Last updated on June 26th, 2025 at 03:45 am
If you’re in digital sales, you know all too well the story about losing sales in your funnels. It’s standard for visitors to drop out before they convert in your sales funnels and shopping cart.
At ClickFunnels, we understand that people will drop off no matter how good your product and service are or how seamless and optimized your funnel is.
There are many reasons for this, from complicated checkout processes, distractions, and technical issues like a dropped connection to simply losing interest.
Still, the reality is that every online business goes through this.
In other words, dropoff will happen for one reason or another, but how can you lower your dropoff rate and improve your conversions?
This article will explore follow-up tactics for keeping customers engaged with your sales funnel, maximizing conversions, and creating long-term relationships for future opportunities.
We’ll also highlight how ClickFunnels simplifies implementing these strategies, freeing up your time to find, nurture, and convert your leads.
1. Retargeting: How to Stay in Front of Your Prospects
If you’ve ever looked at a product online and then begun to see similar ads on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google, or others, and wondered how they keep appearing, that’s the concept behind retargeting.
Retargeting involves tracking pixels that capture search terms and behaviors but don’t lead to conversions. It triggers ads after visitors visit a specific website, web page, or product to stay in their minds.
By using retargeting to follow up with your prospects, you can stay at the top of your mind to remind them about your offers and find new ways to entice them to complete their purchase, raising your conversion rates.
How to Set Up Retargeting Effectively
Without coding knowledge or experience, you can easily set up your retargeting campaign with ClickFunnels.
With ClickFunnels, you can launch your retargeting campaign in four simple steps by taking the following steps:
- Log into your ClickFunnels account
- Select the sales funnel(s) you’d like to add retargeting pixels to
- Choose what step of the sales funnel you’d like to launch your retargeting campaign
- Go to Settings>Tracking Code and paste your retargeting pixels
Additional Retargeting Strategies
For more advanced retargeting strategies, consider the following:
Dynamic Retargeting Ads: With dynamic ads, you can show personalized ads based on the product a visitor searched for and viewed.
Email Retargeting: If you can capture contact information such as an email address, you can send special offers and reminders directly to their inbox with email retargeting.
Social Media Engagement Retargeting: Connect with users who have liked, commented on, shared, or engaged with your content on social channels but haven’t converted.
2. Cart Abandonment: Email Sequences to Bring Customers Back
Cart abandonment is similar to drop-offs in the sales funnel. Before we discuss how to improve your cart abandonment rate, let’s define it.
Cart abandonment occurs when a customer is about to check out but leaves before finalizing the purchase.
Think of it like a traditional cart in a brick-and-mortar store.
People walk the aisles, put items into their carts, and leave the cart behind rather than going to the register to cash out.
Don’t think that cart abandonment is unique to your online store. It’s more common than you think, to the tune of 70% of online shoppers abandoning their carts.
Given the prevalence of cart abandonment, how can you lower your abandonment rates and improve your conversions?
Let’s look at how the world’s most prominent digital retail platform, Amazon, handles cart abandonment.
Even though they have a high cart abandonment rate, they use email follow-ups to remind customers that they have items in their carts, which lowers the rate and increases conversions.
While you may not have a marketing team as large as Amazon to follow up with customers who abandoned their carts, with ClickFunnels, it’s easy to set up email sequences to remind visitors of things they were interested in buying but chose not to.
Using an automated email sequence campaign with ClickFunnels is easy with the follow-up email feature.
Here’s a good example of a highly converting email follow-up sequence:
- Email #1: The Reminder: An hour after cart abandonment occurs, send an email that reminds and prompts the user to complete the transaction.
- Email #2: The Incentive: If the first email does not gain traction after the first email, the following email in the sequence should be sent within 24 hours and include an incentive, such as a discount or exclusive product.
- Email #3: The Urgency: Finally, if the first two emails didn’t get any action from them, your third and final email should include a sense of urgency that consists of a deadline to act, such as the discount and cart expiration in 12 hours.
Additional Follow Up Opportunities
On top of doing an email sequence to encourage conversions, you could consider the following follow-ups to improve future sales:
Post-Purchase Follow-Up Emails: Send a thank you email after conversion and sale with upsell options and incentives to return and make an additional purchase.
For example, consider asking for feedback in exchange for additional discounts on future purchases.
Customer Testimonial Emails: Showcase other customer testimonials shared on your social media and create opportunities for discounts and exclusive deals for sharing, liking, commenting, and reviewing.
Educational Emails: Provide additional resources and guides on utilizing your products and courses.
