Ways to Optimize Your Sales Funnel and Boost Sales

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If you want to optimize your sales funnel, you’ve come to the right place. This post will go over everything you need to know about creating an optimized sales funnel.

Ideally, every prospect would be engaged and ready to purchase as soon as you complete a sale. A customer must pass through a series of steps before they’re ready to buy. The good news is that you can predict these stages with data analysis and optimize them to create much more efficient sales funnels.

This blog post will show you how to use data analysis and Google Analytics to find your sales funnel’s weaknesses and optimize them. We’ll focus on four critical parts of a sales funnel: web traffic, visitors, leads, and Conversions. But first…

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a sequential ordering of customers, detailing their steps to become customers. Sales funnels are part of the marketing funnel system created by Bryan Eisenberg in his 1984 book “Beyond Marketing.” It’s important to note that an individual customer may not pass through all sales funnel stages.

Optimizing the stages of a sales funnel is crucial to increasing your revenue.

The Stages of an Optimized Sales Funnel

Traffic

The first stage of any optimized sales funnel is web traffic. Web traffic refers to people visiting your site but not yet engaged with your brand in any other way. Visitors are considered one-time visitors if they bypass all pages other than their landing page or never return after that first visit. Both of these groups are good chances to increase conversions and revenue, so they should be looked at separately. Let’s look at how you can optimize these groups by using data analysis software to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each group.

Visitors: Optimizing for One-time Visitors

One-time visitors are people who landed on your landing page and never went back. Perhaps they didn’t like what they saw, or you lost them in the shuffle of a busy day. These people should be added to the sales funnel to maximize revenue potential. So how do we determine which steps in our sales funnel they’re missing? The answer is data analysis software such as Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Report for New Visitors

In this example from Google Analytics, only 13% of our one-time visitors completed our registration form. In other words, their abandonment rate was 87%, which tells us that our funnel has plenty of room for improvement.

How Can You Optimize Your Sales Funnel?

Now that you know some common pitfalls of those who land only on the first page of your sales funnel, what should you do about it? To determine the strengths and weaknesses of each stage of your sales funnel, you need to use data analysis software. In the case of this example, we’d need to look at pages that were viewed after landing on our lead generation form to find out what these people are looking for.

Traffic: Optimizing for Visitors Who Make it Past the Landing Page

Optimizing a visitor’s path is easier because you have a bigger sample size, but it can still be difficult without proper analytics tools. The most crucial step here is capturing data from all visitors who make it past your landing page. This shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes if you’re using Google Analytics or another similar tool. Let’s start with the example above.

Optimizing We know that the registration form is an essential step for this group, so we’ll want to dig into Google Analytics to determine which fields are missing from our state.

Google Optimize Optimization Software

You’re looking for information on your website’s most contentious areas. A common mistake here would be focusing too much on the funnel steps after visitors’ most often skipped (in this case, it was “Company Name”). It would help to focus on what people need before clicking through your sales funnel.

How Can I Optimize My Sales Funnels?

Now that you’ve got a better idea of which parts of your sales funnel are getting ignored or incompletely filled out, it’s time to consider your options. Optimizing for one-time visitors can be done by adding events and goals to your lead generation form. This way, you’ll know which fields are often skipped over. To optimize for visitors who have made it past the funnel, you need to look at all of your site’s traffic data carefully. This is quickly done with Google’s Optimize tool, but some alternatives do well.

What Are Some Common Mistakes?

There are several common mistakes that businesses make when optimizing their sales funnels. Understanding these mistakes will help you avoid them during your optimization process. Let’s look at some more common ones so that you don’t run into trouble on your site.

Assuming That Optimizing Your Sales Funnel Isn’t Worth the Time and Money

Optimization isn’t for everyone, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. The biggest mistake here is not having data before starting the process, meaning you’re about to spend time optimizing your funnel when you could just be using that time to market your business instead. Optimizing small funnels can turn a profit if done correctly, making it worthwhile in many cases! Optimizing large funnels won’t produce any results because of how big they are, so you should begin by optimizing smaller ones first.

Not Optimizing All Steps of Funnel

Optimization should be a process, not a one-time event. Optimizing less than all of your funnel’s steps will make it difficult to see results because you won’t know which stage is the problem (if any). Each method in your sales funnel is essential for finding where your visitors are having difficulties so that you can fix them.

Optimizing Each Step of Your Funnel

Optimization requires that you use data analysis software to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each stage. This is often done by adding events and goals to your lead generation form in Google Analytics or other similar tools.

Not Understanding the Difference Between One-off Visitors and Repeat Customers

For optimization, you need to know how often your customers buy from your website and how often they visit it. To optimize for first-time visitors, you need to track events and goals. You need to use tools like Analytics to track users to optimize for repeat customers. Optimization should be a process, not a past event. Optimizing less than all of your funnel’s steps will make it difficult to see results because you won’t know which stage is the problem (if any).

