Entrepreneurship
5 Mistakes You’re (Probably) Making with Your Marketing Funnel and How to Avoid Them

Are you frustrated with your marketing funnel? If so, don’t worry! You’re not alone. Many people these days are overlooking or mismanaging 5 key areas of their marketing funnels and it’s costing them a lot of money. Here are 5 mistakes that you might be making with your marketing funnel and how to avoid them in the future.
1. Not Segmenting Traffic Properly
This is one of the most common errors made by marketers today. All prospects should be separated into different groups based on interests, demographics, etc., which determines how they will be marketed to- this eliminates confusion about what type of content or offer will appeal best to that particular person.
2. Not Driving Enough Traffic to your Funnel
Mistake number two can be easily fixed by driving more traffic to your funnel. One of the best ways to do this is through search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Make sure you are targeting the right keywords, using effective ad copy, and tracking your results so you can make necessary adjustments along the way.
Also consider investing in social media marketing or email marketing to generate more leads for your funnel.
When you have a large enough audience, you can begin to create more specific funnels for them.
3. Offering the Wrong Incentives
If you’re not sure what incentive to offer your prospects, ask them! Many people are hesitant to do this, but it’s a great way to get feedback and learn what type of offer would be most appealing.
You can also survey your audience or use popups on your website that ask visitors what their biggest challenge is. This will help you determine which pain points you should focus on solving with your marketing funnel.
Offering the wrong incentive can actually hurt your conversion rates, so make sure you take the time to identify what would be most beneficial for your target market.
4. Having a Faulty or Incomplete Sales Funnel
A lot of people assume that once they have a lead, they can start selling. This is not the case. In order to be successful with your marketing funnel, you need to have a well-oiled sales funnel in place.
Your sales funnel should consist of 5 key steps: capturing leads, providing value, building trust, offering a solution, and closing the sale. If any one of these steps is missing or ineffective, your funnel will not work as well as it could.
Make sure you are taking the time to properly map out your sales funnel and test it regularly to make sure everything is running smoothly.
5. Not Using Automation Tools
Automation is crucial for success with marketing funnels. You can’t be everywhere at once, answer every question that your audience might have, or fulfill every request they make- but an automated system can.
Using automation tools during each step of the 5 steps in your sales funnel will help you save time and provide better customer service to your prospects no matter when or where they are interacting with you. This type of personalization increases trust levels which ultimately leads to more conversions.
If there’s one thing all marketers should take away from this blog post it’s that using proper segmenting, targeting, incentives, a complete sales process map along with top notch lead generation strategies combined together into an effective marketing funnel result in increased traffic and revenue within your business.
Conclusion
A marketing funnel is one of the most effective tools a business can use to increase traffic and revenue. However, in order for it to be successful, you need to make sure that you are avoiding these 5 common mistakes.
If you’re not sure how to get started, or if your funnel isn’t performing as well as you’d like, contact us today for help! We would be happy to set up a consultation and help you create or improve your marketing funnel so you can start seeing results.
John Lawson is one of the most trusted and experienced eCommerce professionals in the industry. John is the founder of The Ecommerce Group, which he started in 2011 to share his knowledge with other entrepreneurs in the industry. It’s the oldest eCommerce group on Facebook with over 8,500 members from around the world!
John speaks at conferences all around the world, including Retail Global, South by Southwest, Etail, Digital Summit, Hubspot Inbound, Ad-Tech and more. He also writes for several international publications such as Power Retail, Small Business Trends and Disrupt Magazine.
