Imagine yourself filling a water tank with water drawn from a well using a bucket. You may have to make several trips to the well to fill the tank.
What happens if there are tiny holes in the bucket? No matter how big the bucket is, or how small the holes are, over time, it ends up leaking a lot of water. It won’t be easy to fill the tank as there will be a considerable water loss, and you wouldn't have been able to finish filling it as easily as you should have.
Leak, drip, drip, and that's all it takes for you to lose out on your ability to fill the water tank on time. The same happens in companies when there are lead leakages in sales and marketing conversion funnels.
Your marketing funnel is the path your potential customers take from the time they visit your website first to buying your product or service.
Any leakage in the marketing funnel drops the conversion rate and overall efficiency of the sales and marketing teams. This time around, we will take a look at how to find and plug marketing funnel leakages to build a successful and efficient marketing funnel.
Why a Marketing Funnel is Important?
As per the Conversion Rate Optimization Report by Ecoconsultancy, less than 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. Why does this happen? More importantly, what can be done to better performance?
Can the remaining 78% better their performance by utilizing a streamlined and engaging marketing funnel? A leak-proof marketing funnel helps companies organize, nurture and create leads, manage campaigns and increase brand visibility.
Where are the Marketing Funnel Leakages?
Leakages can happen everywhere, at each step of the marketing funnel, leakages happen if marketers aren’t alert. With every step, there’s a chance for visitors/leads to drop off the funnel because of those troublesome leakages.
To find leaks in your funnel, you need to understand where the visitors are dropping and why they are doing so. These exit points serve as 'leaks' which you need to plug to better your conversion rates.
Conducting quantitative and qualitative research will help marketers spot the holes and understand why they exist. Understanding why such leaks exist is the first step in preventing them.
As you go deeper into the marketing funnel analysis, the more impactful a leak becomes, as it leads to the leakage of more water. Therefore, working from the bottom to the top will help you to plug the most critical holes first.
In case, you know what the problem is, but don’t know how to create content that boosts conversion, don’t worry because we have you covered. You can take these approaches to nurture leads at different stages of your funnel.
Finding the Leaks
Conducting quantitative research
Quantitative research is mostly numeric and objective as it works to figure out what the customer's want and how their behavior is. The conventional methods employed during quantitative research are:
- Technical analysis
- Deep dive
- Form analytics
- Heatmaps
Technical analysis
Technical analysis studies different types of visitors to figure out what the general perception regarding your product or service is. Cross-browser and cross-device checks will ensure your website works well on all platforms to ensure maximum reach.
Tools like BrowserStack and Google Analytics work in tandem to analyze all devices and compare the performance of your web-store or website on each of them. These tools will help you identify the compatibility of your website on multiple platforms and also which device or browser works the best for you in terms of conversion. Mobile optimization is also a vital part of technical analysis.
As per Google, the average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, but more than 50% of visitors leave if the site takes more than three seconds to load. So what can a marketer do in such a case?
Having a slow site leads to loss of customers and hence, should be prevented. Use Google Analytics to identify slow pages and run them through PageSpeed Insights to optimize them for mobile and web devices.
Deep dive
Misconfiguring an analytics tool leads to shoddy analysis and even poorer results. Inaccurate research gives you a misguided result which leads to bad marketing decisions. Hence, one of the first steps you need to take is to optimize your analytics tool, to make sure it is looking for the right data and processing it the right way.
Form analytics
Any website that has a form, whether it be a checkout form or a sign-up form, is a valuable conversion feature. Forms are essential because they allow you to interact and exchange information with your customers.
Analyzing forms can give marketers valuable information regarding which form fields people don't mind filling, what data they are hesitant to provide, and what levels of friction each question has to deal with. As a thumb rule, keep the number of form fields minimum for a healthy conversion rate.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps work as visual representations of data wherein data is expressed as colors. Warm colors typically demonstrate high values, and cool colors illustrate low values. Conversion rate optimization deals with both click maps and scroll maps.
Click maps help you map out places on the website wherein visitors feel they will get an external link, while scroll maps tell you how visitors are going through the site.
Conducting qualitative research
Qualitative research, unlike quantitative, is exploratory and subjective. It deals with why customers behave in a certain way. The various methods used to optimize a marketing funnel are:
- On-site surveys - Exit or on-page surveys which allow you to gather consumer feedback.
- Customer interviews- Telephonic or in-person meetings wherein you interact with the customers and try to understand their behavior.
- Customer surveys- Full-fledged surveys that allow you to ask multiple questions.
- User testing- Watching how customers use your site while saying out loud what they intend with their actions.
- Session replays- Watching as customers navigate, choose and buy a real product or service through your website, without any narration.
Plugging the Leaks
Now that you are aware of how you can find the leakages in your marketing funnel, it is time you learn how to plug them, to prevent drops in conversion rates. Here are the top tips regarding how you can plug your leaks to boost marketing efficiency.
1. Commence with a question to elucidate or an enigma to solve. You can either start with high volume, low conversion pages such as blog posts or vice versa, that is, low volume, high conversion pages such as the checkout page.
2. Once you know where you’re losing leads, next move on to why you're not able to convert. These could be due to several reasons, such as:
- Slow loading times
- Poor mobile optimization
- Interruptions on the webpage
- Poorly made web-forms
- Weak CTAs
- Lack of email reminders and offers leading to low engagement
- Not being able to retain customers
3. Remove broken links or 404 errors, which affect both the user experience and SEO performance. Identifying and fixing broken links helps boost your website's performance, helping you optimize your funnel.
4. Improve your lead retention time to better your conversion rates. According to a Harvard Business Review, brands need to respond within at least 24 hours to improve their chances of converting the leads.
5. Make sure you have enough internal links and searches on your site. This helps in improving the bounce rate and allows you to list out exactly what your customers want.
6. Slicing, dicing, and segmenting your data the right way goes a long way in streamlining your analysis process.
7. Include repeat, recent, and relapsed customers in your interviews and surveys to get the best data and insight.
8. Make sure you have an engaging landing page as that helps to guide customers towards your products or services.
9. Blogging regularly will help engage and keep your target audience interested, and hence, must be your priority.
10. Ensure all your web pages, blogs, and newsletters have a clear call to action.
11. Having an active social media presence helps companies generate web traffic, which in turn, helps in increasing conversion rates.
As you plug more holes, you will start realizing you need leads to close more deals, and your sales and marketing funnels are now more optimized. Instead of spending a fortune trying to get more visitors to send through a leaking funnel, marketers should focus on strengthening their funnel and optimizing it.
Have you had issues with your marketing funnel? If you have questions regarding your marketing or sales funnel, then hit us up here so that we can help you optimize your marketing funnel and boost your sales.