Your Funnel Is Leaking Money—Here’s How to Plug the Holes

Jennie Wright [00:00:04]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the acquire podcast, where we get to talk about list building lead gen marketing, marketing strategy, sales conversions, and a whole bunch of really great stuff. And if you’ve been listening to the podcast before, you know how this goes, I’m going to share something today, just you and I on how you can improve your business. It doesn’t matter where you are. I get the privilege of working with people who are making 7 figures, who are making multi 6 and people who are either just starting out or who are making a 5 figure income. It doesn’t matter. These strategies apply. The only thing that changes is scale and complexity.

Jennie Wright [00:00:45]:
Everything that I’m telling you in all of these episodes will apply to you when you get to whatever level you want to get at. And I’ve, I get to see this because I get to work with all these different individuals and I get to actually see that the problems, the issues, and the solutions really don’t change that much. They just change in complexity. They only change in the, in the ability of things that you can do as you’re able to make more money and all of this applies. So what am I going to talk about today? I’m going to talk about this absolute killer topic about how your funnel is leaking money. I see this all the time, and I’m going to show you today how to plug the holes, no matter what your funnel is so that nobody’s leaking out. And I say this, and if you’ve known me for a while, I say this, I want to plug all the holes and fill all the gaps. Meaning I want to keep your ideal client, your hot lead in your funnel ecosystem, as long as humanly possible, because 93% of people who see your offer aren’t ready yet and they need more time.

Jennie Wright [00:01:49]:
And so if they’re landing on your sales page or your opt in page or whatever kind of page it is, they need more information or they need to be able to make a decision. And sometimes more often than not the information they need. Isn’t there. And so I’m going to show you today how to do this. So if you’re spending time, if you’ve been wasting money, if you’ve been driving traffic to a funnel, but you’re not seeing sales and you’re not seeing conversions, This episode is absolutely for you because the hard and painful truth is most entrepreneurs do not have a lead generation problem. They have a conversion problem. I can drive traffic till my head is exploding towards your funnels. And I do this all the time, but if you don’t fix the leaks, you’re just throwing money down the drain.

Jennie Wright [00:02:37]:
You can pay me $20,000 to build out the most extensive funnel in the world. That will absolutely absolutely do well. But if your traffic isn’t great, and if you don’t have the right sales funnel on the backend to capture the leads that I’m driving towards you, you’ve got a problem. It’s conversion. Now this is where we’re going to fix it. So the first thing that’s going to be killing your sales is where your funnel is absolutely failing you. And so the average landing page now, it doesn’t matter. This is like a general sort of percentage that, you know, if we rated across pretty much all industries that a conversion traffic number would be 2.35%.

Jennie Wright [00:03:25]:
Okay. I like to say in general, between 25% is sort of the, and like the, the, just the general conversion stat. Now, if you specify and you niche in and you talk specifically about summits, that number changes. Summit conversion numbers can be anywhere between 20 to 30%. That’s the industry average. Okay. If you’re talking about a sales page, it’s two to 5%. If you’re talking about a lead magnet, it can be about 10.

Jennie Wright [00:03:56]:
Now, why does this matter? Because you think you need more traffic when in fact you don’t, if 10% of the people who are landing on your page, whatever the page is are converting. It’s not a traffic problem. It’s a conversion problem because if I can get a hundred people on that page and I can get 50% of them to convert, now we’re talking. Now we’re really, really converting. Now we can do something with that. So every time I do a summit, every time I do a lead magnet, every page that my team and I build, or that I strategize on or consult on my goal is 35 to 50%. My average over the past thirteen years on webinars is anywhere between a 75 to 95% conversion. Meaning if a hundred people land on the page between 75 to 95 of those people are going to register for that webinar.

Jennie Wright [00:04:52]:
There’s a specific way to build a funnel in order to do that. And that’s just something I’ve perfected over a decade. And that’s, you know, it’s just something that I’m able to bring to the table summits. I can usually get those to convert anywhere between 3560%. I like aiming for about 44%. That makes me happy. If I can get over that, I’m excited. Sales pages, industry standards, two to 5%.

