When working with beauty and wellness experts who are bringing their digital product to life, I find that you’ll typically fall hard on one side of the spectrum – either you’re obsessing over the design of your funnel and it’s holding you back from launching. 

Or, you haven’t given design much thought, if any, and you’re wondering why people aren’t buying your product. 

As I talked about in Episode 6 of this season, copywriting and design for your funnel work hand-in-hand, and while I do believe copy has a slight edge over design when it comes to the importance meter, design is still a crucial make-or-break element to your funnel. 

In this episode, I’m sharing the most important design considerations you need to keep in mind to build a funnel for optimal conversion. 

In this episode, you’ll learn: 

• The five key elements of design that apply to literally anything and everything you could design – these are the elements that ensure a design works for a reader’s eyes and brain 
• What funnel-specific design element is unique to a sales page and that primes it for conversion
• Why you need clearly define sections throughout your funnel, specifically on your sales page for greater information comprehension 
• The two factors of your funnel design that are most essential – yes, even if you’re going the most simple design route of popping your copy into a Google doc

Read the Transcript for Season 1, Episode 7 – Funnel Design That Drives Sales

Hey there and welcome to episode 7 of season one of Compel and Convert. This is the design episode. So if you listen to last episode, which you should go listen to episode six is all about funnel copy. The keys to unlocking high converting copy for your funnel. Go listen to that first, because as I mentioned in that episode, I believe copy is a little bit more important than design.

They do work hand in hand. They’re both very important. Don’t get me wrong, this is not like picking a favorite child that doesn’t actually exist. Copy is just one of those things that has a slight edge over design. So go listen to funnel copy first.

Not to mention, understanding the pieces in that episode will also play into this episode a bit in terms of focusing your design. So design is like copy, not easy. So if you find yourself struggling with it a bit, don’t get down on yourself.

Don’t let it stop you from getting your thing launched or your funnel launched. Because the reality is that copy can be refreshed, design can be overhauled, things can be tweaked and moved around, and this is just the process. You’ve got to start somewhere. So when it comes to design, I’m going to try and not repeat myself too much in the copy episode, because a lot of the same things apply. But design is a science and art.

It is something that people go to school for to study exclusively. So it’s definitely something that if you’re looking at and you’re like, where do I even begin with designing a sales page?

There’s a reason professionals exist, right? So hopefully today with what I can teach you in the design phase is I can teach you some of the fundamentals so that you feel comfortable to either get your preliminary funnel built and you know that you can build off of it later in terms of sprucing up the design also know that there’s a lot of the one nice thing about design and the availability of just the internet these days is that there are a lot of templates out there to help you with design. 

So if you are having a hard time selecting kind of layouts or even color palettes or fonts like anything that you would normally think of as branding as well, in terms of visual branding, there’s a lot of templates and there’s a lot of tools that can help you in that realm. But in terms of some of those visual branding elements, you can’t go wrong with just using a variation of your main brand design. So I just want to add that in as a little pre PS or a pre S, I guess, to this conversation on design, because your funnel should be an extension of your brand, but it should have kind of its own look and feel to it.

Because the reality is, the whole point of the funnel is to focus on a specific offer. So your offer should almost have a little bit of its own sub brand going on. So you want to make sure that it’s almost like the cousin to your main brand where they definitely look related. But they also have some variation so that someone can understand like oh, this is a key offer or this is a standalone product or something of that nature. So design really should help clue someone in as to being focused on one particular offer.

And that actually brings me into the first thing that you need to know about funnel design is that a funnel. What makes a funnel stand out is that it is a fully focused page on one thing only. So if you think of your website where you have your home page and the home page is kind of leading people into these different pathways around your website. And maybe your about pages leading someone to your services page, like each page on your website kind of has a goal to drive someone to another thing. The only goal for your funnel is to take someone to the next step.

So if you have and I believe I talked about this in episode five, Filling your Funnel, I talked about creating a lead magnet to start building your email list. In that episode, I talk about landing pages and how landing pages, the only thing on your landing page is an area for someone to opt in for your email list. They should not have all these other options of pages to click towards or navigate to. 

There should be no top navigation, bottom navigation, it should solely be an email sign up list. And if you go to the link that I’ll include in the show Notes for my freebie opt in for the five keys to building a stand out online brand, you will see how that landing page.

The only option you have on that landing page is to input your email information to get that free audio series, which if you’re interested in getting that’s how you can get it. But if you want to just simply see an example, that’s one that you can look out right away. 

