Interested in setting up your own conversion marketing laboratory? Run your own secret science experiments? Brian Massey, the Conversion Scientist, will tell you how.
Sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission
Warning: this information will make you a more successful marketer, but may also put your immediate job in jeopardy.
To be a true hero, you must have two things:
An arch nemesis
A secret
Unfortunately for those of us in marketing, our nemesis is often the organization in which we work; that Dilbert inspired, plodding structure full of people that think they know how to market. Such a beast is often resistant to our most powerful weapons, such as positive results.
The best way to defeat such a daunting foe is through patience and stealth. As marketers, we must build our strength, our knowledge and our skills.
How to set up your conversion marketing laboratory.
Your Secret Conversion Marketing Laboratory
I propose that you consider building your own secret conversion marketing laboratory, your own Xanadu. This is the place you go to explore new marketing strategies and ask questions that others may not have the guts to ask.
Questions like:
What if we used more copy on our landing pages?
What if we tried an interesting headline?
Would audio or video increase our conversion rates?
Will social media work in our business?
These are the questions that take time to sell internally, especially when you don’t have the data. These are the concepts that IT is designed to thwart. It’s time to unshackle yourself. Build your own conversion laboratory.
Rules of Engagement
Now, as heroes, we want to do good in the world. This means doing no harm to our organization’s brand. We don’t want to work against our organizations already plodding attempts to communicate.
We want to minimize cost – most of us aren’t Bruce Wayne – and maximize automation. This will make our time in the lab most productive.
I cover all of the guidelines in my Search Engine Land column Setting Up Your Own Conversion Lab, Part 1.
Why Do We Need A Conversion Marketing Laboratory?
Because conversion marketing is a momentum game. It requires trying things to find out what works best. It requires rapid question-test-analyze-question cycles. And sometimes we have to test unintuitive assumptions to understand our audience.
Without the lab, there are blocks to momentum.
IT has their gatekeepers that slow our testing cycles. Management wonders why we aren’t writing a press release or blog post.
While most marketing departments think they know best, our lab lets our visitors tell us what they want. This is powerful knowledge. There are some big wins to be found in the lab, especially at the beginning.
The Secret Conversion Laboratory
Your secret conversion lab should be set up with a few best practices to be successful.
Consistent measurement trumps accurate measurement. Conversion marketing means making decisions based on data. Analytics provide that data.
We aren’t interested in an analytics implementation that is accurate down to the visitor. Instead, we want analytics that are sufficiently correlated to reality.
This is scientist-speak for “when things change, our measurement changes by about the same amount.” When more people visit, our metric “visits” goes up by about the same percentage. It mirrors reality.
Don’t waste your precious time trying to get accuracy in measurement. Good enough is good enough.
Most analytics systems are easy to set up, or are competently integrated into most of the online services you’ll be using in your lab.
Equipment cost must be “under the expense line”. The secret lab is, by design, not going to be a budget line item. That defeats the purpose.
Instead, you need to select tools that are free or cheap enough to purchase and implement without going through the budget process. They need to be expensible.
Avoid IT obstacles. The equipment you use in your conversion lab must not require IT resources to set up and use. IT is too often a bottleneck.
It should be highly automated. We must get our marketing duties done with excellence, so our conversion lab can’t take a large chunk of our precious time. If you’re off in the lab for hours at a time, people will begin to wonder. It draws attention.
We will be looking for tools that automate the lab, and solutions that collect and aggregate data for us.
Your efforts should not harm the live web site. Our goal is to become better at marketing for our companies. As such, we should do no harm. Our lab should not:
Violate company brand guidelines
Compete with corporate sites on the search engines
Take significant financial chances
Violate compliance requirements in regulated industries
Circumvent or disregard your company’s privacy and permission policies
Basically, we want to do small tests, learning things we can use to help the company sell more and dominate online.
Beakers, Bunsen Burners and Mass Spectrometers
We are fortunate to have many of the tools needed in our lab available for free or at low cost.
You will need tools to:
Create and host content of many types.
Put measurement equipment in place
Heat up your experiments with traffic sources
Select the right content management system to host your experiments
Cape and tights are not required
It may be tempting the done a hero’s uniform once you begin to feel the power of what you learn in your lab. Honestly, It’s best to stay under the radar.
Let us know which tools you find in your lab in the comments, and please share any interesting results you get from your experiments.
Sales funnel or full funnel conversion optimization? Which should you use and when? It all depends on what you want to understand.
