Last updated on October 18th, 2025 at 05:26 am
Looking for ways to improve your sales funnel?
There’s no such thing as a perfect sales funnel — there are only those that convert well… and those that don’t convert well.
Either way, there’s always room for improvement.
And at ClickFunnels, sales funnels are sorta our thing 😉
In this guide, we’re going to give you 8 marketing strategies to improve the performance of your sales funnels — these are the same things we do to build high-converting funnels.
Let’s get started!
Our Top 1% Members Make These Three Simple Tweaks To Their Funnels
1. Curiosity
Curiosity killed the cat — but it also converted the masses.
In marketing and sales, few forces are as powerful for driving action as human curiosity.
Think about it.
What if I told you that…
I know exactly how to assemble a semi-passive income machine that can generate $1K, $2K, $5K a month or higher WITHOUT risking your hard-won nest egg…
Wouldn’t you at least want to know what this mechanism is?
After all, maybe it can be a game-changer for you.
So you ask for more information.
And I provide it:
- This system lets you generate income by serving small, niche audiences over and over again…
- WITHOUT advertising
- WITHOUT staff
- WITHOUT capital
- WITHOUT guesswork
- I’ve been quietly banking profits from this system for years.
Well shoot!
You still don’t know what it is — but you know what it’s not — and your curiosity is really peaked now.
You say, “What is it??”
And I say…
- If there was a pill you could swallow that would take investing stress away…
- …how much would you pay for a bottle?
- If there was a blueprint for generating steady streams of income, without putting your capital at risk…
- …what price would you NOT pay for a copy?
- Investors regularly pay thousands of dollars for financial newsletters, hoping to glean a winning stock or two.
- And for a system that shows you how to generate risk-free income AT WILL…
- …most course creators would probably price this course at $2K to $3K.
- Maybe $997 if they’re feeling generous.
Oh man, you think to yourself, it’s going to be expensive to find out.
So how much is it? you ask.
And I tell you that I’ll give you my entire system for just $197 but you only have the next 20 minutes to make a decision.
What a great deal! you think to yourself.
And you buy it.
But you don’t even know what the product is!
It doesn’t matter.
Because you knew what the product would do for you, you knew what it wasn’t, and you became okay with paying to find out what the product was.
Seems like a marketer’s pipe-dream?
It’s not. The text I used above was pulled directly from Bryan Ward’s KISS MY ASS, WALL STREET course that sells like hotcakes.
Go read the full page if you want to see how curiosity alone can turn visitors into buyers.
2. Tripwires
Obviously, there’s a big difference between cold traffic and warm traffic.
Warm traffic is usually the people on your email list. These people already know you, they trust you, and many of them have even purchased your products or services before. Those people are much easier to sell high-ticket offers to.
Cold traffic, on the other hand, comes from advertisements. These people don’t know who you are and they don’t trust you (yet). Selling to these people requires some extra strategy.
Curiosity is great for selling high-ticket products or services to warm traffic — as in Bryan Ward’s example above. It probably works for him because his email list trusts him and knows he always delivers massive value.
But drive cold traffic to that sales page?
I’m willing to bet it would flop pretty badly… because it’s an expensive offer and these people don’t know who Bryan Ward is.
The answer to this problem is the Tripwire Funnel.
Here’s what it looks like…
It starts with a normal sales page that offers a product at a heavy discount (usually $7 to $9) so that it’s a no-brainer for people — even cold traffic — to purchase.
If they decide to buy, they’ll enter their shipping and payment information right on the sales page before clicking the button.
That’s when the real genius of this funnel happens. Instead of closing the buying loop and saying “Thank you for your order!”, a page pops up that looks something like this — we call it the OTO (or One Time Offer) page.
This is where you offer the actual product you’re trying to sell with your sales funnel.
All people have to do to add this one-time offer to their order is click a single button and it’s a done deal.
Since they’ve already taken the high-friction steps of entering their payment and shipping information, this upsell gets a much higher conversion rate than if it were the first offer the visitor saw.
Tripwire Funnels are awesome for selling products and services to cold traffic through advertisements… and covering the cost of your ads.
Get a free Tripwire Funnel Template over here!
3. Downsells
Tripwire funnels are great for selling products or services to cold traffic.
But of course, not everyone is going to buy your one-time offer.
Some people will want what you’re offering but it’ll be a little too expensive for them to convert — actually, that’s true for pretty much every sales funnel ever.
There’s always going to be a group of people who want to buy… but not at that price.
What if you could add a simple pop-up that would capture sales from those more resistant visitors?
With a downsell, you can.
When a visitor says that they don’t want whatever it is you’re offering, a downsell pops up to either…
- Offer the same thing at an even heavier discount.
OR…
- Offer a different lower-ticket product or service they might be interested in.
And they work like a charm.
Here’s an example…
Everyone buys something.
Adding a downsell to your sales funnel will help you capture more sales and make more money from people who don’t want your first offer.
4. Follow-Up Sequences
Not everyone who goes through your sales funnel is going to buy.
And for those who don’t buy, many of them will still enter their email address and then abandon it during the checkout process.
The good news is that you can now market to them for free via email!
Check out some of these cart abandonment stats (from Sleeknote):
- The Average Cart Abandonment Rate Across All Industries is 69.57 Percent
- E-Commerce Brands Lose $18 Billion in Sales Revenue Each Year Because of Cart Abandonment
- 57 Percent of Shoppers Will Abandon if They Have to Wait Three Seconds for a Page to Load
Crazy, right?
This is why you need to have automatic email follow-up sequences in place to recapture those lost sales.
Now take a look at these stats (from Moosend)…
- 45% of cart abandonment emails are opened; 21% of all are clicked on, while 50% of the users who clicked purchase.