So a fully focused page, like with a sales page is not just a page on your main website that has information around one offer. It is truly only someone can only look at that one thing when they’re on that page. So there’s no top line navigation, there’s no footer navigation, there’s not a mention of like these other offers that you have going on.

It is just one offer. And if we’re focusing on digital products here, this will be focused solely on the digital product offer that you’re trying to sell through your funnel, at least as we get to the sales page. Right? Because if we’re doing a lead magnet first, that Page’s focus is getting email collection. And then the next step in the funnel, once you have nurtured someone a bit is to get them to purchase your offer.

So the sales page is focused solely on that offer.

The next thing to focus on when it comes to funnel design is having clearly defined sections of information. So in the previous episode where I talked about copy, I talked about things like the big transformation, the pain points, the benefits, and the features. Each of those things needs to have its own section. 

So as someone’s moving through your sales page, as they’re learning about your offer, there needs to be these clearly defined areas where they can go, OK, what’s included in this offer or what are some of the things I can gain? It helps to have clearly defined and when I say define, I mean background colors vary between these sections, the layout changes.

Maybe you have two columns for the features and you have benefits, each in their own box. You want to have these clearly defined spatial areas that outline these various pieces of copy. And when you talk about the main transformation that typically will come in to play with headlines or a main banner on the page, you want to essentially organize all the pieces of your copy into these clearly defined sections that allow someone to get through the information more easily. 

Because if you simply put all this copy onto just a blank page. And actually, if you listen to episode six, I talk about the fact that you can sell something simply through a Google Doc.And that’s why I feel like copy is slightly more important, because someone needs to have the information and make an informed decision, but they don’t need to have the design to make that decision. The design, however, does help someone get through that information easier. 

So if you’re looking at all of your sales copy on a well formatted Google Doc, and when I say well formatted, I’m referring to the use of bold and underlines and headings and bullet points. All those things we learned in high school or College English where you’re writing a paper and they tell you, hey, can you organize this so that it’s easy to read and not having run on sentences or big chunks of paragraphs with like 16 sentences? That definitely does not work with online marketing.

And I’ll go into this in a second. I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, but you essentially want to have these clearly defined sections of information so that someone can make it through all the information in a visually digestible way. That not only makes going through the information enjoyable, but it also makes it more persuasive because someone is having a good experience consuming all of this information. Because it’s clearly laid out, it’s visually appealing and it’s playing into their emotions. 

Because things like color and the emotional look and feel of the photography that you’re using or the fonts that you’re using, all of these visual cues that come through and design do elicit emotions.So we want to make sure that we’re playing into that as well. And that’s where knowing your brand is really important, because obviously you want to be conveying those visual cues in a way that is on brand for you. 

So first, fully focused page focus solely on your offer or the goal at hand, whether it’s collecting email addresses or selling the offer itself, clearly define sections of information. And then finally, I wanted to call out a couple of key elements that exist within the greater elements of design. So I’m going to backpedal just a little bit.

In design, there are five key elements that come into play all the time, everywhere they are space, cadence, balance, emphasis, and detail. Now, I think it’s really helpful to have a working knowledge of these things because it does help you pretty much everywhere. It helps you with social media, graphics, email design, brochure design, literally anything you’re designing, even the way that you’re spacing out products on your retail shelves. This helps. So I’ll just go through each one very briefly.

I just don’t want to get too in the weeds because like I mentioned with copy, these are principles that people literally study for years. So to try to boil it down into a podcast episode and make it seem like this is all you need to know for design would be a disservice to you. Honestly, I think people who try to over simplify these marketing concepts and practices and disciplines that people spend their entire careers perfecting and experimenting with is just tricky because it makes it sound like it’s really easy when really it’s not. 

But just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean it’s impossible for someone who doesn’t have a design degree to do if you understand the foundational elements. So I basically just want to convey the foundational elements. That way you feel like you have a good place to start and you have a good working knowledge that whether you want to take a stab at doing it yourself, the first go around, you can. 

And when you’re ready to hire, you have a good foundational knowledge so that you can hire somebody that you are confident is really going to deliver great work for you. Because that, I think, is the conversation that doesn’t happen enough. We like to talk about all the I’m going on a tangent here, but just let me have my moment here. A lot of times in the digital marketing or online business space, and I’m using the Royal we here because I think it’s an industry wide issue and I belong to this industry.

So I’ll just group myself in there too, even though I try to not follow these things, but I’m sure I’ve done so in the past. We like to make it sound like it’s just anyone can do anything they want online. And that is true. There are no gatekeepers anymore. Anybody can purchase a domain, start a website, launch a product.

