EP. 11: Is your funnel more like a sieve? How to get more sales without more people.
What’s this episode about?
If you feel like you are doing all the things to market your business but you still aren’t getting the sales, this episode is for you! I take you through where your business might be ‘leaking’ customers and how you can stop the leaks and start to keep more people in your funnel and therefore buying from you.
Episode key takeaways:
Why understanding the numbers is so important
What could be stopping new people from joining your cold audience
Why your email welcome sequence is so key
You website holds the key to getting more sales so you need to know it inside and out - I share how to get familiar and the common issues
The 3 reasons you’re getting so many abandon carts and what to do about it
KEY LINKS:
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Read the transcript:
NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Hello, and welcome to growing pains. The marketing podcast for parent and baby brands who want to grow and get more consistent sales, but without the overwhelm of feeling like you have to be online 24 7, I'm Sophie, your host, and a Facebook and Instagram ad strategist who specializes in parent and baby brands as well as a mom of two.
Join me each week as I alongside some wonderful guests, she had practical tips and advice about how you can use and combine marketing strategies to get more impact for your effort.
Hello. And welcome to episode 11 of the growing pains podcast. So in this episode, I am going to be talking about what to do. If your funnel is more like a save. And by that, I mean, it's got a lot of holes in it. So if you've listened to episode one, two, and three, I talk you through the PMT approach, which is all about how you target the right people with the right [00:01:00] message at the right time to take them from never having heard of you to purchasing. Hopefully more than once. If you haven't listened to those episodes, I really highly recommend it because a lot of why talk about that is like the basis of it.
So I took you through the funnel and how people move through it. It's also known as a buyer's journey. So in this episode, I'm going to talk about like the next step, really. I want to talk about something. I see a lot with businesses who know what they're meant to be doing, but it's just not quite working and they're not getting the consistent sales they want. They know, they've got ways to bring people into their world, to warm them up on social media or email, and then take them through to the purchase. But they seem to be losing a lot of people at each stage. So normally there's two reasons. There's either that you've got a holes in your funnel. So as people move through it, they sort of slip out the funnel and you've not tightened up or your processes or worked out what exactly is going wrong.
The other thing is that you don't have a plan and actually everything is working independently and isn't working [00:02:00] together to kind of create a really seamless journey for the buyer. Now, I'm going to talk about the plan one next week, but this week I'm talking about plugging the gaps in your funnel.
Now naturally it will happen. You know, you're never going to put a thousand people in the top of your funnel and get a thousand people at the bottom. Like that just won't happen. However, at each critical point, you will lose a certain number of people and the less people you lose.
The more opportunity you have to get people to the point of purchasing. So I wanted to give you a bit of an example of this. Now, if you follow me on Instagram, you might've seen me using these examples before, but I really wanted to break it down and make you kind of see why I think it's so important.
So let's just say you use ads to get a thousand new people aware of your business. Now for the sake of argument. And this example, we're going to be using ads to get someone, to sign up to our email list. Okay. So, what will happen is you do an ad and then you might get a three to six. Let's say that's really quite good. [00:03:00]
Click through rate on your ad through to like a landing page where they would sign up for the email sign up. And so, and then on that landing page, Let's say you've got a 50% signup rate. Which again is pretty standard. So that's a thousand people being aware of your new business, using ads. And that's three to 6% clicking on an ad through to the landing page. And then 50% of people actually signing up to your emails. So that's actually 30 to 60 people clicking through and 15 to 30 going on your list. Okay. So that's 15 to 30 people who are now in your warm audience. They're on your email list. Now the biggest opportunity with an email list is a really kick-ass welcome sequence. That's not just like my view. That's like well-known within the industry and statistically.
You'll see them the best open rates, the best click-through rates and the best conversion rates, as long as you're doing it. Well. So if you're not doing it well at the moment, I'm going to [00:04:00] come to that later. But for now, let's just say you send them a really great, welcome sequence, which has an open rate of about 30% and a conversion rate of 50%. Now, again, there's a pretty good staff.
So of your 30 to 15 people. Like four to nine people opening the email and two to five people are actually buying at some point. So overall, a thousand people see your ad and two to five people are buying. Now. I'm not saying that's exactly how it's going to happen, but it's just an example to kind of show you. And those are kind of industry standard. Conversions. But the difference between two patches and five patch says for every thousand people is pretty different, right? Now, especially if we're talking about, let's say we reached 2000 people a day. So actually instead of it being between two and five patch stairs is actually then between four and 10.
Which says multiply that by seven days a week, you've actually got 28 purchases versus 70 [00:05:00] patches. So you could imagine the difference then over a month or over six months. The cure at the point where it's like making a difference between whether your business is viable or not. And that's literally just the difference at the beginning between the three or 6% click through rate with your ads. And it applies every single point. So whether it's a 50% signup rate on your email signup page, whether it's an open rate on an emails of 30% or a conversion rate, then to 50%. Every point in the higher, you can get those conversion rates. The more likely you are to be able to get people to convert at the end.
