Hey, guys Julie here- today I want to talk about the very very sad truth of my funnel is broken.

So many people come to me after they’ve spent all this time and energy and money building a funnel and then it doesn’t work and they’re so discouraged.

So before I even get into how to diagnose a broken funnel, please remember that funnels don’t usually work the first time. In fact, they often don’t even work the second time.

So you have to try again, again and again. So don’t be discouraged. Everybody has broken funnels when they’re first born. That’s what I say when you birth a funnel because they’re really ugly, usually when you first birth them.

First things are first: you need Benchmarks.

Okay, so benchmarks help you figure out if a funnel is actually broken or if you’re just nervous because this is your baby.

So everybody’s gonna have different benchmarks.

Industries have different benchmarks and as you get good at this, you’re going to have your own benchmarks for your company and products. But I’m gonna give you just some basic ones to start with.

All right so the first thing is 20%.

20% of people who see your landing page should opt-in.

Now there are exceptions to every rule but that means if a hundred people land on your landing page and you can’t get at least 20% of people to opt-in, then chances are something isn’t right on the landing page.

20 to 30% of people should be opening your emails.

Now that that number goes down the more traffic you have so if you are running thousands and thousands of people through your funnel every single day that might actually be a little lower.

But for most beginners, if you’re just working with a couple thousand people 20 to 30% of people should be opening your emails. If they’re not then something’s wrong with your subject line for sure.

One to five percent of people should buy your entry offer.

So that means once they opt-in for something free and they get on that Thank You page, and you have maybe it’s a $7 book guide, program, course… whatever you want to see one to five percent.

So if a hundred people opt-in you want between one and five people to purchase. And if they’re not purchasing then something’s definitely wrong with your entry offer.

Now the upsell or the OTO is what we call, you want to see five to maybe even 10% of people will buy your OTO offer. Now sometimes this is less so don’t be discouraged if you’re getting like three to seven percent.

It depends on how big of a jump you’re going if you’re like hey buy a $7 book and then you’re like buy a 300 dollar program, yeah that’s gonna go lower. But if you have like a modest jump from like 7 to maybe forty-seven you should see five to ten percent of people buying. So it’s actually easier to get this than it is to get this which that’s a discussion for another day. But I just wanted to give you that benchmark.

If you are running a webinar funnel, you want thirty to fifty percent of people to watch it.

So that means if you get a hundred people to opt-in, you want between thirty and fifty to hang around and watch your webinar, alright?

So these are just some benchmarks that we’re gonna use to diagnose your funnel.

Now there are also some benchmarks for ads as well because sometimes the problem isn’t the funnel. Sometimes the problem is the ad.

Now again, this is even this is even harder to just like give you standards because every industry is different. But in general,  you want a relevancy score on your ad of eight or higher.

Facebook delivers you a relevancy score after it’s been shown to 500 people and if you have a relevancy score of less than eight or seven, Facebook’s telling you, “you know what? People aren’t really resonating with this.” So you definitely want a relevancy score of 8 or higher.

You also want to go to the CPC column. This stands for cost per click. And you want to see it at 50 cents or less.

Now take that with a really big grain of salt because I’ve only worked in some industries not all but 50 percent, I mean 50 cents or less, that means people are clicking on the ad.

You also want to see like a click-through rate. That means the percentage you want to see it at like 3 percent or higher. Now once you start running ads and doing all of this yourself, you’ll have your own benchmarks. I have a lot of ads that are like 6-7 percent click-through rate so you just want to like set your own benchmarks. but these are some good benchmarks to help you diagnose where your funnel is broken.

So let’s take a traditional funnel, okay. Here’s your Facebook ad and it goes to a freebie. Okay, so something free. And then the Thank You page you offer them a seven dollar book. Okay, they go to the order form and there’s like a little order bump here.

Then they get offered a one-time offer of a forty-seven dollar let’s say, it’s a course okay.  And then they go to the order confirmation page.

Okay, so this is the funnel. Somewhere in here, something’s not working. So we’re gonna use our benchmarks to try to figure out where stuff isn’t working.

These are the three things that usually account for most broken funnels.

A bad offer.

Bad copy.

Bad audience.

Notice I didn’t say design there even though I am a designer. Design really has very little to do with it. As long as your design isn’t horribly intrusive. Even if it’s ugly, sometimes it converts.

Alright, so let’s talk about the bad offer. This, if the offer is bad and the market doesn’t want it, there’s really not much you can do about that.

So what’s a sign that the offer is bad? The sign is that nobody buys this, right? You’re seeing less than one to five percent.

Okay so this because this is the first offer that they get in the funnel, they’re not even getting a chance to see if they like your forty-seven dollar offer.

So this right here, you have to spend so much time on it to make sure it’s so amazing that people are going to buy it. So if you’re seeing less than one to five percent of people buy, that means your offer is bad.

