If you want to scale your business, you need to develop a funnel that converts profitably. You need a process that brings strangers into your business and converts them into customers at a profit. Simple in theory, but harder in practice… until now! I’m going to walk you through the 6 best funnel building tools that’ll allow you to generate more leads and more customers.
Marketing funnels are one of those things that business owners tend to freak out about. You know you need one but you worry that putting it all in place is going to be complicated and time-consuming.
But here’s the good news: you already have a funnel!
A marketing funnel is what we call the process of converting someone from a stranger to a customer. So if you’re an e-commerce site your funnel is when someone clicks on your website, adds to cart, initiates checkout, and adds their payment details. If you’re a service-based business, it might be that someone comes to your website, fills in a consultation form, agrees to a phone call with you and then becomes a client.
1. The Best Tool For Building A Landing Page
Your website is a great starting point for your funnel but even the best websites can be a bit distracting; with so many pages and different places to click and explore it can be hard to get a decent conversion rate. A landing page can be the perfect antidote to the distraction — it’s a more focused page with one clear call to action that you want your potential customers to take. And with the right tools, you can create effective landing pages, and improve your sales funnel, fairly quickly and easily.
There are a lot of tools on the market, from ClickFunnels and Leadpages to Unbounce. And depending on your email marketing software you may also be able to use features in Mailchimp or ConvertKit to create landing pages and very basic funnels within those tools. Of those, my favourite is ClickFunnels because of how quickly and easily you can create landing pages and funnels, whether you need a simple funnel or something more complex.
Although, I don’t love everything about ClickFunnels – so be sure to check out my non-bias review of them here.
2. The Best Email Marketing Software
One of the key functions of your funnel is to move people onto your email list. This is so we can continue communicating with them after they’ve taken a specific action with us. Such as, downloading our free guide or signing up to our webinar. Having a good email marketing provider in your funnel setup is vital. As with the landing page tools, there are lots of different options out there.
You have Mailchimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Aweber, and ClickFunnels has its own built-in email marketing feature too. When I first started in business, I used Mailchimp. While I really did like certain aspects of the software, I found that it didn’t have some of the complex tagging features and automations that I really needed. So now I swear by ConvertKit, which gives me all of that.
ConvertKit’s tagging features mean that if you have a specific offer you can tag the people who’ve clicked on the offer link and send them follow-up emails that’ll be more relevant to them. I’m also a visual person so from a user experience point of view, I appreciate the very visual way that you can build your email marketing sequences in ConvertKit.
I reviewed Mailchimp vs ConvertKit here.
3. How To Easily Transcribe Videos
Whether on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or LinkedIn, videos are an essential way to drive more traffic into your funnel. But did you know that the vast majority of people prefer to watch videos without sound? Part of making a profitable marketing funnel is making sure people can consume your videos. So captions are super important if you want to capture their attention and make sure they hang around long enough to engage with you and take action. Rev.com is a transcription service that does just that.
All you need to do is send your video to Rev.com and they create your captions and send you a file that you can upload to wherever platform you’re posting your video. Their service is always quick and the price is reasonable too.
The average watch time for a video on Facebook is just six seconds and if you’re not using captions to capture those people who watch without sound, you’re likely missing out on a huge chunk of views. And when you think about how much time you invest in creating and promoting your video content, it’s worth going the extra mile to make sure you’re catering for how your audience likes to consume content.
If you’re looking for your videos to be transcribed or you’re looking for captions to be created, then definitely check out Rev.com. Click here to get $10 off your first order.
4. The Best Funnel Tracking Tools
Once you’ve created your funnel, it’s important to add tracking to it. When you send people to your funnel, landing page or sales page, you need to know what they’re actually doing when they visit that page. That’s the only way you’ll know how it’s performing and whether or not it’s converting as it should. And that’s where tracking comes in.
There are a huge amount of funnel-tracking tools out there. The most obvious is Google Analytics which allows you to see the bounce rate, or how long people are spending on your page. This is such useful information because if you see that people are hardly spending any time on the page, you know that you’re not capturing their attention quickly enough. Or if they’re spending a ton of time on the page, reading the content but still not buying, you know that you need to look at improving the copy and the experience on that page.
The Facebook Pixel
One of the most important tools – especially if you’re running Facebook ads – is, of course, the Facebook Pixel. If you’re running Facebook Ads to your landing page and your funnel, you want to be able to track how well those ads are performing. You want to be able to track how much you’re spending to acquire each new lead, and each new customer. If you have Facebook Pixel installed at every stage of your funnel, you can track the performance of each ad. By doing this, this helps make sure that your content is being seen by the most relevant people, the people who are going to take action. And in turn, this can help you get more customers.
Finally, I want to give a shoutout to Hotjar, an amazing tool that allows you to go super-geeky on the numbers and on people’s behaviour when they visit your site. For example, with Hotjar installed on your site or landing page, you can actually see how people scroll through the page and at what point they click off. You can see which buttons they click and whether they watch your videos. It gives you such an incredible insight into which bits of your page are working…and which bits aren’t.
5. Finding Freelancers Online
If you’re building a funnel, creating ads, landing pages and sales pages, you’re going to need some extra help. Whether that’s a designer to create some graphics for you or someone to edit the video for your opt-in page. Fiverr is the place to go to hire people with different skill sets to help you out. The best thing about outsourcing some of the smaller things is that it frees up your time, and you’re then able to focus on building your numbers.
One small caveat here is to be careful with who you work with on Fiverr. The people on the site are offering their services relatively cheaply, and so you don’t always get the best quality service. So do make sure that whoever you choose looks legit and can show you examples of their previous work. We want to make sure we’re hiring people that have the skillset that allows that video to create a better experience on our pages.
6. Facebook Ads
If you have a marketing funnel you need to promote, the best way to do that is through Facebook Ads.
With Facebook Ads, you can see how many people have viewed the ad, how many have clicked and, of course, how many have purchased. It’s hands down the best way to get a sense of whether your funnel actually works.
Because when you’re building your funnel, the most important thing is getting that stranger to become a customer, in a way that generates profit and by running Facebook Ads, you can see exactly how much you’re spending and whether or not your funnel is profitable. Right now, there’s no better tool and no better advertising platform for sending people to your funnel and for getting them to convert.
So there you have it — my roundup of my 6 favourite funnel-building tools. If you’d like to work with an agency that specialises in advertising, funnel building and knows all of these tools like the back of their hand, get in touch today.