So I hope you can see why I feel like it's really important. To be pushing towards the higher end of every single conversion rate so that you can make sure that you're not. Leaking people and ultimately impacting your business. So now I'm going to talk you through. At each stage, the cold audience, warm audience and hot audience.
Where there might be holes in your business. And [00:06:00] how we can fill them essentially.
So let's start with ads. Let's just say you're using ads to bring people into your business. Okay. Now, the first thing I always look at is click through rates and this is link clicks. So there's lots of different options. When you look at your ads. And the key one here is link clicks because that is people who've actually clicked on your ad.
Through to a landing page, whereas other ones like all link clicks, we'll be looking at every single link click. So if you have copy in your primary text, if they click read more, that will count as a link click. So we're only really interested for this example and people who are clicking through to your landing page.
So good click-through rate does vary depending on what you're asking people to do. So if you're just asking people to go through and read a blog, You're going to get a much higher click through rate than you are. If you're asking someone to go through and make a purchase. So really thinking about what you're asking them to do is going to give you a bit more of a guide, but as a rough guide, if you're [00:07:00] asking people to purchase, so that's like the highest.
Intent someone you can ask someone to have you ideally be looking for a 1% click through rate for cold audiences and a 3% for warm audiences. Now, if you're not getting this that's when you start looking at your copy. So is your copy grabbing people? Is your creative stopping the scroll? Have you got the right audience? Like, is it going out to people who are likely to be interested in what you're offering? So it's really kind of going back to basics with your ads and testing and also different things. So testing different audiences, testing, different copy and creative, and it's okay. If it doesn't work, it's absolutely fine because then, you know, right. Okay. That's definitely not what we want to do. And you keep pushing through with this stuff is working. You keep pushing trying different variations of it until you get to a point where you're getting really.
Strong click through rates. So now you've got people clicking through. To get them to do whatever you want them to do. You want to start comparing link clicks and landing page views. Now I'm in ads manager. You can see [00:08:00] both. And the really the key thing here is if someone is clicking on your ad, You really want them to then be triggering the landing page view?
Event because if they click on it, but they never make it to your website, that is a game that is a hole in your funnel. So they've clicked the ad. They've been interested in it. They've gone through. Now the most likely cause here of them not getting through to the landing page is a slow loading website.
Or a website that's not optimized for mobile. Now, considering that I think the style is about 80% of people like browse the internet on their mobile rather than their laptop. And I would say for parents in particular, like, especially all those midnight sales and like, you know, people who are scrolling overnight when they're dealing with their kids or whatever, early morning, when you're like sitting with the kids, trying to waste time before you can actually start the day.
That's going to be so much higher on mobile. So if your website's not optimized for mobile, and then in particular, in this example, the landing [00:09:00] page view, so you might not have a landing page that's on your website. You might have it based on your email. Your email provider mailer light or whatever you use, make sure that you check the landing page in the mobile view, as well as the laptop view.
It's really, really easy. When you are sat at a laptop, designing your website, designing your landing page. Designing your lead. Backnet all that sort of stuff to just get really stuck in like laptop view. And you really need to flip to mobile because that's how most people will see it. They have a look at that. There's always going to be a bit of a drop-off here. Because people might have clicked accidentally or they get distracted or whatever, but generally speaking, you want that to be like as high as possible. So now talking about the landing page, we also need to be really dialed in on this conversion rate. So again, it'll depend on what you're asking for. If you're just asking for an email address, that's much lower ask than asking for a purchase.
But [00:10:00] irrespective you want to know of X amount of people that landed on my landing page. How many took the action that I asked them to take? Whether that's booking a call with you, whether that's giving them, their email address, whether that's purchasing from you, you need to know. Am I looking at a 2% conversion rate here? Am I looking at 5%? Am I looking at 20%?
Because if you don't know what that number is, then you can't like how, if you need to improve it or not. Generally speaking, econ websites have a generally have like about two, two to 4% conversion rate. And that really depends on. And they're really dependent on the price of your products and who your audience is, and whether it's a high volume pro product or whether it's like, you know, really niche. And but generally speaking.
Two to 4% is what we're kind of aiming for when we're running ads. If it's lower than 2%, we're going to struggle to get the value out of the ads. Basically. So you need to know what your conversion rate is. And you're probably thinking, well, that's all very well. So if you, but how the hell do I find that out?
So Google analytics [00:11:00] is your friend massively. There's huge amount of data in Google analytics. Make sure you go in and see if you've got Squarespace. It's really easy. You can go to the back end and have a look. Shopify have their own stats and they will tell you what your conversion rate is, especially if your e-commerce will be very clear.