Now if you’re seeing less than 20% of people opt-in on your landing page, your freebie might be a bad offer. Remember your freebie, your lead magnet, your bate is also an offer and if people don’t care then they’re never gonna get through this.

So bad offer is usually like the worst problem to have because it means you need to go back to the drawing board.

The second thing is bad copy.

Sometimes the offer is great but you just don’t have the right hook or the right angle.

Clickfunnels allows you to split test pages so you can make variations of this page and this page and you can split test different headlines to see if maybe the hook on the headline is not working.

Make sure that you’re not just selling the features of what you offer, but you’re selling the benefits and the meaning behind those benefits. So that’s the second reason.

The third reason could be bad audience.

And it just means that the people that you’re targeting this Facebook ad, they just don’t really care about this stuff and so you need to try a new audience.

So using these benchmarks, if you notice that your ad has a good relevancy score, it has a good cost per click, and it has a good click-through rate then you know the ad is doing well. You can just kind of push that aside.

If you’re seeing that 20% of people are actually opting in then that means your landing page is in good shape. Now a lot of people, by the way, make this higher 30, 40, 50 % but you want at least 20%.

If you get here and you’re getting at least one to five percent of people buying your entry offer, then you’re good.

And then here, if for some reason you’re seeing lots of people land on this page and then on this page but then they pop off, it could be that your order form looks crappy on mobile.

Think about that.

A lot of people run their funnels and they watch them watch everything on mobile so it could be that the order form is just too confusing or it requires too much information. So that could be an issue.

By the way, I forgot the benchmark for order bumps. You should see between 30 and 40 percent of people take an order bump,  If it’s a small order bump, okay.

And then here you want to see between 3 & 7 or 5 and 10% and then you know, your OTO is a really good match.

Now if these offers are good and you’ve been able to sell them on your own but then when you put them together people aren’t buying, it could be and this is very common- that you’re satisfying their appetite and therefore they’re not needing to buy.

And this happens all the time when someone says here, “I’m gonna give you a free course on proofreading and then I’m gonna try to sell you a book on how to be a proofreader,” they’re not hungry for that because you just fed them this meal.

So, remember that once in a while there may be a fourth reason and it’s that the offer combination is not working for the audience.

Alright, so sometimes what you can do is you can just swap out a different OTO or a different offer.

Remember this is the most important one because they don’t even see this if they don’t get through here first.

And sometimes I just run traffic directly to the offer instead of putting the free in front of it because the free is making them full you know… they want to go take a nap.

So you can also try taking an ad like this and running directly to the offer and seeing if you can get people to buy.

Sometimes the free doesn’t help you.

So this is how you figure out where your funnel is broken.

Don’t change everything at once.

Change one thing at a time and remember the step get people to click get people to give you their email address, get people to be interested enough to go to the order form, get people to put their credit card information, get people to say yes and then deliver the goods. And along that path start at the front and work down.

I’m talking today about the four foundations of funnel building.

So I want to break down the four principles of funnel building so that you can start to see what areas you’re weakened in which areas you’re stronger in.

So the first foundation of funnel building is all about the offer.

Okay, the offer is really the core of everything.

If you don’t have a good offer you cannot build a funnel. A funnel will not fix a bad offer.

What a funnel will do for a good offer is make you a millionaire.

So you want to make sure you’re in a hot market and you want to make sure it’s irresistible.

Okay, I think part of the problem is we think our offers are amazing because we’re really close to them, but we don’t really make sure that our offer is in a hot market. That it’s actually irresistible. That it’s like a no-brainer you know.

And I tell the story sometimes I say, “okay if someone told me that there was a Mercedes for sale and it was fifty thousand dollars and it was worth a hundred go buy it I’d be like no thanks okay I don’t want to spend fifty thousand on a Mercedes.” If somebody told me, “hey there’s a home on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s actually worth two million but you can get it for fifty thousand do you want to buy it?”  I would buy it. it’s irresistible. It’s absolutely without a doubt. it’s like a no-brainer I I would borrow the money I would figure out how to do it. So make sure it’s irresistible and make sure it’s a hot market.

The other part about the offer is you need great copy. So think of your copy like clothes. So you know you have yourself and you can wear really bad ugly clothes. Ripped, smelly holes you know, or you can go out and buy the best clothes you can find it’s gonna make you look a lot different. Like right now I look way better than I look any other day of the year I’ve got great clothes, great copy.

So these are the things you need to focus on with your offer: Hot market, irresistible great copy.

All right second is flow. This is the second foundation. This is where we really have to look at how the offers work together.

So in a sales funnel, unless you’re doing a webinar funnel and traditional sales funnel there are actually multiple things being sold, right?

