Growing the Funnel
In my last post I talked about how you can use the funnel concept in marketing as a measure of your success. Fundamentally the way the funnel works is that it allows you to increase your performance (read ‘make more money’) by either changing the amount of stuff coming into the funnel, or by increase the conversion rate.
Firstly we’ll talk about the conversion rate. The most common sell page I see on the web today is a long page full of testamonials, audio snippets, video recordings, teasers and guarantees that what ever you might be will be worth it. There is a train of thought that basically implies that because there are so many of these styles of pages on the web that they must work. And even though I’ve never actually used one I’ve read about their great success in a number of places.
In our last example we identified a conversion rate of 0.1%. Using a better selling page you have the capacity to sell more to the same amount of people visiting your website, and remember even small increases can have a substantial affect on your income. You may find that fine tuning your sell page you might be able to increase your conversion rate so that 10 in 1,000 people buy your product. Using the formula we worked out last time this means a conversion rate of 1% (10/1000), much more respectable.
There are of course many ways to increase your conversion rate, and a better ’sell’ page is only one. The problem with is that you may find that there is a definite ceiling to your conversion rate. It’s rare to find anyone doing over 5%, and near impossible to do anything over 30%. So don’t expect to go much over the originally discussed range of about 3%. Once you get there you may as well stop trying to increase, or more to the point concentrate on another part of the funnel, as you’ll find that your efforts simply don’t pay off anymore.