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Neil Patel

How to Build a Conversion Funnel That Will Triple Your Profits

Neil Patel

Ever feel like you’re doing everything you can to improve your conversion rate, but people just aren’t buying? You’re following all the best practices, like having a single call-to-action and using enough white space.

You’ve got your content broken down into relevant areas that readers can easily scan and your offer is irresistible. Your form only asks for the bare necessities, yet you’re still not seeing the results that you want.

Don’t worry, you’ve done everything right…

Set-up-wise, that is. But, there’s more to conversion optimization than just page layout, form design and copywriting. In fact, very few companies even do this one marketing tactic, let alone do it right.

The one thing is: lead nurturing.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Neil, I already do lead generation! That’s not my problem! They’re not clicking! They’re not converting!”

But, therein lies your problem. Your customers aren’t some mass-produced assembly line commodity and that’s exactly how “lead generation” approaches them.

If I were treated like some cookie-cutter-stamped thing instead of a person, I wouldn’t be giving you my business either.

Why Lead Nurturing Matters

Let’s look at where customers are coming from. No matter how they get to you, as many as 73% of leads are not even ready to be sold to. Even from the pool that are qualified, half of them aren’t ready to buy. That puts the odds against you. right out of the gate.

But, every cloud has a silver lining…

Companies who properly nurture their leads see a 450% increase in qualified prospects. And, those who take the time to nurture and grow those customer relationships, see 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost.

And, remember what I said about the nearly 3/4ths of customers who weren’t ready to be sold to and the 50% that weren’t ready to buy? After nurturing those leads, 15-20% of them become customers and they typically make 47% larger purchases than those who aren’t nurtured.

That’s a lot of numbers to be throwing around, but the core message is clear:

When people know that you care about and anticipate their needs, they’ll reward you with their wallets.

So, how can you start anticipating what the potential customer wants and deliver it before they even ask? The answer is: a conversion funnel.

What Exactly Is a Conversion Funnel?

A conversion funnel, or sales funnel, is the path that a prospect takes through your site that ultimately results in a conversion. Because the amount of traffic (visitors) your website gets will likely be larger, with prospects dropping off at various points in that path, those that do convert will be a smaller percentage of the original group – thus the funnel shape.

Why do they drop off? There can be any number of reasons, ranging from technical errors to disconnects between your ad and your landing page and so on. Each of these drop offs increases your bounce rate and lowers conversion rate.

As you build your conversion funnel, you will learn how to identify and fix these “leaks,” so that more and more of your visitors become loyal customers.

In the past, you may have seen examples of conversion funnel visualizations. Here is an example of a sales funnel chart:

Essentially, traditional sales funnels are generally a variation on AIDA (attraction, interest, desire, action) — but conversion funnels are not quite that simple and straightforward. Potential customers shouldn’t be treated like cattle — they’re not designed to be wrangled or sorted.

A conversion funnel is less exclusive and places more emphasis on customer behaviors, nurturing and retention at each step of the customer journey.

More questions are asked at each level of the conversion funnel:

A conversion funnel is more open-ended and understands that the true art of converting doesn’t just end at checkout. Here is a conversion funnel chart:

A conversion funnel is a continuous mission of getting, keeping and growing your ideal customer base, while using technology, social media, and other available tools to meet their needs more efficiently. It’s lead nurturing, behavioral targeting, retention and referrals, all rolled into one marketing strategy.

Sounds overwhelming? It’s not, when you break it down piece-by-piece. Let’s take a look at each element of a conversion funnel on its own and learn how to implement it:

Step 1: Attracting Customers

When it comes to getting people to want to learn more – is quantity more important than quality? Oftentimes, the goal is to “fill the funnel as quickly as possible,” even if the leads aren’t exactly high quality.

I disagree.

You’ll spend more time filtering out the inactive and uninterested website visitors, when you could be spending your valuable time creating offers, content marketing and solutions that truly resonate with people at each stage of the buying process to increase conversion rate.

To do that, it’s vital to know what your target audience wants.

There may be several ideas here — write them all down.

At this stage, we’re looking at how your solution benefits people from multiple angles. Every potential customer is at a different point in the sales funnel and having a multi-pronged attraction phase will help you to generate more targeted, high quality “hot” leads than just casting out your digital net and hoping for a bite from any traffic source.

Here’s an example of a landing page for a school specializing in nutritional courses.

