To say that sales funnel optimization is important today is an understatement…

Since almost every business in existence today are using sales funnels, ensuring that your funnels are performing at their best is key to staying competitive.

Now if you don’t have a sales funnel yet, that’s okay, this guide is going to give you some great ideas on what you can do.

Or, if you have a funnel that isn’t making you money yet, it’s usually not in need of any big changes.

Most of the time you only need one or two tiny tweaks to make it work.

That’s where this guide comes into play, it will show you ways you can tweak your funnels to make them even better.

Sales Funnel Optimization Strategies

No matter what kind of sales funnel you have, optimization should always be a priority.

This means that once you’ve launched your funnel and the traffic start flowing, you need to optimize each page in order to get the best conversion rates.

And if you don’t know how to do that, here’s 12 different sales funnel optimization practices that can help you get a better funnel.

1. Implement The Value Ladder

There are in essence two models that people are using when they are working with sales funnel:

• The AIDA sales funnel model
• The Value Ladder sales funnel model

You know what, I’m not going to cover everything there is to know about these models in this post, because it would go on forever if I did.

Therefore I suggest a better alternative:

I have an entire post talking about the difference between the Value Ladder and the AIDA model. So, if you want to learn what’s best for your business, that’s a read I can recommend.

In short:

The Value Ladder is based on how human relationships actually work.

It’s pretty much a give-and-take dynamic.

Instead of just giving, giving, and giving some more, you actually ask you prospects to make tiny micro-commitments.

From there you then build up to your more expensive products by asking your prospects to make bigger and bigger commitments.

Even with these micro-commitments, only a fraction of those who downloaded your lead magnet will buy your most expensive product…

But here’s the thing.

If you’d approached those same people with your most expensive offer right away, it’s highly likely that none of them would have bought it.

Because you can’t just walk up to someone and ask for craploads of money, you have to ease into it.

So, If you’re struggling with the AIDA model, maybe a optimization strategy for your sales funnel is to try the Value Ladder.

2. One Page = One Goal

This is probably one of the most important principles when it comes to conversation rate optimization.

Each page in your funnel should be designed with just ONE goal in mind.

In a perfect world, the only clickable elements on your page should be the CTA buttons.

This means that there should be no other distractions that’s keeping the visitor from reaching the next step in your funnel.

Or in plain English:

• Navigation links – gone – or at least only use the most necessary once
• Featured blog posts – gone
• Social medial links – also gone
• and the list goes on.

What this means is that you are left with a page that has a clear message on what you want your visitors to do.

In fact, I think you should look at your current website and see if you can’t replace it with a sales funnel

I wouldn’t say that you should completely ditch your website, but know that a sales funnel and a website have different purposes in your business.

Why this drastic action?

Because according to the data I’ve seen, on average a sales funnel generates about 6x more sales than a website.

So you could be missing out in important sales because of a website that isn’t converting.

3. Target Benefits Not Features

Since I have a background in engineering, this one was really hard for me to overcome.

When I used to work with that, I never worked with benefits and emotions, I needed features and cold raw data.

And it took me a while to understand that people in general don’t buy features (well I and maybe two other does), they buy the benefit.

Therefore the copy of your pages is one of the key factors when it comes to your conversion rates.

But how can you improve this if you’re not a copywriter?

I used to lay awake at night thinking about this as well.

When it comes to copywriting you need to understand that there is a distinction between feature and benefits:

• Features are the function or a quality of the product (e.g. “This mobile case is shockproof”)
• Benefits are the value that the customer will get from that product (e.g. “This case will keep my phone safe if I drop it”)

And I’ve actually heard a copywriter say this once:

Features tell, benefits sell.

Meaning:

People tend to take action based on the benefits of the offer, then justify it with the features.

This is why the #1 way to increase your conversion rates is to make your copy more persuasive and really point out the benefits.

So don’t ramble on for days about how cool your o product is.

Instead, talk about how your product will make the prospects life better/easier.

4. Testimonials Is King

If I were to summarize testimonials and social proof it would be like this:

When we are unsure of what to do, we look at what others are doing.

In business this means that when a potential customer isn’t sure about your offer, they’ll start looking for other peoples opinion on:

1. You as an individual
2. Your company and brand
3. Your offer

As you probably have seen, most bigger brands use both testimonials and social proof whenever they can to increase their credibility.