Full funnel conversion optimization – or the Conversion Sciences Profit Funnel™ – provides the analysis and insights needed to help positively impact your business bottom line. Analyzing a sales funnel helps improve those issues found in a specific buying process.
There is nothing wrong about analyzing a sales funnel conversion rate or a sales funnel model for a specific segment of a customer journey. But your online business will definitively benefit from performing a Profit Funnel™ or full-funnel conversion optimization as well.
A highly experienced team of conversion experts can leverage both models when optimizing, instead of narrowing the view and hurting profits. An inexperienced conversion consultant will only see a siloed series of sales funnels, evaluate them independently and make decisions based on their own unique ROAS instead of their interactions.
Let’s review the key differences between sales funnel and full funnel conversion optimization or Profit Funnel™. We’ll begin with a great example of both models, a definition of a full marketing funnel. Finally, we’ll cover their differences in scope and the metrics used by each funnel.
Happy customers means returning customers. The starting point for full funnel conversion optimization is the customer blueprint and guess whose CRO audit services include a map of the customer journey for your online shop?
Example of Sales Funnel vs Full Funnel Conversion Optimization
Imagine an addiction treatment center that offers both low-cost at-home testing kits and treatment programs. Their at-home drug testing kit sells for $10, and it costs $5 to manufacture and ship. Their treatment programs start at $15,000.
They have an effective social media presence, paid campaigns to engage and attract their target market. And they also provide valuable resources for people with addiction problems and for their loved on their website. These range from informational articles to online quizzes to help find out whether or not one is suffering from an addiction and what is the best course of action.
Ok. Time to tackle sales funnel optimization. If they analyze their PPC sales funnel they will realize that it is costing them $20 in ad spend to convert each home testing kit sale. This added to the manufacturing and shipping costs may lead them to determine that this $10 sale is costing the company $25. But they are not looking at their profit margins, they are simply calculating Return on Ad Spend or ROAS.
Thus, they may decide to turn off the ad spend and stop this failing campaign because they “lose” $15 per sale. Or they may attempt to improve a Google Ads campaign that is already performing quite well.
But what if this addiction treatment center looks at the full-marketing funnel or Profit Funnel™ instead?
They would find that 20% of their customers have repeated their kit purchase every 3 months.
By the same token, they have not estimated the impact that their content development and social media efforts have on those conversions. And they were attributing the sale to the last touch-point.
As the buyer journey is not limited to a single channel, analyzing a single sales funnel could narrow your business focus and marketing assessment scope.
Moreover, this treatment center finds that 2% of the people who purchase their $10 test later sends a loved one to their center for a $15k treatment program. Those $20 in ad spend for each testing kit sale got the family to notice their services and inquire about their drug-rehab program. Therefore, for every 100 tests they sell, an average of 2 patients will join their treatment program generating a minimum of $30,000 in revenue.
Before I became the CMO, I was more focused on how we were spending our marketing budget than on how marketing could help drive long-term business objectives.But thinking like this holds businesses back. Marketing should be valued for its long-term potential, rather than its short-term efficiencies.
So, What is Full Funnel Conversion Optimization or Profit Funnel™ Optimization?
As we have noticed, a full funnel evaluates the 360 degree customer journey with a company or brand. Its goal is not only to acquire a customer but also to understand, nurture and improve their relationship and experience with the brand.
It focuses on not only pre but post-transaction because it takes into account how this will affect the probability of increased number of subscription renewals or sales, lower customer rotation, lower customer acquisition costs, and increased profit margins.
As we can clearly see, even though it’s called a funnel, this model looks more like an infinite loop with many potential touch-points throughout the buyers journey, over time and across a multitude of devices and online/offline experiences.
Have you even thought of people interacting with your site or buying from you via Alexa? Photo: Grant Ritchie via Unsplash.
1. Sales Funnel vs Profit Funnel™ or Full Funnel Optimization: Differences in Scope
One of the main differences between sales funnel and a full funnel conversion optimization is its scope. The oftentimes narrow span of a sales funnel is overshadowed by the number of elements or touch-points that a Profit Funnel™ considers.
Let’s check them out.
Single Path vs Infinite Loop: Are you optimizing for Omni channel yet?
The most evident difference between the sales and the Profit Funnel™ models lies in their reach. Highly restricted to a specific conversion path for the sales funnel versus a very broad view of the customer journey for the latter.
While most sales funnels are focused on a single transaction (such as a lead, sale or subscription) the full funnel or Profit Funnel™ acknowledges the entire lifetime of a potential customer or client. Its purpose is to allow us to take a step back and look at the entire customer journey or full marketing funnel and help optimize by what is most profitable without discarding the customer experience.