Jennie Wright [00:05:17]:
I’m always aiming between 15 to 22% and I usually get it. So. If you’re thinking about the fact that you need to drive more traffic, drive more traffic, and this is where you start spending money on paid ads. This is where I have to tell you, you have to fix your funnel first. Okay. And so the first major leak is conversion. And the first thing that’s going to drive people away is unclear messaging. Right? So there’s two things, right? So there’s actually, there’s more than two, but the biggest things are messaging and the way it looks.

Jennie Wright [00:05:49]:
We’re doing a podcast. This is audio. You might see a bit of video on YouTube if you’re watching this, but I can’t ma I can’t explain and visually show you how to build a funnel. I can do webinars in those, and I will absolutely invite you to them. But for the purposes of what we’re talking about, let’s focus on unclear messaging, because that is a real, real game changer. If somebody lands on your landing page, your website, your sales page, and they have no idea what you actually do within the first five seconds, you’ve already lost. They’re gone. So you need to verify check, change, update what you do on your website.

Jennie Wright [00:06:30]:
You have to make sure that your audience can figure it out super fast, super quick, or they’re going to bounce. They’re going to be gone. Right. And then you’re losing that sale. They’re they’re absolutely just absolutely not going to be there. And I totally had to pause the recording cause I had to sneeze. So excuse me. We have to make sure that this five second test works.

Jennie Wright [00:06:59]:
So what does it say on your page? What is it that you’re trying to get people to do? So who are you and what do you do? Who’s it for? Why is it valuable? What to do next? Make it stupid simple. Make it so simple that it is impossible for people to get it wrong and make sure that you speak to all the different ways that audiences learn and figure things out. So the person who likes to read, is there enough information for the reader? Is there enough information for the scroller? Is there enough information for the watcher or the listener? Is there enough information for the visual person only? Right? So do your graphics convey? Do the images connect and so on? This is where the messaging and a bit of the visuals play into each other. How do you fix this quickly? Well, your headline needs to pass the so what test. Does it immediately tell visitors why they should care? Should they be able to say, so what? And be able to go, wait a minute, that doesn’t matter. Ditch the jargon. Clarity always sells, not cleverness. I have fought this tooth and nail for a decade.

Jennie Wright [00:08:06]:
People love to be clever. People love to con to convince themselves that people admire their cleverness. Everybody just wants to get to the point, drop the jargon, speak clearly. Don’t mess around with people with clever things or too many emojis or too much of anything to try and sell a vibe, right? If your vibe is just your vibe and that’s your vibe and just go with it. But if you are trying to push a narrative because you think it’s going to appeal, people pick up on that real darn quick, and they’re not going to opt in. They’re not going to buy. The second thing that I want you to think about is a incredibly weak call to action. Are you making people guess as to what they should be doing, or are you telling them what to do? Right.

Jennie Wright [00:08:55]:
A CTA button should basically speak for itself. If it says something really, really vague, like learn more or discover or get started, you’re going to lose sales. These are very, very generic. These are very, very, passive and you need to switch into an active voice and you need to give people the direction on what they should do. Now, this is not creating fake FOMO, cause I hate that this is not creating a sense of urgency that doesn’t exist. This is real, right? Download the free guide, get instant access. Now try it for seven days. I love that one.

Jennie Wright [00:09:33]:
Try it for seven days or whatever CTA feels good to you, but please don’t make it a passive one, moving people who, and, and a lot of this, a lot of this is very normal that you may have a very passive voice when it comes to sales. Cause you’re afraid of sales. That’s quite normal. But if you switch into an active voice, it is not salesy. It’s not making it salesy. It is giving people clear direction. I want my GPS to tell me when to turn right. To turn left to, you know, in a hundred meters, I need to get on the on ramp to the highway.

Jennie Wright [00:10:09]:
I do not need my GPS to say. If you would like to, your potential right turn is coming up. So if you could dot, dot, dot, I mean, way too passive. I’m making, I’m making a very gross example, but you know what I mean? Right. You have to be very, very engaging with people and your CTS have to reflect that. So make your CTA specific and action oriented. That’s going to fix it quickly and test different CTA placements on the page. Top of page middle, right before close.

