Funnel design is one of the most essential elements of a high-converting sales funnel. To create an effective funnel, you must regularly revamp your funnel design. But how can you improve each part of your funnel?
You can improve your funnel design using a step-by-step approach that simplifies the process. First, optimize your landing page design, starting from the layout to the CTA. Next, improve the design of your contact forms and the sales page. Finally, optimize page load speeds for a better UX.
Below, we will walk you through a step-by-step approach to help you improve your funnel design. Maybe you don’t need to work on every part we talk about, but understanding various ways to improve each area can be helpful.
How To Optimize Your Funnel Design To Boost Conversions?
Over time, changes happen in the marketing landscape, and your brand needs to adapt. Funnel design is one of the sales funnel elements that requires constant improvement.
In this section, we will discuss how you can improve your design one step at a time.
Step One: Improve Your Landing Page Design
The landing page is your initial point of contact with the target audience. It is also your best chance to impress the audience and convince them to enter your funnel and begin their customer journey.
However, landing pages may underperform for several reasons.
1. Difficult To Maneuver Navigations
Landing pages are essential, so it’s tempting to pack them full of all the information we can. However, the space is limited. The result is a highly cluttered page that ends up being counterproductive.
Sometimes it’s tempting to add stylistic elements or extra text that doesn’t really need to be there.
Unfortunately, the audience does not care about seeing fancy designs and fun website elements if it doesn’t address their problems.
The use of excessive navigation elements causes clutter, distracts your readers, and prevents them from taking the intended action.
How to improve: Make your landing page free from distractions by minimizing navigation menus. Go through the landing page as if you were a brand-new user.
If you feel friction anywhere, your audience will likely feel it too. Identify the key role of your landing page and check whether the navigation you’ve set up supports that purpose.
Once you know what’s important and what’s not, remove all the additional navigation menus that overwhelm the user. Additionally, keep the landing page simple and free from clutter.
2. Boring And Poorly Written Landing Page Copy
The landing page copy is one of the most overlooked elements of funnel design. However, it is a crucial element and plays a key role in your landing page conversions.
Unfortunately, there are several potential copy flaws that may prevent your funnel from converting well. Some of these elements include inferior headlines and poorly formatted body content.
Boring headlines fail to grab the reader’s attention and persuade them to keep reading. This could lead to high bounce rates and overall underperformance in your sales funnel.
How to improve: First, ensure your headlines are catchy and compelling. Next, make sure that the body communicates the main idea for that landing page. Avoid filler words that do not add any value.
Once you have a good copy, it is time to format it properly.
To enhance readability, break down huge chunks of text into small, easy-to-read paragraphs. Use appropriate font styles and sizes that suit your target audience.
You can also use visual elements such as images to make your copy more appealing. During this time, ensure your visual elements are visible and of good quality.
For your images, keep their pixel sizes manageable. If your images take up too much bandwidth, your page will load slowly, and readers will become frustrated.
3. Invisible Or Weak Calls To Action
Another design element that heavily impacts the success of your landing page is the call to action. It is every marketer’s dream to see their readers take action.
But that does not always happen. If your call to action is weak, it will not convince your readers to take the next step.
Similarly, a call to action that is improperly placed on the landing page may confuse readers, thus preventing them from taking action.
Moreover, if the call-to-action buttons are presented with poorly chosen colors, they may not be noticeable.
How to improve: Start by ensuring your call to action copy is concise and straight to the point. Don’t make your CTA message unnecessarily long.
Also, strive to make the call to action authoritative but friendly. This combination helps to compel readers to take action without sounding like you are giving orders.
Choose bright colors for your call-to-action buttons and ensure the chosen colors contrast the background.
This way, your CTAs will stand out from the rest of the elements, thus making them visible and hard to miss. In addition, this practice increases the chances of your prospects seeing and clicking on it.
Strategically place your call to action on your landing page. While there are no set rules on exact placement, make sure they are visible and close to copy that encourage action.
As a rule of thumb, you should place CTAs right after a piece of copy that prepares the audience to take a specific action.
When using pop-ups and overlays to convey your call to action, ensure you strike a balance. While pops cannot go unnoticed, they can quickly get annoying if they are hard to dismiss.
So, if you choose to use pop-ups and overlays, minimize animation effects that might irritate and annoy the user.
Align page elements
Another way to improve your CTAs is to align the rest of the elements on the page to support the call to action. A CTA is the main pitch that you present on your landing page.
To ensure that readers follow the call to action, the copy and the entire page layout should prepare the reader to move forward.
Finally, allow sufficient white space around the call to action button. Don’t add any elements around that CTA because these may distract the reader from taking the desired action.
Using the negative space also makes it easy for them to locate and click on the CTA button.
Run split tests
You are not done optimizing your landing page design if you have not tested it. Running A/B split tests is a great way to determine which design works best for your landing pages.
These tests allow you to create variants of your landing page so you can test headlines, calls to action, and more.
The best part about A/B split tests is that they give you insights into the performance of your designs within a short period.
You should regularly run split tests to determine which areas need further improvement. If you keep testing and optimizing, you will have highly converting pages in no time.