Looking at this page, you can see that it’s a typical lead generation form – asking a lot of questions, but giving little value in return. Consider this page from a student’s point of view:

There’s just no substance here to make a prospect want to take action. “The world’s largest nutrition school,” means nothing to a potential student. “We’ve helped over X students make a difference in global nutritional awareness,” is much more meaningful.

You’ve got the numbers to back up the statement, plus the emotional appeal of making a difference. Add in some social proof and you’ve got a compelling content marketing message that gets right to the point.

What’s more, you need to show the potential customer how you’ll deliver value, not just tell them. And, it needs to be something they’d value, not something you think is valuable.

Here’s another example of a website from a printing company specializing in architectural blacklines. This is directly from their services page:

That’s a lot of equipment and a lot of information required to be able to send them files. Why not build a viable mailing list and nurture potential customers at the same time?

For example, in exchange for a little bit of info, architectural firms could receive a free checklist on how to get CAD plot files into print-ready shape or a free report on why blueprints are costing them money (and how blacklines are more durable, accurate, etc.) Or a drag and drop tool which checks and approve the file format.

But, even after the customer has clicked the ad or website link, there’s still no guarantee that they’ll find your offer enticing or worth acting on – which is why you need:

Step 2: Encouraging Action

Once they’ve landed on your page (you do have a set of landing pages for your campaign, don’t you?), it’s incredibly tempting to let your copy and your design do all of the heavy lifting. But, you can do even more to compel that action – by creating an emotional investment in your website visitor.

How do you create that connection?

The answer isn’t found as a one-size-fits-all campaign, but rather in a series of “quick wins” with the customer.

For example, the CEO of Zappos states that, from the customer’s very first call to them, they’ve created a touch point that will make-or-break that customer’s impression of Zappos from that point forward.

As everyone knows, Zappos’ customer service and social media presence is legendary, because they’re emotionally invested in their customer’s satisfaction. This call-center touch point is a “quick win,”

Walgreens Pharmacy is another example. They spend a great deal of their time simply listening to their customers and not guessing as to what they might want. When the commute home became too hectic and time-consuming, Walgreens was one of the first to offer drive-through prescription pickups, streamlining their sales funnel.

Recently, with the consumer push toward embracing a healthy lifestyle, Walgreens purged its shelves of tobacco products.

When their non-English-speaking customers had trouble reading their prescription pamphlets, Walgreens had them printed in 14 different languages.

When older patrons complained about not being able to read labels, Walgreens instituted larger print versions. In all of these cases, they listened and answered, instead of guessing and hoping for the best.

The Customer Disconnect

Another common problem is the disconnect. You click an ad or a link on a page expecting one thing and getting something totally different — the exact opposite of a quick win.

Here’s an example from a finance site:

“So. we’ve established that the first step to take should be to set up a Roth IRA.” Clicking that link should take me to steps on how to do so, but instead I see this:

See the disconnect? When a customer expects one thing, but is given something completely different, no matter how good that “different” thing is, it can make for a sour impression and a lower conversion rate.

Getting “quick wins” to guide potential customers through each step of your conversion funnel is all about encouraging customers to take one small step, whether it’s writing their first tweet or rebuilding their first small engine by taking it apart one piece at a time.

One of the best places to create an atmosphere that’s ripe for quick wins is your email list. Compared to your typical email list blast, nurtured emails get 4-10 times the response rate.

Marketing automation company Eloqua did a detailed study on how personalization can affect email open and click-through rates. These marketing automation emails contained not just the prospect’s name, but their location and other items as well:

Some of the most popular marketing automation and email marketing services, like Hubspot and Infusionsoft, let you target customers based on actions that they take (or don’t take), while helping them to sort and segment themselves by specifying what type of content they’re looking for.

In some cases, especially in the B2B world, some people are just too busy to bother with deciding what content they want — so they do nothing. Business executives receive an average of 120+ messages per day, so your email marketing campaign needs to get their attention – and quick.

What would you do?

Here’s a perfect example. Look at Seamless, a company whose main customers are people who are so busy that they don’t have time to grab a bite to eat. They know this and everything they do is geared toward the busy: from short, mobile-friendly messages to apologies for the interruption:

That email is just a little nudge to remind them that there’s a discount event going on tomorrow. That’s all. The follow-up email looks like this:

Again, short, sweet and sharable.

As you can see, the key to encouraging action is to help your prospects help themselves, which in turn helps brand awareness. Good behavioral targeting and a keen understanding of what your “tribe” wants are crucial in this process. If you don’t know, sites like topical forums and Quora are brimming with these kinds of questions.

