Why Isn’t Your Supplement Funnel Working?

After spending months on your marketing strategy you launch your supplement funnel only to find out that it’s not working.

That’s the worst feeling you can have as a marketer.

If your supplement funnel isn’t working though, there is hope. It can be turned around with the right marketing strategy.

But first you need to diagnose the problem.

When a dietary supplement sales funnel to cold traffic isn’t working it typically comes down to 4 key reasons.

Sometimes the problem is only one of these four reasons. Other times, more than one are not hitting the mark at the same time, which is typically the case.

Let’s look at each of them so you can diagnose your marketing strategy.

REASON #1: Your copy isn’t strong enough

The sales copy is rarely ever looked at as part of your marketing strategy, but it is.

To properly diagnose it you need to ask… Where are you losing them in your copy?

Is it in the opening lead?

Or is it later on when you get into the scientific bridge between the problem and the solution?

Or maybe you’re losing them at the transition point to the product offering.

The opening lead needs to use proof, story, a big promise, a compelling question, or a surprising pattern-interruption to grab the viewer’s attention and stir an emotion.

The bridge between the problem and the solution should flow seamlessly from one step to the next and contain plenty of attention getting proof points along with use of one or more of the following: story, questions, pattern-interrupts, humor.

The product transition needs to clearly acknowledge the “before” state or the “problem” of the prospect and then connect your supplement to the desired “after” state or “solution.” At the same time it needs to counter objections at the time they naturally enter the mind of the reader.

Overall the sales copy should be relevant to the subject matter and the ad click. It should be believable, and surprising to even the most cold and jaded prospect.

There should also be no complicated words or awkwardness to trip up the reader.

These are just some of the points we look at when diagnosing a sales letter but these are the big ones.

REASON #2: Your offer isn’t right

With the right offer you can scale your traffic but with the wrong offer you’re dead in the water. 

The offer itself accounts for a major part of what makes a cold traffic funnel work. Simply changing the offer, could mean the difference between success and failure.

If you scale traffic to a weak offer, you’re just going to amplify poor results.

This is one area of marketing strategy that most people don’t put enough thought into.

But first what is an offer?

It’s not your product. Rather, it’s the way in which your product is positioned.

The traditional offer is 1 bottle, 3 bottle or 6 bottles and that works, sometimes (if your copy is strong enough.) 

But if your copy is weaker, then your offer needs to be stronger. This is where you want to offer a buy one get one or perhaps a free plus shipping offer.

In each case the funnel economics are completely different and the business needs to dictate what’s acceptable, not the funnel or even the offer.

There are seven key offer elements that you should include and test:

How many do you get?

1 bottle, 3 bottles or 6 bottle options are common but so are 1 bottle, 2 bottles or 4 bottles. It’s not about modeling what everyone else is doing. It’s about what has the best chance of working for you. Which comes down to your specific product costs, conversion rates and profitability, which is what funnel economics is all about. Learn more about funnel economics here.

How much

What does the customer pay? Or asked another way, what percentage discount do your give on your multi bottle offers? Again this leans heavily into your funnel economics.

Payment terms

Does the buyer pay all at once? Or in installments? Or nothing at all today and will be charged in full in 30 days. More often than not you’ll be using a pay up front offer, or a hard offer but don’t be afraid to consider other out of the box offer types.

Shipping

Typically free shipping is offered on the higher ticket packages as a way to nudge people over to those offers.

Premiums

These are the extra bonuses you give to sweeten the pot. Again these are usually offered in higher ticket packages and sometimes stacked more heavily on the largest package giving more there and taking away premiums as you come down in the offer package. Typically leaving the 1 bottle with no bonuses as a way to push people up scale. One key principle is that premiums don’t have to be connected to the product but rather just something the audience really wants.

Scarcity

Can you build in real scarcity into the offer or a specific offer option? The trick here is to make it believable. Just saying that these will go out of stock and you’ll have to wait to get more is so overly done with supplement offers.