I think that’s one of the most beautiful things in the world. I’m so excited that the democratization of business and the beauty industry, I mean, all of it. The Internet has been a wonderful thing for giving everybody opportunity and just a chance to do something different or expand upon their dream and not have to jump through 50 rings of fire to make it happen. That said, just because it is easier than ever doesn’t mean it’s actually easy. This stuff is still hard.

It’s still a lot of work to build an entire funnel when that’s not your discipline of choice. If you are a beauty or a wellness expert, you have devoted your expertise in your career, your craft to learning in depth about whatever it is you’re an expert at, right? And someone else couldn’t just come in and learn the fundamentals and quickly grasp your expertise either. 

However, by sharing the foundational elements and by sharing the basics, we give someone the tools to get started and we give people the ability to take some of their own opportunity into their own hands and not it’s essentially not being a gatekeeper. Right. Saying that yes, these elements are available to anybody while also having the nuanced understanding that it’s difficult. And if you’re finding it difficult, totally normal. You can do this on a basic level. It may not be perfect, it may not be what you want, and that’s okay. It’s enough to get the ball rolling.

And then once or if you ever feel the need to hire to take things to the next level, you now have enough of a working knowledge that you can feel really confident in whoever it is that you’re bringing on board with you to help you elevate your funnel or your project to the next level. Okay, going to get down off my soapbox, my proverbial soapbox, and get back to the design principles. Ok, so the five elements of design space, cadence, balance, emphasis and detail. 

Space refers to negative space. So think about when you are typing up a document, how you like to press the enter button between your different sections to give your information some space to breathe. That is space and design. By giving text enough space on the sides, the top, the bottom, in between lines, you are allowing the reader to have an easier time to consume the information because their eyeballs don’t have to work as hard. 

So if you were to put this in the context of your retail shelves, if you were to smush all your products together, like right next to each other, it makes it really hard for someone to delineate, like where certain products start and where other products end. By spacing them out a bit and by giving them some negative room to breathe, you are allowing somebody to feel like they can conceptually see things a lot easier. So that is what spaces cadence refers to the rhythm of design.

So every now and then you will see it’s kind of hard to put this one into verbalize this one. But sometimes you will come across text or something that’s designed where it’s like you almost have to stop and try hard to understand the order in which it needs to be read. That’s because cadence is missing. So cadence, if you think of it, is like a flow. And if you’re thinking of, oh, here’s a good example.

If you’ve ever seen those Instagram Memes where it’s like, you read this first, then you’re going to read this next, then you read this and you’re like, how did they know that? That’s because that’s cadence. I’ll put an example of this in the show notes, so you can understand what I’m talking about. But things like headlines and sub headlines and then body text and little points of emphasis, which that’s another piece of the design puzzle as well. 

But cadence essentially gives your copy or whatever design elements are on the page. Whether it be squares and grids or lines, it gives it flow and hierarchy. That way someone’s eye visually knows where to travel on the page. It sounds a little bit more complicated than it actually is when you see it in play. Balance. Balance is exactly what it sounds like. 

So if you were to have envision a page where everything was shoved all the way to the left, and I’m not just talking about justifying the paragraph to the left, I’m talking about all the text was like, on the far, far left edge of the page. Not only does it lack space because there’s not enough space on the edge of the page to give someone’s eye enough room to really grasp the text, but there’s nothing on the right hand side like balancing it out.

It looks super lopsided and it just looks weird. Balance refers to when you keep things across the center field in a balanced way. So if you have two columns of text keeping them the same width apart and then the same width from the outside of the page is what’s going to look good for design, because they are in balance. If you were to throw off that balance, it’s going to look weird. Even if someone doesn’t have any knowledge of what’s off, I’m sure everyone can agree that they’ve looked at something before and gone, I don’t really know what’s wrong with it, but it just doesn’t look good. 

That’s because the balance is likely off. So balance is something that our eyes are naturally attuned to. We naturally want to see things in balance, and our eyes seek balance. So in your design, you want to keep that balance so that you’re keeping your reader from essentially having to work too hard. That’s kind of the whole goal with having a well designed funnel is keeping the design structured in such a way that it keeps someone moving along the page with the copy in conjunction.

So it’s kind of like this dance, right, where you’ve got two things working in tandem with each other to help someone not essentially give up because it’s too hard to follow the information. I actually was looking at a sales page just the other day. I get served up ads for all sorts of stuff. That’s one of the perks of my job because I look at so many different things and I analyze stuff for these podcast episodes that I click on a lot of different things. So I get served up ads for literally all sorts of stuff.

