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I’m Hailey – content strategist and founder here at Your Content Empire where we help you create more profitable, purposeful and productive content — and hopefully enjoy yourself more while doing it too. Learn more about me here >>
In the early days of my business, I abandoned plenty of great funnels. When I look back now, I find myself mourning that wasted potential.
Like many entrepreneurs, I had a ton of ideas that I was excited about – new products, new programs, new freebies.
There's a reason they say boredom kills a lot of really great businesses. Our commitment to new ideas outweighs our commitment to our existing ones.
Here is the secret: it's a lot simpler than we make it.
We think it's all about having the latest and greatest idea when it's more about picking a great idea and sticking with it.
If you truly want to scale your business, I would encourage you to pick one main offer and build a sales system, aka a sales funnel, around it. Dedicate your time to tweaking and optimizing that sales funnel until it works.
Only once you've reached that point, should you allow yourself to move on to the next idea while that existing sale system goes into maintenance mode.
I recently updated my sales funnel audit calculator, and I couldn't wait to share it with my community. I know that you're an entrepreneur who is full of good ideas and a ton of heart. I want to help you get these ideas to more people.
The big reasons why I love this calculator are:
When it comes to fixing our funnels, it can be overwhelming to face that overflowing to-do list. When you think of the areas of your funnel that you could fix, and when you combine the to-do list that you already have from your day to day business, it is no wonder so many of us have action paralysis. When we get overwhelmed, we end up working on all of the wrong things.
Another big reason why people struggle with sales funnel audits themselves is that they don't know what the numbers mean. There are a lot of little figures that have big consequences when it comes to the overall performance of your sales funnel.
The great thing about this calculator is that you put in your numbers and it does the analysis for you. It tells you exactly what these numbers represent.
Imagine you were at an audio booth with a ton of levers in front of you. As a business owner, you have the power to turn up different levers and get different reactions and results. That is precisely the way your sales funnel works. You can choose what you focus on and amplify, and that can have big implications for how your sales funnel performs.
The great thing about this calculator is that it breaks down exactly how much you can afford to pay per lead depending on your other costs. This sales funnel can also show you the potential of what can happen if you optimize different elements of your funnel.
If you want to get the calculator for yourself, make sure to click on the image below and download a copy for yourself.
There are a couple of things that are needed for this sales funnel calculator to work.
If you put in zero, it's going to mess with the calculations. If you're starting with a brand new funnel with no sales yet, focus on getting 100 people through and making your first sale through the funnel first.
If you have a ton of sales, you might be able to use this calculator every month to run the optimization report on it. On the other hand, if you have fewer sales and you want to start improving things overall, you can also measure the lifetime of your sales funnel.
It's up to you how frequently you want to use this calculator. Always stick to a regular schedule for follow up audits to see if those numbers are moving in the right direction.
Wondering what numbers the calculator analyzes for you?
The first phase of creating a sales funnel is to create your freebie system.
The freebie is what is going to attract high-quality leads and validate them. You want to make sure it has an extremely close connection to your paid offer.
Your freebie system includes:
The key numbers to know in your freebie system for your sales funnel audit are:
The offer system is the part of your funnel that takes your validated leads and gets them to the offer. This system is all about priming your customers and educating them about what your offer is so that by the time you send that first sales email, they're already thinking “YES!”
The offer system includes:
The key numbers to know for measuring your offers system would be:
The final phase of your sales funnel is the traffic system. I always like to tell entrepreneurs who're using content marketing to grow their business to make sure they have a reliable sales funnel system in place.
We want to make sure that any traffic that you're driving to your website has a purpose. That purpose, if you're in business, is to make sales.
Your traffic system includes:
The key numbers to know for your traffic system are:
Knowing the numbers is only going to do you so much good. It's still vital information to identify, but it's better to use these numbers to make informed changes to improve your sales funnel.
After you look at the numbers, the first decision should be to identify whether it's a traffic problem, a leads problem, or a conversion problem.
Most sales funnels have a traffic problem. You want to make sure you're optimizing your traffic sources. This could mean altering specific social media platforms, layering in paid ads, or doing more podcast interviews. Whatever you need to do to drive more people to your freebie.
Your main area for improvement is going to be the opt-in page. What can you do to increase the conversion rate of that specific page?
This means you have two main areas of improvement for your sales funnel:
1) You're going to want to look at your sales page. What can you do to improve it?
2) You're going to want to look closely at every email that you send out. What can you do to increase the number of opens or increase the number of click-throughs?
If you're tempted to give up on your sales funnel and move onto another idea, I want you to stop and download the sales funnel audit to calculate where the issue is. You've already done a lot of work in setting it up, Let's find a way to salvage all of that hard work!
Download the calculator and set aside some time to use it.
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