Jennie Wright [00:10:42]:
A lot of people give me flack over pop ups. Do not give me flack over pop ups. They fricking work. Pop ups are awesome. Pause pop ups on exit intent. That’s my caveat. Okay. Not pop ups for the sake of having a fricking pop up because that’ll drive anybody insane, but you can actually get percentage points of conversion on a pop up than not having.

Jennie Wright [00:11:02]:
And even though it might drive you insane, it works. So I always push for it. Some people push back on it because of the aesthetic and I’d understand that’s fine. But if you want conversions, I can get you percentage points and percentage points matter, regardless if you are going for an opt in page, a sales page, summit page, whatever these percentage points can make a massive difference. Okay. I have tested summit landing pages and sales pages with, or without a pop up summit pages and webinar landing pages without a pop up, I can get a conversion rate. You know, anywhere between, gosh, like I’ve said before, 20 to 30% on a summit, sometimes up to 40% on a webinar. I’d like getting 75% above put a pop up in there.

Jennie Wright [00:11:46]:
I can instantly get you 5% more. 5% I is not even a joke. A ugly pop up is going to work against you, but a pretty pop up obviously is going to work for you. So here’s some more quick fixes that in my opinion, drive conversions without you having to push for more traffic, because traffic is a pain to get, and we’re always working at it. But if I can get your pages to convert better, you’re going to do better. Right. So let’s talk about lead magnets because this is a big one. We’re always told we have to have lead magnets.

Jennie Wright [00:12:15]:
I have at least half a dozen, if not more. Going at any given time. Right. I have PDFs. I have videos. I have free little mini courses. I have private podcast and a whole bunch of others. The ones that are working right now, all depend on your audience and they say.

Jennie Wright [00:12:34]:
Okay. Whatever the darling was yesterday will be the darling again in a year. And what you have right now needs to be refreshed on a consistent basis. I always aim to update and refresh my lead magnets every two years. That’s usually the shelf life. Okay. Especially depending on the topic. So topics change, information updates and changes look and feel of things, updates and changes.

Jennie Wright [00:12:59]:
Every time you have a refresh on your brand or you’ve tried a new look and feel your lead magnets have to reflect that and look the same. So you have to make sure you do that. And if you don’t, then people are going to notice that’s one thing. Second thing is you need to look at your lead magnet and determine whether or not it is weak or worse or relevant. And this is hard because we’re looking at our own stuff, but let’s be real. Most lead magnets are pretty meh. Okay. They suck.

Jennie Wright [00:13:29]:
They’re really not giving any sort of support. And they’re really sort of identifying that you’re just after the person’s email address, I’m not really after helping them. So I always look at the three X rule. This is my rule for lead magnets. Your lead magnet should be so valuable that somebody would have paid for it. So I want them to think, okay, I would have. I would have paid $5 for this or $15 for this. Right.

Jennie Wright [00:13:57]:
Somebody should have paid for it. And then the biggest mistake that I can tell you that people are doing is making their lead magnets generic. And I see this across the board, 5 figure businesses, multi 7 figure businesses. The only thing about the multi 7 is they’ve got some really good ones and then they got a couple of duds and they have to work on the duds. So making it too generic, like free business guide, free business, you know, free PDF download. Congrats. You sound like everybody else. How are you going to stand out? How is it going to be different than something that I can Google and find for myself? And by the way, here’s the secret.

Jennie Wright [00:14:34]:
Pretty much everything that you’re going to tell people, most people can Google it and find it out. The reason that they’re not is because they’re lazy and your lead magnet should give it to them. Right. So as an example, if I was going to teach people how to do a summit, a summit has a hundred or more working parts at any given time. And when I’ve created task lists for clients, just a basic Asana task list for summit can have anywhere about 140 to 200 different, line items. Okay. If I was going to teach somebody how to do a summit, I’m not going to teach them 143 different line items that they need to do to create a summit. But what I am going to do is I’m going to make it super specific about the one thing that’s preventing them from going forward with a summit, how to find incredible experts, how to promote like a pro how to convert leads into buyers, right? How to get the most leads out of a summit, how to make those things.