Just look at a sampling of questions from Quora.com —

An example of Quora questions related to WordPress and blogging

And, speaking of giving them what they want, that doesn’t mean that you can sit back and let the system do all of the work. No way.

You’ve got to create a content plan that anticipates, meets and exceeds their expectations — a tall order to fill by any standard.

So, where do you start?

Step 3: Crafting a Content Plan

A content plan isn’t just about writing what you “think” will resonate with your target audience – but rather about knowing precisely what they want at every stage in the conversion funnel. You’ve got a lot of layers involved and some of them might even overlap, so it’s vital to understanding exactly where all of your readers are at each stage of the process.

Let’s walk through an example together. Say you run a local computer repair service. You want to create content that addresses the needs of prospects at every stage in your conversion funnel.

So, for those in the Acquire stage of the conversion funnel, you’d want to use your local media outlets and social media platform, as well as content in your blog posts, to address some of their most common computer concerns and perhaps even a how-to or two.

At this point, it’s all about getting people familiar with your service, increasing brand awareness, convincing them of your expertise and encouraging them to trust you with their valuable data such as credit card information.

Activating customers would primarily be urgency-based, as in, “my PC won’t turn on.” “I keep getting the blue screen of death!” and “my hard drive is making a strange crunching noise.” They need help now and are willing to do just about anything to get out of a painful digital situation.

Of course, once the problem is solved, you fear you might never hear from them again, as is so often the case with service-based offers.

This is where things like outreach programs (perhaps an “introduction to basic PC backups” program at the local library) or lead magnets such as contests and events (“share your worst computer horror story!”) can really pay off and bring in potential customers from many traffic sources.

Loyalty programs are icing on the cake and a terrific foundation for repeat business and referrals in the service industry, while upgrades and new software make the perfect option for up-sells and cross-sells.

One of the most under-utilized and highly beneficial pages that you can include is a “Start Here” guide for beginners. Referring back to our computer fixing example, BleepingComputer.com does this through their 3-step Welcome guide:

Their visitors are going to range from 70-year-old grandmas with their first computer to a frustrated mom of 4 whose son just downloaded a “game” that ended up being a virus. With just three easy steps, anyone can get free help using their computer or direction when trying to rid it of spyware or other junk.

Notice how BleepingComputer has made each of the individual steps as easy to follow as possible.

How can you create a welcoming area for first-time customers, regardless of traffic source? First, make it abundantly clear exactly how using your site will benefit them and what steps they should take first. For example:

Hi and welcome to (Your Site Name). If you want to (what the customer wants) and get (more of what the customer wants), this is the best place to learn.

My/our goal is to (help you/show you/teach you, etc.) how to (benefit), whether it’s from (one method of getting that benefit) or by (second method of getting that benefit). To get started, just follow these simple steps…

See how you’ve taken the steps to instantly identify what they came there for, how you can deliver it and which ways they can go about getting it?

After this is the perfect opportunity for content marketing and to tell them about your free, irresistible offer. The fact is that if someone has scrolled through the welcome guide to get to that point, chances are they’re at least somewhat open and receptive to what you want to share.

Then comes the part that so many people forget (or never have time for, because they’re stuck on the first three steps).

Step 4: What Happens Next?

Moving near the end of the conversion funnel, you have all of the content marketing activities that end in -sell: cross-sell, up-sell and next-sell. But, don’t forget the people part of the equation in your rush to sell, sell, sell.

If you want to build a conversion funnel that practically fills itself with referrals, you need to make your lead magnet offer as enticing as possible to both the giver and the receiver.

Dropbox has one of the best referral programs in the business and this marketing tactic is a major factor that contributed to their enviable growth. The key components here are two-fold:

The more friends you invite that end up subscribing, the more space you get for your own account.

Here again, it’s not just about casting a wide net and seeing what you can catch. Referral programs, social loyalty programs, content marketing tactics, whatever you want to call them — they all have a specific set of steps toward the end goal.

