Your Sales Funnel is Leaking. Here’s How You Can Fix It.

For a business owner with a solid funnel in place, it’s easy to take a look at the number of people in each stage of the funnel and predict pretty accurately what the sales are going to be from day to day or week to week.

If you’ve got a funnel in place, though, and your numbers aren’t looking great, chances are you have a leak somewhere. Your funnel has a hole (or two or three…) where prospects or subscribers are falling through. There are four common causes for funnel leaks, and once you spot them, they’re pretty easy to fix.

Not enough traffic. The heart of your sales funnel is the traffic you bring in. Without visitors to your website or opt-in pages, you’ll have no subscribers. Without subscribers, you’ll have no (or very few) sales. Without sales, you’ll have no business. Yet this is where a lot of people struggle. How can you get more eyes on your content and more subscribers into your funnel?

How to fix it: You could read a book on traffic generation, but here are some tips: Use good SEO to encourage search engines to rank your content well. Use paid ads to drive targeted traffic to highly relevant pages. Recruit joint venture partners and affiliates to promote your offers. Buy ads in related email newsletters or on blogs your audience faithfully reads. Be present and active in the places where your ideal reader hangs out, whether that’s on social media, in niche forums, or at live events. Yes, in this increasingly online-obsessed world, face-to-face still has an impact.

No follow-up. This is a leaky funnel mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make. They spend a lot of time and energy setting up a great landing page and driving traffic to it, they deliver the goods to their subscribers, and then…nothing. No follow-up emails. No offers to buy more. No related services or products. Nothing.

How to fix it: Before you spend time building that opt-in page or offer, be sure you have an ultimate offer to promote, or those subscribers you so carefully collected will end up costing you money instead of earning it back.

No call-to-action. This typically happens right at the top of the funnel. Your blog posts, social media content, podcasts, YouTube videos—everything you offer for free—must have some kind of call-to-action, or it’s all just wasted energy (if your goal is landing paid business, that is). Your call-to-action can be as simple as “Subscribe to my YouTube channel” or “Follow me on Facebook for more tips,” but it must be there.

How to fix it: Every time you write a blog post or an email, as yourself, “What do I want my readers to do when they’re done reading/listening/watching this?” That becomes your call to action.

No product offers. When you’re just starting out, this can be a problem. You know you need to be building a mailing list, but with nothing to offer them, what’s the point? The truth is, there are lots of ways to make money in your funnel even if you don’t have a product to sell.

How to fix it: Promote affiliate offers. No matter what industry you’re in, there are a variety of tools and products your readers need. Find those tools, sign up for the affiliate programs, and recommend them to your readers. Not only will your readers thank you for pointing them in the right direction, but you’ll earn a little cash, too. That said, be strategic – promoting any and everything makes you look scattered (and desperate). Only share things that really make sense for your audience.

Got a leaky funnel? With a few tweaks and some attention paid to your follow-up sequences, chances are you can fix those holes and increase your profits in no time.

Need help fixing it? I help entrepreneurs and small business owners streamline their systems and processes and put some finesse on their funnels. Contact me today to book a free discovery call.