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- Boost Conversions Step 2: Revisit Your Conversion Funnel
In this, the second part of our short series on boosting conversions on your blog, it’s time to look at your conversion funnel.
Yesterday, the Blog Tyrant showed us how to review our offer of a paid or free product or service. Through that analysis, you should be able to pull together some detailed and valuable information about your product. That’s great, but the other aspect that the Tyrant touched on was your conversion funnel.
I want to take those ideas a step further today.
Understanding your conversion funnel
We’re talking in this series about conversions for any product or offer—so that could be a product or service you’re selling, or it could be a free subscription you offer on your site.
Whether it’s free or sold for a price, your offer has a conversion funnel. The Web Marketing Ninja showed us this one in his article, How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel for Success:
The key is that at each point in your conversion funnel, you’ll lose potential customers.
As the Blog Tyrant explained yesterday, you can use your blog stats package to review where, exactly, those losses are occurring.
And as the Web Marketing Ninja explains in How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel, the best thing to do is put measures on each point in the funnel so that you can understand what, exactly, is happening at each point in the conversion process. He says that looks at as much data on each point in the sales process as he can—and that includes bounce rates, time on page, entries and exits through the page, traffic sources, and so on.
So the conversion funnel review process might look something like this:
- Go through your site, and map each step in your conversion funnel.
- Look at your analytics work out what you’ll measure at each point in the funnel.
- Put numbers against the metrics you’ve decided to measure at each step.
Understanding the data
Once you work through this process, you’ll find yourself armed with a lot of data. How you interpret that data will go a long way toward boosting your conversions.
For example, finding that you have a high exit rate from a page in your funnel means people are leaving it—you’re losing potential conversions at this point. That’s good to know, but that information alone doesn’t tell you what you can do about it.
In working out implications of that information you may need to also look at bounce rates for the page, and where the traffic it receives is coming from, for example. This information can be a big help in making the right choices when it comes to tweaking the funnel.
For example, let’s imagine that we’re analysing the About page for ProBlogger the Book. Now this page is the second in my sales funnel—the default page is at http://probloggerbook.com/.
Most visitors go straight from that default page to Amazon or B&N. But let’s imagine that a significant percentage click through to the About page … and then exit without clicking on one of the Buy buttons, or subscribing.
If I look at the data, and all I see is that this page has a high bounce rate, I might be tempted to try a range of different strategies to fix that. But what if I look at the traffic sources and notice that a large percentage of users are arriving at the About the Book page through search engines?
The About page doesn’t have any Buy buttons above the fold, so if users are coming from a search engine, where they’ll likely also see an Amazon or B&N link in the results, they may immediately think, “Oh, this is just marketing information. I’ll click back and look at the details on Amazon—I know I can buy the book there.”
In this case, my strategy for tweaking the sales funnel will differ from the ideas I had when all I noticed was the high bounce rate. My efforts might also include improving the search rank of the default sales page for the book, if it’s appearing below the About page in the SERPs, but converting better.
As you can see, understanding the data as a whole is very important if you’re to make decisions that will have the best likelihood of positively affecting your conversion rates.
Focus on key points of loss
As you review your funnel, you’ll also need to consider where to focus your efforts to improve it.
While the data may reveal a number of areas for improvement, you’ll likely find that some will produce a much bigger bang for your buck—as the Ninja explained in this recent post. If your time is limited—and whose isn’t?—you’d be best to focus on these pages, if not exclusively, at least initially.
As you’re looking at those pages, don’t limit yourself to considering one or two factors. Often, we can become fixated on things like button size or placement, and forget about other considerations that might be negatively impacting conversions. These could include:
- headlines, sub-heads, and scannability of the content
- how we’re using images and where they’re placed
- whether the language on the page resonates with users
- the strength of your calls to action
- links to other content, including navigation links
- use of testimonials
- offers of samples
- the page’s purpose in the conversion process, and whether it meets that from a fundamental, usability standpoint.
These are just a few ideas, but consider them broadly. For example, reviewing the strength of your calls to action is on that list—but that doesn’t just mean the calls to action to buy your product.
The ProBlogger Book sales page includes subscription box. Should that remain on a low-performing page? Should it be removed? Is it likely to be diffusing the strength of my call to action or is it providing a valuable mechanism by which I’m capturing new subscribers who may not be ProBlogger regulars?
My analysis of the data, coupled with my strategy for the page and goals for the conversion funnel, should help me determine the answers here.
Match the changes to your users
A quick final point: you’re not in the dark when it comes to trying to work out what tweaks you’ll make. In a later part of this series, we’ll find out how to conduct split tests that will help you to test various incremental changes so that you can see which ones work best, and use those.
