people of the need to act immediately.
It serves as direct instruction and helps the site visitors to have exact knowledge of the actions they need to take.
It does not need a lot of effort and commitment. Hence, the users will act without having to worry about the potential consequences.
It uses action language and stands out from the text on a website and draws the attention of the users to convert them to customers.
An excellent online sales funnel takes the leads across several calls to action, with each one taking them to the next step and grow in commitment.
For instance, the first step may involve clicking on a link to know more. The next step will involve giving contact details. The last step will then involve making purchases.
You can lead your customers through some steps that will make them buy from you through a solid call-to-action.
3. Not Following Up Your Prospects
It is not every prospect that will convert when after contacting you.
You can view your prospects as golden customers or as time-wasters. However, every prospect falls in the middle of the two extremes.
Some of your prospects will need some persuasion before they can be converted to customers.
Some marketers do not like to push customers that are initially hesitant or uninterested in buying. However, it is crucial to convince them than to write them off.
Most of the leads (about 80%) will need at least five points of contact interaction with a company before they make a purchase.
Therefore, you need a lot of patience and perseverance to convert the prospects to paying customers.
Also, your methods of following up your leads can influence your success. Deal with their concerns quickly and as detailed as possible. Prospects have 9x more likelihood of becoming paid customers if their challenges were handled in less than five minutes of making their requests.
It is also essential to build good relationships with leads. Your company needs to have a human face, whilst being authoritative, informative and helpful.
You have to build a relationship that is based on trust with your prospects. With this, they will discuss their issues willingly with you, and they will follow through with your calls-to-action, and this will ultimately generate sales.
4. Unclear Funnel Progression
Are your sales funnels clear and straightforward? Can customers become confused along the line?
A sales funnel can be unclear in diverse ways:
- If there are a lot of steps for the prospect to take.
- When distractions make website visitors confused.
- When there is no urgency and customers view that progression as unimportant.
If you want your target customers to convert, move them to make a purchase as soon as possible. This includes eliminating distractions from your sales pitch and ensuring that your website is clearly structured.
You need your customers to understand why they need your products and services. So, redundant links or inappropriate content will make it difficult for customers to locate the end of your conversion funnel without being confused.
Storytelling is also important; as human beings learn best via stories. You should take your prospects through a clear narrative journey that handles their concerns and gives answers to their questions on your products.
Therefore, remove or rearrange the distractions on your page to make your website visitors progress to buying from you.
5. Failure to Provide Support at the Middle-of-the-Funnel and at the Bottom-of-the-Funnel
It is tempting to focus on getting a lot of people to your website and then hope that a percentage of them will convert to paying customers.
Here, a lot of work goes into expanding the sales funnel at the top end. Ultimately, this leads to a huge number of drop-off in the middle and the bottom of the funnel.
You need to note that potential customers require different information at the different points of the conversion path. Your content needs to go beyond getting website visitors. It should also help people get answers to questions concerning your products.
Providing content for middle-of-the-funnel involves providing details about the product and answering Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
Your prospects will also need some specific support like giving a breakdown of the process of placing orders and making purchases.
So, identify the content your prospects will require at different stages of the sales funnel, and it will be available and ready at their demand.
If you focus more on the middle of the sales funnel, you may minimize the traffic generated by your content. However, it will lead to steeper sides on your sales funnel and faster conversion.
6. Pursuing the Wrong Audience
When you focus too strictly on creating awareness of your brand, you may bring in many people that are just not interested.
You have to note that a high number of visitors on your website does not necessarily lead to high rate of conversion. However, it is the visitors that want to make a purchase that affects the conversion rate.
Therefore, attracting a broad audience just for increased visitors’ stats will result in wasting your time. This is because you will deal with people that are merely interested in the content you put out, instead of your products.
You have to ensure that you are targeting the audience that has the high likelihood to convert to paying customers.
To find these people, you need to carry out research:
- You will have to study your client base to know who they are, their needs, and what drew them to your business.
- You need to also carry out more extensive research to know what the general needs of the target customers and the communities that they go to frequently.
- You can also look at the people that your competitors are targeting. Then, you can go after them, or you can look for a related audience that has slightly diverse needs.
Targeting the right audience will take some time on planning. Also, when you focus on the right audience, you have fewer visitors on your site. However, most of these visitors will prove to be useful, and you will be able to focus on the people that actually deserve your time.
