As I said earlier, your third funnel might be 60-70% perfect and the other 30-40% can be achieved only through constant and consistent … optimization. In other words, you’ll have to think -untiringly, insistently and break-free – about the finer points of improving your conversion funnel over time.

Let me help you with a few essential tips:

1. Simplicity

The more steps you have, the more you delay potential conversions and sales. If your funnel is too deep, you are going to leave more time for your customers to reconsider an intended purchase!

Yes, you need some time to earn their trust, but you should not give them enough time to drop off your funnel completely! If you notice that too many prospects are dropping off – especially if it happens at a certain step – you should definitely simplify your conversion funnel!

2. Competition

We have already discussed about the importance of knowing your competitors. While you are constantly monitoring them, occasionally you may find some weaknesses, gaps, unfilled needs, etc that can be efficiently incorporated in your sales funnel. Take what they do poorly and do it significantly better! Simple as that …

3. Branding

Since we are talking about a multi-step process it’s very important to maintain your messaging and branding as consistent as possible throughout the whole process, in every stage of your conversion funnel. In other words, you’ll have to promote the very same values and benefits across every step of your sales funnel to keep your messaging consistent and powerful.

Of course, you can always insert new thoughts or ideas into your funnel, but you should never change or alter your dominant message and your important brand elements.

4. Affiliate links

As I already said, using affiliate products in form of cross-sells is admitted or even recommended. But using them excessively or aggressively including affiliate links in other funnel elements (for example, affiliate links added to your landing page!) will hurt both your personal image and your conversion funnel.

The truth is that any inadequately used affiliate link is a potential friction point and an additional “risk” factor that can decrease your own sales. The most important rules:

• Always put your customer first!

• Make sure that the affiliate product you are recommending really enhances your own products.

• Promote only products that you really know or even better, you have actually tried already.

5. List segmentation

Once a prospect has already become a buyer you should immediately transfer the given person from your prospects list to your customers list! Why? Because they – understandably – will become annoyed if they have already bought your product, but continue to receive emails or promotional materials inviting them to buy the very same product or service. So, get them onto your buyer list and offer them other valuable products or services that can enhance or enrich the benefits of the product you just sold.

More than that – if you really want to maximize the efficiency of your funnel – you should continuously migrate your prospects to multiple different – specific – lists as they progress through your conversion funnel. All you need is a reliable autoresponder.

6. Multiple landing pages

Having separate landing pages for each stage is vital to capturing the largest possible share of targeted prospects regardless where they are in the buying process:

• Awareness; at this point they don’t have an opinion yet, so the main goal of your landing page should be to demonstrate your expertise in a way that can benefit them.

• Interest; by this point they may be in the market for your offer, but they haven’t started to seriously analyze it. Your landing page should be used to develop further the original idea presented in the previous stage. Your goal is to pull them deeper into the funnel, so you’ll have to offer them some high quality incentives (free trials, free downloads, etc) that contains enough helpful information to increase their appetite.

• Consideration; at this point they are almost ready to do business with you, therefore your landing page should focus on creating even more confidence by mentioning and underlining additional benefits, advantages, service safety seals, unique guaranties, etc.

• Intent; by now they already know that you are the one they want to do business with, so you’ll have to give them a final push. Your landing page should contain testimonials, social proofs, user reviews, etc that will help you to convince them to take the that craved action.

7. Different price points

Your ultimate goal is to create a solid base of recurring life-time customers. If you have managed to establish yourself as an authority in your field or you already have a list segment with satisfied customers who have already purchased your products or services, you’ll be able to create longer, deeper funnels in order to guide your customers upwards through different increasing price points.

There are two essential rules when you are trying to create a smooth flow from one given price point to a higher price point:

• Make sure that the next price point feel like a very logical step.

• The higher priced offers are placed throughout your funnel consistently, at regular and well-balanced intervals.

Obviously, in a longer, deeper funnel you are going to have even more drop-outs and leak-points. The trick is to elegantly lead these people out of the funnel towards one of your other revenue generating places. This could be the entry point of another funnel or a highly relevant similar offer, one that is in the given price range of course. If you are really good, you can even make it seem like a favor and you’ll be able to keep these people as recurring customers.

A few important final thoughts

Any optimization process should rely on rock-solid data. This is why regular testing is vital if you want to bring in a continuously increasing percentage of paying customers. Using different design elements, changing the messaging of a given funnel stage, adding or removing certain funnel levels, etc are excellent ways to test new approaches.

Evidently, not all of your new ideas will bring instant or better results, but every single test will give you the opportunity to learn more about your business. This is how you’ll find out what works and what doesn’t work for your sales funnels.

As I already said, your first funnel won’t make you rich overnight. Try to start with a simple funnel – for example social media posts pointing to a landing page – and start gathering data from your super-simple funnel to figure it out how to improve it or develop it further. Having drop-off at every funnel stage is absolutely normal, so don’t panic and don’t over react! Try to understand why it happens. Try to get a comprehensive view of your prospects’ habits, psychology and path to sales. And always keep in mind that …

Conversion funnels are about generating seemingly logical decisions by leveraging basic human emotions.

Finally, use your test data to identify and to remove any potential barriers or friction points that can stop – or delay – people from progressing through your conversion funnel. The less friction the prospects encounter, the more likely they will end up by accepting your offer.

Here are the 4 most common sources of friction and some simple yet very useful tips that will help you to avoid these bottlenecks:

• Too much or too less information; don’t overload your prospects with too many information in a given funnel stage, but give them enough information to move forward. A shorter content will work better for low-scrutiny offers and situations where is little commitment, and a longer content is accepted or recommended for high-scrutiny offers where there is a higher interest level. Just keep things simple, make your offer and pricing easy to understand as possible and use your common sense to find the happy medium.

• Unnatural flow of information; a conversion funnel is a multi-step process where every stage is logically connected with the previous level. A confusing or incoherent logical thread will produce a higher abandon rate. Place your concise key-information strategically – in every stage – to create the needed impact in important decision-making moments.

• Too deep or complicated funnel; make your first offer extremely attractive, value packed and easy as possible to buy. Once they have their first positive experience, will be much easier for you to get repeated purchases using deeper funnels.

• Lack of trust trust and authority; you’ll have to build up a verifiable reputation an a solid trust through customer reviews, social proofs, testimonials, trust seals, outstanding security guaranties and safety seals, generous and fair return policies, etc.

Final conclusion

The concepts covered in this course are the most important uprights for any online marketing strategy.

Without efficient lead generation methods and avenues, a clear business concept, a data-driven customer strategy and an efficient conversion funnel there is no such thing as online marketing.

If you want to start an online marketing business, please take your time to digest and fully understand these elements, because all these factors are literally vital for your success.

And that's it my friends!

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