Create a 3-part email sequence to follow up with cart abandoners. Point them toward finishing their purchase. Explain the value they’re going to get. Or maybe even downsell them with a greater discount.
This is a mandatory part of a successful sales funnel process.
5. Emotion, Logic, & Fear
One of the most important parts of sales funnels is the words on the page — and the structure of those elements.
How do you write and structure your sales pages to be as compelling as possible?
Well, at ClickFunnels, we’ve found that about 50% of people purchase because of emotions… and the other 50% purchase because of either logic or fear.
Check out the third tip in this video (starts at 4:35)…
That’s how we recommend structuring your landing page.
Start with emotion, introduce logic, and end with fear.
Okay…
But how does this work in real life?
Let’s look at an example from our One Funnel Away landing page. Notice how the top of the page is almost entirely designed to trigger people’s emotions…
We talk about how “the life you want, the marriage you want, the family you want… is going to be fueled by the business you build.”
Then we tell them that “freedom is just one funnel away.”
We’re trying to get them to dream about what this challenge might be able to do for them.
We even dive into an empathetic story of where they might be at in their life and what they’re struggling with.
We provide hope by telling them that their dreams are “one funnel away.”
That’s the emotional part of this landing page.
Next, we move to logic. How? Check it out…
That’s hard to argue with. That’s an immense amount of value for just a $100 investment.
For people who weren’t entirely convinced by the emotion of our landing page, this will be a strong logical argument to push them over the edge.
Then it’s just a matter of fear.
How do you create fear?
By making your offer scarce — offer it only for a certain period of time or only offer it to a certain amount of people.
People are procrastinators and urgency pushes them toward action.
Here’s how we create a sense of urgency on this landing page…
We tell them that time is of the essence because the next challenge is starting soon and we don’t know when the next challenge will be.
For people who weren’t entirely convinced by the emotion and logic on this page… they’ll be convinced by the urgency.
Using all three of those elements is a recipe for high-converting success.
6. Order Bumps
When most people buy something… they don’t just buy one thing, they buy a lot of things.
Because we get into the “buying mode” — we’re ready to purchase and we’re ready to take action.
You don’t, after all, go to the grocery store and buy a single piece of fruit… you buy all of your groceries at once.
People buy things the same way online. They get into a hyperactive buying mode and they want to buy everything they need to solve their problems all at once.
That’s why order bumps are so powerful.
This little add-on offers to sit on the checkout page, above the “Complete Order” button and below where people enter their payment information.
For example…
If you want to increase the average order value of your sales funnel, add a few optional and relevant order bumps — you might be surprised at how many people take you up on them.
7. Funnel Hacking
At the end of the day, you can’t know what will work for your own sales funnel until you’ve tested it.
But if you don’t have a huge budget or team for testing funnels… then that might not be a realistic approach for your business.
You need to get to what works faster.
And that’s where funnel hacking comes in.
As it turns out, there are a ton of big businesses somewhat like your business that are constantly testing and optimizing their own offers to get as much success as possible.
Funnel hacking is the process of strategically investigating the sales and marketing process of your competitors and then using that framework to build, test, and optimize your own.
Make sense?
Here’s a great video that’ll help you find your competitors and browse through their sales funnels…
Then it’s just a matter of entering the lab, taking what you learned, and creating your own successful sales funnel!
To learn more about this critical part of the process, sign up for our free funnel hacking web class over here!
8. The Soap Opera Sequence
Within your sales funnel, you’re going to generate a lot of leads and new customers.
To keep momentum, you’ll want to introduce those people more thoroughly to your brand and point them toward your primary products and offers.
How do you do that?
Use an email sequence called The Soap Opera Sequence.
This is a series of 5-7 emails that are used to engage readers, build rapport, and sell products.
What is a Soap Opera Sequence?
It’s called a “Soap Opera” sequence because of the inspiration it draws from seductively engaging Soap Opera TV shows.
Now you might be thinking, Soap Operas are ridiculous!
But there’s a reason they’re still around today — to many people, they’re only ridiculous in how engaging they are.
Here’s how Russell explains it in DotCom Secrets…
“If you’ve never watched a Soap Opera before, the stories rely on open-ended, high-drama episodes that hook the viewers in and keep them coming back every single day to find out what happens next. The programs are continuous narratives that never conclude. The characters are always either getting into trouble or getting out of trouble, falling in love or breaking up, heading to jail or escaping, dying or magically reappearing. If you relate to the characters, you can’t help but get sucked into the drama and want to know what’s coming next.
We’re going to use the same story structure and elements to create your opening email sequence.”
As you can see in the graphic above, there are basically five phases…
- Set The Stage — This is where you introduce yourself, build a bit of rapport, and tell people what they can expect in your upcoming emails. You also want to build some anticipation.
- High Drama → Backstory → Wall — This is where you capture them with a high-drama moment, tell them a bit of backstory, and then reveal the wall you came up against.
- Epiphany → The One Thing — This is where you reveal your big epiphany, how you came to the realization that changed everything.
- Hidden Benefits — This is where you’re going to talk about the benefits of your product that your target market probably isn’t even thinking about… the hidden benefits.
- Urgency CTA — This is where you’ll create urgency or scarcity to push your most stubborn readers over the edge.
If you want more information so you can craft a Soap Opera Sequence of your own, get a free copy of Russell’s DotCom Secrets book by clicking here and watching the video below!
Final Thoughts
Whew!
That was a lot.
But now you have 8 more powerful marketing strategies for optimizing your sales funnels.
Use these tactics to make more sales, generate more leads, and grow your online business.
And if you’re ready to take action, then take the next step by clicking below!
Our Top 1% Members Make These Three Simple Tweaks To Their Funnels