Step 1. Identify
What’s Working
Where are your sales
coming from right now? Is search advertising working? How about search
engine optimization (SEO)? Social media? Email marketing?
If you’re scratching
your head, don’t worry, you’re not alone! Most businesses I talk to
struggle to identify which marketing channels are profitably driving
leads and sales.
To be clear, I’m not
talking about website traffic. Just because you’re getting thousands of
visitors from a marketing channel doesn’t mean it’s working. I’m
talking about conversions (leads and sales). And the only way to talk
about conversions is to have conversion tracking installed on your
site.
That’s step one.
Install conversion tracking and then review the data to identify what’s
working. Sounds simple enough, right?
Step 2. Identify
Your Bottleneck
In step 1, you
determined which marketing channels are driving leads and sales. Now
it’s time to dig a little deeper to see how we can improve what’s
already working.
The question we’re
looking to answer is, “Where
is your sales funnel breaking down?” In other words,
where’s the bottleneck? What’s preventing those marketing channels from
generating even more leads and sales?
The analogy here is a
hose. If you’ve ever played with a hose, then you know that you can
slow down, and even stop, the flow of water by making a kink in the
hose. I remember as a kid I used to make a kink in the hose, get close
to an unwitting friend, and then release the kink to shoot the water
out like a fire hose. :)
The kink in my example
is the bottleneck. And our job is to find these kinks and release them
so the sales can shoot into your business.
In order to find the
kinks, you need to document your entire sales funnel. By that, I mean
write down every single step in the sales process from when a person
lands on your website to when they become a paying customer. Once you
have your sales funnel mapped out, then dig into your analytics to see
the conversion rates from each step to the next.
I guarantee that if you
go through this process you’ll find steps where a high percentage of
prospects are getting clogged up and not converting to customers.
Step 3. Write
Down the Specific
Next Steps
Let’s imagine you run
an e-commerce website. Let’s say you’ve been following along here and
you identified that SEO is driving conversions but that your final
checkout page is a major bottleneck to sales. Lots of prospective
customers are adding products to their cart, clicking through to the
checkout page, but not completing their order.
Now what?
Well, the natural instinct
here is to write down a task like “fix checkout page” or “improve
checkout conversions.” Don’t worry if you already wrote that down… I
struggle with this as well.
The problem is that
those two tasks are not the very next steps to make an improvement. The
very next step is to either brainstorm with your team or a consultant
to get ideas to test. Then you’ll need to get your web developer to
create the new checkout page. And finally, you’ll need to create a
split test experiment to see if your new page statistically improves
the conversion rates of your current page.
See the difference?
On the surface, it may
not seem like much, but if you write down the specific next steps
rather than the overarching goal, then you’ll be more likely to cross
it off your “To Do” list — and improve your ROI.
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