Running your business can sometimes feel like sitting at the roulette table thinking, “Gee, I hope this works out!” But making key business decisions certainly shouldn’t have to feel like a matter of luck or a guessing game.
Should I spend more money on ads? Do I have the revenue to hire another team member? Making the right call on big choices like these will always feel harder if you’re just going on your gut feeling.
But when you actually start digging into your numbers, it will start to feel a lot less amorphous and hard to predict. Plus, knowing your metrics is a major factor in your business’s growth and your earning potential.
That’s why here, we’re looking at all things automation, funnels, and metrics with dynamic growth strategist Michelle Fernandez. Not only is Michelle a Circuit Sales System student who is building her own Circuit, she’s also helping other students build theirs.
Having witnessed first-hand the errors business owners make when building out funnels, Michelle is unveiling 12 of the most common sales funnel mistakes so that we can safeguard your journey toward consistent and predictable sales growth.
So grab a pen and get ready to remove all the guesswork from what is and isn’t working in your Circuit!
(One note on terminology: Circuits and funnels are, of course, two very different things. Funnels go one way and then they end (which is a big part of the problem) but Circuits are an endless loop of getting people to purchase. For the sake of simplicity, we use the term funnels throughout.)
Mistake #1: Elements Don’t Work in Harmony
Whatever your product is—whether it’s physical or digital—you need to have everything working in harmony. Many business owners don’t have their traffic funnel set up because they think once they’ve turned the ads on, that’s it. But remember, there’s a whole process behind this and a whole funnel within your traffic funnel!
From your landing page funnel, to your email funnel, and even a text funnel for some, there are lot of elements to consider. But the great thing is, you can get one element running first and then add other layers when you feel it’s necessary.
For example, if you’re driving ads to opt in for your Circuit, you can get that going and then decide to retarget people who have not watched the video yet. You might then add another layer in by texting or doing DM outreach to people who got to the page but haven’t signed up yet. It doesn’t have to be done all at once. It can be done in stages, but each one of them can build on each other.
But the big mistake that course creators are making is not having all of these elements working in harmony. When you do have this ecosystem of people seeing you in a lot of different places, it gives people the impression of you being everywhere. And the more that you are everywhere, the more people are thinking that your product or service really is good.
Mistake #2: Not Sending Reminders
A lot of course creators think, “They didn’t watch it or they didn’t open the email or they abandoned it, so they must not want it.” But that’s simply not the case! Think about how many times you’re shopping for something on your phone, get distracted by life, and then can’t find it again because you got there from an ad. There’s nothing wrong with reminding people.
It’s not bothersome to them because they wouldn’t have signed up in the first place if they weren’t interested. Reminding them simply guides them back to where they were before. The mindset of a lot of business owners is that they don’t want to annoy people. Their thinking can then go down a spiral of: “Nobody wants my stuff, and this is never going to be successful…” No! You just have to remind them it’s there.
But be aware that there is a difference between continuously saying ‘You haven’t watched this yet’, and actually adding value when you send reminders. That could mean pointing them in the direction of a different resource or including a message from a student with a note to encourage them to watch the rest of it in the video. That way, you’re giving them something extra in those follow-ups.
Mistake #3: Broken Buttons
Let’s face it, tech breaks all the time. And—perhaps even more annoyingly—just because things have worked before, doesn’t mean that they’ll always work.
That means having a process in place to go in and regularly check that buttons are working and directed to the right place is critical. There’s really nothing worse than somebody saying, “Hey, I tried to get this but … isn’t working”(and frankly you’re lucky if someone writes in to tell you at all!). Your immediate thought then becomes, “How many other people tried to take that action and it didn’t work? I spent all this money on ads to get there!”.
Michelle recommends testing buttons every week or every two weeks. The whole idea is to build momentum in your Circuit until it becomes a well-oiled machine, where you never miss out on something.
