Generally speaking, the more eyeballs on your offer, the more purchases you will get, right? 

While this is true (to a degree), what’s equally important as driving traffic and new leads is making sure that anyone who *does* see your offer is primed to purchase based on what they’re experiencing while in your funnel. 

Is the design on point? Is the copywriting tight? Where are people dropping off inside the funnel? In this episode, I explore those questions along with the main question of “I’ve launched…now what?”

In this episode, you’ll learn: 

• Why the way you frame your launch and funnel goals matters for determining what’s working with your funnels 
• How to determine where your funnel is performing based on industry benchmarks
• Best practices for making tweaks and changes to your funnel to optimize it for peak performance

Read the Transcript for Season 1, Episode 10 – You’ve Launched Your Funnel…Now What?

Hello there, and welcome to episode ten, which is the final episode of season one of the Compelling Convert podcast. And I’m just so thankful that I’ve been able to share of this journey with you. Of course, I can’t see specifically who’s listening based on my podcast numbers, but I can see that there are people listening and people who have joined in new subscribers. 

So thank you so much if you’ve been following along, and if you’ve been following along since the beginning, because I know I was doing a little bit of podcasting before this season started, and it’s been really nice to just focus on one core topic. I hope you’ve been able to get a really good deep dive into the topic of digital product funnel building, because it really is a very nuanced area of online business, and one that often is made to seem super easy, like we hear about.

If you’re familiar with the Click Funnels One Funnel Away challenge, which was actually my introduction to funnels, but it very quickly became evident that it’s really not easy. There are a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of things to consider. So I am hopeful that you’ve been able to get a good grasp on the funnel building process through this series and the next season. I don’t have a specific air date yet.

I have a topical focus for season two in mind with some episode ideas already fleshed out, but I also have quite a few things coming up this summer with moving, so we’ll be moving somewhere. I’m not sure where yet because the military has yet to tell us where we’re going, but we’ll be moving, and there’s just some other things happening family-wise. So to be continued on that. But my hope is that you will follow along with me over on Instagram @Studio Clary. I’ll continue posting content there with helpful tips and tricks.

I’ll continue sending emails, so be sure that you are on my email list. And if you’ve liked this audio series this season one, you can go sign up for my free audio series called Clarify to Convert, and that’s a short miniseries with more in-depth stuff related to the process of how I walk someone through doing a project. So if you need help there, you can check that out. All right, let’s get into the good stuff, not mumbling. So today we’re going to go over kind of a final piece of the puzzle, which is funnel optimization.

So you are like, okay, I’ve launched now what? How do I know if this thing is working? Now, before we start, I have talked about this in prior episodes, but just want to frame it here. When it comes to your goal, when you’re building a funnel, right, especially a sales funnel, it’s right there in the name. Your whole goal is sales.

Obviously, the whole goal of business is to get sales. We’re not in business if we don’t make money, right? We’re not running a charity unless you are running a charity, in which case it’s a little different. But still, your goal is to be raising money. So at the end of the day, when it comes to framing goals around funnels, while you may have a specific sales goal you want to hit like, I want to make $5,000 from my funnel this month.

That’s a great goal to have and it’s concrete and it’s measurable. But you can’t guarantee that you’re going to get $5,000 out of your funnel, right? Depending on the price point of your product, that breaks down to how many sales and then how many sales you get breaks down to how many people you were able to get your offer in front of. And when it comes to getting your offer in front of people, how much traffic were you able to drive? Certain elements, once you reverse engineer them, enough become slightly out of your control.

So what we’re going to cover in this episode when it comes to funnel optimization is tweaking the elements that are in your control to help you meet the goal that may or may not be in your control, if that makes sense, because I like to put things around process goals where I’ll say, okay, my goal is to run an ad campaign for two weeks that generates 10 unique visitors to my landing page. 

And from that landing page, I have a loose goal, obviously, and I’m going to get into this. So I won’t share it quite yet. But I have a loose goal. Of the percentage of people out of that thousand that I want opting in, I ultimately cannot actually control how many people are putting in their email address or how many people get shown my landing page ad on Facebook, of course.

