4 Strategies to Improve Your Sales Funnel

If you’re looking to pump up your inbound marketing bona fides, look no further; today, we’ll be covering 4 ways to construct a stronger sales funnel that you won’t want to miss. With the rapid decline of outbound marketing tactics, it’s more important than ever that savvy business owners work stronger inbound principals into their marketing, develop their websites for new effective sales funnels, and strengthen the funnels they already have in place.

Inbound Best Practices

A strong sales funnel demands a strict adherence to the principles of inbound marketing. By developing your outreach efforts, website design, content, and every other stage of your sales funnel according to the best practices established by experts in the field, you’ll see massive improvements to the efficiency of your funnel. Consider these points:

Original Content

Original content is key to a strong sales funnel; rehashed, uninspired, and otherwise boring content won’t go far with modern audiences. If they’ve seen it elsewhere, they won’t see any reason to stick around or come back—much less continue down your funnel.

Eliminate Waste. Figure out what efforts and paths on your funnel aren’t making proper returns, and get rid of them. Not every stream of traffic results in sales, and even those which do make sales may not be worth the time invested.

Actionable Content

You need CTAs, clickable logos, forms to fill out, anything that gets your visitors moving from passive reading to active engagement. Even if it’s a minor effort, getting that first action from a lead pushes them closer to making a purchase.

Nurturing Leads

Don’t jump the gun with leads—especially the really tempting ones. Take your time, develop your leads into guaranteed sales, and make the absolute most of your traffic.

Clean Layouts. Make sure your website’s design encourages visitors to travel the way you want them to travel—eliminate distractions and detours.

New Traffic

Exploring new sources of traffic should be undertaken carefully. An exciting new idea may become a major boondoggle—and wasted effort will only weaken your funnel.

Consider these avenues for outreach:

• Referral Partners
• Social Media Participation
• SEO
• Paid Advertising
• Improving Efficiency

At the core of any sales funnel effort worth making lay a beating heart of data collection and thorough analysis. Your website should be designed with tracking and analysis in mind, giving you exhaustive insight into how your users interact with your content, your sales pages, and every other part of your funnel. If you redirect prospects to phone lines or other means of contact, you need to track that and understand that usage, as well.

After you have this network of data at your fingertips, it’s crucial that you begin—and never stop—refining your funnels. Split test as much as your traffic allows, guiding prospects to slightly different variations of the same page and keeping tabs of which worked better. This is a never-ending effort, so make sure you have the tools and knowledge to keep it up without wasting time.

What else?  What strategies do you use to strengthen your sales funnel?