ProBlogger: Boost Conversions Step 2: Revisit Your Conversion Funnel

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Boost Conversions Step 2: Revisit Your Conversion Funnel Posted: 30 May 2012 07:01 AM PDT In this, the second part of our short series on boosting conversions on your blog, it’s time to look at your conversion funnel. Yesterday, the Blog Tyrant showed us how to review our offer of a paid or free product or service. Through that analysis, you should be able to pull together some detailed and valuable information about your product. That’s great, but the other aspect that the Tyrant touched on was your conversion funnel. I want to take those ideas a step further today. Understanding your conversion funnel We’re talking in this series about conversions for any product or offer—so that could be a product or service you’re selling, or it could be a free subscription you offer on your site. Whether it’s free or sold for a price, your offer has a conversion funnel. The Web Marketing Ninja showed us this one in his article, How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel for Success: The key is that at each point in your conversion funnel, you’ll lose potential customers. As the Blog Tyrant explained yesterday, you can use your blog stats package to review where, exactly, those losses are occurring. And as the Web Marketing Ninja explains in How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel, the best thing to do is put measures on each point in the funnel so that you can understand what, exactly, is happening at each point in the conversion process. He says that looks at as much data on each point in the sales process as he can—and that includes bounce rates, time on page, entries and exits through the page, traffic sources, and so on. So the conversion funnel review process might look something like this: Go through your site, and map each step in your conversion funnel. Look at your analytics work out what you’ll measure at each point in the funnel. Put numbers against the metrics you’ve decided to measure at each step. Understanding the data Once you work through this process, you’ll find yourself armed with a lot of data. How you interpret that data will go a long way toward boosting your conversions. For example, finding that you have a high exit rate from a page in your funnel means people are leaving it—you’re losing potential conversions at this point. That’s good to know, but that information alone doesn’t tell you what you can do about it. In working out implications of that information you may need to also look at bounce rates for the page, and where the traffic it receives is coming from, for example. This information can be a big help in making the right choices when it comes to tweaking the funnel. For example, let’s imagine that we’re analysing the About page for ProBlogger the Book. Now this page is the second in my sales funnel—the default page is at http://probloggerbook.com/. Most visitors go straight from that default page to Amazon or B&N. But let’s imagine that a significant percentage click through to the About page … and then exit without clicking on one of the Buy buttons, or subscribing. If I look at the data, and all I see is that this page has a high bounce rate, I might be tempted to try a range of different strategies to fix that. But what if I look at the traffic sources and notice that a large percentage of users are arriving at the About the Book page through search engines? The About page doesn’t have any Buy buttons above the fold, so if users are coming from a search engine, where they’ll likely also see an Amazon or B&N link in the results, they may immediately think, “Oh, this is just marketing information. I’ll click back and look at the details on Amazon—I know I can buy the book there.” In this case, my strategy for tweaking the sales funnel will differ from the ideas I had when all I noticed was the high bounce rate. My efforts might also include improving the search rank of the default sales page for the book, if it’s appearing below the About page in the SERPs, but converting better. As you can see, understanding the data as a whole is very important if you’re to make decisions that will have the best likelihood of positively affecting your conversion rates. Focus on key points of loss As you review your funnel, you’ll also need to consider where to focus your efforts to improve it. While the data may reveal a number of areas for improvement, you’ll likely find that some will produce a much bigger bang for your buck—as the Ninja explained in this recent post. If your time is limited—and whose isn’t?—you’d be best to focus on these pages, if not exclusively, at least initially. As you’re looking at those pages, don’t limit yourself to considering one or two factors. Often, we can become fixated on things like button size or placement, and forget about other considerations that might be negatively impacting conversions. These could include: headlines, sub-heads, and scannability of the content how we’re using images and where they’re placed whether the language on the page resonates with users the strength of your calls to action links to other content, including navigation links use of testimonials offers of samples the page’s purpose in the conversion process, and whether it meets that from a fundamental, usability standpoint. These are just a few ideas, but consider them broadly. For example, reviewing the strength of your calls to action is on that list—but that doesn’t just mean the calls to action to buy your product. The ProBlogger Book sales page includes subscription box. Should that remain on a low-performing page? Should it be removed? Is it likely to be diffusing the strength of my call to action or is it providing a valuable mechanism by which I’m capturing new subscribers who may not be ProBlogger regulars? My analysis of the data, coupled with my strategy for the page and goals for the conversion funnel, should help me determine the answers here. Match the changes to your users A quick final point: you’re not in the dark when it comes to trying to work out what tweaks you’ll make. In a later part of this series, we’ll find out how to conduct split tests that will help you to test various incremental changes so that you can see which ones work best, and use those. But even before you get that far, the audience research that the Blog Tyrant was talking about yesterday should give you some insight into how you can alter points in your conversion funnel to match the needs, characteristics, and expectations of the audience you’re seeking. He mentioned, for example, that video can be useful for certain audiences—perhaps that’s something I should consider adding to my book’s About page? I know from my other data and reader feedback that my regulars love video content, so it seems like it could be a good idea… Ready to act? Once you’ve finished reviewing your sales funnel, you’ll have a pretty clear idea of the possibilities before you for boosting conversions. It’s time to act. Tomorrow, Tommy Walker will step us through the changes he actually made to his own website in an effort to improve conversions, so that we can get a first-hand account of how all this research feeds into practical alterations to things like page layouts, calls to action, images, and more. But in the meantime, I’d love to hear your tips or extra advice for reviewing conversion funnels—whether for a paid or free offer. Have you ever done it? What secrets can you share from your experiences? Let us know in the comments. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Boost Conversions Step 2: Revisit Your Conversion Funnel

