Sales funnels guide your potential customers to a buying decision through a series of landing pages, email campaigns, videos, offers & payment methods. A sales funnel is built ONLY for 1 specific purpose – the purpose you want the visitors to land on your page & take any action on a particular subject without getting lost in other things on the page.
A typical sales funnel is designed to keep bringing prospective visitors closer to converting into paying customers & then being loyal consumers of your product/service offering. The diagram below visualises the various stages of a customer’s journey inside the sales funnel from the outer ring & ultimately to the innermost ring where they convert:
Why do you even need to optimize your sales funnel in the first place?
Marketing & sales go hand-in-hand. Modern-day performance marketing efforts is all about analysing the data of your hypothesis, A/B testing your results, making the desired changes & optimising your operations accordingly.
We don’t think anyone would disagree with what was just said. There absolutely is no sure-shot proven formula that is ‘one size fits all’. Marketing is all about following a proactive approach to fetch the best possible results!
Similarly, there is no perfect sales funnel for anyone. A sales funnel might work for your online course today, and it might not work tomorrow. So, optimising sales strategy is the best way to keep the leads to keep on converting.
Some of the few crystal-clear benefits of an optimized sales funnel:
- Helps you procure for your business the right B2B marketing strategy that is targeting the right prospective audience!
- Builds an understanding of multiple reasons why your product/service is not up to the mark for your prospective customers, hence allowing you to build suitable services & target the right audience.
- Gives you a certain edge over your competitors to optimise the user’s journey better than theirs & convert better.
So without an optimised sales funnel, you would be jumping off a cliff & hoping to make a safe landing regarding your leads converting into customers.
How to optimize your sales funnel?
Now that you have understood what sales funnels are & why do you need to optimise the landing page for your online academy, let us look at the best optimisation strategies that you can cater to your personalised sales funnels:
Understand your audience, DILIGENTLY
First things first, how on earth are you even planning to optimise your sales funnel when you don’t know enough about your audience in the first place? The more you understand your current customer & prospective customer base, the better you will be able to market your product/service to them & convert them into paying customers.
For that to happen, you will first need to build an in-depth buyer persona of your prospective customers & understand them in & out. Mentioned below are just some of the points that you should identify.
| Personal Details | Male/ Female, Married/ Single, Number of family members |
| Demographics | Age, financial standing etc. |
| Career Background | Seniority, experience, Job Title and responsibility, Career Goals, KRAs, etc. |
| Career Goals | Money, Recognition, Industry awards, Promotions, Etc. |
| Values and Attitude | Eco-friendly, Human Rights, Education, Status etc. |
| Personal Interests | Sports, Hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes etc. |
| Bottlenecks | Routine, attention span, access etc. |
You will be wasting your precious time & money if you have built a sales funnel targeting the wrong buyer personas. So, dedicate a good enough amount of time to building a dedicated buyer persona & then start optimising a sales funnel as per the need!
For a detailed buyer persona, you can also access an amazing free tool: Make My Buyer Persona by HubSpot
- Pump up your landing page game
A well-built landing page is the best team member of a highly optimised sales funnel. Why? Because it can possibly include everything you would need to optimise your sales funnel for high conversions. The following are 3 of the most important elements to be incorporated in a landing page to optimise sales funnels:
- Quality content
Good quality content works every time! Ensure the copies are on point, be it your primary promise or things as simple as subheadings. Having said that, the layout & design of your created content are crucial too. Make sure not only your content is compelling, but the way in which they are designed is appealing to the eye too!
- Make use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO involves creating content along the lines of multiple guidelines by Google so that it effectively ranks on Google’s search engine. The purpose of this is to drive traffic to your sales funnel, collect leads & generate sales.
When built properly, an SEO strategy works wonders for you. Even though it can take a bit of time to see the desired results from SEO, it is still worth the wait if you have an effective long-term strategy in mind!
Social proofs, testimonials & case studies
Prove & validate your product with the help of multiple social proofs, & just don’t be shy in this segment. You can incorporate social proofs via Video Sales Letters (VSLs), Graphs, Charts, and customer testimonials & success stories!
We want you to be completely bang on with as many case studies & social proofs as you can fetch for your online course business & BUILD that CREDIBILITY.
- Build an email database & capture the lost leads using Email-Marketing
Even well-designed sales funnels experience several leaks, and YOU, as a sales team master, should NOT leave the probability of converting even those leads into paying customers.
But what is the best way to do it? Email marketing! Best marketing practices include Email Marketing as a very important element to re-target the prospective audience & induce them again to buy the service offering through the sales funnel.
This helps drive lost and cold traffic to your sales teams that convert into paying customers!
Recommended Read: How to build & Nurture an email database for Exponential sales?
- A/B testing – MOST IMPORTANT
Optimizing a sales funnel is all about ‘Launch, Test, analyse, Launch again & repeat!’
A/B testing your results is the most CRUCIAL part of optimizing a sales funnel. Why?
As we said earlier, there is no single sure short formula for the perfect marketing optimization strategy. The entire bunch runs on trial & error with the help of multiple data sets! Hence, A/B testing comes to the rescue as a definitive tool to understand the feedback of your sales process & then make the necessary changes accordingly.
A/B testing helps you narrow down your alternatives & choose the best one between them so that you can optimize the funnel for better results fairly easily.
In Conclusion
No matter how laborious & time-consuming it may sound, optimizing your sales funnel is not a 1-day task. However, apart from all the elements that help you optimize your sales funnel, the most important one is TESTING!
A sales funnel can never be called an optimized one if it is not regularly tested, and the results are not regularly analyzed
With whatever you just learned – keep testing, keep analyzing & keep refining to optimize your sales funnel!