But try and dig into it a bit more than like your overall website conversion rate. Yeah. What, which products in particular are converting? Well, which pages are converting well? You really need to start looking at. That those kinds of numbers and tracking them just to see really where you are, what your baseline is and whether you need to then work on it. So that's your cold people they're coming into your world. And you're just looking about how you can grab as many of them as you can and move them into your warm audience. So making sure that you're getting a strong conversion to your warm audience as possible.
Now the next one is your warm audience. We're going to start with email open rates. So if you don't have a welcome sequence, I really would start here. So there's obviously there's your like [00:12:00] core emails, like the order confirmation or, you know, that initial email you send to clients after they purchase from you?
But getting the automated sequences set up, I can't tell you how important this is for your business for e-com you, I've got a whole other episode coming out soon on the five automated systems you need in your business. It's really brilliant episode. I can't wait to release actually. But just to get us started here, just start with a welcome sequence. Honestly only has to be three emails if you're just getting started.
You want to deliver your lead magnet, whatever it is, whether it's a percentage discount or it's a PDF download or it's some kind of value add. Deliver that. And then do an email about the business and about your products and then another email. A couple of days later. Telling them something else. It could be anything I've sent some brilliant welcome sequences recently, actually.
And it's not about you, but it's about how you can help them. So like what pain points do you solve? So you could send them testimonials. You could even send them [00:13:00] a slightly edited version of social media posts have done really well for you. It doesn't have to be totally new content. But start that relationship with them. Start that.
Start that kind of building of trust and help them understand like what your brand is about. Like they might've come through to your email list from an ad. There's only so much you can convey in a, in a single ad. Your email list is that time to go a bit deeper and a bit more.
I read a quote once, which said if social media is like a cocktail party, then email marketing is like sitting down for a coffee. And I just think that's a really lovely way of looking at it. Like social media is quite surface level. It's quite broad. Yes, you can reach a lot of people, but you don't tend to be able to go deep. Whereas on an email list is where you can really start to build that.
Talking of social media. So this is another area where people can join your warm audience. Now, the more people engage with you, the more they stay warm, the more they see their content that obviously going to help you in terms of converting them into customers.
Now think about having a [00:14:00] range of content for people at different stages of the buyer journey or the funnel. So, you know, people who have just like come across you from the explore page and have no idea what you sell. People that follow you all the time and say, want a bit more of a behind the scenes or, you know,
Developing new products or services or testimonials about how well your clients are doing. And then for people who are already working with you reminding them why you're so great or you know, testimonials coming here with you. Well, if you ever do discounts, that kind of thing. So really just thinking about when you look at your grid, like if I landed on it and I was someone in any one of these categories, would I be getting something from it essentially, like making sure you're still pushing people to buy like strong sales and calls to action post.
That's often something I see is missing. Like the warm audience bit people get may kind of, you. They'll share stuff about their life or they'll create engagement posts or they'll, talk about. Things that get people chatting, which is brilliant. Definitely needed, but there's a missing piece about explaining what you [00:15:00] do as if I've never seen you before. And then the sales post that people find a bit uncomfortable. I'm going to have to be there cause you need to get people through. To actually purchasing from you. And then finally in your warm audience, they could have landed on your website. So again, just kind of going back to what I was talking about earlier, you want to know everything that they're doing once they're on your website, how long are they there for, what are they looking at? You can use.
Free software that shows you like heat maps of your website. And like, so you can see what people, what are people clicking? Where are they getting stuck? Why are they not adding to cart? Like how many adds to cart? Am I getting. And why they not adding to cart more? Like why are they not taking the action that I've asked them to take, like booking a call with me?
Is your website optimized for people purchasing or moving through that buyer's journey. So once they land on it, they know what the next step is. They know how to move forward with you. I can't tell you the amount of websites I go on. Where you're like, okay, I'm really interested in this what do I do? How do I, and it'll just say in the copy, like [00:16:00] send me an email. If you're interested, it drives me bananas. Like you haven't even got a link on the, send me an email, like make it as easy as possible for me.
To book with you to buy from you. Because otherwise you're going to lose me. I'm just going to move on to another website that makes it a lot easier. And then moving on to making it a lot easier on the website. You've got your hot audience and these are people who've already added to cart or initiated checkout, but generally we'll talk about any adding to cart. Cause not all websites, track initiating checkout.
This one is more for the econ businesses. If you're a service provider, your hot leads, you're probably looking more of taking them offline. I imagine. And so at that point, you're kind of nurturing them. And making sure that you kind of get them over the line in terms of e-com. Add to cart.
So a big block of HAMP tends to be postage and packaging. So it would it being too high in proportion to the product. So if you're buying something that say a 10 99, And then postage and packaging is four 50. [00:17:00] It's like paying our 50% again. And that's where you're probably going to lose people. So I either we talk.