One Decision Maker vs Multiple Stakeholders
Have you been optimizing for a single decision-maker? Maybe you were leaving some marketing personas out of the equation. The higher the ticket price, especially for B2Bs, the higher the likelihood of having more than a single decision-maker involved in the purchasing process. Most companies will include different stakeholders’ input through the funnel and each one of them may further or delay that coveted B2B sale.
Sales funnel conversion optimization targets one person. Profit funnels recognize there is often more than one decision-maker.
Conversion Sciences Profit Funnel™ recognizes and accounts for this fact. Trying to optimize a single funnel to convert this lead is short-sighted, when understanding the 360 degree customer journey and optimizing for it, will significantly increase conversions and boost profit margins.
We often find – when auditing a client’s conversion efforts – that their sales funnels don’t include mobile customers. Addressing this gap via mobile conversion optimization efforts has increased their profits manyfold.
The Profit Funnel™ recognizes the value of determining which of those platforms holds the highest potential for each particular conversion and finding a way to best optimize each path.
Sales funnels often focus on increasing conversions on a certain page on either mobile, tablet, or desktop. Thus, leaving out the reality that customers will interact with your brand, product or service in multiple ways and through as many devices as exist.
Have you even thought of people interacting with your site or buying from you via Alexa?
Full Funnel Conversion Optimization Enables a More Personalized Online Experience
The data-driven strategy of optimizing the full marketing funnel helps you identify consumer segments. Behavioral information can be collected in-store, online, and post-visit. The insights derived from this analysis helps you craft and deliver online personalized experiences to boost conversions and increase their contribution to your bottom line. All the while deriving insights to improving your marketing strategy.
“You are engaging with the consumer on an intimate level — they are telling you what products are interesting. That customer data is one of the most important things to grow your brand.” – Kate Kibler, Timberland’s VP of direct-to-consumer.
For high-traffic sites, Conversion Sciences offers the latest martech stacks – ML and AI-powered – via the Conversion Catalyst AI™. Our Conversion Catalyst AI™ builds a predictive model that identifies which visitors are ready to buy, and delivers the perfect experience so that they are more likely to buy from you. So you can deliver the most optimized experience be it on your website, on wearable devices, voice search, augmented-reality or any of the myriad of experiences the IoT brings us.
Full funnel analysis and optimization will deliver a more cohesive personalized experience to your online customer segments.
2. Sales Funnel vs Full Funnel Conversion Optimization Metrics
It’s hard to take a look at your full marketing funnel and try to gauge how well it’s working besides ROI and profit margins. But following those metrics without fully understanding which effort or efforts made the difference, is no way to run a business either. But lucky you. Full funnel is optimized with your bottom line in mind and a bespoke full funnel attribution will help you identify what’s helping and what’s hindering your conversions.
Therefore, the difference between sales funnel and full funnel conversion optimization is that you will end up concentrating your marketing spend on those efforts who bring in profitable returns. Much better than looking at a measly conversion rate. right? ;)
Sales funnel conversion optimization targets one person while Profit funnels recognize there is often more than one decision-maker.
ROAS vs ROI
Are you narrowing your business focus down to sales funnels and conversion rates? Are you making decisions that affect your whole business by a simple ROAS? Or are you leveraging a 360 degree customer blueprint to improve your company’s profit margins?
In the addiction treatment center example, when the sales funnel was not profitable (its ROAS was negative), they could have shut down the ad campaign. But when they looked at the full funnel (in-patient treatment registrations), the ad investment was profitable and it justified the initial losses in the funnel. It had a positive ROI.
Thus, by using both metrics, you can isolate those efforts whose ROAS may be positive but not their ROI, which takes into consideration not a single digitally advertised campaign but how each contributes to the business profit margins. And you can spare from killing efforts with negative ROAS because, in the end, their revenue-generating power is much larger than the one calculated from the revenue from ad campaign/cost of ad campaign.
By doing so, you change the focus to driving business performance, not just advertising performance.
Single Attribution vs Custom Attribution
Going back to the addiction treatment center example. There are things they do that contribute to their bottom line – such as informational blog posts, quizzes, etc. But their attribution model assigned the conversion value to a single Google Ads campaign.
People have several contacts with a brand before they even consider converting on that landing page, clicking on that PPC ad or that Instagram shoppable image. Which means that any and all contributions along the 360 degree funnel, or full funnel or Profit Funnel™ must be taken into account and their value toward each of the conversions (testing kit purchase, treatment) attributed properly to measure its impact on revenues and on profit margins.
