Whether you call it a sales funnel or a marketing funnel – the purpose is to bring in new leads who have a need for whatever you are offering.
These are a few of the pitfalls that prevent your funnel from working as well as it could.
1: A lead magnet that has a wide appeal
Most people understand what a lead magnet is – but not everyone understands how highly targeted it needs to be. A general lead magnet will attract lots of people to your list, but it won’t bring in your ideal clients or customers.
A lead magnet that is targeted to attract your ideal customer will ensure that, when you move people along to the next stage, they’re open to it – because you’ll be offering them something they actually want – which will increase your sales.
2: No nurturing of your subscribers
Giving people something free that has great value for them is only the first step. If that’s all you do before you start sending sales messages, your list will start unsubscribing. As the saying goes ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer’; similarly one item of value doesn’t make a customer!
Nurturing is easy – and there are various ways to do it.
My advice would be to set up a series of automated emails (autoresponders) that are triggered by the initial sign up – so once done you can leave them to work away in the background. I often take the main points from the lead magnet and sent a series of email over a couple of months – every few days – reminding people to download it first, then highlighting the main points and encouraging them to take action.
Another way to keep delivering value is to send an email to your list linked to each new blog your write. You can probably get away with this once a week – or put two blogs into one email every month or so. As long as you write great value material in your blog posts, you’ll keep giving your list excellent, quality material.
3: Start without the funnel mapped out
There’s nothing wrong with launching your lead magnet without having ‘built’ the rest of your funnel – BUT that often means that the follow up is either long delayed, by which time people have forgotten the great value they started out getting OR it doesn’t happen as life/work gets in the way.
Good practice is to have a clear map of the four or five levels of your funnel mapped out, what you’ll offer at each level, how you’ll engage your subscribers, what the upsells will be and how they’ll be delivered as well as the nurturing focus for at least the top two levels.
This will ensure that the effort and time you invest in building your sales funnel will actually pay off in converted subscribers.
