Ever wonder if your funnel is long enough?
Or maybe you keep thinking that your funnel is too short.
Is there an optimal length for a marketing funnel?
The short answer to that question is yes, there is an optimal length for your funnel.
How do you determine that length? That’s the right question to ask. The fun part is that it comes with other questions you have to ask yourself.
If you need more information about what a funnel is, I invite you to read my article on funnels.
*May contain affiliate links. Clicking on the affiliate links will most likely result in the same price you would pay elsewhere or you may get a special offer using those links.*
Are you ready to discover how long your funnel has to be?
The first question you need to know is:
What Kind of Funnel Are You Building?
This is the most important question you need to get the answer to.
You need to start at the end, what the outcome of the funnel is and then build the steps you want people to go through.
What is the end result you are looking for when people are going through your funnel?
There are different kinds of funnels for different outcomes:
- Gift offer (Email list building funnel)
- Ebook funnel
- Ecommerce funnel
- Facebook group funnel
- Challenge funnel
- Webinar funnels
- Sales page funnel
- Book a call funnel (for high ticket offers)
- Etc.
Most of these funnels will grow your email list, unless you are not using email marketing. Keep in mind that building an email list will help you grow your business.
There isn’t such a thing as an affiliate funnel. It contains the same steps as any other funnel.
The gift funnel is simple. You bring traffic to your landing page where people have to enter their email address to get the gift. Then they are part of your email list and you can send them valuable content and offers.
You can make your funnel a little longer when people are getting the gift. On the next page, they are invited to watch a video that will bring them to a sales page for an offer that would be useful to them.
The gift can be many things like:
- A free ebook
- A free report
- A cheat sheet
- A checklist
- A survey
- A quiz
- A mini course
- A free event
This can be one of the shortest funnels you can have in terms of steps people have to take to get the gift. It is one of the longest on the long run since you will be sending weekly emails to these people for years (as long as they stay on your list)!
So, yes, funnels can be long in terms of years, not only the steps people have to take to get to the end result.
The Facebook group funnel is used to grow your Facebook group.
There is an ad promoting your group. People join and they answer a few questions to be accepted in your group.
Then, you need to keep your group active and inform the members on the products or offers you promote so they can buy from you.
This can also take years to optimize.
All kinds of funnels can be fairly short in terms of steps people have to go through.
The next questions you need to ask yourself are::
How Many Offers Do You Have? What Are You Selling?
How long does the funnel have to be is also determined by the number of offers you can offer to your audience.
Of course the funnel can be shorter when you have one single offer.
Of course the funnel can be annoyingly long when you have 10 offers.
Let me give you an example of a longer funnel for a single offer.
- You run ads for a free challenge.
- People click the ad.
- They sign up for the challenge.
- You do the challenge, usually 5-day, and people show up.
- People leave comments. They interact.
- Then you present your offer. Some people buy, others are on your email list.
- You email the replays. People watch the replays.
- You get some sales once in a while from your subscribers.
So this is a longer funnel, yes, long in time.
Ok, let’s take a look at a longer funnel in a short time period to get to the sales pages:
- You run ads for a freebie.
- People click the ad.
- They enter their email address.
- They now have a video to watch. Their gift is in an email they will receive.
- They are invited to click on a link to the next page.
- They are now reading a sales page.
- They go to see the gift they received.
- They then decide if they want to buy right now or not..
- They are on your email list.
Some marketers say: the longer the funnel, the more committed people are.
But at some point, a funnel can be annoyingly long. You know, where you have one thing to buy but then there are multiple offers that are presented to you and you endlessly click no to each one of them…..
And it’s been 20 minutes now that you are trying to just buy that one course…I mean, 20 minutes excluding the 1h30 you spent watching the webinar…!
Model From Others.
One of the best ways to decide how long your funnel should be is to see what others in your industry(or niche) are doing.
For example, if you are in the make money online industry, take a look at what others are doing by simply going through their funnels.
This is what most people do.
Russell Brunson teaches people to do that.
It’s simple. You model what you see and you do the same with your offer:
If there is a video, you do a video.
If there is a super long sales letter, you do a super long sales letter.
If there are 3 upsells and 2 downsells, you do that too!
You put images where they put images.
You write headlines as much as they write headlines.
What audience are they targeting?
Everything from their funnels you can use for your funnels, use it!
If the most successful people in the industry are doing so, it’s because it works.
Just keep in mind that they have much more offers than you probably do. So as you get started, you can create a smaller version of what they do.
That leads us to the last step:
Analyze Your Data.
You need to learn how to analyze your data. This is how you know if your funnel works. This is how you know where to make changes when people are not buying.
When you run ads for your funnel, you need to know how much money you spend on your funnel and how much money you earn.
If you are building your email list, you need to know how many people are buying every month.
If you are sending your leads to your Facebook group, you need to know how many people from your group are buying from you every month.
If you have a simple funnel where people buy, how many people buy every week? Not every month, you can make changes to your funnel if you don’t see a lot of results after 2 weeks.
The other funnels can be looked at in the long run. You will make your money eventually. You need to know how much money each person will bring you. That’s why you can analyze every month, especially in the beginning.
Be ready when a funnel works to put more money in it, so you can earn more money.
If you keep losing money with a funnel and you are not aware of it because you are not looking at your data, you are wasting your money.
In the beginning, it will take some trials and errors to create something that will work well. It’s normal. Give yourself a couple months to find something that will give you real results.
In Conclusion
A funnel has to be as long as it has to be to be profitable for your audience and for yourself.
Determine what is the end goal and build your funnel from there.
Keep in mind that there is a human being on the other side of the screen that will have to go through it, so make sure it is maximized for customer experience, you know, so it doesn’t take 30 minutes to buy a bottle of shampoo or an online course!
Keep an eye on your data and change things that don’t give you the results you want.
Are you ready to build your funnel?
Cynthia