#116 - 3 Reasons Your Funnel Flopped

Then that means that when you come into this launch, not only does it not really matter if your launch makes zero sales, but it wouldn't be the end of the world because the funnel is there supporting you. It's just a slight, a totally different mindset to come into it.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. Better, easier, and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello, everybody. It is Kate here from HelloFinals co. And welcome to episode number 116 of the Doing It Online podcast. Today I am sharing the three real reasons that your funnels flopped. And to be honest, probably none of them are actually what you were thinking. They're definitely not what my clients are thinking when they come and they jump into our programs and they're like, I've got a funnel and I. But it's never really worked. Can you help me? And then we go through and we break it down and we audit it. And the reasons that these funnels are usually not quote unquote working is like they're always shocked. They're always shocked. And that's why I was like, okay, we have to do this episode because people don't know. When I say people, I mean the non nerdy people out there, the people who haven't devoted the last far too many years of their life to learning the inside and outs of funnels. They just don't know what they don't know. And that's fair enough. It's kind of a complicated technical world and we generally only get shared the top highlights on like social media and stuff. We're going to go in deep. That is what we do. We. And by the end of this episode, you should know either if you have a funnel that isn't blowing you away and isn't doing what you want it to do, the three first things to go and look at to make sure that you can fix that, or if you don't have a funnel yet and you're thinking about adding them.

Three biggest mistakes to avoid when you are creating that funnel so you can create a funnel that actually does what you want, which is make you sales, right? Sales on autopilot, regularly, reliably, every single week. That's what funnels should do. Let's start off with like the why, okay, why are funnels even important. Like why would you even want to have a funnel that works? You would think that it's pretty self explanatory, but not always. So first of all, bit of tough love. If you do not, if you have an online business, if you're an online coach or a online course creator, or you do selling any type of offer online, even if you have like an online store, even though the funnels that we teach are not made for e commerce, but if you sell things online and you do not have a funnel that is working, then you don't actually have a business. What you have is a super stressful, often badly paid job. And I hate to break it to you because if you had a business then you would be able to pay yourself a good salary, you would be able to take holidays, you would be able to set your hours and only work X number of days a week if you want, you would be able to get sick and the business would keep going. But if you don't, you don't have a funnel. Like I said, you just have something that needs you to shop every single day or you get in trouble. AKA you don't make sales, you don't make revenue, it drops off. In fact, it's almost worse than a job, right? Because at least as a job, if you do get sick, you will still get paid for a certain amount of time. But if you don't have a funnel in place, I said it's not a business, it's something that is not supporting you, it's something you have to support. And that is something I'm really passionate about, is helping people to design businesses and set up the systems in their businesses so their businesses support and not the other way around. Anyway, I'm going for a tangent. The second thing is that funnels actually can serve different purposes. There's lots of different funnels out there. They're not all designed to do the same thing. Which is why you shouldn't have a funnel hack by the way, because you might be copying a funnel and you have one objective and it is actually designed for a different one. But for us, like for the funnels that we help people set up inside Ecoursempire, our goal, like our first goal is always a funnel to bring in extra income. We always want that first, right? That's usually when our clients come to us, that's, that's goal number one. They want to make more sales, they want to make more sales more regularly, they want to increase their profit, they want to increase their income, they want to Be able to launch less. That is the objective that we're always. Usually focus, usually. Sorry, I don't know what's wrong with my mouth today. Usually focusing on with our funnels. And the first milestone towards that goal for us is to hit what we call the FFC or the Financial Freedom Checkpoint. When people jump into our programs, we get them to calculate out how much their funnel needs to earn, to cover all of their expenses, to pay them at the salary that they need to cover all of their like home and life expenses as well, as well as obviously covering tax and a 20% buffer. Because every month is slightly different. You want to have that baked in. And then we want help them design and set up and build out a funnel that is going to bring that in regularly, every month. Because when that happens, like I said, that is when you have a business, that is when you go, I know I can start planning for things, I can start looking to bring on team, I can start mapping things out. Like it just makes, makes