That’s why you should do the same as well:

• Mention relevant credentials
• Mention relevant accomplishments
• Use “Also Seen On” media badges
• Display endorsements from well-known people (not like Hollywood well know, but from someone in your niche that your audience respect)
• Provide testimonials from previous customers

If you can implement some or all of the above, you’ll see some incredible things happen.

Why?

Because it will help reassure your prospects that you, your company, and your offering is the real deal. This will then make it more likely that they convert into customers.

Let me say this thought:

If you’re a brand new business, and don’t have any social proof yet, then this might not be the best optimization strategy for your sales funnel.

You see..

In my experience, it’s not so easy to just go out and “get some” social proof, if no-one ever heard of you.

But once you start to get a bit of reputation and some testimonials, don’t be afraid to use them go get even more conversion. #snowballeffect

Also, whatever you do (even though it’s tempting) NEVER fake social proof.

5. Unmissable CTA

I touched a bit on this earlier in this guide.

If you want to make something stand out on your pages, it should be the CTA buttons.

You need to make sure that the visitor can’t miss them even if they were trying really hard.

You can accomplish this by making your CTA buttons:

• Big – I mean, who finds a tiny tiny little button?
• Bright – You got to make sure that they DON’T blend in with the overall color scheme of your page
• Prominent – Make sure that you have one CTA above the fold so your visitors doesn’t have to scroll to find it

For example:

Take a look a Amazon Primes landing page, see how they have placed the two CTA:s above the fold.

They are also blue, so they stand out from the black while still looking stylish.

Also, if you scroll down you can see that there is a CTA within every section under the fold.

So if you have a long-form landing page, make sure to add at least three CTA:s to that page (it’s recommender to have three on a long-form page).

6. Remove The Distractions

Do you know what the number one comment people get when they ask for feedback on their landing pages is?

Your landing page is too complicated.

Most of the time they’ll be recommended to delete 90% of the stuff that exists on their pages.

Why?

Well, almost every bad performing landing pages have too many things going on at once, and this actually scares the customer away.

But how do you fix this?

There are two things you can do right now to increase the performance of your landing page:

1. Keep it simple: The best way to not scare away your leads is to remove everything that isn’t relevant to what your offering. All of the distracting images, juggling monkey gifs, and cool pictures of you on a boat got to go.
   
   The cleaner you can make it, the better it will do.
   
   Think of it like this:
   • Visitors land on your page
   • The first thing they see is a clear headline that explains what the lead magnet is all about
   • Then you show them the lead magnet
   • Lastly you add input fields and a CTA button for if they want to take action.
     
2. Curiosity: Which will be covered in the next section.

This is why you need to take a hard look at each of your pages in your funnel and ask yourself:

1. Which page elements are inviting towards a conversion?
2. Which page elements are pushing away the lead from converting?

Then remove everything that falls into the second category.

Remember, all those fancy elements you’ve added to your page might look cool…

But in reality they could be preventing visitors from reaching the next step in your funnel.

7. Add More Curiosity

Probably the no.1 reason to bad conversion rates are lack of curiosity…in general, not just in your funnel.

Here’s the thing…

If your visitors can figure out what you’re going to teach them just by locking at your headline, they won’t opt-in.

Even though they don’t know the full scoop of what you’re going to teach, they generalize and draw parallels to figure out what it is.

Then they go: “Nah, I don’t need this, it’s probably going to cover this, this, and that, and I can figure that out on my own”.

This will lead to low conversion rates and also high CPC:s.

If you instead create a headline that is a bit more cryptic in its message, then the curiosity will spike.

Because now at first glance you can figure out what you’re about to teach, they’ll have to opt-in to find out what it is.

Example headline #1: How I used sales funnels to get 4K new leads into my business

Example headline #2: Discover the simpel method I used to get 4K new leads into my business, without spending thousands on ads.

Which one would you opt-in to?

This first one is specifically talking about using sales funnels to get more leads, which means that people can figure that out on their own.

They don’t necessarily need you to give them the answer.

The second one is more curiosity based and only talks about a simple method that generated tons of leads cheaply. It could be anything really.

Now if they want to know what the simple method is, they’ll have to opt-in to find out what it’s all about.

