The sales funnel a well-known marketing tool used to outline a customer’s journey from finding a brand to purchasing from that brand.

Starting at the top, in the awareness stage, a customer is introduced to a new product or service. They travel to the top of the funnel to go through different interest levels and decisions.

When they leave the consideration stage they finally flow down to the bottom phase of action, where they make a purchase.

This tool has been around since 1898, and many entrepreneurs have used it to successfully increase their revenue. If the method didn’t work, we would not be talking about it all these years later.

But the truth is that not all sales funnels are built for success.

They need to be designed intentionally, consider the customer, and remain flexible to produce positive results. There are multiple reasons why a sales funnel might fail, but there are strategies you can use to keep that from happening to you.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons a sales funnel might fail so you can minimize these risks and employ a successful sales process.

Over time consumers have changed and we need our sales funnels to reflect that.

In the past, prospective customers might have followed a structured path before making a purchase. But now, every consumer has their unique buying process and they can all vary greatly.

One person might be quick to make a buying decision, buying at the first sight of your sales funnel. But others might circle in the evaluation stage for months before making the call to hit the buy now button.

The best shot you have at securing customers is to be thorough in creating your customer avatar. You’ll want to know everything that makes them tick, including their pain points, their preferences, and the issues that matter to them.

Some may seem irrelevant, but it is the best way to figure out how to engage with your customers and build a relationship with them. Something that will be critical for getting them to buy.

Consumers have so many options at the tips of their fingers now. If you don’t do your best to get to know them and conveniently meet them where they are in the buyer journey, they will buy from another business that will.

There is no point in wasting your time getting the attention of leads if you are going to use it to give them subpar information.

With the ease of access to products and information, people will quickly move on from content that doesn’t give them exactly what they want. Your marketing strategies need to be tailored to your new users.

The copy you use should be at a professional level, at the very least free of grammar issues, and easy to read. On top of that, it should be relevant content that is useful to your audience.

If they can easily find what you are giving them elsewhere then you are not giving them a unique and valuable customer experience. They won’t have a reason to purchase from your specific brand instead of checking out competitors the next time around.

Similar to poor copywriting and messaging, having a boring offer will turn prospects away as well. People have grown to expect instant gratification, if your offer isn’t enough to give this type of satisfaction then people may decide your brand doesn’t have anything worth trying out.

Free trials, discount codes, or free shipping are a couple of offers that have become very popular for coaxing prospects into making their first purchases. Consumers want to avoid inboxes full of spam and are becoming increasingly wary of online sales tactics.

If your sales funnel does not offer something your audience wants to get right away, they will scroll past. It’s not worth giving away an email or phone number for something they don’t value.

Hiring an agency can seem like the right thing to do. It makes sense that professional agencies would be able to implement a traditional sales funnel better than the average Joe. But unfortunately, there is always a risk when handing over total control to an agency.

They might be equipped to get your brand in front of more eyes. But sometimes it can lead to impersonal messaging that doesn’t resonate with your potential customers.

If an agency approaches your customer journey from the wrong angle, failing to fully understand the type of value you offer your consumers, then they can miss the mark entirely when trying to use a traditional funnel to get conversions.

Again, consumers are more informed than ever before, they want to see unique content that reflects their interests and values. They want to become customers for brands that reflect their own personal brands.

Agencies can sometimes lose this personal touch, and more traffic doesn’t always equal more conversions.

All good things take time. Even the best sales funnel will take time to gain traction.

First, you have to drive traffic to the funnel. Then you have to watch the results to see what is working.

Running split tests can help to see what elements of your funnel are working and which ones might need tweaking. It could take a series of adjustments before you start to hit the conversion goals you set for yourself.

If you jump ship after one or two adjustments you are sure to miss out on the success that will come from an intentional and consistent sales funnel.

Part of the reason people give up on their sales funnel too early is a lack of knowledge around it and how consumers interact with it. Although it is described as a sales funnel, where leads drop in at the top and pass straight down to the bottom, it is not that clean and simple in real life.

There are countless forms of offline and online advertising being used today. People can jump into the sales funnel at different stages and go back and forth between them.

Trial and error is a necessary part of seeing what works for your potential customers. Consumers know they have the power in their hands and have endless options to choose from. They expect a personalized experience tailored to their likes.

As you adjust your funnel to your audience’s tastes it will improve their buying process and become more effective. It takes time to iterate and build up the personalized sales funnel that is ideal for your online business.

Like almost anything, there is an upside and a downside to sales funnels. Let’s take a look at what they are to see the value they can offer your business.

