How to Move Your Social Traffic Into a Sales Funnel

Want more conversions from your organic social media traffic?

Wondering how to set up a sales funnel for your social media visitors?

In this article, you’ll learn how to convert more social media visitors using a sales funnel.

Why Optimize Your Funnel?

Social media marketing is one of the best methods for increasing organic traffic. However, most of these visitors won’t be interested in buying from you.

Most of the traffic from social media will be cold traffic. These are people who have never purchased from you and are probably visiting your site for the first time. Warm traffic (people who opted into your list) and hot traffic (people who have already purchased from you) will be in the minority.

That’s why you need a sales funnel to accompany your social media marketing strategy. A well-designed funnel can capture cold leads, nurture them, and get them to trust you and convince them to purchase from you. Here’s how to optimize your funnel to help convert more customers from cooler traffic.

#1: Calculate Social Media Conversion Rates for Your Funnel

Before you begin optimizing your sales funnel, you first need to determine how well it’s currently performing. This audit will help you not only assess where you are right now but also make it easy to set achievable targets. You can also find out which social networks are triggering the highest conversions so you can focus more on them.

To audit your funnel, you can use a website analytics tool like Oribi. You can try Oribi for free for 14 days. After that, you’ll need to upgrade to one of their paid plans, which start at $29/month.

After you sign up and add their tracking code to your website, it will mine through your site to find all of the signup/subscription forms, checkout pages, thank-you pages, and so on.

Oribi will track traffic generated and conversions made through these forms to show how well the traffic is converting. You can also see how traffic from individual channels is performing.

In the image below, you can see both the conversion rate of the overall site and the conversion rate of individual channels. Traffic from Facebook is converting well, but traffic from Twitter is doing even better. Hence, it would be a good idea to focus on increasing Twitter traffic.

#2: Set an Overall Conversion Rate Goal

Once you know which social networks to focus on and the current conversion rate, the next step is to set achievable conversion rate targets. If you aim too high and fail, you’ll end up disappointed. It’s better to aim for optimum targets and over-deliver, which will boost morale.

To set achievable targets, you need to compare your current conversion rate to industry benchmarks. For example, suppose you want to increase the traffic to subscriber conversion rate of the site above. If you look at the stats, the overall conversion rate is 1.7%, the Facebook conversion rate is 2.3%, and the Twitter conversion rate is 9%.

Now compare these stats with industry benchmarks. According to Sumo’s email signup benchmarks, sites on average convert at 1.95%, but the sites of the top 10% of marketers convert at 4.77%. Thus, there’s room for improvement.

Your goal should be to exceed the average conversion rate first and later reach the level of the top 10% of marketers. Start by setting a target to increase the conversion rate by 0.5% to 1% over 3 to 6 months. Then check the progress at the end of the period. If you meet or exceed your goal, you can continue increasing the target percentage.

Once you have a conversion rate target in place, you can take steps to increase it. This process involves optimizing your funnel for social media conversions and modifying your social media strategy.

#3: Optimize Your Funnel to Increase Social Media Conversions

Here are a couple of techniques to optimize your funnel to turn more social media traffic into conversions.

Offer a Social Signup Option

Social signup is when you give landing page visitors the option to sign up via a social media network instead of typing in their email address and other details. All they need to do is click the social signup button and their details will be added to the form. This will shorten the effort required to enter your funnel, so it helps increase your conversion rate.

LoginRadius conducted a split test to check if offering social signup would increase their conversions. In this version of their landing page, people can only sign up with their email address.

This second version of the landing page makes it easy for people to sign up with Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn. Offering the social signup option increased their conversions by 52%.

The social signup options you offer should depend on the social networks that are driving the highest traffic to the page and converting best. Don’t offer too many options because this can hurt conversions. Limit the number of social networks to three or four.

Add Share Buttons After Signup

One mistake I frequently notice is adding share buttons only to the landing page. It’s done to encourage shares and add social proof so more people will sign up. But how many of the people who visit your page will share it before they consume the content? Not many.

Most people prefer sharing content after they gain access to it. Therefore, you should add the share buttons to the content itself so people can share it while they consume it.

Another tactic is to add share buttons to the thank-you page, like Bryan Harris did here. After people signed up for a course on his site, he redirected them to the thank-you page, where he offered bonus content in exchange for a share.

This incentive led to 54% of people sharing the course. These shares referred 3,498 visits and 349 new subscribers. Bryan created a free tool called GoViral to help you execute this same tactic.

While adding share buttons to landing pages helps increase conversions, placing them in the latter stages of the funnel is even more effective.

#4: Activate Social Media to Drive Targeted Traffic

After you optimize your site for converting more social media traffic, you can begin improving your social presence to drive traffic that converts better.

Focus on a Few Social Networks

At this point, you know which social networks are driving the highest conversions, so create a new management plan that focuses on these networks only. By focusing on only a few networks, you’ll be able to create better content for them and build stronger relationships with your followers. And you can stop wasting time on networks that aren’t bringing results.

Use Social Listening

One task that many businesses regularly execute is social media monitoring. This is where you reply to people who mention your company’s social media handle. The problem with this method is that a lot of people will mention your company’s name without tagging the handle. That’s why it’s important to upgrade from social media monitoring to social media listening.

A social listening tool lets you track both handle and keyword mentions on social media. You can track keywords like your company name, product name, competitors’ name, products, and more. Whenever people mention the keywords, the tool will alert you. You can then contact these people and start a conversation.

Once people reach a certain level of interest during these conversations, you can refer them to a landing page where they can enter your funnel. This technique requires a little extra effort, but the conversion rate will be high because you’re directly conversing with people.

For social listening, you can use a tool like Mention. It lets you track keywords in several languages on blogs, social media, forums, and more. You receive an alert when a mention is made so you can respond quickly.

It’s easy to check whether the mentions are positive, neutral, or negative in nature. All of the data collected with this tool helps you create better traffic-driving content for your funnel.

Run Retargeting Ads

Retargeting website visitors and list subscribers can work really well because you’re targeting warm audiences that already know you and your work. They just require a slight nudge to enter your funnel.

There are many ways to use retargeting. One method you should try is to promote your blog posts on Facebook using ads. Interested people will click on the link and read the post. When they perform this step, the retargeting pixel installed on the blog post tracks their visit. You can then serve them with highly relevant ads. If you promote an offer that relates to the topic of the blog post, your conversion rates will likely be high.

Conclusion

If you want to get more customers from your social media marketing efforts, you need to have a well-designed funnel. Social media drives the traffic and the funnel nurtures the leads and converts them into customers.

It makes sense to take the time to develop a funnel and optimize it. After that, you can optimize your social media strategy to drive more targeted traffic that will enter your funnel and turn into customers.

What do you think? Do you use some of these tactics to convert social media traffic with your sales funnel? Do you have any tips to share? Please leave your comments below.