Guarantees

The guarantee should remove all worry and fear of making the wrong decision. The best guarantees are ones that position your company as losing out if the product doesn’t work. The typical solution to that is an “empty bottle” guarantee, where the buyer doesn’t even need to return the bottle or can return an empty bottle to get their money back.

To learn even more about each of the elements that go into a perfect offer above, read the… how to craft a killer offer that gets them to buy article.

REASON #3: You’re going to too broad of an audience

This marketing strategy is very counterintuitive but it works and is often the difference between big time success and failure.

The mistake most marketing strategies make is going to go broad and wide with traffic.

A narrower segment is much more profitable than a broad one. Allowing you to scale as you learn and optimize your funnel.

The main problem is in going broad and never adjusting the traffic campaign.

Trying to convert everyone on the Internet is unrealistic. If you go too broad, you’re just going to get clicks that don’t convert to customers.

Yet if you go too narrow, you’ll end up driving cost per click through the roof.

The goal is to find the perfect balance of audience quality, size, and price for the optimal return on ad spend (not about conversions or clicks.)

The tricky part is knowing when your audience size is optimal. An optimal audience is targeted enough to drive the right cost per click (CPC) for your specific funnel economics and conversion rate, but broad enough to a reach enough of an audience at a reasonable cost. 

Your bid strategy should always be focused on the quality/size balance. As a general guideline, you never want to pay more than the lifetime value of your average customer. Conversion rate of course plays a big role in that, allowing you to find the “Sweet Spot” where bid cost balances against conversions.

REASON #4: You didn’t get your message to market match right

Getting the message to market match is number four on the list of marketing strategy failures.

The market is who you’re selling to and the message in the sales copy you’re using to try and convert a visitor into a sale.

If the market is right but the message is off, there is no match and thus no sale.

To connect the message to the market and convert a cold visitor, the message has to resonate.

Sometimes the best strategy is to send your prospect right to a long-form sales letter or video sales letter from an ad campaign. 

This marketing strategy typically works best when the ad campaign tells them what the supplement is, what it does and some scientific research. This flow from ad to sales page is an example of a direct offer. It puts the offer, a free trial, discount, etc. right up front right in the ad. Or it puts the promise right up front, while still being compliant. You’ll see lots of examples like this on Facebook.

The other marketing strategy uses an ad campaign that peeks curiosity and brings in the audience on a big idea. This is an indirect strategy where you grab the visitors attention with an intriguing piece of information relevant to the problem. A common example is: The 5 worst exercises for (fill in the blank.) 

You’ll see lots of examples like this from ads on website like Newsmax.

With either case, the marketing strategy is to capture interest before delivering value and then selling.

In which, matching the message to the market is critical. Because, if the message is not a match to the audience then you’ve lost them, along with the sale. 

Too often marketing strategies over look the elements of hope and desire, which are part of our supplement selling framework. It’s the difference between a customer pulling out their credit card online and driving to a vitamin shop to buy the cheapest version on the shelf.

Hope and desire are what you want to tap into here to connect the message to the market. This is what prospects will use to justify your higher ticket $59 supplement to themselves.

Desire and hope tap into emotion. Which is more powerful than simply a compliant list of benefits and scientific research studies. Supplement buyers do need proof in order to buy, that’s one way a supplement purchase is different than an other product, but at the end of the day people buy based on emotion.

The typical framework we look for when diagnosing the message to market match is the transformational story framework.

• How I struggled (this establishes empathy)
• The discovery (this is the thing that turned the struggle around, i.e. the hope)
• What life is like now after the discovery (this intensifies the desire)
• Why I’m sharing this now (which leads into the benefits, proof, offer and everything around it)

If you want to learn more about message to market match read the article: Message To Market Match For Direct Response Supplement Companies

Will your funnel be a success or a flop?

Running a supplement funnel that is both profitable and scalable at the same time is not easy. But if your problem falls into one or more of the common 4 reasons above you’re on your way to a scalable funnel. That is if you take the next steps to fix the problem with the right marketing strategy. 

Discover the 3 funnels that can help your health supplement business succeed.