Jennie Wright [00:15:33]:
Right. So I get my lead magnet would be super specific, hyper specific to be like really, really on the nail. The seven word email that boosts sales by 35%, the four ways you can attract your next thousand leads, quick wins, things that people can do right away. I’ll give you an example. Earlier on today, I wanted to build a case study survey for my business. I want to encourage past clients, current clients, people who are happy with the work that I’ve done. My team has done to share their experiences so we can create case studies, case studies, by the way, are an amazing lead magnet. They’re They’re also a great conversion tactic and you can use them everywhere.

Jennie Wright [00:16:13]:
Summits, webinars, sales pages, social media, YouTube, everywhere. And so in creating this form, I had a simple problem. Do I use, do I create a form on go high level? Do I use a survey on go high level? What questions do I ask? What are the best sort of visuals for a case study? How should I build a great case study? And so in my searching, I did Google and I found a really cool lead magnet. Somebody out there has a lead magnet on exactly how to build an incredible case study right within GHL, by the way. I’ll tell you that I’ll tell you the deets, use a form, not a survey. So cause it just has more flexibility. And so I learned this today. So right before I recorded this podcast, I created a, form in GHL with all the questions for my case study.

Jennie Wright [00:17:05]:
I’m now using, Zapier to connect it. And then I’m going to ask my, my clients to provide these case studies to me. And then I’m going to use that in future Things. I’m going to use it as a front to sell, not a front. I don’t mean a front in a bad way as a, as a thing to sell programs, products, and services, as content on social media as blogs and so on right now, I have some of these, but this is more of an updated way that I’m doing it. Like I have lots of testimonials and whatnot, but I’m trying to get more specifics. And that’s what I did use hyper specificity with your lead magnet. And the things that you’re doing to deliver quick wins to people.

Jennie Wright [00:17:47]:
Right. Now, the biggest thing that I see a lot of people doing I’ve even done it myself. It is a work in progress at all times is a nurture sequence. That is a snooze fest. If we can get them to the landing page and the landing pages, the landing page has been tweaked to convert or sales page interchangeable. Then, like I was telling you at the top of the podcast, like 93 to 98% of the people who land on your sales pages and your pages are not ready to convert yet. They’re not ready to buy. So they, they got your lead magnet.

Jennie Wright [00:18:18]:
They signed up for your summit. They looked at your sales page. They signed up for something, but they’re not ready to buy yet. Not immediately. So how are you going to get these people ready? Right. 80% of the leads that you attract into your business never convert because they do not get followed up on. Okay. That you do not follow-up.

Jennie Wright [00:18:37]:
You’re not sending the right sequences and the right information to warm them up. If your email sequence sounds like an instructional, like an instructional manual, people will absolutely unsubscribe. They’re gone. People buy based on relationships. They want to get to know you. This is why when we do summits, this is why when we do sales pages, this is why when we do webinars, you need to make them interactive. Have video create relationship, insert yourself into your own summit, do your own keynote show up so that people know who’s behind the curtain and want to buy from you. They buy on personalization.

Jennie Wright [00:19:13]:
They buy on getting to know who you are and what you do. Right. This is why it’s important to tell stories. This is why it’s important for people to get to know you. This is why video is important. I mean, it’s great for people to hear my voice, but it is also incredibly great for people to see and watch video. Now, do I like being on video? Apps of freaking lutely not. I’ve said this many times.

Jennie Wright [00:19:36]:
I have a wonderful face for radio. I know. Don’t worry. I’m not really insulting myself. Do you see what I mean? You absolutely have to show up and you have to make sure that your nurture sequences support the people, personalization. Everybody knows this personalization in your emails. You storytelling to connect before you pitch drop in micro commitments. I do.

Jennie Wright [00:20:00]:
Throughout everything that I do with webinars and summits, micro commitments, hit reply. Let me know what you think. Show up here, do this like just little itsy bitsy things, because the more little micro commitments we can get, the closer we can get to a yes. And that is not doing anything bad. It is literally just getting people to say, yeah, I want that. Oh, I want that too. I want more of this. And eventually we get to the point where we’re going from a small micro commitment to being able to get somebody to convert into the thing that we’re hoping to convert them into program, product, or service.