Optimizing Too Short of a Sales Funnel

Optimization often requires going past traditional lead generation methods to learn how well different aspects of your funnel work. Your sales funnel needs to be at least three pages long ( stages) before you can optimize it in any meaningful way.

Optimization should be a process, not a one-time event. Optimizing less than all of your funnel’s steps will make it difficult to see results because you won’t know which stage is the problem (if any). If you want to keep optimizing your sales funnel, you should check the important fields weekly instead of waiting until a few months have passed. This can help improve your site’s conversions and make more informed decisions later.

Optimizing Only One Step at a Time

Optimization requires that you understand how each stage interacts with your visitors, which means you need to optimize each step of the sales funnels individually. If you only optimize one step at a time, you miss chances to improve your whole sales funnel, and it’s harder to figure out where your problems are coming from.

Optimize Each Step of Your Funnel

Optimizing Without Data Analysis Software

Optimization without data analysis software means you won’t know what’s working for you and what isn’t. You must understand how each stage of interaction with your visitors affects your ranking to optimize.

When a sales funnel is optimized, the best marketing campaigns, website layouts, and service packages are used to create a well-organized system for making more money from customers. Optimization means testing various options and applying what you’ve learned to create better results.

How is a Sales Funnel Different from a Conversion Funnel?

A conversion funnel is a generic term for a website visitor’s steps before converting into a paying customer. Here are some examples:

They visit the site
Read articles about the product
Download an e-book
Contact support via email or chat
Sign up for a trial of the product

On the other hand, a sales funnel measures how much revenue each funnel stage is responsible for. For example:

The prospect visits your website and signs up for a trial
They do not sign up for the problem but download an e-book
They contact support via email or chat and convert into a paying customer
You could even say that by signing up for the free trial, they recycle as well.

Typically, if you use Google Analytics to track conversions, you’ll see these as separate conversion events. But there are some tricks you can use to track them together more effectively! For example…

How to Connect Conversion Events with Sales Funnels in Google Analytics

Google Analytics isn’t great at connecting specific sales stages with specific conversion events, but it becomes much more manageable if you use Custom Goals.

Let’s look at the prospect who signs up for a trial and downloads an e-book. If you set up Conversion Goals in Google Analytics to track both of these actions, they’ll show up as separate conversion events with no connection.

The solution? Use Custom Goals instead!

Optimize Your Funnels Based on Revenue per Customer

1) Identify Key Sales Stages

First, identify several vital sales stages that indicate customers are ready to buy. For example:

Sign Up
Download Trial
Request E-Book or Demo
Contact Support
Add to Cart (unconfirmed purchase)
Purchase (fully converted customer)

2) Connect Conversion Events with Sales Funnels

Now, use a Custom Event to track each sales stage. For example, every time someone signs up for a trial you might add the following code:

ga(‘send’, ‘event’, [eventCategory], [eventAction], [eventValue], [customDimension1], [customDimension2]);

By setting up these events, you can track how they interact with your sales funnels in Google Analytics. You’ll need to set up Conversion Goals for the stages of your critical sales before continuing…

3) Optimize for Successful Customers

Take a look at your conversion funnel and identify gaps between customers who sign up and download an e-book vs. those who convert into paying customers. If there’s a gap, perhaps your sign-up process needs improving.

4) Optimize Your Funnel to Reduce Abandonment

Take another look at the conversion funnel and identify gaps between customers who start your free trial or download an e-book vs. those who contact support via email or chat. If there’s a gap here, perhaps you can reduce friction by reducing the number of steps to engage with support (e.g., adding chat functionality).

5) Optimize Your Funnels Based on Revenue per Customer

You should also look at your sales funnels and other dimensions like revenue per customer! This is where things get interesting.

For example, let’s say you have two different types of customers:

Type A – $100/month

Type B – $200/month

If you were optimizing based on revenue per customer, you’d want to ensure you’re sending the right messages to Type A and Type B customers.

As you can imagine, this is a lot easier said than done. However, Custom Events will help you connect your data from multiple sources and optimize your funnels accordingly.

6) Optimize Your Funnels Using Multiple Dimensions

Finally, you may find that specific dimensions work better than others when converting potential customers.

For example, maybe you’ve noticed that people who view your product demo are more likely to convert into customers than people who don’t watch the video.

In this case, you could create a custom dimension called “Demo Video Viewed” and link it to your conversion goals. Then, you could segment your funnel based on whether or not someone has viewed the demo video.

7) Optimizing Focused Traffic Sources

If you’ve set up goals, you can use the Multi-Channel Funnels report to analyze your sales funnel traffic sources. Optimize your marketing channels to improve conversion rates along each step of the funnel, and then re-visit Optimizing for Successful Customers to see its effect on revenue per customer.

You’ve Optimized Your Sales Funnel!

Papalexios

I’m Alexios Papaioannou, a word wizard, and affiliate marketing ninja with a decade of experience crafting killer blog posts that captivate and convert. Specializing in affiliate marketing, content writing, analytics, and social media. My secret weapon is a love of running that boosts my creativity and energy. Let’s create epic content together!