you show up as a complete, like, as a very different human as well. When that weight of the world that like constantly running and constantly stuck in survival mode is lifted again. I could talk about this, and I can and I do all day, but we'll move on. But the next reason why funnels are so important is they actually support your launches again and again. We have people come to us and they're like, oh, I've tried everything. My launches don't really work. And I've tried funnels and they don't really work. And I don't understand because I work one on one with my clients. We get great results. I know this is a good idea. I know that I'm smart, I'm working so hard. Why are these not coming together? And the thing is, they do have this symbiotic relationship. Oh, I'm super proud of myself for weaving that into a sentence. Where your launches support your funnels and your funnels support your launches, but again, only if they're both done in the right way. But in an ideal world where they are done in the right way and you do have a funnel up and working and you, you are launching in the right way for your offer, your niche, your, your sort of phase of business, then the purpose of the funnel in this scenario, as well as obviously covering off that FFC every month and beyond, is that it takes away a lot of the stress that is associated with launches. Because when you are launching like two, three, four times a year and it's a big launch and you spend months preparing it and countless hours go into it as well as expense because there's ads, there's contractors, there's team, there's all kinds of things. There is a lot riding on that launch doing well. And there's also usually the first x percent of sales like is just paying for the launch. Normally people, they have a break even point but. And that's just like a really sucky way of doing anything to be honest. Like, I mean, I hate you. This is why I got into funnels, because I was stuck in that cycle myself and I saw so many other people as well where it would almost be like the week before a launch when you were like getting out the credit card to pay for stuff because you were completely out of cash. Like that was a really, really familiar sort of scenario that I would see with a lot of other course creators. It's like you'd have this launch and you get that income from that launch and that was amazing. But half of it was actually sort of paying back the money you chucked on the credit card to pay for launch in the first place. And then you had to make that launch money stretch all the way through to your next launch and you're kind of down to fumes by the time the next launch happened. So imagine if that launch went badly, you'd be screwed. This is why you need a funnel. Because if the funnel is covering off those expenses, covering off paying you, paying your team, covering off all of that time, and yes, if you set them up right, they can even cover off your Facebook ads costs, right Then that means that when you come into this launch, not only does it not really matter if your launch makes zero sales, even though it would suck because obviously yes, you have still invested time, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't be the end of the world because the funnel is there supporting you. But it's just a slight, a totally different mindset to come into it. Like it's just a totally different mindset and different place to be coming from when literally the first sale that happens in your launch is pure profit or close to it. And it doesn't matter if actually you made 0 sales or 5 sales or 100 sales, all of a sudden, as I said, with that different mindset you can start playing, you can start having more fun. It doesn't, there's not so much pressure, it's not so much burnout. And the other bonus of having a funnel that works is that with that sort of traditional launch model, normally what you do before a launch Right. Is you do a bunch of list building. They come through your launch sequence, whether it's a challenge or it's a webinar or whatever it is you're doing, and then they don't buy. They normally just kind of get dumped in your email list. They'll get you regular newsletters and then next time you launch, hopefully they'll buy then. But if you have a funnel, they don't just get dumped on your email list, they get put through your funnel. So they get even more great content and more warming up and more chances to buy. And usually that gives people a secondary like post launch sales bump of all those launch people who've now gone through the funnel so it can add an extra 10, 20% to your launch sales again without having to do anything. Hopefully so far you're going, nodding along, going, oh yes, funnel's good. Tick, tick, tick, need one of those. And as I said, if you're listening to this, either you've tried to do a funnel before and it just hasn't worked, you've probably given it up, turned it off or whatever, or you've been meaning to do a funnel for a very long time and hopefully this is going to be what tips you over to actually prioritizing it and putting it higher up your to do list. Because so many people just put it far too long and far too late down that list. What are those three reasons? Why is it that your funnel flopped or could potentially flop so that you can avoid it? Number one is you actually had the wrong expectations. This is so, so common. This is really, really common. And for the clients who come to us, so I said, who already have a funnel, like, usually they come to us because their funnel isn't working