When it comes to creating the perfect sales funnel, you don’t have to do everything yourself. There are special tools that can help to make it easier to automate, integrate, and analyze. There are three types of tools that are useful for your sales funnel – tools for creating sales pages, tools for following up with customers, and tools for selling your product.

Opt-in Page Tools

Professional tools that help you create and manage opt-in pages include the OptimizePress WordPress theme/plugin, LeadPages, Unbounce, and ClickFunnels – to name just a few. The last 3 are cloud-hosted platforms that don’t require you to have your own website. All these options offer proven, high-converting design templates that make creating opt-in and sales pages much easier. Having a professional template speeds up the process so that you can make multiple pages for multiple campaigns, or split-test one campaign with several versions of the same page. The elements are there and you simply plug in your individual content.

These tools are designed to integrate easily with your autoresponder and make your email marketing faster and smoother. They also come with built-in SEO features to take over some of the work of optimizing your pages. There are even other tools that make your site compatible for mobiles and for creating membership sites.

Email Marketing Tools

The most important tools for email marketing are autoresponder software programs such as Aweber, MailChimp, GetResponse, ActiveCampaign, and Infusionsoft and Ontraport.  In fact, it’s impossible to effectively market through email without them. These programs manage sign-ups, organize your subscribers, send your broadcast messages to subscribers, and track the results of your campaigns.

Tools to Help You Sell

A number of different software products help by automating the sales process. The most popular of these are shopping cart systems that are used by ecommerce websites such as 1ShoppingCart, Volusion, and Shopify. They take orders so that you don’t have to. You simply load the program with the data it needs and it’s ready to take orders. There are software programs that you download and run from your computer, as well as web-based services.

Shopping Around

Most quality programs come at a premium price and many are not cheap at all. However, making the decision to purchase these tools is a serious investment that will save you time and allow your business to scale up. When traffic starts increasing, they will make it much easier to handle your growing business. By automating a number of essential tasks, these tools prevent you from having to outsource or hire staff to help.

Because these tools cost a good deal of money, you should always shop around before buying. Take advantage of free trials to see how they work and whether or not you like using them. Read software reviews and comments on forums to decide which tools best suit your given needs.

Estimating ROI

You can also use tools to help estimate the ROI of your campaign. Keep track of conversion rates at each part of the sales funnel, using the tools that you’ve employed already. Then, compare those conversion rates with what you’re spending and look for ways to increase conversions.

If you’re not getting enough information from your landing page tools for this, try using a more in-depth analysis platform such as Optimizely for better testing and optimization. However, don’t get caught up spending too much time and money on in-depth analysis until you’ve got a significant amount of traffic going through the first stages of your funnel. Your focus should be on designing and creating a good sales funnel that gives your prospects the value and information they need to move them to qualified leads and eventually customers.

Optimization should come afterwards, when you have everything set up and you’re consistently sending traffic to your funnel.