So I either talk to people about either including places, your packaging and your pricing. Having different levels of postage and packaging, depending on like what you're buying. Or having that, I mean, having free shipping over a certain amount is really helpful because say you're free shipping.
Was over 15 pounds and I was buying something for 10 99. You'd probably get me to buy something for another fiver so that I get free shipping. And I get something for it rather than just paying for the postage. So I think that's always worth thinking about as well also, you know, for ads in terms of making them profitable, the higher you can push that free shipping.
The higher, your average order value. And then the more margin you're going to make on your aunts. The other thing to think about is, are you making it easy for people to pay? So, you know, can they use PayPal or Google or apple pay? Do you offer Klarna? I'm not going to get into the hole, whether you should offer credit to people or not.
But if you have a high priced product, you might [00:18:00] want to think about whether you offer something like that. To help people spread the cost of it. To adapt to pay for it from it's obviously up to you. But I definitely think it's worth looking at your checkout. Like, is it super easy if I am breastfeeding my baby at 3:00 AM.
Is it going to be easy for me to purchase or are you going to make me go downstairs and get my card? Because I'm not going to do that. So think about that. And the final thing as well is do people have to create an account I've come across quite a few websites recently to be fair, had much bigger websites than like small businesses, like the kind of big global ones they make you create an account. I don't want to create an account.
So making sure that you always have the option to check out as a guest. And and just make sure the overall checkout is as few steps as possible. Like, you know, aim for Amazon wave. Like literally one click and it's done. You're never probably going to get that with your own website, but you know, as few clicks as possible.
Making a really clear journey from thinking, yeah, I want this to paying. So [00:19:00] yeah, those are some of the things you need to think about. So I hope this episode has been helpful. I think I've covered quite a lot. And I know that sometimes you can think, yeah, this is really helpful, but. I don't exactly know where to start on my own.
I would really encourage you to just go back through the episode and just take a few actions, even if it's just like setting up your Google. Google analytics and taking a look at your conversion rates. Setting up a welcome sequence. Looking at your Facebook ads, if you're running them already and seeing what your click through rates are.
And just see way, like, even if you just go through and kind of track the different numbers I think that would be really, really helpful. I do in fact have a group program, which is launching soon, and this is exactly the kind of thing that we're going to be working on. You me and a group of other women in exactly the same places you were going to be looking at how we can stop the time-consuming marketing.
Slow organic growth and inconsistent sales and work towards slick automated systems. So your marketing's working [00:20:00] even when you're not. And you're with the kids. Organic growth, which makes you want to engage with social media again, I mean, I, can't a hundred percent promise that Instagram won't release some ridiculous new feature, but you know, we're going to try our best.
I'm consistent sales. So you have the security of money coming in each month and you don't have to feel stressed. Every single month about what is going to happen. And it's not just ads. I'm going to be covering. We're going to be looking at social media, email marketing and Facebook ads. And crucially for me anyway, is how they all work together so that you actually can optimize each one of them. And everything's not just working in isolation.
So, if you think that sounds like something you might need. I'm about to offer out five free plug the gap strategy calls. Where are we going to go over? What I've talked about in today's episode? Help you see where those gaps are and create a bit of a plan for you to move forward. Even if the program isn't right for you, you'll come away loads clearer on what you need to do. So it definitely grabbed one of the slots. It will be a really lovely session. I [00:21:00] love chatting to people who are in.
My warm audience. And I just really want to help people to see what they can do to improve their business. So it will be a lovely chat if nothing else. There will be a link in the show notes to book one of those calls. And if you are listening to this. Much later. So I'm recording this in May, 2022. If you're listening to this later on, I'm going to put it out there. That the course is incredibly successful and has huge life-changing differences to the people that have been on it. And you really need to reach out to me. And let's talk about you joining the program
back to the podcast. So the next episode is out next Monday, and I'm going to talk you through. Planning because this week I ran a poll on Instagram. And a large proportion of, you said, you know, roughly what you're doing.
You just need a bloody plan. So next week, I'm going to be walking you through how to make a bloody plan that you stick to. In the meantime, come and find me on Instagram. I am at the underscore social underscore [00:22:00] pod. Make sure you join my email list. I share more tips and behind the scenes of what's working for me and my clients.
Thanks so much and have a fab week.
Thank you so much for joining me this week before you go, make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can receive new episodes, right when they're released. And if you ever enjoyed these podcast episodes, I'd really love to ask you to leave a review in apple podcasts reviews are one of the major ways that apple ranks their podcasts, and it only takes a few seconds, but really does make a massive difference to new people.
Finding me. Thank you again for joining me, Sophie, in this episode of growing pains, see you next time.