that well. And the thing that I find quite hilarious is that often they come to us with a funnel and we actually pull it apart. And for some of them, actually it's working brilliantly. They just didn't have the right expectations. They've turned it off. Like you have people go, oh yeah, I tried to have a funnel and I only got a couple of sales, so I just, I just turned it off. And then we look at it and we go, well, how many people went through it? And they're like, oh, I know, like 50. Like, well, for that type of funnel, every type of funnel is different. But there's a benchmark that things should be hitting at certain points. And if you look at the number ago, actually you were hitting all those benchmarks, instead of turning it off, you should have turned it up, you should have gone out and scaled it. And there's different ways of doing that as well. That's usually what we then step in and help them with and optimized it and increase the average cut value. Like the bit that you had was fine. Like having the correct expectations going in. I think some people think. And it's, and it's funny because quite often these people, like they, they have successful businesses, they've launched a bunch of times, they would have, they wouldn't expect that of a launch anymore. Like maybe they did the first time around. Again, it's a really common issue that we see with people. The first couple of times they launch, they only have a small list. It's the first time they're launching something. They've heard all these crazy stories about people making millions of dollars with online products. They do a launch, they get however many sales, they're disappointed with it because they thought they were going to get hundreds. They're like, I've got 500 people on my list and only 50 of them bought. And we're like, well that's amazing because that's 10%. That's a crazy high conversion. Whereas, you know, but they were expecting like 50% of people to buy or something like that. So anyway, off track. It does make me chuckle a little bit when clients who wouldn't have these same expectations on a launch would then put it onto a funnel. Number one is knowing what to expect with your funnel. Like knowing, how do I know if this funnel works well, how do I, what are the things I should be looking for? And those key points, like there's a lot of stats you can track in a funnel. You don't need to track all of them, but there's definitely things you want to be looking at along usually like registrations, how that's converting the act. I mean, then it starts to get. Depending on which funnel, it gets very different. But then end result, like how many people who've gone, you want to know how many people who registered in the first place, what that registration was, then whatever that next action is, how many people have taken it, how many of those people purchased and then how many people purchased overall. Like those are kind of the numbers you want to be tracking. And, and as I said, there's different benchmarks for every type of funnel. But even if you went for the bog standard industry one, which I kind of hate, which is 2% of all new subscribers, should be converting within seven to 14 days. Or if seven to 30 days, sorry, depending on the length of your funnel. A lot of people don't even sort of look at that. They kind of think, oh well, it's a funnel. They've been warmed up. It's more deliberate. That should be like much higher. So number one, wrong expectations. Like just imagine if you already had a funnel and actually it was amazing and if you just started promoting it that it would do all these awesome things but you actually turned it off because your expectations were wrong. The next reason that we see so many funnels flop, and this one is probably more common, is that they don't actually have what we call a funnel friendly offer. No matter how much I love funnels, the fact of the matter is that funnels do not convert as well as live launches. That's why we recommend people do both. Funnels traditionally converted about 50% of what a launch would convert at. Again, it depends on the type of funnel and some types of launches should never be funneled that like challenges, for example, challenges should be live. Do not turn a challenge into a funnel. But when you're choosing your offer and you're crafting or choosing which product or program you're going to having your funnel and in crafting the offer around it, you need to make sure to make sure this funnel converts as well as possible that it is the easiest. Yes. Possible. You want it to be a hell's yes. Okay. It can't be something that is confusing. It can't be something that does require too many live touch points, which some things do. You need to put that best foot forward, that easiest, that most funnel friendly offer first, which is usually the one which is the easiest. Yes. That's not always the cheapest one. I'm actually not a believer in creating funnels that are this tier of small offer or like really small offer, small offer, medium size offer, large offer kind of thing. I do love a self liquidating offer at the start. Again, I won't get into those. But as far as what we call your core funnel, I'm all about putting like I said, best foot forward and quite often that is going for your. Your bigger offer first. But again, I digress, I digress. But when it comes to the funnel friendly offer that the main thing is, is that it has to be. Well it has a couple things. It has to be an easy yes. Like it has to be something that people can make that decision on