8. Create a Lead Magnet

This is probably the simplest optimization strategy for your sales funnel, yet I still see people not doing this.

If you struggle to get people to convert in your lead generation funnel, add a lead magnet to it.

So instead of just asking a visitor for its contact information, you trade it in exchange for a lead magnet.

This gives the visitor a reason to sign-up to your newsletter or whatever it is you want them to sign-up to.

Think of it like this:

If you ask someone to “just” opt-in, there is no clear benefit and motivator for them to so.

This, even though YOU know opting-in to you would be awesome, because they get to hear more from you.

But, if you instead offer them something that they can benefit from in exchange for opting-in, then they are much more likely to do so.

And it doesn’t have to be that difficult for you to craft a good lead magnet.

Example:

If you run a blog where you publish lots of high quality content.

A lead magnet could be as simple as you offering to send a summary of each new post you publish to their inbox.

This way, if someone liked your content the first time they visited your page, they’ll probably benefit a lot from opting-into your newsletter.

Now they don’t have to check out your page every week to see if something new has popped up, you simply tell them when you have posted something new.

Beneficial – Yes!

As you can see, lead magnets doesn’t have to be hard to set up, and even if they were, the benefit you get from them is well worth the effort.

9. Build Pages For Conversion

Sometimes the simplest of things can cause the biggest problems.

The structure of your pages is one of them.

It’s far too easy to just focus on one or two aspects of your pages, I know I’ve done that mistake many times.

I like logic, therefore my main focus on my pages was logic and a bit of scarcity.

However, I learned pretty quickly that logic didn’t sell to the majority of my page visitors, so my pages clearly wasn’t built for conversions.

Or at least not as good as they’ve could have been.

So I started to use the same method that I’ve used in email marketing on my pages.

I switched to the Gain – Logic – Fear method:

• Gain – Here you target those who buys straight away based on their emotions
• Logic – Here you talk logic with those who didn’t buy with their emotions
• Fear – This is where you state that it’s a limited time offer that expires soon, triggering the FOMO (fear-of-missing-out) of the visitor

With this structure I saw a increase in conversion rates almost instantly.

Let me explain why by using an example:

If you look at the book Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson you can see that:

1: The top of the page is the gain part, where he talks to those buying with emotions.

2: In the middle of the page you have the logic part, talking to those who need a bit more meat on the bone before making a decision.

3: And last on the page is the fear or scarcity, where he states that this is an exclusive deal that isn’t going to be around for ever.

10. Use Order Bumps to Increase Sales

A good optimization strategy to us if your selling products within your sales funnel is to use order bumps.

That is the little offer you see under the credit card information boxes but above the submit button.

Using an order bump is a easy way for you to try an increase the overall cart value.

The profits from it can then be used to cover some (or most) of your advertisement costs.

There are pretty much only three things you need to know about order bumps:

1. Relevant to the initial offer
2. Reasonably priced (stay within the $7 – $47 impulse buy range)
3. Quick to explain what it is (order bumps are not a 10 page offer)

For example:

If you sell a book on bird keeping, why not offer the audio book for $7 as an order bump.

It checks all the boxed, it’s relevant, reasonably priced and very easy to explain.

The same thing goes if you were to sell a training course, offer the templates from the course as an order bump.

I think you get where I’m going with this.

So let’s look at the next one which is: keeping the buying loop open.

11. Keep the Buying Loop Open

So many entrepreneurs are closing the buying loop to early, or doesn’t even open it at all.

When someone buy the product you offer in your funnel, what do you do?

Do you take them to a order confirmation page and call it a day, or do you open up the buyers loop?

If you’re opening the loop, then keep up the good work.

If not, here’s how you do it.

When someone buys from you, a portion of those is what I call hyperactive buyers.

This means that some would have kept on buying from you if the offer had been presented.

So how do you figure out with customer are hyperactive buyer?

With upsells and downsells.

Instead of going straight to the confirmation page, send them to a upsell.

If someone doesn’t want the upsell they click “no thanks” and ends up on the downsell page. Whether they say yes or no to that doesn’t really matter since the next step always is the confirmation page.

This is not a hyperactive buyer.

A hyperactive buyer on the other hand wants it all.

These are the people that not only buys the course but also the templates, the books, the software and the private coaching.

Aka. They are a dream customer in a way.