But there are elements I can tweak to try to move that closer. So that’s what I’m going to get into. Let’s see here. So we’re clear on the goal. Now, the ultimate thing that we want to really focus on from the get-go is traffic.

Because if you have this ultimate sales goal and we reverse engineer all the way back, it all comes down to how many eyeballs are getting onto your offer. And that is going to trickle down the further that someone moves into your funnel. So how many eyeballs are going to see your ad? 

And from there, how many of those people who see your ad are going to click on it over to your landing page and from your landing page, how many of the eyeballs that land there end up getting to your email list and so on and so forth? So it’s like each stage of the funnel, it’s less and less eyeballs.

So you’re not doing anything wrong. No, I mean literally no one has 100% opt in rate, right? So I’m going to use even numbers here. But if you’ve got 1000 people that saw your ad, which, by the way, is a very good metric to begin measuring with. You don’t want to turn off an ad when only 100 people have seen it.

It’s not enough data to work with. You need enough people to see the initial thing to be able to draw conclusions on some of these conversion benchmarks I’m going to share with you in this episode. So let’s say you have 1000 people who see your ad for your lead magnet, freebie, your webinar, whatever. How many of those people who then click on the ad? How many of them are there?

And then how many out of the people that landed on the landing page converted over to your email list? So generally speaking, the more eyeballs on your offer, the more purchases you’ll get, right? So if you’re doing math now, the conversion rate may not shift, although ideally it will, because hopefully you will optimize and then those rates will change. 

But because you have more people seeing your ad or your email, you’re getting more top-line revenue. So the whole goal is to get as many people as possible into your funnel because the more eyeballs you have, the more end purchases you will get.

Now this is where things become very nuanced. Just because you’re increasing eyeballs doesn’t mean that your conversion rate is going to be better or improve, because you still need to ensure that you’re attracting the right people the right eyeballs into your funnel to begin with. 

Right? So you might have an ad that’s capturing a lot of attention and it’s converting well into clicks over to your landing page or your lead magnet, but it’s not converting into email subscribers well enough. And then those people, because they’re not moving onto your email list, they aren’t moving further down the funnel and converting to purchases.

And it might be because they’re not the right people for your offer. So one thing that’s really important to consider, this takes time to figure out. So many consumers are not going to be immediate purchasers. 

So when you are presenting an offer or you’re in an inactive launch period, a good metric for seeing if the leads you’ve built are actually strong leads is looking at how many of those warm leads to the people you are getting onto your email list, are looking at your emails, opening your emails, and then looking at your offer when they are finally presented an offer and then taking you up on it. 

This is why it is nice to have some sort of a low level introductory type of offer, because it helps to vet whether you’re bringing in the right audience who will ascend through your business’s overall value ladder. 

And I believe I talked about this value ladder right in episode one, I believe where your business typically has a few different levels of offer, you’ve got one that’s more of like a bite-sized something that someone can kind of get a feel for what it is you offer, and then if they like that, they decide to level up into the next thing. 

So if you run a Brick and Mortar spa or studio, you might be familiar with this as the first time customer facial. Maybe it’s a very introductory type of facial. Someone gets a feel for what your spa is like and then they decide, okay, I want to get the three package that’s really going to deliver me the customer results I want, or I’m going to take this intro to yoga class. And once I get a feel for how it goes, I can decide maybe I can be a more advanced level.

Or maybe I want to sign up for a monthly membership because I really like this. So they’re getting a little taste with this introductory type of offer. Right?

So you may have in the context of a digital product, you may have a full comprehensive training course that you want everyone who comes into your universe online to take. But they may not be ready quite yet. Right? So a taster of that overall comprehensive course, like a workshop or a preliminary training, that can be a great micro commitment to see that you’re bringing in the right people who will be ready for the bigger thing with time. 

So keep in mind, as you are doing the traffic work, like you’re being active on social media, you’re putting out content, you’re trying to drive people into your universe and ideally get them onto your email list because that is the one platform you ultimately control.