Services like Ambassador and Referral Candy each have simple programs that you can quickly set up on your own. The good news is that many of the steps to creating a rewarding referral system are the same as setting up a conversion funnel:

  1. Identify the market that would be best served by bringing you referrals. I don’t mean the market that would best serve you, but rather the ones that could benefit the most by sending potential clients your way.
  2. Let that market know what kind of customer you’re looking to attract. The last thing you want is to spend time chasing down prospects that aren’t the right fit. Remember the referral has to be just as beneficial to you as it is to the one doing the referring.
  3. Teach them how and why they should bring that referral to you. What will the person doing the referring get? What will the referral themselves get? How exactly should they refer you?  Remember, you’re not the only one asking them for referrals, so taking the time to share what works best for you (and why it’s in their best interests) will help you stand out from the pack.
  4. Make your system rewarding. People and companies need motivation, not just education. Take the time to brainstorm the kind of rewards system that gives people more than enough reason to send qualified prospects your way. Money is a good motivator, but it’s not the only one.
  5. You’re banking on borrowed trust. Don’t ever forget that. Sometimes, a prospect’s perception of you is a direct correlation between how much they trust the person giving the referral – and they may trust that person wholeheartedly. If that’s the case, a great deal of that trust is in your hands. Use it wisely.
  6. Rinse and repeat. The system part of a good referral system is that you’re always working to convert prospects at various stages of the referral process. Even if they choose not to become customers at this point in time, there’s always the future.

You know your product or service like no one else, so you’re uniquely suited to offer advice and suggestions that will help the customer get more value out of your offer. Listen more than you speak.

Oftentimes, customers will share their frustrations, but, in doing so, give you more details about how they’re actually using the product or service.  This puts you in the perfect situation to streamline the sales funnel, and create a more customized upsell wherein you both win.

Remember, you don’t have to follow some kind of pre-fab script here. Gauging the timing of when to present the up-sell or cross-sell, or possibly even skipping it completely are all the hallmarks of a strong conversion funnel.

If you’re running into issues where the customer is getting cold feet because of pricing, then you haven’t demonstrated the value to them well enough. You know your product or service has value — it’s reflecting that and integrating it into the customer’s life or business can makes them see that value as well.

Once you’ve got a solid referral system in place, it’s time to test.

Step 5: Testing Your Funnel

So many times, conversion optimization experts will place the majority of their focus at the top of the conversion funnel — the acquisition part, with very little concentration on the bottom of the funnel, where the online sale happens and conversion rate increases.

What’s more, you likely have many pages – all clamoring for organic traffic and a limited budget with which to test.

To figure out which pages to test first, look at:

You’ll make more profits and delight more customers by turbo-charging those best performing pages.

Once you’ve narrowed down precisely which pages would benefit most from your new sales funnel, it’s time to put it in action and track the results.

Setting Up Google Analytics (The Free Way)

The first and most common way to start testing your new conversion funnel is through the creation of conversion goals.

These systems track a potential customer from the moment they land on a page from their traffic source, and document where they go (or where they leave, increasing bounce rate) and how many of them ultimately converted.

The most common way to do this is through Google Analytics. It’s free and can be set up easily on your site, whether you’re using plain HTML or a third-party content management system like WordPress.

Google Analytics tracks website visitors on your site and lets you know a variety of details about them. including how long they stayed, where they came from (traffic source) and even what browser or system they’re using.

First, you’ll need to log into Google.com/analytics to either create or log into your account. Each website you manage is known as a “property.”

Once you add your website, you’ll need to click on the Admin link to find the relevant tracking code.

Copy and paste this code, in its entirety, on all the pages that you want to track. You can go back to your analytics dashboard to determine that the tracking is properly installed. Now, it’s time to create conversion goals.

Creating Conversion Goals in Google Analytics

On the left side of your dashboard is a section called Conversions, which, when clicked, will open up a sub-menu:

Conversions is located at the very bottom of the Analytics dashboard

There are four different types of conversion goals that you can track: Destination, Duration, Pages/Screens per session and Event.

You can either create your own or download some that other users have created and then customize them for your unique needs and user experience:

Examples of conversion goals that you can import

If you want to create your own, simply click New Goal, give it a name and choose the type of goal you want.

Then, fill in the details. For example, if you wanted users to register on your site and wanted the registration success page to be considered as the “goal,” you’d enter its URL here, like so:

Now that you’ve created a goal, it’s time to create the funnel to support that goal. Turn the Funnel on:

Now you’ll see that you can add the individual funnel steps here. Below is a case study from Shopify on their sales process and how a customer might browse and order shoes:

Going through the individual funnel steps

If you have previously created and added properties to your Google Analytics account, you can choose “Verify this Goal,” to see how they would have converted using your previously collected data from the prior week, and this impact on your conversion rate.

Then, simply choose “Create Goal” to finish. Your newly created goal will become a part of your Google Analytics report, so that you can see how different factors affect your conversion rate, such as time of day, location and more.

