#93 - What funnels are REALLY working in 2022

The right funnel at the right time, done in the right way, is such a powerful, life changing, business changing tool. But it has to be done right.

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. But better, easier and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from HelloFunnels Co and welcome to episode 93 of the Doing It Online podcast. Now today I wanted to sit down and spill the tea a little bit on what we are seeing is working and not working in funnels right now. Because as with everything in online marketing, there are always ebbs and flows, there are always trends, things are always changing. And it seems that particularly in the last few years that the world has been changing more and more rapidly. It is so, so important if you are out there either creating funnels for yourself or even more importantly creating, helping to strategize and plan and build funnels for other people that you have your finger on the pulse that what is and isn't working so that nobody is out there wasting time or energy on something that is just not going to bring them the results that they want. And as a funnel lover, funnel advocate if you like, I'm always, it's part of my mission because my mission is to help hundreds of amazing, talented people to be able to go out there and grow their businesses and serve more people and do more of what they love and make the world a better place. And I help them to do that by helping them to automate their sales and marketing. That's what I am passionate about and I want other people to join me in this quest and to help other people to create amazing funnels that work. And the only way we're going to get these funnel shy people across the to take that big leap and to do the scary thing of setting up the funnel is if they think that funnels are worthwhile and that they work and they're not some flash in the pan trickery anyway. That's why it's, I think it's so important to share and to pull back the curtain on what is and isn't working, that there are people aren't out there making funnels that are never going to work. And that's just perpetuating this myth that funnels are rubbish because that's not true. The right funnel at the right time, done in the right way is such a powerful life changing business, changing tools, but it has to be done. And that's what this episode's all about. What is working 2022? What is actually working? What do we need to be focusing on when we're building funnels right now? Let's dive right on in. Okay guys, what is working in, what is really working in funnels right now in 2022? First of all, good news is that from the funnels we have in our own business and that we're seeing, we have hundreds of clients who have funnels up and running. This is fairly broad survey across all kinds of niches that we are still seeing great success with. What I call the big three, that is your webinar funnel, your application funnel and your self liquidating offer funnel. They are still working. Really, really. As long as they were of course done right in the first place and were set up, they were the right fit for the right business in the first place. But there are some key differences, particularly for the ones that are doing exceptionally the ones that are growing. And I want, that's kind of what I want to go through today. First up really is webinar. I'm noticing a big shift in webinars at the moment. And one of the first things I finding really interesting with webinars, both live and evergreen, is there's been a huge drop in show up rates. And whether that's something that will recover over the coming months is yet to be seen. But I know pretty much from late last year through to now through to March is when I'm recording this. Some people were finding that even for webinars that they've been running for a long time, even with all the other stats things, checking the boxes like all the other benchmarks, hitting where they were supposed to be, seemingly everything else is the same. Their shop rates have halved, particularly for lives. Show up rates are way, way down. So what does that mean? That means of course that we have to get a bit creative. We have to, this is when we have to start tweaking and being flexible with our strategy. Because of course the, the real gold is when people are actually watching these webinars. Now why are the show up rates down? There could be so many reasons. For a lot of places finally Covid restrictions. The funny thing is some places Covid restrictions are finally just gone and they're over it and people are going back to their life again. And so for a lot of them that means back to activities. Back to just getting away from screens and then there are other places which are getting locked down again. You've got that side of things. Also don't forget that we just had it was holidays. We've had all kinds of other crazy things going on in the world that could definitely be an impact. And also people may just because of COVID and all the lockdown and how it was sort of the opposite at the start of the pandemic where all of a sudden people were much more used to consuming things online and watching things through zoom and stuff like that and having those kind of experiences just with their day to day. They could potentially be over it by this point. And again, we need to sort of get a bit creative. Anyway, that's one of the things we notice is that definitely shop rates are down, but that doesn't mean that conversion rates are down, just means the shop rates are down. And as I said, you've got to get a bit creative. What we're seeing people are playing with and testing. And I encourage you to think of these as experiments. And before anyone goes and does one of these experiments, I would only recommend that you do one of these experiments if you already had a webinar set up that has been proven what your numbers were. Because the thing is, and this is part of our ethos when you're creating any type of funnel is we always want to start with the simplest and the proven. Like what do. What do we know more often than like I don't want to say 99% because that's not a number that it, you know, I don't like say actual numbers. But what do we know is most often across all kinds of things the thing that works and we want to do that first and go, this is what works for most people most of the time at the highest rate. Do