And you own your email list, right? If people have opted into your lead magnet or to your newsletter, you have their information. You can contact them anytime you want. You are not at the algorithms mercy now, of course, you’re still at the mercy of people having very stuffed and crammed inboxes. You need to be good with writing solid subject lines and putting out things consistently so that you’re staying at the top of someone’s radar.

But if you are getting people onto your email list, you want to ensure that you are getting the right people. Okay? So when it comes to numbers, let’s talk about some key benchmarks. Now, I just want to preface this by saying these are very general. They are not industry-specific.

I don’t want to say take it with a grain of salt because these really are truly good metrics to follow. But if yours is going like slightly under, and when I mean slightly, I mean like one to two percentage points under, it’s not that your thing is failing, right? These are just some good numbers to shoot for. And they might be shocking. You might be like, what?

That is not very high. Just bear with me here. You will see how it all shakes out. So some key benchmarks to keep in mind. And there are a lot more in the industry.

These are just like the big ones to know. So you want to shoot for out of the people who land on your landing page for whatever, whether it’s a freebie or for an introductory offer, something like that, that you are just trying to get them onto your email list. You’re not getting them to buy, you’re just getting them to opt-in for something. You want a 20% opt-in rate. Now if you’ve got more than that, fantastic.

Do not change anything. You do not need to change anything. You’ve got a 30% opt-in rate. You’re like knocking it out of the park. You don’t need to change anything.

If you are far under the 20% opt-in rate. That’s where you may want to look at. Where is the disconnect between the people who are seeing an ad or a social media post and who are clicking onto the landing page? Out of the number of people who are clicking onto the landing page, why are only such a small amount of people opting in? And this is where I’m going to get into troubleshooting in a little bit.

But I just want you to see where the trickle-down occurs. Because if you are not getting enough people to even see the landing page, well, the fact that your landing page conversion rate is so low may not be that big of an issue. Maybe it’s a traffic-related issue. You’re just not driving enough people to the opt-in page to begin with. Right?

But if you are driving enough people like you can see that there’s a good number of clicks. And like I mentioned, 1000 unique views on an opt-in page is ideal before you start making any changes. And if you’re doing organic marketing efforts, it can take quite a while to get to a thousand unique page views. That’s why I keep talking about ads, because ads is a really nice way to kind of accelerate getting those initial thousand unique page views. And of course that requires a little risk.

You’ve got to put some money into an ad campaign that’s going to get those views. But if you have the resources to work with, it really helps you with accelerating the optimization process. Okay, so let’s just say you’ve got 100 people who look at a landing page just for simple math here. 

I am not a math expert, but if you want a 20% option rate out of 100 people who land on your landing page, you want 20 of them to sign up for your email list. Okay then from your emails. So you’ve got 20 people who signed up for your email list out of that 100 you want 20% of those people opening your emails. Not everyone is going to open their emails. It’s just the way the game works. 

I will say when it comes to email open rate, you can get much higher than 20% if you are sending good quality content and you are getting the right people on your email list. I have consistently seen and worked with clients and done their email marketing and achieved anywhere from 30% to 40% open rates.

And it’s all about getting the right people on your list, sending out quality content and doing so consistently. Those are the secrets. And they are not secrets. They are very simple. Not easy, but simple.

So from there, 20% open rate is what you’re going to shoot for. I would encourage you to try to shoot higher, like aim for the stars then from your email open rate or from an ad. Ideally, we’re not marketing to people who are completely cold. And when I say marketing to people who are completely cold, I mean marketing an offer directly, you can do that in some instances, like with a self liquidating offer that’s very low cost. But really that’s an effort to list, build and get qualified leads onto your email list.

But in general, you would be a little off-put if you saw an ad on Facebook that pitched you $1,000 product out of nowhere. Right? Like, you need to warm people up first. People need to learn about you. They need to have touch points with you.