But even before you get that far, the audience research that the Blog Tyrant was talking about yesterday should give you some insight into how you can alter points in your conversion funnel to match the needs, characteristics, and expectations of the audience you’re seeking.
He mentioned, for example, that video can be useful for certain audiences—perhaps that’s something I should consider adding to my book’s About page? I know from my other data and reader feedback that my regulars love video content, so it seems like it could be a good idea…
Ready to act?
Once you’ve finished reviewing your sales funnel, you’ll have a pretty clear idea of the possibilities before you for boosting conversions. It’s time to act.
Tomorrow, Tommy Walker will step us through the changes he actually made to his own website in an effort to improve conversions, so that we can get a first-hand account of how all this research feeds into practical alterations to things like page layouts, calls to action, images, and more.
But in the meantime, I’d love to hear your tips or extra advice for reviewing conversion funnels—whether for a paid or free offer. Have you ever done it? What secrets can you share from your experiences? Let us know in the comments.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Boost Conversions Step 2: Revisit Your Conversion Funnel
Переслать - Melbourne Food and Wine Blogging Event
I’ve been excitedly sitting on this one for a while now and am relieved to finally announce a new ProBlogger event that is coming up for Melbourne Food and Wine Bloggers (and anyone else who wants to travel to Melbourne for an evening).
The event is being held in collaboration with my good friend – Shane Delia – an amazing chef and co-owner of restaurants including two of my favourites – Maha Bar and Grill and St Katherines Kew.
Shane and I have talked for some time now about organising an event for bloggers and are today releasing tickets for the first of what we hope will be a series of events for foodies.
We have lined up what we hope will be a fun and informative evening that will feature 3 delightful speakers, an insightful panel discussion and a delicious 3 course meal from the team at Maha (including wines to match each course.
Here are the event details:
- Date: Tuesday 17 July 2012
- Time: 6pm arrival
- Venue: Maha – 21 Bond St, Melbourne
- Inclusions: Event ticket with 3 course meal and wine matching (served on communal tables)
- Cost: $120 per person
Our speaker lineup for the event draws on 3 fantastic people from different areas of the food and wine writing fraternity in Melbourne. We’ve chosen a Wine writer and Food writer and a blogger. Here’s who who’ve lined up:
DAN SIMS, THE WINE GUIDE
A fresh perspective on wine writing Cool, calm and collected without pretentious frippery is how Dan likes to keep the world of wine. An award winning Sommelier and the engine room for many of The Wine Guide's clients and for their events that happen around Australia and beyond.Dan's excitement for good wine is palpable whether in front of a camera, or in front of a room full of bloggers, and his even handed approach to wine has drawn plenty of praise from the press and trade.
Dan will share his insights on how his no-nonsense approach to writing can be applied to your own blogging.
More about Dan | @dansims | Facebook

"JETSETTING JOYCE", MEL: HOT OR NOT
Successes and learnings from my food blogging journey Jetsetting Joyce started blogging in 2007 when lived in London. Back then, LDN: HOT OR NOT was a simple Blogger template with hardly any pictures and maybe one or two paragraphs about where she'd eaten, what play she'd seen, what shops she'd visited and places she stayed. It was a way of keeping in touch with family and friends and was more of a travel diary than something meant for a wider audience.When Joyce returned to Melbourne 2009 she was going to quit blogging…but found that it'd become quite an addictive habit. So MEL: HOT OR NOT was born and has continued to thrive for over 3 years with Joyce's honest and informative reviews about everything Melbourne – restaurants, bars, theatre, festivals, events, shops and businesses. All written with one decisive criteria in mind – is it HOT OR NOT?
Joyce's blogging addiction has meant she now also writes TOT: HOT OR NOT, a blog about parenting which started in August 2010 with her first pregnancy, plus a blog filled with cycle chic inspiration as part of her online bike shop CycleStyle. She fits all the blogging around her day job as an intellectual property and IT lawyer. (Yeah, she's a busy lady!)
Joyce will share her learnings and successes and how she's applied them to her blogging career.
More about Joyce | @jetsettingjoyce | Facebook

HILARY MCNEVIN, BROADSHEET, THE AGE
The art of writing a review: expressing your opinion, with context and effective, thoughtful communicationHilary McNevin worked front-of-house, managing restaurants and studying wine in both Australia and the UK for 15 years before shifting careers. She studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT and during her study and since finishing the course at the end of 2007, has freelanced for Epicure in The Age as a regular contributore and fills in for senior reviewer Larissa Dubecki on the Espresso column.Hilary has reviewed for and sub-edited The Age Good Food Guide 2008 and 2009, and continues to review for the guide. She is a reviewer for The Age Cheap Eats, The Age Good Cafe Guide, Good Food Shopping Guide and Good Bar Guide. She is the restaurant reviewer for The Moonee Valley Weekly, a Fairfax publication and is a contributing food writer for Broadsheet.com.au.