that. How does it work for you? What are your conversion rates for that, your show up rates, your sales rates, all of that stuff. And then you can go now we know this is our baseline, this is what's been proven for most people to work the best. Let's now if we want to do some experiments, we can do that and we'll see does it make it better or worse. But I don't recommend anyone start. So if you don't have that key data, I don't recommend you start with an experiment because you do not know if that experiment is better or worse. You just know that it exists. We always want to start with having that key data, having that good old standard been proven for Years and years and years kind of webinar, one of those core funnels that I mentioned for those of you who have that running already and you're like, hey, I've seen some conversion rates drop, or I've seen the show drop. How can I fix that? That's what these experiments really are about. What I'm seeing a lot of people testing is actually having a much, much shorter short presentation, a 30 minute presentation, or you know, 20 to 30 minutes even, and even having it. And the thing is that they're not skipping necessarily any of the points. You'll see that there's a lot like the way that we teach webinars. There's a certain structure that you, you want to loosely follow to just make sure that you're covering off all the things you need to cover off, that you're still giving great value, that you're, you know, doing it sort of in an order that makes sense. And that's going to help your clients to understand what they need to understand to be able to make the decision of if they do or don't want to purchase. At the end, when you're obviously you're cutting this down to 30 minutes, you have to be a little bit, you know, you have to look at what's going to be included in that 30 minutes. And one thing I've seen in some people say is that, oh, it's a 30 minute presentation and then they have their pitch on top of that. Really, they haven't actually necessarily made their actual webinar any shorter. It's just the training portion is 30 minutes rather than maybe it was like 40, 45 before. And then they have the pitch at the end. Maybe the webinar is actually 45 minutes long, but that's the training portion that they're advertising is shorter. Or you're seeing people, they're keeping their webinar the same length, but they're taking like one really, really juicy bit and sending it as a little teaser either beforehand or for those who register and don't show up. And it's like, hey, you missed this. But this was like something that we know everyone has loved and we didn't want you to miss out of it. But here's this teaser and then they watch the teaser and at the bottom there's an option like, hey, do you want to watch the rest of it now? Click here and you could go through and watch the whole presentation. That's another thing that people are kind of playing with, like, how can we when people are so time poor. When people are perhaps a little bit over watching videos online or just sitting at how can we still entice them and make it seem a lot more of a doable thing? Sitting down for 30 minutes rather than hour seems a lot more doable. Getting that first taste at first proof of like, oh, actually maybe this is something seems more doable. I've also seen and this is something that's been working really well in live launches is which then of course you can and you can still use this strategy just as well in an evergreen launch is that after the webinar is finished someone where they register or not if they were on your live launch, this would be for everyone in your list. If they're going through your webinar. Be about everyone who's in your warmup funnel or warm up sequence like wherever they're at you probably you've come to the in the warmup sequence where you're going, hey, come to the webinar. It's amazing. Don't miss out. And then they don't where they register and they don't show up or they don't register. You just send everybody a link to the replay with a limited time only on it and it's like this is amazing. People loved it. I didn't want you to miss out. Click here. Don't even need to register for anything. You can just click here and watch it now. But it's only available for a certain amount of time. It's another way of just trying to get more eyeballs onto this presentation, trying to fix that issue of the of the show up rates. Another key difference that we're seeing when it comes to again, both funnels and launches. This isn't just about funnels is the way that people are fueling them. The way that people are getting their eyeballs has shifted dramatically since the end of last year. And by that, like it used to be in the good old days that if you had a launch that's done well and you've tested a few things out before and you're like, I'm ready. I want to do double. I want this launch to be double what I did last time. It used to be all you need to do is try and get in front of twice as many eyeballs. And how do you do that? Well, you usually double your ad budget probably a little bit more because obviously as you scale things do get more expensive. And sure, you're probably doing some list building in the lead up too, but you'd probably have like the bulk of your spend would be. And the bulk of your emphasis on where you're getting these people into whatever your, your launch or your funnel is going to be would be cold traffic. And particularly with launches, it might be like we're doing a five day challenge and we want to get X number of people in. We know we're going to get a certain percentage from our list, but we want to get like another 50% or more like a really big number of cold, like people have never heard from us. And we're going to spend the two weeks before this challenge just spending a ton of money on ads and we'll get people in. And that used to be a pretty solid plan. Unfortunately, that's not really working as well anymore. People are finding that ads, particularly to anything cold, are just getting insanely expensive, very unreliable as well. And also with the way that the tracking and things are changing with Facebook ads is you almost need to be able, you almost need your ads to be evergreen like to work well at the moment because it takes like a long time to like you're not getting as the data back instantly anymore. Like there's a lag and a delay on actually getting