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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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Stop Embarrassing Yourself With a Brand Persona That Doesn’t Make Sense Posted: 30 May 2012 04:00 AM PDT Occasionally I see this commercial on TV for a credit union. It tries to be hip and edgy in a Poochie the Dog sort of way in a sad, desperate attempt to stand out and seem relevant, yet ironically I couldn’t tell you the name of the company if you held a gun to my head. The commercial starts off with a guy taking off his suit jacket and tie and talking about how this credit union is different because it’s so hip and casual–so casual that its employees just have to wear a button-up shirt and slacks instead of a full suit and tie. Now that is casual! The man then hops on a Segway and rides it roughly ten feet while explaining all of the awesome benefits to joining this exTREEEEEEMEly cool credit union. He then gets off the Segway and is about to enter the credit union before he turns around, smirks, and adds, “We even blog.” My reaction: Holy shit, no way. A blog?!! You are kidding me, credit union. You mean to tell me that you blog? I thought that was just something cool kids did on their LiveJournal or MySpace profiles! How did a stuffy, fuddyduddy credit union schmooze its way to the popular kids’ table and manage to start a blog, which is clearly only something supremely awesome and super fun companies are allowed to do? At this breakneck rate of technological adoption, I’ll be blown away by the credit union’s Twitter account five years from now! All kidding aside, no. Just no. This is fucking embarrassing, credit union. If I had an account with you I’d close it out of sympathy shame. You think you’re so casual with your tie-less business attire and the fact that you ride a Segway and blog, two pop culture references that haven’t seemed innovative for at least a decade? I know who to blame for this: Old Spice. Ever since Isaiah Mustafa very suavely pitched the company’s products in a classy-yet-humorous way, various brands have scrambled to copy the ads’ tone and have failed miserably. The only thing the copycat ads accomplish is a) Making you feel embarrassed for these companies for having a profound lack of imagination, and b) Getting you to realize how good the Old Spice ads were. The only copycat exception I can think of is the Dollar Shave Club ad, which emulated the fast-paced absurdity of Old Spice quite successfully. But for the most part the brands that saw what Old Spice did, laughed, and exclaimed to their marketing team, “Hurr durr this is a funny and successful ad campaign. Do exactly this for our brand!” crash and burn in a spectacularly cringe-inducing manner. Which brings me back to this crappy credit union’s commercial. My biggest gripe with the ad isn’t that it’s a failed poor man’s poor man’s Old Spice commercial, it’s that it feels like watching your dad awkwardly try to rock out to popular music with his hat turned backwards and flashing the peace sign because he’s confusing it with the “Westsiiiiiide” gesture. This Old Spice-type brand persona doesn’t fit for a credit union. It could, much how Geico manages to successfully churn out odd and amusing ads for something as mundane as auto insurance, but it doesn’t, mainly because this credit union is trying to copy a completely different industry’s ad campaign without understanding why it worked in the first place. If your goal is simply “Do what they did because it worked for them” without understanding what elements made the campaign so successful, you’re deaf to the giant WHOOSHing sound of the point flying far above your head. You absolutely can find inspiration from various sources–you don’t have to just scrutinize your competitors in order to determine how to make your company better. Oftentimes you can be motivated in other ways, like, say from a men’s line of fragrances and skin products. However, you can’t just take a success story and shove it in your employees’ faces while barking, “This worked for them so make it work for us.” Have some fucking common sense–”Facebook has a ‘poke’ feature so we should, too” should make you roll your eyes and echo the lecturing tone you heard from your parents when you were a kid: “Well, if Facebook jumped off a cliff, would you?” Is humor an appropriate tone for your brand? If so, what kind of humor can you use and how can you incorporate it in a way that makes sense? Do you really need all those social media sharing widgets on your site if you specialize in funeral services, or are you just thinking you need them because “They’re popular with the kids nowadays”? Excitedly wanting to copy a successful element of a popular brand or website is like buying a Saint Bernard because they look cool without thinking about the fact that you live in a studio apartment on the 30th floor of a high-rise in a major metropolitan area. Think this shit through; don’t just react when you see something cool and blindly try to copy it. Don’t be the out-of-touch credit union that’s trying to Poochie the Dog some business from you. If you don’t understand the “how’s” and “why’s” behind a company’s success, you’ll just end up embarrassing yourself and failing miserably when you try to do the exact same thing. Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?

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