While a single touch attribution model is a fast and simple way to allocate credit to a campaign, full funnel must use a bespoke or custom attribution model to understand what is working and what is not.
It’s common yet dangerous and naive to make assumptions about which touchpoint to attribute credit for a conversion. Oftentimes these assumptions are created from unrecognized personal bias and proven false through data analysis. This is one of the biggest reasons that analyzing all metrics is vital to a company’s long-term success.
The fight for online leads and sales has traditionally been fought at the search engine. That is changing.
Web analytics, bid management, competitive intelligence, ad testing and ad management tools are all common staples of any serious paid search effort. Return on ad spend (ROAS) is being tracked all the way through the sign up or purchase process and ad strategies are being adjusted accordingly.
Quietly, the battle for online leads is moving to a new front. This new front is measured by revenue per visit, and it’s kissing cousin, conversion rate. Like the tide that floats all boats, website optimization is being seen as the way to reduce all marketing costs by dropping the acquisition cost of new prospects and customers.
Why do we say this is happening quietly? That is the conclusion we came to when examining an unusual data set from SpyFu.com. We were able to determine which businesses had conversion optimization tools installed on their website. This, we reasoned, gave us a pretty good idea of which businesses would dominate in the world of online marketing — assuming they were actually using the tools.
In one report, 73% of businesses are spending between $500 and $5000 per month on paid search ads. Almost a quarter are spending between $5000 and $50,000 per month. Yet, only 14% of businesses have at least one website optimization tool installed.
Who are going to be the winners in this new front? Where does your business fit in this statistic?
What kind of person is “good” at analytics? It’s time to change our opinion of what a “data scientist” is. If you are involved in the care and feeding of an online marketing endeavor, you have to be good at this “data thing.”
Fortunately, this doesn’t mean that you put on your lab coat and pocket protector and spend endless hours combing through data, charts and spreadsheets.
That IS the job of the data scientist. No, you are more of a data detective, finding data to guide your decisions in unexpected places.
If Austin is the conversion capital of the world, it was a supernova of conversion optimization brilliance this past week when the Conversion XL Live conference was held here. Luminaries from around the globe converged here for a program that covered topics from landing page design to “bandit” algorithms.
I learned a lot.
Here were some of the highlights for me.
The Dame, The Detective and the Double-cross
I used Humphrey Bogart detective movies to illustrate that conversion optimizers use a variety of data sources to determine what to test and what not to test. The femme fatale will appear in the detective’s office and pose a problem. The salty detective will investigate, looking for clues. If he’s not careful, he can be double-crossed by the data.
For a data detective, the initial hypothesis is the “dame’s” story. Of course, she is hiding something. He must find clues to tease out the truth using alternative data sources. He can use post-test analysis techniques to make sure he wasn’t double-crossed by his data.
Some of the alternative sources I discussed were:
Aggregated Behavioral data like Google Analytics and AB Testing Tools.
Aggregated User Interaction data like click tracking tools and form-tracking tools.
Individual User Interaction data, like session recordings, ratings and reviews data and live chat transcripts.
Self-reported data, such as surveys and online feedback.
Customer knowledge, often found by interviewing sales and customer support people.
When you prioritize hypotheses that have lots of support in data, you keep yourself from being double-crossed by unexpected results.
Mobile Website Design
We believe that the mobile Web is like the desktop Web in the 1990s: we will look back and laugh at the choices we are making today.
Amy Africa has done a lot of testing on mobile websites, and gave us a flood of Mobile Web 2.0 tips. My notes were extensive, but some of the her revelations were surprising.
Don’t think in terms of pages. Think in terms of screens and scrolls.
Make your “action directives” (action buttons, search options, etc.) big and bold.
80% of mobile success is having the right navigation.
One third to one half of mobile visitors will use search. Design search results pages as if only three items will be seen.
Mobile forms are abandoned more often on mobile.
Email is of even bigger importance with mobile users than desktop users.
Social logins can reduce abandonment if done right.
“Oversell the phone number” in the purchase process.
Responsive design comes with a mobile performance hit.
Transfer mobile visitors to the desktop by sending email or text.
Email will make up for deficiencies in the mobile experience.
She introduced me to some new terms, including “donuts”, “spreaders” and “cart hoppers.”
It’s clearly an exciting time in the mobile world.
Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning
Matthew Gershoff introduced us to the world of predictive analytics and machine learning.
Optimization = Learning efficiency + Applying the “best” learnings
New tools, such as his company Conductrics provides tools that use the key ingredients of optimization.