7. Misreading or Not Paying Attention to Analytics Data
This is another mistake that a lot of companies get into when attracting people to their business. Many businesses fail to correctly use the data they have at their disposal.
Analytics tools look challenging to understand. However, if you fail to study the numbers of a sales campaign, it will be hard to identify the areas that need improvement.
The data available and the statistics in many analytics tools is remarkable. When they are well studied, you will be able to identify patterns that are not recognized easily.
For example, a Google Analytics tool that helps users to view the figures on online users’ behaviours with different browsers.
A study showed that a website had a higher conversion rate from visitors with high-resolution browsers. Also, a low-resolution browser increased the bounce rates of the users.
This example showed that in this specific case, issues with web design caused people that have older browsers could not engage properly with the website. Consequently, a lot of conversions were lost.
There are a lot of guides that are available online, which can help you to fully understand the results of your analytics. By using these tools, you will be able to discover the aspects of your sales funnel process that needs to be revamped.
8. Not Taking Advantage of Marketing Opportunities
There are different ways to draw prospects to your brand.
Some businesses think that content marketing only involves posting their content online and hope that people will find it. However, that is not the case. With the noise and different messages competing for attention online, you need to advertise to help your prospects find you.
Some of the ways that you can draw attention to your content and help your prospects to discover your business are:
- Social media platforms
- Through a connection with major market influencers
- Engaging with essential communities
Other offline methods of attracting customers that are often disregarded include:
- Print advertising: This is often overlooked. Therefore, it is a great way of standing out from the multitude.
- Having a face to face meetings with potential clients: This has proven to be one of the most effective types of marketing for B2B organizations.
You have to note that sticking to the old, familiar ways of getting new customers will not suffice. There is a need to experiment and seek new ideas to attract the right target audience to your business.
9. Regarding a Sale as the End of the Funnel
You have been able to convince your target audience to visit your site.
You have shown them the advantages of your products and services, with some persuasion, they finally bought your product or service.
Now you feel like you are done with them.
You congratulate yourself. Job well done, right?
Wrong.
When you regard sales as the last step in your sales funnel, you will be making a huge mistake.
If you were able to convert a prospect to a customer, it means that you have to take them further on the journey.
You will have to motivate people to be lifelong converts of your business. This means that they have to continue to buy from you. Also, you will have to convince them to invite other people to partake of your products, thereby making them brand evangelists for your company. Converting a one-off customer to a lifelong customer is not an easy task. It can prove as difficult as when you first convinced them to buy from you. However, they have already started a pattern of purchasing behavior.
Therefore, your main responsibility here is to ensure that they keep moving in that direction. You will have to ensure that you do not end your marketing endeavours once you have made sales. This is to encourage lifelong support of your company.
Therefore, you have to give support and put out content aimed at showing customers how to get the best from their purchase. This is to ensure that they do not eventually think that they have wasted their money on your products. Also, you will need to give high-quality customer support so that if anything goes amiss, the customer will still feel valued by your brand.
It is also crucial that your social media campaigns also reach out to already existing customers and potential buyers. This gives your users space for them to discuss your products and become a community.
These actions will increase the likelihood of having the customers buy from you repeatedly. Also, they will tell other people about your products.
10. Lack of Patience
This is one of the biggest errors of marketers with new ideas and techniques.
You have to note that it takes some time to build something great.
Also, no business can succeed without giving their marketing ideas some time to succeed.
Sometimes, companies will try to use attempt marketing strategies that have been made popular by bigger companies. However, in the absence of instant, remarkable results, the company will give up on the plan, calling it a failure.
However, they ignore the reality that even the most successful ad campaign does not start off immediately. Many times, campaigns will need to grow before they can produce successful results.
Also, some companies discard their content plans simply because they did not record instant success. Most times, this comes with the inability to distribute content properly and to advertise the products of the company.
However, there is a need for balance here. Moving from an idea to another without giving any the chance to become established will lead to having only the beginning of campaigns in place. Therefore, the most essential step in building an effective sales funnel is to give each strategy enough time to launch.
Although there is no rule on the time that a campaign will take before becoming successful. However, you might have to allocate three times longer than the time you initially projected for it before you can change it. This way, you would have allocated enough time to the sales funnel to produce the required results.
These points are among the most popular mistakes that most companies make, which can destroy their conversions.
You can check your sales funnel, and if you are guilty of any of these mistakes, you can improve them with these points stated above.
