How to Identify Leaks in Your Sales Funnel

Have you been experiencing difficulties with hitting your sales targets or engaging with high-potential leads throughout your marketing funnel? Often, these missed targets are the result of drop-offs throughout your conversion funnel. However, many people are still unaware of how they can enhance their digital marketing funnel to connect with leads, identify top prospects, and generate online engagement and sales.

Comprehensive funnel analysis allows you to streamline your sales funnel by identifying drop-offs and using this information to guide your conversion rate optimization activities. The most effective funnel analysis identifies the ideal user experience across each stage of your funnel, so you can effectively chart their user journey across key touchpoints.

The Sales Funnel and Why it Matters

According to Econsultancy, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates, while the remaining 78% are left in subpar relationships with their overall performance. For the latter of the two, a streamlined and engaging sales funnel could help to improve user experience and overall revenue performance.

A well-rounded sales funnel helps organizations accomplish a variety of goals, which change as a potential lead is directed through a multi-faceted funnel strategy. Optin Monster defines these goals as:

• Attracting a community that may not be familiar with your business
• Engaging with that audience who now knows and understands your business
• Educating the prospects who would like to purchase your product or service
• Converting customers who are ready to exit your sales funnel and make a purchase

Once a person has crossed the line from lead to customer, it’s important that you maintain a healthy B2C relationship to prompt repeat sales and brand loyalty.

Remember: a sales funnel is a series of stepping stones that ultimately lead to a sale, not one big jump from engagement to purchase. More often than not, a brand or business won’t plan for the small conversion needed to successfully lead a prospect through the conversion funnel.

What is Funnel Analysis?

Your digital marketing strategy is only as strong as your sales funnel. By conducting a thorough funnel analysis, you can gain insights into when and where your prospects are dropping out of your sales funnel and gain insight into the changes needed to increase your overall conversion rates. As mentioned above, a sales funnel is a visual representation of how your business guides prospects through their sales process to ultimately become customers.

A funnel analysis is simply a method that provides a tangible way to measure and visualize how prospects are moving through your sales funnel, and how their choices and steps coordinate with the ideal way you want your sales funnel to function. By providing clear percentages and drop-off rates, high-quality funnel analyses are a vital component of understanding your prospect base and their needs.

Identifying Drop-Offs

Hubspot Research found that improving the efficiency of the sales funnel is a top priority for 18% of companies, outnumbered only by closing more deals, with 28% of companies stating this as a preference. The good news? Identifying drop-offs with a comprehensive funnel analysis and a thorough conversion funnel optimization can help deliver both desires.

Of course, there will be a percentage of leads that do not make it into the sales funnel at all or drop off early on in the process. Although a perfect conversion rate probably isn’t in reach, there are actionable steps that can be taken to optimize your conversion rate by decreasing the number of prospect drop-offs.

Investigating the “where” and the “why” of prospect drop-offs will help you understand how to cultivate more engaging calls to action during each phase of your sales funnel.

Funnel Envy has created a comprehensive guide to identifying drop-off points using Google Analytics (GA). Because Google is a free provider of countless business-based services, their free analytics service is accessible and easy to learn. Google Analytics helps you track your website metrics, allowing you to identify where prospects are dropping out of your sales funnel. However, to effectively measure these drop-offs, you should set up your sales funnel in Google Analytics.

1. On the Google Analytics dashboard, you’ll find the “Admin” button. Click on it, and then select the “Goals” tab.
2. The “Goals” section of GA allows you to set up the final goal of your sales funnel. For example, if your final goal is to get prospects to sign up for your newsletter, create a new goal in GA and follow the screen instructions to name it accordingly.
3. Once you’ve created your end goal, input the URL for the page on your website that shows a prospect has reached your desired point.
4. To set up your entire sales funnel in GA, activate “Funnel Tracking” and add every stage of your sales funnel using the same steps as listed above. This strategy allows you to track drop-offs throughout your entire conversion funnel to identify where prospects are leaving your website for easier conversion optimization.

Want to see your entire sales funnel tracking in action in GA? After GA has had time to collect website data (if you’re a high-traffic website, wait a couple of days), click Conversions> Goals> Funnel Visualization.

Increase Engagement and Conversion Rates

With GA set up and ready to track your sales funnel drop-offs, it’s time to focus on increasing conversion rates. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways that you can optimize your web presence and activity to increase conversions, send more prospects through to the end of the sales funnel, and generate loyal repeat customers.

1. Create a Landing Page for Your Website

A landing page has one purpose: to guide a prospect towards your final funnel goal. Whether this is collecting their contact information to send a newsletter or make a purchase from your business, a landing page allows you to address a unique problem and how your service or product can help.

A landing page should be singular in the way that it speaks to one problem and offers one option for the prospect: to take your desired action. As a part of your digital marketing strategy, make sure you link to your website’s landing page on a regular basis. When designed correctly, a landing page can help increase conversion rates.

2. Make Sure You’re Blogging Regularly

A well-written blog – whether it’s a how-to article or a deep dive into a specific facet of your industry – can help increase website traffic and ideally generate more prospects for your sales funnel. Informative blog articles work to get your blog to show up in search engines, aligning your website with prospects who are genuinely interested in the solution you’re offering.

3. Consider Your Call to Action

All web pages, blog posts, and newsletters should include a clear call to action or CTA. These pieces of information are designed to tell a user what their next logical step is after consuming your branded content. For example, if one of your key goals is to capture contact information, include a brief CTA on your web page that allows a user to complete a contact form or sign up for your newsletter.

If you feel like optimizing your webpage even further, use anchor text to include your CTA naturally in your copy.

4. Stay Active on Social Media

This may sound like an obvious tip, but an active and thriving social media presence will help you generate web traffic and increase your conversion rates much faster than offline marketing alone. Digital marketing is a vital component of driving web traffic and optimizing your sales funnel, as We Are Social found that there are 2.56 billion mobile social media users globally.

Throughout your social media profiles, make sure that you’re regularly linking to new blog content, landing pages, and optimized web pages to drive traffic. With a higher visitor rate on your webpage, you’ll have a better understanding of where drop-offs are occurring.

5. Give Users Something to Get Excited About

User engagement is critical in optimizing your website’s conversion rates. Keep them interested and intrigued by providing actionable insights, how-to’s, and even freebie guides to help a user better understand your product or service. Ideally, these insights are beneficial to a prospect and allow them to become more connected to your brand and flow through your sales funnel.

Connect with leads, identify top prospects, and generate online engagement and sales by becoming a Certified Digital and Social Selling Specialist. Download a brochure today!