Mistake #4: Ignoring Metrics
Many course creators are not measuring their metrics. But if sales have dropped significantly below what you would expect, you need to be able to identify if there is is something wrong with your funnel or if it’s down to holidays or the time of year.
Make sure your customer service team is savvy enough to alert you if something is a little bit off. Are they contacting you if they’re receiving a lot of messages about something not working? They need to be bringing those anomalies to your attention so you can fix what’s broken as quickly as possible.
At Nicki K Media, we track our metrics every Friday across our brands. Our operations manager goes into SamCart and looks at all the brands because we have a general idea of what we should be selling every day. We check on a weekly basis and can quickly discover if something is off.
We also take a quick peek on a daily basis. Once you have a consistent system running where you know how many sales you should be generating on a daily basis, you can immediately notice if sales are off. So many of our friends who have run live launches don’t discover there’s a problem until afterwards, when they get half of the numbers they were expecting!
Mistake #5: Emails Aren’t Delivered
If you’re counting on having a six-figure launch and instead get just one or two sales, it can feel very disheartening. But many people simply don’t realize that their emails are not being delivered, and so it’s no wonder their launch tanked.
Anytime you put out a new funnel, run yourself through it before it is live to your recipients. You’ll find so many things that are slightly off, which you can then fix before it goes live to the world. It’s also a good idea to have someone else on your team doing the testing in addition to you (using a different browser than you did).
Mistake #6: The Funnel Isn’t Protected
Protect the funnel at all costs! Nobody should touch the funnel except for the one person on your team who “owns” it. If you have too many people going in and making changes, there isn’t one person who knows what’s supposed to be there, what’s supposed to be turned on or off or in test mode. Things are much more likely to break or go a bit funky with more than one person touching your funnel.
Mistake #7: No Process for Running Tests
Tests are so important for optimizing our business. Whether it’s opt-in page tests, email tests, or any other type of test, even a one percent increase in your conversion rate can make a massive difference to your revenue. But it’s also incredibly easy to mess something up with tests (as we found out when we realized one of our email sequences was turned off!).
There are several best practices to running a test properly and instituting a process for how you run your tests will minimize the risk of something going wrong. For example, we never start a test on a Thursday or Friday or before a point person is going to be on vacation.
Always communicate with your team to let them know about the tests you’re running. That way, if there’s anything that’s off, they can go into that Slack channel or however you communicate and see if there’s a test running that could be affecting it.
Also, whoever is the key stakeholder for that test should check everything to make sure it’s running properly in the first couple of days of the test. They should then continue checking in periodically to make sure that everything is working for however long it’s running.
Mistake #8: Poor User Experience
Another big mistake course creators make is forgetting the customer’s experience. When you become fixated on making something look nice, you can often end up worsening the user experience or making it more complicated than necessary.
Pick someone on your team who isn’t part of marketing (or even a family member!) and ask if they understand what your communication means and what action you want them to take. Is the messaging clear? Sometimes things that are so obvious to us are not obvious to our customers.
Mistake #9: Tracking the Wrong Numbers
Michelle says one of the big turning points in the success of her business—aside from switching her Circuit on 😉 —was really getting serious about her numbers. Looking at them as unemotional data allowed her to figure out how to improve.
Start off by identifying your key performance indicators (KPIs), which are a critical indicator of what your progress is towards your intended outcome or result.
A lot of (often newer) business owners, who have not been used to tracking their numbers, focus their attention on tracking sales. But remember that is the outcome and so it’s too late to make any changes that will impact that number—tweaking your inputs is what will really make a difference. And with your Circuit, you can continue to make tweaks *while* you’re making sales.
Michelle recommends going through the entire funnel, starting with your traffic. What is your opt-in rate? What does your traffic look like? A lot of people think, “Oh, Facebook ads aren’t working,” but the problem could lie in your funnel. If the metrics from the Facebook ads are hitting what they’re supposed to, then the ad is doing its job of getting the click but the funnel’s not doing its job of getting the conversion or getting those opt-ins.