the data. The data is also not less accurate than it used to be and it takes longer to be able to really sort of optimize and get these ads working as well as you want. So if you've only got a short window, you're not going to necessarily get the results there that you want. So there's a shift here. We have to go, oh, things aren't working anymore. Let's throw in the towel and all, you know, go off and be coconut farmers. I don't know why coconut farmer has always been my, my backup, my backup profession. But the we just have to, again, we just now have to get creative. We just have to look at what do we need to do differently then how do we change it. And the thing I actually like about this change is that it suits the way that I like to market and run my business so much better. And it also means that funnels have gotten more and more important, I'd say, than ever before. Because what where that shift is really coming now is away from that big cold push, big spend on cold traffic right before a launch, which has always been super risky, even when things were pretty. I say the good old days, everyone, no matter whether you go back two years, five years, whatever, people always thought ads were too expensive at the time and they've just gone up since then. But even when you could kind of consistently or Semi reliably predict these things. Now it's more about we need to have a longer term strategy. We need to be constantly list building, constantly spending on list building. We need to have a really dialed in retargeting sequence, an email sequence for a warm up sequence for people. Once they're on our list, we make sure that they're really getting indoctrinated, really getting great value knowing who we are, what we're about and that it's not just email, that it has multiple touch points. And the thing is, so if you're going to be doing this, if you're going to be going, all right, well Instead of spending 50%, 60% of our budget for this promotional launch or in one spot or in like a short period, we're going to now spread it out over three, four months before the launch, which of course then means is a much longer time until you are necessarily getting sales and then you spend maybe like 20% or 10% just retargeting your warm audiences when it actually comes to launch time. If that is a strategy. Now that can be something that if you don't have a funnel can get real expensive real quick. Like it's people seem to be kind of happy to go, I'm going to be making sales in two weeks, I'm happy to spend. Whereas now it's like oh, if you're not going to be making sales for four months, are you still going to be happy to spend that same money? Probably not if you don't have a funnel. So this is like I said, where funnels are going to become more and more important because we're going to see this shift in how people are spending, how people are doing their marketing. You're going to have really going to need to have a funnel that is working that is helping you to make your marketing pay for itself over those, those in between months. And you're going to be really doing, spreading that list building out over a lot longer period as well. The other thing that is going to become more and more important is that there's going to, there's being a bit of a shift away from the traditional list building channels. Again, it's that whole I would spend 70% of my budget on Facebook because that's traditionally been the best thing to do. That's again that's going to change. We're going to need to start to diversify. Things are going to get a lot more complicated, which is a nod. But it's just this is the nature of the beast. This is business Things are always changing. Looking at other social ad platforms and not just that obviously you got TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, trying to diversify your, your strategy out to be on not just Facebook and Instagram is going to be really, really important. But then diversifying beyond that, beyond social ads. Looking at things like Google Ads like sponsorships, podcast sponsorships, sponsored content, things like that, doing a lot of, you know, joint ventures, getting that, getting creative, going a bit old school. Like none of these things new and shiny, which is kind of what I like about them. This is like how we used to market and then I think everyone just got a little bit lazy because I was just like I just spend on some ads on Facebook. It's easy, right? No, we're going to have to get creative again. We're going to have to go a bit old school. So the, like I said, the emphasis is going to really be on that continual list building, really making sure that you are building, you're nurturing your list, you're treating your list nicely. Sorry, that's tongue twister. That you're getting great open rates and that your email service provider knows that you're not spammy and you know is sending you from the good servers due to that, that email service providers have good servers and less good servers. You want to be sent from the good server. It helps your open rates. So yeah, now is the time I said to get a bit creative. But you want to make you feel more comfortable with testing these things out with spending money in that more, longer in probably a higher amount than you're used to in your. In between months. Again this is where you're going to need to have a funnel. The third place, third thing that I'm seeing that's really quite different and becoming more and more important also is how we're getting our stats, how are we knowing things are working or not working because obviously we've seen there's been some big changes and more changes coming on what data you can and can't see through your, through the Facebook ads, through all kinds of even like your email open rates because of, I think more changes that are coming through is that they're not going to be reflected as accurately anymore. Some people are saying you're going to see higher, some people are saying going to be lower. You know, they can't seem to agree on that, but there's definitely going to be an impact. Again, how do we know that things are working and how do we know they're working well enough that we then feel happy to Spend and to be spending in between and like it can be quite stressful. There's a few things that you can do. First of all is we can trust our gut a little bit more, which I know can seem like a terrifying thing, but.