The goal is to establish a relationship with your audience to create repeat upsell opportunities.
3. SMS Follow-Up
SMS marketing, or text marketing, is one of the most effective ways to get your message in front of your audience.
With an open rate of nearly 100%, text messages are one of the most effective ways to see your follow-up.
To make sure that your follow-ups aren’t off-putting and annoying to your prospects, here are some of the best practices:
Be Clear: Your message should be concise and to the point. Don’t waste your prospect’s time with long, unclear messages.
Get Permission: To avoid being disregarded or, worse, listed as spam or junk, get SMS message opt-ins first.
Time Your Messaging: With SMS messaging follow-ups, you can set a time for delivery that isn’t intrusive or disruptive.
Set a time when your audience will be more receptive and less annoyed by a pinging text, such as late at night or early in the morning.
Offer Value: Besides getting permission and having the perfect timing, you must incentivize your follow-up. Include a limited-time offer, exclusive add-ons, or other “premium” opportunities to add to what you’re trying to get them to purchase.
If you’re interested in SMS follow-ups, ClickFunnels facilitates third-party integrations with apps like Twilio, allowing you to send SMS messages effortlessly.
Additional SMS Strategies
Once you have permission to market through SMS, consider these additional tactics:
Life Event Messages: Using a dedicated CRM (Customer Relationship Management), create personalized messages to your prospects that highlight a special life event like a birthday or anniversary and provide a unique, special discount or offer.
Flash Sale Alerts: Create demand with flash sale alerts and create a deadline to increase the sense of urgency.
Surveys And Reviews: Use SMS messaging to improve your overall sales funnels, messaging, and offers by asking for reviews and producing surveys.
Incentivize participation with limited offers or unique discounts.
4. Creating a Unique Impact Through Physical Mail
A very underutilized option as a follow-up strategy is to use physical mail to create a unique, personalized impact.
Sending handwritten notes, postcards, or small gifts can make your brand stand out.
Another way to stand out is to create brochures and flyers with exclusive offers that significantly impact your follow-up plan.
Integrating with ZenDesk, ClickFunnels makes it easy to automate your direct mail campaign by setting up a trigger in your sales funnel where ZenDesk will allow you to automate the printing of personalized messages, mailers, and deals to your prospects.
Additional Follow-Up Ideas
On top of using direct mail as a follow-up for your prospects, you can create additional touch points with your leads through a few of the following strategies:
Personalized Welcome Kits: When a prospect becomes a new customer, send a short branded welcome package with tips, tricks, and exclusive offers.
Seasonal Promotions: Create and send personalized seasonal and holiday discounts.
Handwritten Notes And Offers: Personalized thank you notes significantly increase connection and build brand loyalty.
5. Voicemail: A Personalized Touch
Sometimes, hearing a human voice can make a profound impact.
Voicemail follow-ups create a personalized touch and build trust with your brand, which is lacking in all other follow-up options.
Tips for Creating an Effective Voicemail Follow-Up Include:
Use A Script: A script allows you to get your point across efficiently and can be optimized over time for ultimate impact and maximum results.
Be Clear: Using a script allows you to communicate your point without meandering.
Keep it short and get to the point in under 30 seconds.
Following a script does more than make it an effective message, it also keeps you from rambling and wasting time.
Repeat Important and Key Points: To make your message memorable, clarify your offer and repeat crucial points. Again, repeat the most important points for greater impact.
Request A Callback: Encourage further engagement by requesting a callback for further details and offers.
ClickFunnels 3rd-party integration makes using apps like SlyBroadcast a snap to pre-record your voicemails at scale.
Additional Voicemail Opportunities
Live Call Follow-Ups: Once a customer has engaged with your voicemail, follow up with a scheduled live call.
Combined Reach: Voicemail With Email: Consider sending an email immediately after sending a voicemail to increase your connection opportunities and visibility.
Start Automating Your Follow-Ups Using ClickFunnels!
Whether you’re operating as a solopreneur, small business, or have a complete team on staff, finding efficient ways to follow up with your prospects can save you time and allow you to allocate your resources in other avenues.
With ClickFunnels, you can build highly-converting sales funnels and automate routine and essential tasks, such as your follow-up strategies, from retargeting campaigns to SMS, voicemail, and physical mail campaigns, to allocate your resources more efficiently.
If you want to increase your conversions through various follow-up tactics and optimize your sales funnels for even better conversions, try ClickFunnels for 14 days FREE and convert your prospects and leads into customers!