Then you can look at the registration to determine who’s watching and how long they are watching. Where are they dropping off in the video? And then it comes down to what each of the emails are or where people are clicking. You can still track open rates, but it’s not as accurate as the click through rate. What are you doing in your emails to make sure your audience is clicking? If changes need to be made, could you put the link in a different place to increase numbers?
By having these KPIs and these benchmarks, it allows you to keep your eyes on the prize, know exactly what to focus on, and what matters most in order to increase conversions.
Mistake #10: Ignoring the Context Around the Numbers
Sometimes an ad can be performing really well in that it gets people to click through a page. But if it’s not targeted at the *right* audience, even though your opt-in rates to the page can look great, the sales won’t look as good if it is fundamentally not getting in front of the right people.
The same is true for video views because it’s on-demand. If you’re only looking at the completion rate and think, “I worked so hard on this and people are only watching 48%”, you may need to dig deeper into the full context of your numbers.
When you look at everything and you see you’ve got 100 unique views with 200 total views, then you’ll see that people are coming back, they’re watching it twice, or they’re watching it in two sessions and they’re finishing almost all of it. This is why it’s so important to look at the context around all of your numbers instead of making assumptions based on single metrics.
People also tend to get hyper focused on how low they can get their cost per lead. Obviously, you wouldn’t turn your nose up at 50-cent leads (does such a thing even exist?!) but if you could pay $50 for a lead which resulted in a sale, you’d take it!
Another key metric to measure, particularly if you have memberships, is your retention rate. How many people renew? What’s your churn rate? How long are people staying in? You have to figure out what to do within your own program to build that self belief and boost retention.
Mistake #11: Having Too Little Data to Make Decisions
We see a lot of course creators who say they’re tracking all their numbers but it’s just not working. However, when you only have five to 10 people who have gone through the funnel, that is simply not enough data to make decisions.
Don’t just determine the amount to spend on ads because that’s what is in your budget right now—it will take you much longer to figure things out. If you can bite the bullet and spend a hundred dollars a day, you will get more traffic coming in, and reach more people.
Looking at the front end with the traffic, you want to reach 2,500, 3000, 5,000 people. Spending a hundred dollars a day with the traffic would allow you to figure out so many things over the course of a week. Do I have the right audience? Are people clicking? Spending just that little bit more will give you the data faster and help you make decisions to move forward.
Mistake #12: Having the Wrong Audience
One of the things that we talk a lot about is running your circuit to organic first— aka the people who naturally found you and thought “Ooooh, I need this solution!”
That’s a really good test for your Circuit to make sure everything is dialed in, your messaging is on point, and that your offer is what people who have found you want.
Once you have determined your Circuit performs really well with organic, then you can start moving into Facebook ads. Because again, if you’re sending traffic to the wrong audience, it might look like your Circuit or your funnel isn’t converting. But when it’s going to the wrong audience, then it’s not going to convert. You have proof that it works and then you can go out and try to find that right audience with your ads.
All of these mistakes can be avoided by looking at the health of your business. Digging into your metrics gives you more clarity on key business decisions like spending more money on ads or not or whether it’s feasible to hire a new team member. It’s about connecting the dots with your ability to grow and taking the guesswork out of what is actually working and what is not working.
There’s no denying that there is a LOT to consider when building out your sales funnel—and many mistakes to avoid! Take it step-by-step or hire someone like Michelle to help you work through all of this.
Watch More
In this episode of the Energize Your Online Business podcast, Nicki and Kate are joined by growth strategist Michelle Fernandez to discuss how tracking metrics and analyzing data can ensure consistent and predictable sales growth. Listen in to find out how to take the guesswork out of what is and isn’t working in your Circuit.
Your Turn!
What are some of the mistakes you have made in your sales funnel and how do you correct them? Let us know in the comments below!