Funnels are nice. You create them once, then let them do their thing — sell to your customer on autopilot.
Well, not indefinitely.
You can always squeeze a little more revenue out of your funnel.
You can always nudge your click-throughs on that email sequence just a tiny bit higher.
You can always keep your prospect watching a video or reading a sales page just a bit longer.
You have to optimize at some point.
But your funnel’s large. Where do you start?
Well, the answer’s not clear…
But there are some guidelines for where to start.
It’s All Relative – The Conversion Rate Spread
Find your largest drop-off in conversion rate from stage to stage. In other words, subtract Stage 2’s conversion rate from Stage 1’s, etc.
Identify the biggest gap and find out why that is — then get to optimizing and testing until you bring the rate up sufficiently.
Rinse and repeat.
For instance, maybe your drop-off between Stages 3 and 4 is the largest. Once you bring that up to speed enough, you can shift to the next large gap, and so on and so forth.
It Takes Some Math, Too
Business is simply a math equation. How can you get more out for every unit of time/money/resources you put in?
Essentially: What would provide the highest level of return, given the investment?
Apply that same logic to your funnel…
That means gathering data on your conversion rates between each step of the funnel, and how much revenue you generate for each X% bump in conversions.
For instance, increasing some back-end part of your funnel’s conversion rate might bring you 3 times more revenue than focusing on the front end.
A Note
Your business doesn’t happen in a vacuum. While you’re optimizing one area of the funnel, the other might fluctuate in the number of leads passing through.
That’s fine, as long as it’s the same general type of customer.
What matters is that you see what kinds of changes happen at the part of the funnel you’re working on.
Either Hone In on the Laggard, or Focus on ROI
In the future, I’ll write a series of posts detailing what to do at each phase of a funnel to optimize it.
For now, if you want help with your funnel…