A sales funnel is an essential part of your marketing plan to achieve the desired results. It is a map of a customer’s journey that starts from the first interaction with your brand all the way to the final sale. You can call it a chain reaction, which makes it important that every domino is placed right, so everything goes just as you expected.
In simple words, your sales funnel the core of your marketing strategy that decides your online success. However, many businesses screw their sales funnel, failing and eventually vanishing from the market.
We’ve conducted research on the different kinds of mistakes that most businesses make. To help make things going better, we bring to you the top 5 sales funnel mistakes to avoid.
Not Tracking the Data
As a business owner, it is essential to have a big picture in mind while preparing your sales and growth strategies, but the fact here is that most marketers focus only on the big-picture metrics like page views, bounce rate, etc. There are many other important metrics that must be taken seriously, like return visitors, exit pages, and scroll patterns, which often get ignored. These figures may seem irrelevant but can make a massive difference to the success or failure of your sales funnel.
Of course, the big-picture metrics are essential; the smaller metrics frequently provide much more actionable insight that can be implemented to your strategies to improve your sales funnel.
For example, if the overall conversion rate on your website is 1%, you have one person out of every 100 of your visitors who becomes a customer. The metrics don’t give you a clear picture of the specific areas of your marketing automation strategy that need improvement. It is important to discover the source of your traffic and the most trending key phrases that attract the most traffic to your website to customize your sales strategies to get more sales and traffic.
Too Many Steps
Every action taken by the people requires a decision. For example, if they click on the “contact us” button on your landing page, this means that they liked the qualities of your services or products. And if they don’t like what they read or see on your landing page, they are likely to jump back or move to a competitor.
Many businesses make the mistake of making the process lengthy for visitors to reach the desired page. Remember that we are living in an era where internet users are the least patient. If they have to click more than three times to reach the desired page, they’re likely to drop the idea.
If you are using “paid search” services to bring traffic to your landing page, and if 50% of them jump back, you are likely to face losses through your investments. It is smart to make the process short and simple for them to reach the desired page to achieve maximum returns.
Your Copy Sells Features, Not Solutions
Just imagine! You are looking for a product to deal with your knee pain, and you land at a website that describes what the product is and what ingredients it has. However, there is nothing mentioned about how these ingredients help deal with knee pain and how much time it will take to reduce the symptoms by using a particular product.
What will you do in such a condition? You will jump back and visit another web page!
Many websites make the same mistake of being focused on the features of their services and products, instead of providing solutions. When selling a product or services, the best part possible is to sell it to your audience by the merits of its benefits. Remember that your customers don’t want to know what it is, but they want to know how it can help them.
One option to achieve your results is to mention the “Reviews” from your past customers on the product page or identify the most common pain points of the customers and mention how your product helped them deal with it.
Using the Wrong CRM
One of the most common mistakes done by most businesses when maintaining a sales funnel is using the wrong CRM. The options are endless these days; all you have to do is to understand each Content Management System (CRM) and make a smart decision, based upon your requirements.
Very often, marketers go with the first tool that they come across on the market or whatever they have already heard about. Using the wrong CRM for a sales funnel results in the waste of time, money, and resources as they endeavor to adapt their sales funnel to their CRM.
Marketing & Sales Departments Not Working Together
The biggest reason for the failure of most sales funnels across the world is no proper coordination between the marketing and sales departments. Here is what usually happens in most companies; the marketing department brings as many leads as they can, while the sales complain that the marketing team is more focused on lead quantity, not quality. This all results in a mess as the marketing team protests this saying that the sales team is not doing its job correctly – the result is revenue loss.
This is a very common problem. The best way to deal with it is to resolve inter-departmental disputes. Communicate with both the teams on a common platform and start talking things over. Only if both sides understand the functionality of each other, they can help the business grow.
Conclusion
Launching a successful sales funnel and business growth strategy isn’t rocket science. All it takes is some time on research, analysis, and understanding of the behavior of the end customers. A well-organized sales funnel, the core of every online business, without which all marketing strategy is doomed to failure.
So, make sure to avoid the above-mentioned mistakes that are done by most businesses to ensure having a significant revenue growth with expected leads and sales online!
