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Are Sales Funnels Effective? Are They Necessary Or Dead?

It’s almost impossible to avoid sales funnels nowadays, but are they as effective as most marketers make them out to be?

Let’s talk more about this topic and how they can help you out.

Are Sales Funnels Effective? Do They Really Work?

Sales funnels have been around for a long time but were most recently popularized by the abundance of sales funnel courses, groups, and software tools like Kartra’s all-in-one platform.

The caveat here is that sales funnels are only as effective as how you set them. In other words, you are going to need to get a few things right such as:

• The right offer.
• The right traffic.
• As well as the right time.

For example, you could have the best sales funnel with the best offer, but it’s not going to matter if you don’t have traffic to put it in front of.

You can also have the best traffic, but that also won’t matter if you don’t have a great sales letter. Or heck, maybe your offer is priced too high and most people just don’t want to spend that much.

So with quite a few variables that you need to nail before you scale, are sales funnels going to be necessary? Allow me to talk about that next and give you even more insight when it comes to using sales funnels.

Are Sales Funnels Necessary?

Sales funnels have certainly evolved over the years. Sales funnels used to consist of a few pages and that quickly got the job done. Nowadays, sales funnel tools have gotten much bigger and better (for the most part).

Here is an example of the features that can come along with a recommended sales funnel software:

• Landing pages.
• Webinar pages.
• Squeeze pages.
• Sales letter pages.
• Customer support centers.
• A wide variety of templates.
• Complete membership sections.
• Checkout pages and shopping carts.
• One-click upsell and downsell pages.

And that’s only scratching the surface when it comes to all of the bells and whistles.

The point I’m trying to make here is that if you need elements of a sales funnel, then why wouldn’t you get everything that you need?

From all of my testing, there is a HUGE difference when it comes to these two different types of sales funnels:

• Sales letter and checkout page.
• Sales letter and checkout page with order bump and one-click upsells.

You allow your customers to make more related purchases, which in turn, allows you to make more money and help recoup any of your advertising costs.

That’s something that I often bring up when it comes to the pricing of specific sales funnel tools. Many times, a lot of the features can actually help you pay for the cost of using them, assuming you are sending traffic and making sales in the first place.

On the other hand, there are always going to be reasons as to why sales funnels get the thumbs down, or in other words, fail. Let’s talk about that now.

Why Do Sales Funnels Fail?

While sales funnels have certainly been the coolest thing since sliced bread, you also have to keep in mind that they aren’t the magic solution for most online businesses.

While sales funnels can certainly help build and grow your online business, you need to be precise with your sales funnel and who you want to put it in front of.

Here are some great questions to help you out when it comes to creating sales funnels:

• What is my niche?
• Who is my perfect audience?
• What offer would they crawl on glass to get to?
• Are there similar types of offers already on the market?
• Do they have the funds to be able to purchase my offer?
• How will I send traffic to the top of my sales funnel (free or paid)?

There are probably 100 more questions that you can ask yourself when you’re in the beginning phase of creating your sales funnel. Nevertheless, knowing the answers to these questions will reduce the chances of failure.

For example, knowing your niche and audience is pretty fundamental, but you’ll be lost without the answer to those questions.

You need to have an offer that they actually desperately want. If you see others selling something similar in your market, and people are actually buying it, then that’s a really good thing.

You also need to know how to drive traffic to your sales funnel. This is a step that a lot of people forget about, given the fact that it takes time to learn and master a specific traffic source.

Given the fact that you need some knowledge of your market as well as how to drive traffic to your sales funnel, it becomes a little easier to see why “sales funnels” begin to fail in the first place.

Imagine a scenario where someone sets up a sales funnel and goes to send traffic to it. Let’s take using Facebook ads for example:

• Everything is set up in the Facebook ad manager.
• Clicks slowly start to come in, but there’s something wrong.
• Not only are you not making sales, but you’ve generated no leads.

With every click that comes through, you feel the pain of losing money and not gaining much from it (aside from what doesn’t work).

I’ve felt this before, quite a few times, and it can be something that is challenging to break through. Especially if you have limited knowledge about the market and what’s hot at the current time.

So all in all, it’s not that the sales funnel doesn’t work, but more so the person who created the sales funnel, didn’t see success, and then gave up.

Sales funnels are rarely going to be a grand slam on the first try, and that’s something that more people need to realize.

Are Sales Funnels Dead?

This is a very common type of question that I hear when it comes to internet marketing in general:

• Is social media dead?
• Is affiliate marketing dead?
• Is internet marketing dead?

I think you get the idea, but I don’t believe that I need to sell you on the fact that sales funnels are pretty much everywhere that you go online.

Squeeze pages, landing pages, checkout pages, webinar pages, membership pages, and so on and so forth. These are only a few parts of many of the sales funnels that you see, and they certainly are everywhere.

After all, online businesses need something to do with their traffic, and generating leads and making sales with the help of a sales funnel is certainly a great sport to start.

Why Is It A Good Idea To Have A Sales Funnel? Final Words

On the other hand, there are times where you just don’t care about having a sales funnel. A few examples might include:

• SEO is your thing.
• If you only create videos.
• If you’re a writer or blogger.

And heck, you can STILL use a sales funnel for those activities that I mentioned up above. Ultimately, if you are promoting any type of offer or service, or you need to generate leads, a sales funnel will definitely help you out.

All in all, I hope that this article helped you get a much better idea about how you can be successful when using sales funnels. I’ve mentioned Kartra as a sales funnel a few times, and I’ll leave you with a couple of related articles where you can learn about them.

That is, of course, if you feel like having a sales funnel will be a valuable asset for you and your online business.

• Helpful: Kartra review details.
• Helpful: How to get a much longer Kartra trial.

Thank you for stopping by, and happy sales funnel building.