Setting Up a Goals with Optimizely

Optimizely is one of the most popular conversion tracking and management systems, with free and paid (credit card) options available to suit your business needs. To get started, log into your Optimizely account and go to the Editor. Next to the start/pause experiment button is an icon of a flag with a check mark. This allows you to add new goals to your conversion funnel experiments.

You can edit a goal, remove it from that experiment or remove it from all experiments that include it. Let’s create a completely new goal:

Creating a new goal with Optimizely

You can save a great deal of time by sharing goals between experiments, rather than having to re-create them each time.

If you want to add a previously created goal, simply click “Add a Saved Goal.” Then, just move your mouse over the existing goal that you want to add to your new goal and press “Add.” If you’d like to create a completely new goal from scratch, you’ll just need to choose the type of goal that you want to add.

Like Google, Optimizely has several different types of goals that you can track, and use to build a sales funnel report:

Pageview Goals – Track the number of times a certain page was seen

Click Event Goals – If it can be clicked, it can be tracked. This type of goal triggers when someone presses their mouse button, so all clicks around the item that you want to track (like the search button below) will be counted.

Custom Goals – Track how many times a certain item was clicked. This is not for URLs, but rather things that would ordinarily be difficult to track, such as AJAX forms or specialized scripts.

You can also create revenue goals by assigning a monetary value to an element or page, as well as engagement goals, which is the default.

I don’t recommend setting up engagement goals, because it’s such a broad definition — any click, submission, drag and drop, highlighting of text, etc. can be counted as “engagement” and is not a reliable metric to base decisions on.

Bringing It All Together

Now that you’ve identified the individual goals, it’s time to string them together into a conversion funnel. Optimizely calls this multi-page tests.

To do this, first choose a multi-page experiment. You do this from the Editor, by going to Options > Experiment Type

Now, much in the same way as you added individual steps to your goals before, you’ll add individual pages to your conversion funnel. Just click the Add Page link at the top. You’ll then be presented with this page:

Now, you’ll need to create the variations that you want to test (the multi part of multi-page testing). In this example, Crate & Barrel wanted to test which specific holiday message would encourage more credit card sales:

Which message would resonate more with potential customers?

Once the pages are defined, it’s time to create a seamless user experience across all of them, to ensure a smoother marketing and sale process. So, users who saw the original home page would continue to see original versions of the pages across their time on the site and users who saw the variation would continue to see variation versions, or micro funnels.

To do this, go to Options > URL Targeting and you’ll see the options available. You’ll want to specify targeting conditions for each page here:

For more details on URL targeting and specifics with Optimizely, please see their help page.

I’ve Got My Funnel Set Up and Tracking Data, Now What?

Even after you’ve gathered the data into a funnel chart, you’re still not done. According to a study from MarketingSherpa, expanding on a successful split test is not a strength of many companies.
Here’s what they do after a successful test:

It’s good that most companies are using tracking metrics, but look at the poor numbers on reviewing tests, deciding on research questions and looking at opportunities for future optimization. These are the things that you need to be looking at in your marketing funnel and formulating, in order to get measurable results that you can act on.

Getting results without a concrete plan is like running headlong into a brick wall without realizing that you could’ve swerved to avoid it!

And, even after you’ve formulated, tested, analyzed and decided, there’s still the issue of…

Step 6: The Conversation After the Conversion

Remember that a conversion is simply one piece in a very large customer relationship-building and experience-generating puzzle. Funnel conversion rate is not the be-all-end-all of your marketing effort with that customer. Sometimes, the conversation after the conversion can make just as much of a difference in filling your funnel as chasing down every source of reliable traffic.

As with so many of your efforts before it, the after-conversion checklist involves paying close attention to your customer. Your work is not done the moment you get that blip on your conversion optimization radar. Even after the click, the sale or the subscription, your customer is still asking, “did I make the right decision?”

They need that reassurance and a gentle push to the next step. They might feel abandoned, confused and distracted, if they’re dropped right down onto a thank you page or a member’s area. They start to question what value they get out of your product or service, which makes them second-guess their steps thus far.

This is why it’s so vital to have a “conversation after the conversion” — and take a look at things from the customer’s point of view, for example:

Conclusion

Remember that the conversion funnel is an ongoing cycle. The process is always shifting and your conversations with your customers are always evolving. What served their needs yesterday may not be adequate enough today.

Always be asking yourself “what can I do to make their experience with me absolutely unbeatable?” and live up to those expectations. Those are the kinds of actions that not only fill your conversion funnel, but keep customers beating a path to your door.

With this in mind, have you started creating your conversion funnel yet?

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