Quick Tips: Optimizing Your Growth Funnels For A Lot More Sales

You’ve gathered prospects, turned them into leads and have been pumping them full of awesome content.

Now it’s time to start cashing in by optimizing the late funnel segment of your marketing efforts.

Let’s go over a couple of things.

Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship with a prospective client regardless of their timing to buy. But the overall purpose of lead nurturing is to land a sale when they are ready to buy.

Anytime a prospect, website visitor, or referral makes a move to stay in contact with you (Facebook, email newsletter, etc.) they can be considered part of your funnel or a “lead”.

Offering potential customers that aren’t ready to buy a reason to keep in touch with you can pay off big time, but only if you recognize the best time to call them to action.

Providing a continual stream of valuable content is great for your readers, but there’s an endgame, it has to be planned in advance and well timed. That’s what we’re going over.

Ready to turn leads into customers? Let’s go.

• Know as much about your leads as possible when they enter your funnel.
• Deliver high value content with seamless Call’s to Action to move leads downstream.
• Remove doubt by offering strategic answers, testimonials, and promises.
• Be persistent.
• Roll out the red carpet to retain and up-sell customers.

Start With Who’s In Your Funnel

Selling your lead starts before any other marketing efforts.

If you don’t have a good grasp on the leads you’re getting, then there’s no way to get a predictable close rate. Too many businesses have a great offer to turn prospects into leads, but the overall marketing is too broad.

You can eliminate this by having a few detailed buyer personas.

Products don’t sell themselves, but content does. Having your funnel full of people or companies from all walks of life means you can’t provide one size fits all content and expect consistent results.

Take your time and create your buyer personas based on data that best fits your brand.

Deliver Value and Seamless CTA’s

This could be two sections, but they really have to go together.

Now that a lead is in the funnel they should be getting content that has been created based on any number of factors and segmentation triggers. While it’s a great idea to offer “pitch free” emails and social posts, you shouldn’t go without some sort of call to action.

Once leads are excited by the value you just provided, they are ready for you to give them something to do.

You think the guy playing the violin on the street corner is playing for free? No, but it doesn’t take a genius to notice his instrument case sitting next to him full of dollar bills. If you can sit and listen to that beautiful music until the end without putting in a dollar (or at least clap if you don’t carry cash), I don’t know how you sleep at night.

You are giving the lead an instruction that is meant to provoke an immediate response. Be careful, this can be tricky. Being too pushy or forceful can scare some potential clients away.

Be like violin man, put a related CTA politely near your super valuable content that moves a lead closer to a landing page and that much closer to becoming a sale. Here are a couple of ways to do it.

• Side Column: Use the content beside your blog posts to push important offers that relate to the content on the page.
• Social Media: Whether it be a valuable link on your Instagram profile or linking your newsletter to Facebook, use the tools social offers for CTA.
• P.S. Email: Quite possibly your most valuable “subtle” CTA. Put whatever you’re working on (with link) in the p.s. section of a purely value email. Some will even click on this without reading the content, if it’s enticing enough.
• Pop-Ups: Love ‘em or hate ‘em they’re conversion rates are undeniable.

Common Calls to Action include convincing leads to sign up for a trial offer, try a free demo, watch a video, scan a QR code or call your office. Another widely used tactic is to provide value for a quick response such as ‘50% off for the next three days only’.

Any leads that have followed through on a call to action are now officially at a lower stage of your sales funnel which could prompt a new set of content, a consultation, and eventually the sale.

You have nurtured them to a point where they have actually made a move toward you and not the other way around.

This is HUGE!

You are almost done in your quest to turn lead nurturing into sales. There’s just one more mountain that lies at the tip of your funnel:

Eliminating all Remaining Doubt

If you have leads responding to your CTA’s, but hanging out in the funnel without buying, they may have doubts.

In order to fully eliminate any lingering doubts that your leads have; put yourself in their shoes.

What are the thoughts they are having that are preventing them from making the deal?

Here are a few of the easiest ways to remove any roadblocks in a buyer’s mind.

Common Concerns

This is another place where your data and analytics could come in handy. Your leads, if segmented properly, probably have many of the same concerns and you can even talk them off of the fence by providing answers to these common fears in an email or video.

Guarantees

Everyone likes an easy out if they don’t like a product or service. Depending on your product you may offer different guarantees.

Example: A free trial may convert better than a money back guarantee on a software product.

Social Proof

Providing proof in the form of testimonials or social media compliments are a really powerful tool to help people realize the benefits you can bring them.

Learning Curve

A common problem is the worry of being left high and dry after the deal is done. Let clients know you want to foster a long-term relationship by telling them about your customer onboarding (more on that in a minute).

Closer Tip: These doubt removal interactions are a great time to add powerful CTA’s and schedule sales calls. This is a time to be more persistent.

After the Sale, Build Customer Loyalty

Now it’s time to roll out the red carpet.

2016 will see an increase in the month to month, try it out first and switch the instant you’re not happy, economy. Not to mention that buyers will likely increase the amount of time it takes to make a purchasing decision. These trends mean one thing for you.

You can’t afford to lose current revenue.

Building a post-purchase funnel is a great way to onboard customers with timely and tailored content as well as increase the lifetime value by offering other products and services to existing clients.

Successful communication after a purchase isn’t easy. You have to, of course, thank your new clients. Everything (for a while) after that has to be catered to them and their current purchase before offering a new purchase.

Selling a product or service takes a lead nurturing campaign, but selling your brand takes multiple efforts and time, which is why this method isn’t used often.

Now it’s time to take action, create content, and close.