It seems that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, with the bottom line being they can increase revenue. Any business benefits from an increased conversion rate, better relationship building, improved customer retention, and increased revenues.

A sales funnel helps to narrow down potential customers so that you can focus more heavily on the ones most likely to convert. This helps by saving time, energy, and resources from being spent on people who will never buy from you.

And it helps you build relationships with the leads who are likely to become paying customers, hopefully making their customer journey shorter.

A sales funnel helps with getting lead generation and building trust in your brand. It also gives you an avenue to nurture budding relationships, which helps to eventually convert customers.

A sales funnel not only targets leads but can also work well for returning customers, increasing the lifetime value of your consumers. You can upsell and keep the lines of communication open for regular purchases.

Email marketing is a huge tool for digital marketers because of its power to communicate with customers long-term, nurture leads, and prompt repeat purchases. A sales funnel collects emails so that you can follow up with your lead nurturing process.

With a sales funnel, you create a landing page for your product or service with one goal, to make a sale.

The landing page contains a contact form, or subscribe button, for collecting emails and phone numbers, and lead generation. Since this space is dedicated to the product or service you are selling you can get detailed in how you present it on the landing page.

Your marketing copy can address any concerns or questions potential customers usually have about your product and answer them. You can also lay out how your product will improve the lives of your target audience or make them happy if they purchase it.

Despite the advantages, there are still some disadvantages worth noting.

A sales funnel shouldn’t be your end-all-be-all when it comes to digital marketing and sales, as they can be difficult to personalize. They can leave out details of other products or services and only provide a snapshot of the full information you have to provide your new customers throughout the marketing funnel.

Plan to make up for these disadvantages in other areas of your funnel marketing strategy to cover all your bases.

With a website, you can have multiple pages that showcase the products, features, and benefits of your business. You can attach an online store and have a blog where you can educate consumers about your brand and products.

You don’t have this ability with a sales funnel. It is to the point, with the purpose of not distracting your customer from the sales funnel goal, to make a sale.

With a website you can offer many products to your audience, but with a sales funnel you offer people the one product they need most. It is like a one size fits all solution, where you attempt to answer the most common questions and provide only the most relevant information to try and influence a buying decision.

You might have other products or services that would be an instant purchase decision for some of your prospective customers, but if they only see your sales funnel they won’t know they are an option.

The structure of a sales funnel can make it seem like once a customer has made a purchase they leave the funnel and are not thought of again. This type of thinking is a big mistake.

Existing customers are a priority and should be treated as such. It’s cheaper to retain a customer than to find new leads and convert them. Customer retention plans need to be in place so that you aren’t missing this important piece.

Another disadvantage is that a traditional funnel can seem impersonal if not created correctly. This can cause a huge problem based on what we know about current customer behaviours.

Research tells us that customers want their needs met and marketing content that appeals to their interests. Sales funnels can fall short when it comes to properly personalize the messages for customers.

The short answer is yes and no. With so many advantages and disadvantages involved with sales funnels, it comes down to the implementation.

If you design a sales funnel that caters to your target audience and gives yourself time to iterate it can be extremely successful. On the flip side, if you build a generic sales funnel with impersonal messaging and a sales first appearance there is a larger chance your customers will not be interested in it at all.

Evolving your sales strategy is one way to create an effective sales funnel. Use customer avatars to direct how you build your funnel. Prioritize ways that you can nurture customer relationships and improve the buying experience.

When you know what they are looking for you can include it in your sales funnel. Make yourself aware of their habits, emotions, and goals. Appeal to these factors in your sales funnel to give them a quick and easy way to make a purchase they feel good about.

Effective sales funnels also make customer support easy and obvious. Provide contact information and include a contact us form. You can also provide helpful resources.

You can even add links to social media accounts. This can increase effectiveness by building trust with more customers. They will be confident in purchasing if they know they can easily reach you after closing the sales funnel.

Most importantly, prioritize long-lasting relationships. Continue with after-sales communication using personalized emails, engaging social media posts, newsletters, and more.

Provide content that positions your brand as an expert. This will build trust and brand loyalty that will keep your existing customers cycling through your sales funnel.

You can choose to build it yourself, which may save some upfront costs as agency fees can be shockingly high, even for a simple sales funnel. Or you can invest in finding an agency to do it for you, saving yourself time and the learning curve.

You will need to pay for a few types of software to launch your funnel. To cover the basics, you will need to create a landing page. This needs to include a capture form where you can collect emails.

There also needs to be a checkout page, so you need to be able to attach a shopping cart and payment option.