And I got served up an ad for a dance class, like an online dance class the other day. And I knew the person who was advertising it like she’s an influencer. I don’t know her personally, but I had seen her content before and I was like, oh, this is interesting. I clicked on it. The information on this page was so scattered, like it lacked space, cadence, and balance.

And because of that, I honestly could only get about halfway through the page before I was like, just I was forcing myself to keep reading the page to see what else was included because it felt my brain was like, I’m tired of looking at this. So it’s not about fancy design. It’s honestly just about following the design principles. Ok, so balance. Next up is emphasis.

So emphasis is things like using a headline text that looks different than the paragraph text. Or when you’re typing up certain words, you’re going to italicize it and underline it or bold it. You’re using emphasis to call attention to certain pieces. And you can do this through what I just mentioned in terms of Bolding or italicizing that’s actually called copy design. But when it comes to your funnel design, you might be using things like arrows or pop out boxes, like little boxes that highlight a key point that you want to draw attention to.

Or maybe you have each section of information exists in its own container or box. And when I say box, I mean like an actual rectangle on the page to give it some shape to work within. Right? So these key elements are things that draw emphasis to certain pieces of information, whether it be through the copy design or through actual design elements where you’re pointing out a specific thing that you want someone to notice. This could also be something like on your call to action buttons.

Maybe you have the button as a GIF where it flashes different colors. That could be a point of emphasis. There’s a lot of different ways that you can use emphasis. This is one of those things where it’s like less is more. You only want to draw attention or emphasis to things that you truly want to emphasize.

Because if you overdo it and everything has emphasis, then nothing has emphasis. If that makes sense. Okay, final thing is detail. So detail can be smaller flourishes, or just added small elements that add kind of that cherry on top type of feel to your design. So maybe it’s adding a pattern to the background of one of your sections.

Or maybe it’s having a background to one of your sections. That is parallax. And parallax means if you’ve ever seen, like, if you’ve ever been scrolling a page and the background image moves along with your mouse and it almost gives it this motion or animated sensation, that would be a detail. Details could also be little borders around your images, things that just add some visual cues that elevate the overall brand or emotional feel to the design. And, like, emphasis, less is more.

You don’t want to go over the top with details, or else they become distracting. Details should really just act as a addressing to your overall design. So that is really it for design. Without getting too in the weeds. I just want to emphasize there that space and cadence.

Out of those five key elements of design, I feel that space and cadence are the most important to get if you’re doing your own design, because, well, I guess in balance, emphasis and detail are nice to have. But I would much rather see a page that has enough space and is well balanced and flows, because at the end of the day, that’s what’s most important. 

The emphasis and the details, in my opinion, can act as more of a flourish. They definitely add a whole lot, and they can put your design over the edge in terms of making you really stand out. But the most key elements of space, cadence and balance are going to be most important for making sure that your reader can get through the copy that’s on the page. 

And that’s where, like I mentioned in the Funnel copy episode, if you had your funnel copy solely on a Google Doc, if it had decent spacing, well balanced, and the information flows, you’ve technically got what you need to sell. You don’t have to have the fancy design with anything more than a white background. Of course, that makes a huge difference. 

So remember, a fully focused page focused solely on the next goal, whether it is getting someone’s email address or having someone purchase the actual digital product that you’re offering. You want to have clearly defined sections for all of your information and all of your various pieces of copy.

So a section that clearly communicates the transformation that clearly outlines what they’re currently feeling, their pain points. A section that outlines all the benefits and why those are important and how they’re going to experience those things and know when they’re happening. And then a section that showcases all the features of the actual product that they’re purchasing. So having clearly defined sections of information is really important for that design. 

And then finally making sure that your key elements are there of space, cadence and balance and that is funnel design in a nutshell, I feel super compelled to tell you even more but I think that is truly the foundation of what you need to get going and to not overwhelm you and to also make you feel confident in going out to start putting some pieces together on your own if that’s what you want to do or if you are ready to bring on help that you feel equipped to look at someone’s portfolio or to look at someone’s sample of work and go, yeah, this looks good.

Like this is what I was envisioning and this is what I think I need. If you have any other questions on that, if you’re wondering about another piece of design that you are just curious about or if you’re like, okay, I did this thing, is this what you were talking about? 

Like if you want more clarity on it, let me know and I would be happy to chat with you on it and you can reach me studioclary.com you can reach out via my contact form or send me a DM on Instagram and I will catch you in the next episode.