Setting goals
Sensing the environment, usually through analytics.
Having the ability to act and execute on learnings.
Observing outcomes.
Learning the decision logic of visitors.
These ingredients are the basis for machine learning.
He recommended courses on VideoLectures.com to get up to speed on machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Conversion Maturity Model
Brooks Bell was interviewed by conference host Peep Laja about the Conversion Maturity Model that defines how advanced an organization is with respect to optimization.
Her namesake company surveyed 300 companies, rating them on six criteria.
Culture
Team
Tools and Systems
Process
Strategy
Performance
The executive sponsor at a company is key to the success of the optimization effort, she pointed out. Very true.
Conversion Optimizers from Everywhere
Austin truly was the Conversion Supernova of the World.
In from Vancouver, Oli Gardner of Unbouce took us through the rules of good landing page design. He provided us all with some free tools to help us evaluate our landing pages and forms.
André Morys runs one of the largest conversion optimization companies in the world. He’s both hugely entertaining and German.
Michael Aagard flew in from Denmark to share some of his most embarrassing testing mistakes and his triumphs.
Yehoshua Coren is a cross-cultural phenomenon as the Analytics Ninja from Israel.
There are special visitors on your site right now. They blend in with all of the others in your analytics, but they behave differently from the others.
They visit more pages, spend more time, share more often and are more likely to buy from you.
These visitors are your account holders. Some have bought from you. Some have not.
Account holders should walk around your site in their socks on the plush red carpet you’ve laid out for them.
They’ve put forth more effort interacting with your site than your other non-buying site visitors because they’ve shown you buying intent. And that’s a big deal for you.
People sometimes confuse us with robot-like scientists, being lead by data and caring little for the creative side of marketing.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
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I like to think that we can be more creative because we add a rigor to our creativity that allows us to try riskier things. If we have some data that says risky might work, we have a methodology through which we can confirm it’s effectiveness with a high level of confidence.
We backstop our creative with data, and this gives us a freedom that few designers and writers have.
We were very surprised by the marquee results of a TrustRadius survey on Conversion Rate Optimization.
While 72% of the companies surveyed have implemented some CRO processes, only 18% of them consider CRO as “Part of their DNA”.
We would speculate that many of these 18% of companies are in very competitive commodity industries, such as travel, office supplies, and pet apparel. In other words, they had to optimize or die.
These aren’t the only industries in dire need of optimization, however. While CRO isn’t a zero-sum game, you do not want to find yourself playing catch-up with your competitors. As this survey shows, CRO is a key competitive advantage online, just as SEO has been.
TrustRadius is in a unique position to conducted a survey of businesses. They offer some of the most helpful reviews of business software on the Web, and were able to get 4100 companies to complete the survey. This is statistically significant stuff.
Here are some of the highlights from their survey.
58% of companies spend more than $10,000 per year on digital analytics, while 44% spend that much per year on A/B testing tools.
59% of companies have plans to spend more this year than in the previous year on digital analytics tools, but only 48% plan to increase spending on A/B testing tools. Download the TrustRadius Buyers Guide to see what they are spending that money on.
The vast majority of companies (91%) use between two and ten digital analytics tools regularly.
As Conversion Scientists, we obviously eat this stuff for breakfast. We’ll show you how much money you could be making with our 120-day Conversion Catalyst™ program. It’s free, and it’s invaluable. Jump on a call with us at (888) 961-6604. You’ll be glad you did.
Here we thought we were the only ones who loved a good periodic table. Data collected from Convirza based on millions of phone calls analyzed in the first quarter of 2014 answers the critical question: what are the differences between a converted call and a non-converted call?
McKay Allen shared the results from this study in this incredible infographic. Some interesting facts you will find:
Agents asked for the business 3x more frequently on converted calls than non.
Converted calls were 42% longer than non-converted calls.
Lead quality score was 65% higher on converted calls than non.
Call tracking is what happens BEFORE the call. Conversation Analytics is what happens ON the call. The Convirza (formerly LogMyCalls) Conversation Analytics uses sophisticated speech recognition technology and hundreds of thousands of proprietary algorithms to extract data from phone calls. McKay Allen shared the results from those Conversation Analytics in this incredible infographic.
Some interesting takeaways:
If an employee asks for the business, the caller is 10.4 X likely to convert.
46% of all sales inquiries are missed opportunities.
6% of calls results in caller dissatisfaction.
Millions of calls are being processed by LogMyCalls. This infographic provides high level data about all of the calls analyzed in Q1. Enjoy and share!
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