their own because they're going to be mostly on their own. Okay. And it also needs to match how you're going to sell it if you're going out there. And if you're planning on running, you want to grow your funnel, you'd have a lot of organic traffic. You want to grow up mostly with paid ads, which most people do. And you're planning on having like list doing, list building, lead gen, maybe webinars, whatever it is. And you're going to go out to cold traffic. The fact of the matter is, like if you're trying to go mass here is that you're going to need to have an offer like those. So those are like mass marketing techniques. They go out to a big audience and you try and get a lot of people through them. For that to convert well, you need to have a mass market friendly offer, which is usually a more beginner offer. Again, another problem I see is some people, they, the offer they put straight out front is a more advanced offer, but that advanced offer pool is much smaller, which makes it much harder and more expensive to drive ads to. This is why it's really important, guys, that you craft these things properly and why it is so easy for people to get it wrong. It's got to be an easy yes, it's got to match how you market it. And the third thing is it has to have a margin for marketing, which is you probably guess, but it has to be built in most funnels. Like some people don't do paid ads to their funnels. They just do what they're doing organically and that again can work really, really well. Organic traffic tends to actually convert at a higher rate. That's great if you have those things in place, but those things take time. Like most of these people, they've been doing what they're doing for years. They've built up audiences on different platforms. Maybe they've got a podcast that's got a good audience. Maybe they're doing really well on YouTube, whatever it is, maybe they're awesome at SEO. Those things are slow, long burns. They're not the levers that you want to be able to have control over. Like paid ads do. So most people are going to want to scale their offer using paid ads. As I said, it doesn't have to be a beginner offer, guys, but just make sure it matches like the kinds of people who are coming in. Like a good little sort of just temperature test is if you go and have a look at the last like 20 people who joined your email list, go and find them on the Internet, surprisingly easy to do and have a look and see, do they look like they're beginners? They look like they're more advanced. Like how ideal are they? And that can be a good gauge for which offer you should be putting in your first funnel, in your core funnel. And like I said, it needs a margin for marketing. So you need to make sure that the price point you choose has a big enough buffer in it that if say 30%, 50%, whatever of it was taken up with your marketing budget, you would still be profitable at the other end. And again, that can take a bit of massaging, that can take a little bit of testing, and it definitely takes some initial calculations. Again, why it's so important to know what to expect, because run wrong expectations will shoot you in the foot in multiple ways. Third reason we see people's funnels flopping is that they've chosen the wrong funnel. I don't know if you this but every funnel is actually designed for a different type of offer, different type of promo. And also they often have different objectives. Like some, as I mentioned, they're not even designed to be profitable. They might just be designed to cover the cost of the ads. This is why it's so, so important to get proper advice when you're choosing and planning your funnel. Think of it like you if you were wanting to dye your hair, okay, if you just go and do something basic like you got brown hair and you're going to add a warm tint because it's winter, you can probably DIY that with an eight washes out kind of, kind of deal, right? It's not the end of the world. The same if you were like automating a couple of emails. But if you're thinking about doing something a bit more complex, something that's going to take some know how some skills like maybe you can get some foils or some balayage or bailage or however you say that you don't even consider diying it, right? You're not 16 anymore. You go, you let the experts do it. The same comes to setting up something as important and complex and potentially not look changing, but life changing as a funnel. You're going to get the experts in to help advise you to make sure that you have the right expectations, that you are choosing the right offer and that you are designing the right funnel for that offer offer. And speaking of experts, that is us here at hello Funnels. And if you would like some expert help getting your funnel to work really damn well, that is what we do. And there are two things you can do right now to help with that. One, you can head to ecoursempire.com right now and you can apply to join our next intake before all the spots are snapped up. Or two. You can join me live for our next totally free 90 minute group coaching session where I'm going to walk you through the three steps you need to take to make five program sales or more every single week without stressful launching or sales calls, even if you have a premium offer. Like I said, it's totally free and totally live. 90 minute group coaching call. Just head to HelloFunnels Co coaching. Save your seat and I will see that.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget, subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.