They need at least seven exposures to gain that know, like and trust. So once you have built the warm lead or the hot lead, you want to aim for a one to 5% buy rate. Now, 1% is very low. I personally am not happy if I see 1%. If I’m seeing 2% to 3%, I’m like, all right, this is good.

There’s room for improvement. Absolutely. Because 5% is doable. And if you are really in touch with your audience, more than 5% is certainly doable. But if you are getting 5% buy rate from the people who are seeing your offer, you’re doing fantastic.

And if you’re doing two to 3%, I think you’re doing great. Less than that. I just think just because it’s a benchmark doesn’t mean it’s necessarily what we should be shooting for. Now, like I mentioned, if you’re hitting these benchmarks, that’s fantastic.

But if you’re not hitting those rates, start at the beginning. If someone isn’t opting into your list, they’re not going to see your emails. So depending on where your numbers are, you may want to make a big change or a little change. If you have people landing on your landing page and you’re like, let’s see, it’s a 20% often rate benchmark, right? Let’s say you’re getting people onto your landing page and you’re only getting about 15%.

Not terrible, but also definitely could be better. Maybe you want to try out just changing the headline or the hook on your landing page. See if that helps up tick your opt-in rate. And of course, you need to drive more traffic to see if it’s working. Now, if you drive more traffic and you’re seeing that that opt-in rate is not changing based on that tweak you made to a headline or a hook.

That’s where you might want to go, okay, maybe I need to redesign the page. Maybe it needs to be more design-friendly. It needs to be more sleek. Maybe it’s a little confusing in terms of where does someone click. Maybe it needs a better, more compelling image.

Change one thing, one more thing, and test again to see if your opt-in rate goes up. Keep making those micro shifts one at a time to see what is going to move the needle. Because here’s the thing. If you overhaul the whole page, you don’t know what worked and what didn’t. Because you may have had great copy underneath your headline, but you just didn’t have a good headline.

Or you may have had great copy, but the image on the page was obscuring some of the copy by making one tiny shift at a time. You can actually measurably see what shift you made that caused a change in the opt-in rate. Right now, if you’re doing all this and it’s still not working, maybe you need a new freebie offer. Maybe you do need something more drastic. This is where you need to look at that sliding scale of am I Super close to the benchmark or am I Super off the Mark from the benchmark?

Because if you’re really off the benchmark, that’s where you can start with the more drastic change of maybe I need an entirely new freebie offer. Maybe I need to redesign the entire page. But if you’re close enough within that, like 15% to 20%. Do micro changes. Do a change to the headline.

Do a change to the image small tweaks. And this goes for every single part of your funnel. That as your reverse engineering. And let’s say you’re not getting the end sales you want. And you start back at the beginning and you go, okay, I’m getting a good opt-in rate.

Fantastic. Go to your email. I’m getting great email open rates. But then when people hit my sales page for my offer, they’re not converting. So by all intensive purposes, you’ve got people who want what it is your lead magnet is saying that you can help them with.

They like the email content you’re sending them, and whatever you’re putting in your emails is making sense to them that gets them interested in seeing the offer. But then clearly there’s something on your sales page that’s missing the mark. Follow the same process with the sales page. Are you at the 1% or the 5%? If you’re at the 1%, perhaps you need to change something drastic, like all the copy on your page, because you need to reposition your offer.

Or maybe you are close to maybe you’re at 2%, which is great, but you want to make it better. Maybe you need to just spruce up some of your headlines on the page. Or maybe you need to make your call to action buttons a brighter color so that they’re more they pop off the page a little bit more. This is where you start making the micro tweaks, and all you have to do is reverse engineer and see where are people dropping off in your funnel and start there. You don’t want to go back to the beginning and start ripping things to shreds if there’s no problem at the beginning.

You want to start with where you think people are falling off and fix it from there. Because if you can plug those holes where people are leaking out of the funnel, well, then you’re going to get more people down at the bottom who eventually make the purchase.

 Right? So if you think of it like an actual funnel, like you would use to pour liquid into a water bottle right from a big jug. If there are holes at the top of the funnel, you have less liquid going into the small water bottle.