It is definitely a strategy that I've been leaning more into over the last few years and trusting the bigger picture of your business and going, look, I know that I have a great offer and that when I make offers that offer works and that particularly. And if you're not in that place yet, then making sure that you are spending the time on making sure your offer converts as well as possible and making sure you're dialing in the whatever marketing you are doing rather than just jumping from new thing to new thing to new thing all the time. Because it's that that jumping back and forth from all these different new things, creating new things all the time when you're not going to be able to clearly see your numbers, particularly not quickly, is going to be. You're going to, you're not going to be able to know if it even worked because it's going to be so much harder. But I think having that changing your mindset slightly to go, let's do things that are going to be long term, let's do things that are going to be assets that are going to work over a longer period of time. Which again makes me so happy because it's always how I've loved to run my business. Chasing the shiny new marketing strategy is just a race to burn out broke town as far as I am concerned. But we have to consciously do that. And when you are doing that and spending the time and the energy just to be improving on things over time, yeah, I know it's not sexy, it's not a silver bullet. But because you then know my things roughly converted this usually you don't then have to be quite as pedantic about the minutiae details, the stuff that you are no longer going to be able to really dial into as well. You're going to be like, well it's okay if maybe the ads are converting between this range rather than specifically at this thing because I know that it's still going to, it's still going to be worthwhile for me. I know that I can spend this amount of money and that it's all going to come back. And plus that's kind of the level of, of certainty that you need to get to. And how do you get there is like if you're not there yet, go check out Some of our previous episodes, we've kind of talked about it in a lot more detail, but it really is having one or two offers, spending a lot of time focusing on making sure those offers are amazing. You really understand your audience, what they can do, your delivery matches, what they need, your pricing is and that the way you're marketing them, that again, you're not just trying new things all the time and throwing spaghetti at the wall. Like you've picked your thing, you go all in on trying to master it. The other thing, for those of you who are like, oh, I can't just trust my gut. I can't just do that. I need the detail, I need the, I need, need to know more of these stats and things. Like some people, I get it, how your brain works. And hey, maybe you're a Facebook ads manager or a launch manager or something like that, listening to this, you're like, no, my clients really want to know the details. You can't just go back to them and say, hey, trust you gut. I get that. So now is also probably the time then to be looking at what kind of tracking do we really need and investing in either Some of the paid tracking services out there we've got. Hiros is one that we use, which is really, really great for getting more of that more accurate data from your social ads, Facebook and things like that. Segmetrics is another great one that I love. We've actually got them both because they do kind of different things. Segmetrics is better for if you're wanting to build like really detailed dashboards and goes in and kind of you can look at data from someone's email, like what's in people's email accounts, like as in like you can look at a client and go, they've got this tag and they've opted in for this thing. And then we want to filter out and see like the trend of people who have, who attended this event and then purchased. Or I want to see visually see a funnel and things like that. Like there's a lot of things you can play with there, potentially too much because you go in there and your brain just explodes. But anyway, that's another option. But also you can also just keep it simple, particularly with funnels and just look at Those top level KPIs we have inside our Funnel Pro training as one of the special little secret sauce things that we gift to the people who go through that program is that we have a special dashboard that we've created that allows you and your clients to easily see the top line numbers that they need to see and see them over time and be able to use this as their guide of being able to see what is and isn't working. This can be used for both launches and for funnels. And it's something that's easy to set up, that is can be set up with using all free tools and tools that your client would already be really comfortable with. We thought that was really, really important. But having a dashboard like that, having a place that you can go and look at, whether it's every week, every month, I would recommend weekly and go, yeah, well, I can see that it's still working. Yes. We can't kind of get in and see the minutiae right now because there's the lag in reporting or whatever it is. But we can see things are working in the important bits. Particularly if you are going to be increasing your spend or increasing your emphasis on list building in between live promotions and things like that. You're going to want to be able to see this over time. And just because there's so many data points that you could look at, just to see the important ones and know what they are is so important. So in conclusion, as I say from you can probably tell, but from what I can see that right now with the way that marketing is going, funnels are more important than ever and they're going to be come more important than ever. And making sure that people have the right funnels for the right type of offer, for the right stage and the right type of business is it's going to be so, so crucial. And that's why it is so important that if you are building funnels or if you're hiring someone to build a funnel for you, that they know the strategy side of things, not just how to link up a couple emails and a countdown time. Right. That's there's a lot more to it when it comes to actually building great funnels. Funnels that work, funnels that are profitable. Which is kind of is the point. Yes. If you are a funnel builder or you would like to support your clients further by adding funnel strategy consulting and creation to your services and like to go deeper into what we've been talking about today, what is and isn't working, including some of the most expensive and embarrassing mistakes I'm seeing people make far too often when they're building funnels now and how to actually package up your offers, you can stand out, attract great clients, potentially even double your prices, if not more, while still absolutely delighting the clients you're working with and lots, lots more. Then make sure you grab your free seat to our Funnel Pro Bootcamp which is an amazing three day workshop. You can grab your ticket at pro hellofunnels.com bootcamp or just grab the link below. We have three jam packed video trainings totally free designed to help you get more clients, build million dollar funnels and create the highly profitable stress free business that you are daydreaming about. And the first one drops on April 20th. Grab the link from the Show Notes, save your seat and I'll see you inside. And until then guys keep on doing. You do and I'll see you online. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to 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 at stealmyfunnel.com.

Sam.