Using a service like WordPress can be free, but if you want to use more than the free account features you will need to pay $4 per month. Their business plan starts at $25 per month.

You will also have to pay a hosting service to host your funnel which you can find starting at around $3.00 per month. If you plan to use a well-known and trusted payment platform for your check-out page you will need to add that to your budget as well. Stripe charges a $0.30 fee plus 2.9% per transaction.

You can use free email marketing tools to follow up with customers, but you will also have to use a plug-in or find another provider for this. If you start to see high traffic through your sales funnel stages you will quickly reach the free limit.

In this case, you should expect to pay a minimum of around $9 per month for only around 500 contacts or 2,000 emails. The price will go up with your email volume.

This is all in addition to the cost of the time that will be spent to set up your funnel, learn how to use the software, and then manage it on your own. You will need to build your pages from scratch and create all your content and messaging. And there will always be backend tasks that will need attention. You will have to manage updates and software bugs among other things.

Instead of doing it all yourself, you can use an agency to streamline the process of launching your sales funnel. This way you can take advantage of launching at a faster pace, using premade templates, having multiple tools organized in one place, and freedom from dealing with backend software issues.

There is a wide range for the average cost of digital marketing for small to medium-sized businesses, from $3,000 to $12,000 per month.

If you plan to completely hand over your digital marketing to an agency that will do everything for you, you should expect to pay these premium prices. You’ll also have to worry about ongoing advertisement fees included with paid marketing.

You can find agencies that charge using a performance-based model, so they will make a commission or charge per lead. This is usually only in specific industries where they have experience.

We recommend that business owners remain in control of their messaging and content marketing. It is the one activity that moves the needle in business, and no one knows your products as well as you do.

Without marketing, you have no business, regardless of how good your product or service is. Learning how to effectively market your products will arm you with an invaluable skill.

People pay large amounts of money to have others provide this skill for their businesses. Developing the ability for yourself will give you a transferable skill that makes you a better entrepreneur.

Even the most skilled marketers will have to launch, test, adjust and repeat over and over again to find the best sales process. Marketing is trial & error. Whether you do it yourself or outsource it, it will take time before it is right.

If you choose to hire an agency to control all of your marketing you will be waiting while they perfect their skills with your brand. You will save yourself the time of trial and error but you will pay with a larger slice of your budget and honestly, no guaranteed returns.

There are certain strategies you can use to minimize the risk. But it is still risky. Starting a business you take on that risk. You can either risk money or time depending on your circumstance. If you invest time, you are also investing in developing a skill.

An option that keeps costs lower and takes some of the necessary marketing efforts off of your plate is to partner with a platform that provides all the tools you need to launch a sales funnel while leaving you in complete control of your marketing and copywriting.

SME Sitebuilder is a digital marketing solution for small to medium-sized businesses. It is a website and sales funnel-building platform that will take care of all the back-end technology and software updates while allowing you to stay in control of your marketing.

Is much cheaper than hiring a technology company to build a funnel from scratch.

There is a large library of premade templates to get you started. In addition to this, the platform also has a CRM, email autoresponder, website builder, and more that will seamlessly allow you to control your marketing from one clean dashboard.

It is easy to see several pros for hiring a marketing agency to take care of your advertising including the fact that it takes it off of your list of to-dos.

Agencies usually are fueled by creative minds who have streamlined their process and have lots of experience. They are also experts who can work with various digital channels, including websites, social media, email, and more. Their reach can make it easy to build brand cohesiveness across all your campaigns.

They can provide an outsider perspective, giving new ideas a try compared to the messages you’ve created in the past.

There is more time for you to focus on other things in your day. You won’t have to build campaigns and emails yourself.

The cons of hiring an agency instead of doing it yourself include the fact that it is going to cost a lot more. But if you do it yourself it could take much longer to build a profitable campaign.

If you can find the right agency you can reduce the amount of time it takes to find a profitable campaign by leveraging their previous experience.

SME Sitebuilder is an affordable funnel builder option because it offers more tools for less cost.

You not only get everything you need to launch a successful sales funnel, but you also get access to other highly valuable tools like the email autoresponder, website builder, CRM, booking platform, and more.

In fact, for the low monthly price of $27 per month you can launch your first sales funnel using templates that are built for conversions. There are plenty of sales funnel examples to get you started.

You only pay for what you need, so you don’t get locked in with high monthly premiums packed with features you won’t use. Take advantage of the 14-day free trial to find the right plan for your needs.

As your business grows we are ready to grow with you. You can always upgrade your plan. Reach out to our support team at any time for answers to your questions.