Step 2: Optimize Your Contact Forms Design
Poorly designed contact forms are one of the causes of low conversions. If your forms are not converting as you would wish them to, it is time to redesign them.
Below are ways you can revamp your contact forms, so they convert better.
How to improve: The first step is to limit the length of the forms. The truth is, filling out forms online isn’t everybody’s cup of tea–most readers despise the process!
Long forms are a turn-off, and they almost always push prospects away. Cut down your form fields to the absolute minimum. Aim for 3-5 form fields to make it easy and fast to fill forms.
For instance, to get people to subscribe, you could simply ask for their name and email address.
You can also optimize your forms by ordering questions on a scale from easy to difficult. For instance, start with the name and email address, then proceed to shipping and credit card details.
This approach encourages readers to stay and complete the form.
Step 3: Improve Your Sales Page Design
The sales page can boost or lower your conversions based on how it is designed. Subsequently, you need to constantly improve your sales pages to accommodate changes as they come.
Below are some common sales page design elements you can work on. If you focus on these areas, you can maximize conversions.
1. Small Font Sizes In Light, Difficult-To-Read Colors
The choice of fonts and color schemes is almost as important as the page copy. However, these areas are usually overlooked, which leads to a poor design that hinders conversions.
Using fonts that are too small is a common occurrence. Readers who struggle to read a piece of content will simply exit the page.
While colors make a page attractive, overusing them is counterproductive. Turning your sales page into a rainbow will confuse your potential customers and scare them away.
Overusing colors also obscures what your brand represents.
How to improve: Understanding your target audience is the first key to choosing the right font style and size for your sales page. Generally, opt for font sizes that are not too large or too small.
The goal is to attain text legibility. For the color schemes, go for colors that best represent your brand.
You will generally have good results with warm colors such as red, pink, and beige since they seem more friendly.
For the font colors, black works best, although other dark colors can also work. Avoid using light gray and light blue for text because these colors tend to blur together.
2. Too Many Buttons And Links That Direct Readers To Other Pages
If you add links or pop-ups that lead away from the sales page, readers may click on them and become distracted. Unfortunately, they may not return to the sales page.
If you have any external links, they may be the reason your sales page is underperforming.
How to improve: The ultimate goal of your sales page is to get leads to convert. As such, all buttons on the page should encourage the reader to take the single action necessary to achieve that goal.
For instance, if you are selling an online course, adding a link to your freebie is not a great idea. Keep everything self-contained, so no one wanders onto a different website.
3. Your Sales Page Is Extremely Busy
There is a thin line between an effective sales page and a busy one. Worst of all, most marketers can’t seem to see it.
Using long-form copy will make your sales page long, but that is not the same thing as having a busy page. A busy page is full of several unnecessary elements that just clutter up the space.
How to improve: Adopt a minimalist design that allows your copy to shine. This means eliminating any external navigations such as menu bars, sidebars, and footers.
The goal is to drive all the attention to the copy and the accompanying images.
4. Using The Same Layout Throughout Your Page Sections
Using the same page layout all throughout can quickly become problematic, especially if your sales page is long. People love to skim through content.
If you add different content for the different sections but maintain the layout, readers will assume they have already read it and may skip sections.
What to do: Switch up layouts to let readers differentiate one-page section from the others. This way, you can prevent them from skimming and get them to actually read your content.
Maintaining similar colors and fonts throughout will help you create a sense of unity, even as you switch up the formatting.
5. A Beautiful Sales Page With No Strategy For Conversion
In order for a sales page to bear fruit, it should have both a pleasing design and an effective conversion strategy. However, if your page simply looks good and doesn’t have a purpose, it won’t be effective.
Aim for a blend of function and form.
What to do: When designing sections, do it with a strategy in mind. This way, you will only incorporate crucial elements that add value to your funnel.
In addition to the above design tweaks, you can also improve your sales page design by:
- Using quotes to add customer testimonials/social proof
- Adding prominent CTAs
- Including guarantees
Step 4: Optimize Your Page Load Speeds And User Experience
Another major cause of underperforming funnel designs is slow page load speeds. Pages that load slowly cause readers to lose interest in that page and abandon it.
If these problems continue unchecked, they can cost you lots of great opportunities.
How to improve: There are many actions you can take to improve your page load speeds. Below are some ideas.
- Minimize the size of your pictures
- Choose a web hosting company with a higher uptime
- Conduct regular page speeds test using tools like Google Page Speed and Test My Site to keep your load speeds optimized
- Reduce redirects
- Utilize a CDN file
- Minimize the use of face animations or page widgets
Ultimately, readers feel more satisfied if they can quickly access the information they want. Optimizing your funnel pages to load faster leads to a great user experience.
Better yet, satisfied readers are more likely to convert.
Continuous Optimization of Funnel Design is Key to Converting Leads into Customers…
A great funnel design is an essential ingredient when you’re building a sales funnel that converts. However, achieving a great design can be a painstaking process.
You need to constantly improve your design in order to keep acquiring new leads and converting them.
The above step-by-step guide will help you optimize your funnel design. Look carefully at each element we described so you can find the weak points in your funnel.
Start with the landing page, contact forms, and sales page designs. Next, improve your page load speeds to improve user experience and boost conversions.