When you encounter one of these buyer, they will buy the first upsell, and then they’ll keep on buying until either:

• There needs are met
• You are out of upsell offers
• The product you are selling is to expensive

And as soon as they say no, you take them to a downsell to try and close one more sale before.

In short:

Keep the buyers loop open to identify hyperactive buyers and sell to them using upsells and downsells.

12. Crate an Offer Wall

This is probably the easiest optimization strategy when you’re using a sales funnel and have multiple products is to use an offer wall.

You probably seen this strategy when you’ve been shopping online yourself.

This is the “You May Also Like” section on the order confirmation page.

With this method you can use some of the empty space on the order confirmation page to display other relevant products.

These products then lead the their own separate sales funnels, creating sort of a network in-between your funnels.

This means that once a customer finishes an order, they can choose to enter another one of your funnels if they find one of your recommender products interesting.

Resulting in an increased chance of someone buying from you again right after the initial purchase.

Using an offer wall is one of the more passive ways to get someone to enter your funnels and buy from you.

Advanced Bonus Tip

Alright, you’ve tried all of the easy sales funnel optimization tips and still feel like: “Do you have some advanced optimization strategies?”.

To that I say: “Yes I do!”.

So put on your big boy pants, because this is not for the rookie funnel builder.

The advanced tip of the day is: Add a webinar.

Instead of just having a boring “Thank You” / Order Confirmation Page, or use the offer wall strategy.

Add a webinar to it to kickstart the sales of a more expensive product.

The idea behind this strategy is that instead of the customer having to wait for the product to show up at their door or wait for email to arrive.

You can get started teaching right away.

In essence turning your “Thank You” page into a webinar.

And if you are familiar with webinars, you know that they are great for selling more expensive stuff.

Hence why this is such a great way for you to guide your customers into one of those sales.

Using this method will result in a percentage of buyers sticking around, watching you teach and also most likely end up in your funnel for the more expensive product.

It could be an offer for a software, mastermind or whatever expensive product you might have.

Implemented Everything And Still No results?

Okay, I have one last tip for you if all else fail…

So you’ve implemented every sales funnel optimization tips from this guide, even the advance one…

And still nothing, your funnel isn’t converting?

Now it’s time take a brake, zoom out, tak a cup of coffee and look at the bigger picture:

• Do you have a hook? If you do, what is it?
• Have you figured out what your story is?
• What’s your offer?

Generally speaking, when a sales funnel doesn’t work, it’s usually a sign of a problem with the Hook, Story, Offer framwork.

It could be just one part that is off, but it could just as well be two, or even all three parts.

So if your struggling with conversions in your funnel, you need to fix the framework.

This framework doesn’t just relate to your landing pages, it also branch out to your ads and sales pages as well.

Problems with the Hook

If you struggle to get people to stop scrolling past your ads on Facebook, your hook isn’t working.

The same goes for landing and sales pages. If no-one is giving you their email address or is buying your product, you got a problem with the hook.

So, the first thing to have a look at when all else fail is the hook.

Problems with the Story

After you’ve grabbed someone’s attention, you start telling them the story.

This is where tell them why they should click on your ad, why they should give you their email address, and why they should give you money.

So the 2nd step is always the story.

And if story telling is something you struggle with, I highly recommend that you check out the Expert Secrets Book where this topic is covered in detail.

Problems with the Offer

The 3rd reson to why your funnel isn’t converting is because your offer just sucks, and that’s why people won’t give you money.

So if your offer sucks, make a better offer.

If no-one is clicking on your ad, it’s because you’re not giving them enough reasons to do so.

“What’s the offer, why should I be clicking on your ad?”

Give them a good reason to why they should stop scrolling and click on your button.

Offer them something that they can’t refuse (if you’ve seen the Godfather movie, you know what I’m talking about).

The most important thing you need to understand is this:

Every page has a Hook, Story, and an Offer, so if all else fail, make sure to nail those three parts.

Conclusion

I hope today’s post showed you how to improve the conversion rates of your sales funnel.

Now I want to turn it over to you:

Which of these 12 sales funnel optimization strategies from this guide are you going to try first?

Are you going to create a brand new lead magnet to boost conversions?

Or maybe you want to try adding a order bump.

Either way, leave a comment below to let me know.