Jennie Wright [00:20:34]:
And your, your nurture sequence has to do that. So go and do an audit. First of all, do you have a nurture sequence? Second, are there enough emails in that nurture sequence to effectively convert people? I just wrote a nurture sequence for a SaaS company, software as a service. And this is a SaaS company. It’s specific to Max, and I love working with this company. It’s it’s been almost a year, but I’ve been working with them and I adore the company. And I just wrote a nurture sequence for them and we’re like, okay, well, how many emails do we need? I don’t know. I didn’t know until I wrote all the emails.

Jennie Wright [00:21:11]:
I was like, maybe five, maybe eight. No, no, not that I need like 12 to con to properly convey everything that needed to be conveyed within the scope of the nurture sequence. I wanted to create with the goals that we had in mind ended up being. Right. That could have easily been 18, depending on your business. That could be easily be more If you sign up for somebody’s lead magnet for some of the big guys, you’ll see that some of them have massively long nurture sequences before you get into the regular rotation of their newsletters. And the reason is they want you to get to know them and personalization. And like I said, people buy based on relationships.

Jennie Wright [00:21:48]:
So go do an audit, make sure you have one enough emails to convey what you need to convey to the tone is right. Make sure that you’ve updated it. Revisit it. Please do not write it completely with AI. Everybody is really, really, really being able to see that. I know the AIs are getting smarter, faster, stronger, and it, and, and there’s some things that you just, you know, you can, you can definitely write with AI, but your email should sound exactly like you. So. However you want to do that.

Jennie Wright [00:22:19]:
I like to research with AI and then I write myself because the AI just hasn’t gotten to the point where it sounds like me that, and you know, there’s too many m dashes. I like m dashes. Okay. I love typography, but, or I just find that there’s too many m dashes in AI, emails anyway. So make sure you’re fixing that. And then the last thing that I want to talk about is advanced funnel strategies. So if you’re already making bank at this point, and you’ve done the things that I’ve talked about earlier on in this podcast, here’s some really good strategies for serious revenue growth from your funnels, right? No follow-up. So you really need to fix the follow-up sales mechanism in your funnels to make sure that you can actually get the serious revenue growth that I’m talking about.

Jennie Wright [00:23:10]:
Like I said, over 90% of people who were visiting are not ready yet. They’re not ready to buy immediately. So if your funnel doesn’t have that follow-up system, you’re leaving money on the table, a a %. And most sales don’t happen. Like don’t happen on the first visit. They happen in the follow-up. So what does that follow-up look like? And this is beyond the nurture sequence. So think strategically, if you have the ability to run ads or You have pixel and you’re, you’re running, you know, you’ve been gathering audience for, running ads, paid traffic, retargeting, retargeting is massive.

Jennie Wright [00:23:45]:
I’ll give you an example. I ran a summit for a client, not too long ago. And what we did is we ran a summit and then we have a $10,000 offer afterwards. Okay. The offer has a thousand dollars deposit or you could pay in full of $10. And so we ran a summit. We ended up with well over a thousand registrants, which you were like, oh, only a thousand, no thousand. Perfect leads.

Jennie Wright [00:24:09]:
Okay. We had like a boatload. We had, what did we have? We had 20% of VIP. So a thousand over a thousand registrants, we had over 20% of those purchase a VIP. So we had almost $10 in VIP sales. Okay. Pretty fricking good. We also had somewhere in the range of about 10 ks in sponsorships.

Jennie Wright [00:24:31]:
Awesome. Fantastic. My fee is now paid for. And then. We also had sales right afterwards. So we took the ads that we were running to the summit and the registrants from the summit. We then retargeted for the 10 ks program. Right.

Jennie Wright [00:24:48]:
And that 10 ks program was sold through a webinar. And so we retarget everybody who registered for the summit to go to the webinar. And we retarget everybody who looked at the webinar landing page and everybody who looked at the sales page. Now this client has closed in, what are we from the February to right now, which is like basically the March, that client is closed $45,000 Now, remember I told you it’s a thousand dollars deposit or 10 ks PIF. Most of the people who bought it put a thousand dollars deposit. This client is able and has been able from this summit with a thousand registrants. Okay. And like $10,000 in VIP and another like 5 or 10 ks in, in, you know, having sponsors has been able to generate just off the backend, like over $40.