You have the initial thing, then maybe you have the order bump underneath. Then maybe you have a one-time offer upsell. Maybe you have a one-time offer down sell. So the flow is about how the offers- how the products interact with each other.

And the best thing I can say is when you’re at Thanksgiving dinner- if you celebrate Thanksgiving- and you eat a ton of turkey on Thanksgiving Day, and then the next day you eat some more turkey, by Saturday you hate turkey and you don’t want to eat it anymore.

So when the products don’t interact well together, sometimes what happens is in our enthusiasm to be amazing we give an amazing product and then we like fill their belly with the information that they need. So that then when we come in with the, “hey buy more, hey buy this”

you’re like no this was good like this satisfied that need.

So you want to make sure that the products complement each other so that if they’re buying something and then they’re buying the next thing, it’s like ooh that goes with it.

So you’ll see this a lot with Russell and Clickfunnels. So he gives you the software then he offers to sell you the things that help you make the software better. Maybe he gives you add-on templates, special code things that make the funnels work more. He’s not just trying to sell you more and more and more funnels, he’s trying to sell you complimentary add-ons.

So this is really important in funnel building is to create a great flow.

You also want to make sure that the price goes like this: you want to start with your lowest cost offer, but you also typically want to make your low cost offer almost as valuable if not the same value as your OTO.

And some of you might feel like, “oh well that doesn’t make any sense… like this should be 3 stars and this should be 4 stars,” right?  That’s how we think in our brains because this is 7 dollars and this is 40 dollars, but you want to make this equal to the value of whatever you’re selling here.

Maybe even more valuable and why?

That’s because that first sale when someone goes from prospect to customer is the hardest sale of all. If you can’t get that sale they never see anything that comes after it.

They don’t ever get to see your OTOs and your upsells and your downsells because they never actually made that first sale.

So that’s why I’m always like make the quality and the value equal to whatever is coming next in the funnel because you’ve got to get them in the door.

So sometimes you take a loss here. Sometimes you don’t actually make money here and that’s normal and okay because you’re trying to get people through the rest of the funnel.

Alright, so flow is the second foundation of funnel building.

The third is follow up. No matter how much time we spend on our funnel, people aren’t going to do what we want them to do. They’re going to pop off the page, they’re going to get

Distracted, their kids are going to need them.

So emails, texts, messenger BOTS and retargeting ads are all ways to follow up in a funnel.

Okay, so you need to pick one, two, three, or all four. Okay emails, text, messenger BOTS and retargeting ads and make sure that you hit them as many times as you can because most people won’t do what you want.

In fact, you know the standard rate for people buying on a funnel is about one to five percent. So for every a hundred people that come through your funnel, maybe you get five people that do what you what you want them to do. The other ninety-five are gonna need all four of these things.

And the last foundation of funnel building is traffic.

And traffic is basically once you have your funnel built, once you have your car built, how are you gonna fuel it with gasoline. What kind of traffic are you going to use?

Now Facebook ads are the most popular, but there are all kinds of other traffic sources and you want to think about your funnel based on what traffic you’re going to use.

So let me give you an example.

Let’s say you’re a podcaster and your pod and your podcast is your traffic.

So you do a podcast, you know people are listening to you. Well with a podcast, people are hearing you talk. They’re getting to know you. They’re trusting you. So do you have to send them to a webinar right after a podcast? Usually not. Sometimes you can do just like a quick download because you’ve already built that trust.

Versus if you’re going off a Facebook ad. They’ve never heard your voice. They’ve never seen you. Maybe you need video webinar VSL, things like that in your funnel to really build that trust quickly.

So your traffic does sort of influence the type of funnel that you’re going to build.

Another way to get traffic is through SEO, through blogging, through other social media… things like Instagram and Pinterest.

You can also use YouTube, networking, jayvees.

There’s all kinds of ways to get traffic.

My recommendation is you pick one and you get really good at it, and then you go to the next one now.

These are the four foundations of funnel building: so your great offers, awesome flow, amazing follow-up and great traffic.

The last piece of this and this is where people often do it completely backward, is that

your traffic usually requires you to put content native to the platform.

So what I mean by that?

Let’s say you’re using Instagram for your traffic well you have to create an Instagram story let’s say.

So you have to create content that fits in the platform that people on that platform are like “oh it’s an Instagram story” … you know, you’re not trying to like do something that the platform isn’t meant to do.

So you’re gonna want to create content that works with whatever platform you’ve chosen so that you can put that content on that platform, which leads them right into your funnel.

All right a lot of people like to do this first.

They think about content and then they kind of think of it all backward, but this is actually kind of like the last step. Once you’ve really built out the funnel and you’ve tested it with a few people or your email list.

So this hopefully gives you kind of an easier way to think about funnel building and the foundational things you need to know before you get started.