Patch up those holes at the top, and you’ll get more liquid filling down the bottom. If you have holes down at the bottom, you’re still going to have liquid coming in, but it’s not going to be as efficient. So find where the holes are and plug them strategically from the top down.

And that is really the overview of funnel optimization. When I was creating the outline for this episode, I really had to rein it in because this is the part of the process where, especially if you’re doing your first digital product, it can be very easy to launch and just think that it’s not working or it worked really well one time, and then it didn’t work so well the next time. 

And it can get it can move a lot. Like, there’s a lot of moving pieces associated with having a funnel. And you may also find that you have a funnel that had great numbers to start with because you had a list full of warm and hot leads. But you went through those warm and hot leads, and now it’s time to refill the funnel with new fresh leads. 

So you really want to evaluate these numbers on an ongoing basis, whether you have an offer that you’re launching kind of an open-closed cart cycles, or you’ve got an evergreen offer, because an evergreen offer may require some tweaking, maybe every quarter or every six months just to make sure that it’s staying fresh. Right. So look at your numbers. Don’t be afraid of the math.

It’s very simple. And use those benchmarks to kind of give you a roadmap and a guide. And if you need more assistance on it, reach out, because I try to give information in such a way that it can help the most people. But obviously, I don’t know your specific offer. I don’t know your specific audience.

And there’s a lot of the specifics that do go into flushing the math out. So with all that I want to wrap up by saying, if you’ve enjoyed this series and you’re thinking to yourself, all right, I feel equipped. I feel knowledgeable. I have a good baseline foundation of all this funnel stuff, but I still need support in figuring some things out. I now have available, which I am super excited to have this availability.

It’s been a while coming to be able to work one on one with clients a little bit, so I’m super excited to have some limited availability to be able to do this. But I am currently offering funnel strategy sessions and audits. So whether you need help crafting your offer, like what’s going to go into this digital product idea? 

Like, maybe you have an idea but you don’t actually know what’s going to go into it in terms of deliverables. Maybe you need help designing the overall flow of your funnel. What type of funnel are you going to run to launch this digital product offer that you have either already made or swimming around the idea in your head? Maybe you need help crafting hooks or headlines or outlining the overall marketing argument and the points that will define your entire funnel copy and launch assets. 

Or perhaps you have something already created and you need to revamp it, or you need to fix something that you’re not quite sure is broken. Like what we’ve talked about in this episode where you’re looking at this funnel you’ve built, but you’re not quite sure what’s not clicking. No matter what piece of the process you are at, these strategy sessions and audits are really going to serve as a diagnostic and as a prescription tool to help you keep things moving or get things started.

So if you’ve listened to this whole season and you feel like you just need a little bit of extra support in getting your thing up and off the ground, or you just need it to give it more lift, like you’ve already launched it before, but it needs some extra help. I would love to be able to help you with a strategy session or an audit, and audit is basically just going to look at what you’ve already done versus a strategy session is going to help you plan what you’re going to do. 

So that’s kind of the difference there. I will have a page that I link down in the show notes so that if you want more details of how that works and what it’s like to work with me, go ahead and check that out. And I would love to have a conversation with you.

All right. Thank you so much again for joining me in season one. Season two coming soon. Stay tuned and let me know what you thought of this season. Please leave a review on Apple Podcast a rating review is so helpful to be able to have new people checking out the podcast to be able to get help with their digital product funnels and it’s just so, so needed in the beauty and wellness industry for experts to be taking the stage, taking the mic, sharing their expertise.

Because quite frankly, there are too many non experts out there who have the microphone right now and it’s not that they don’t share great advice, some of them really do. But you are the expert! So if you have it on your heart to be sharing your expertise in a bigger way with a bigger market beyond a Brick and Mortar location, if it’s in your head and it’s on your heart, you can absolutely do it. So and I would love to help you make that possible if you need the extra support. Alright, I will talk to you soon and thank you so much again.

Bye.