Jennie Wright [00:25:46]:
And that’s just in deposits. Now they had like two or three people who paid in full. But they had $40 in $1,000 deposits. So do the math on that. That’s the power of retargeting. That’s the power of high end strategy. Okay. Make sure you also have an abandoned cart sequence for the people who landed on his, sales page from the webinar.

Jennie Wright [00:26:09]:
There’s a lot bought like a whole bunch of people who didn’t purchase, but there’s people who looked at the cart. And so using something like GHL or go high level, we can then create an automation for people who looked, but didn’t buy. And we can retarget those people with an abandoned cart sequence. Now, customers who receive a follow-up email to try and recover the cart will convert between 2030%, twenty to 30%. So if you don’t do an abandoned cart sequence, you’re leaving 20 to 30% of the sales right there. You’ve just lost a boatload of money, a ton of money. Stop doing that abandoned cart sequences work. They work for me.

Jennie Wright [00:26:51]:
Amazon sends them to me. I just had one the other day when I was trying to buy, some clothing online from a Canadian real real, retailer here in Canada. And I got like, I got this great email and I’m like, oh crap. I totally forgot to do that. And I literally went back and did it because life gets in the way we’re usually on our phones when we’re doing these things and something pops up for me, it was like, oh crap. My, I just got called in for my doctor’s appointment. I was halfway through making this purchase or I had some stuff in my cart and I didn’t buy it. And so the.

Jennie Wright [00:27:22]:
You know, the abandoned cart sequence got me. Okay. If you make sure that you’re doing all this stuff that we talked about today, this is going to create massive improvement. Now I didn’t even cover all of it. I haven’t even gotten into segmentation yet, but I’m telling you that if you are. You know, if, if we go through these things again, I’m telling you that all of this can make massive fixes. Unclear message. Oh my goodness.

Jennie Wright [00:27:45]:
Pardon me. Unclear messaging, weak calls to action. Gosh, lead magnets that don’t work or who are weak nurture sequences that just aren’t effective or don’t exist at all. Follow-up sequences. Massive thing to do retargeting abandoned cart emails. All of these things can have a incredible impact. And if you do them and they don’t take long to do, you could do a lot of this stuff literally in the next couple of days. You’re gonna see a an incredible difference.

Jennie Wright [00:28:14]:
And so I think it’s so important, especially as I’m thinking about, you know, potentially having a potential, like there being a recession or a slowdown or sales slowdown, you may not be able to get more traffic, but you can control the traffic that you’re getting by improving what happens when they land on your pages. Right. So fix all the leaks, close all the gaps and fix your sales. You don’t need more leads necessarily. You need better conversions. And the difference between a struggling funnel and a thriving one, isn’t just the traffic. It would hap it’s what happens to the traffic once it gets to your page. So before you start throwing money at ads or chasing more traffic, fix what you have, that might be a little bit broken and make sure that you optimize it.

Jennie Wright [00:29:00]:
And if you need help optimizing your funnels so that it converts let’s honestly, let’s talk. I am so happy just to take a peek and I’ve helped hundreds and hundreds of businesses go from struggling to 6 figures and to 7 figures just by plugging these exact leaks that we’ve just talked about. So there’s a link, in the show notes. If you want to book a call with me, I’d love to chat about it and give you a hand, show you what you can do and get you on your way. So hopefully this is been helpful. I’m so glad you’ve listened to this point. I’ve got so many great episodes coming up in the not so distant future. I’ve been recording like crazy and I’ve got some insanely good topics coming up and great guests.

Jennie Wright [00:29:41]:
I’m super excited. So please stay tuned and thank you so much for listening to acquire. If there’s anything that you think that people would want to hear, let me know. Also make sure you’re leaving a review and letting me know what you think of the podcast. Thank you so much. We’ll talk to y’all soon. Take care.