She contributes regularly to Winestate magazine and the James Halliday Wine Companion magazine and in July will begin writing Melbourne food news for Delicious magazine. Hilary had her first book Guide to Fish: Choosing and Cooking Sustainable Species published by Fairfax in October 2008.
Hilary will share her extensive experience in writing reviews, providing key "journalism" hints and tips on the fine art of review writing.
More about Hilary | @hilarymcnevin
Tickets are Limited: Get Yours Today
This evening is going to be a lot of fun. Not only will you hear from these panelists (and Shane and myself) you’ll have the opportunity to connect with 100 other Melbourne foodies (and might even get the opportunity to meet Mrs ProBlogger who is eying off a ticket too).’
Tickets for this event are limited – so register today to reserve a spot yourself and your friends (a maximum of 4 tickets per person).
PLEASE NOTE: Registration is free via eventbrite but will reserve your ticket only. Your seat at the venue will only be confirmed once payment is collected. A representative of Maha will make contact with you to confirm your payment details once you have reserved your seat via eventbrite.
View more event details and a list of attendees via http://probloggerfoodwine.eventbrite.com/.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Melbourne Food and Wine Blogging Event
Переслать - Boost Conversions Step 1: Review Your Offer
This guest post is by the Blog Tyrant.
A few weeks ago I was sitting down to dinner with my big sister, and talking about one of my web businesses.
“What’s your quotation success rate?” she asked me with a face full of pizza.
“Pretty good,” I replied, sounding—I admit—pretty stupid.
“Find out exactly what it is,” she came back.
My big sister, the psychologist-turned national-sales-leader for her real estate company, then went on to explain to me how she knows exactly how many quotes she has to send out in order to make a sale. She knows how many phone calls it takes on average, what delivery method is most successful, and when to follow up the client with a phone call or an email.
And she’s constantly trying to improve that quotation figure by getting feedback on her failures.
While she was telling me all of this a penny dropped: this quotation (or conversion) rate applies to blogging, too. Sure, knowing why people buy your product or sign up to your email list is important. But perhaps even more important than that, is this:
Find out why people don’t buy or sign up.
The first of four steps
If one of your blogging goals is to boost your conversion rates—for sales, subscriptions, downloads, or some other action—you don’t need to just consider your successes. You also need to look at your failures. Boosting conversions isn’t just about doing more of the good stuff. it’s about identifying the bad stuff, and doing less of that.
But this is just the first step in the process.
Over the next four days, ProBlogger will walk you through a process that will help you to boost conversions—for sales or signups—on your blog. In it, we’ll cover these steps:
- Review your offer.
- Revisit your conversion funnel.
- Revamp your communications.
- Run A/B tests, tweak, and refine.
It’ll be quite a ride—so I hope you’ll join us for three posts that will follow this one! But now, let’s get started, and consider the question:
Why aren’t people converting through your sign up or sales page?
Getting started
Before you can really understand your audience, your product, and where things might be going wrong, you’re going to need a few tools in hand.
- Google Analytics: If you haven’t done so already, go and install Google Analytics on your blog. It will take you all of two minutes, but it will provide you with essential data you’ll need to grow your business.
- Email marketing software: Again, everyone who takes their blogging seriously will need some form of email marketing software that works better than Feedburner. I always recommend Aweber for bloggers, as it’s easy to set up and has amazing stats for you to play with.
- A desire to understand some psychology: Yep, you read that correctly. I’ve always put an emphasis on studying psychology alongside other marketing techniques, because it really helps you to understand buyer behaviour and the psychology of desire, and to figure out what people do or don’t want.
Armed with these three things, we’re in a good position to help grow our conversions.
Conduct a conversion review
As I said, my sister knows exactly how many quotations she has to make to generate a sale. In blogging terms, she knows her conversion rate, and she’s always looking to improve it by seeking feedback from failed quotations.
So let’s look at three key questions that you can ask to better understand why your blog’s readers and visitors aren’t converting on a given offer (paid or free). Once you understand this, you’ll be in a much better position to dramatically boost your conversion rate.
Question 1: How well does my offer suit my audience?
The first thing you’ll need to do is make sure your product or free giveaway is well-matched to your audience. Pitch the wrong product to the wrong audience, and you’ll find it extremely difficult to boost conversions—that is, if you can generate any in the first place.
Let’s consider the Mercedes Benz brand as an example. This is a high-quality, luxury car brand with a higher price tag than the average motor vehicle. This means their marketing methods need to be tailored to the right audience. For example, you’ll never see and ad for Mercedes in a magazine aimed at the teen girls market. However, you might see one in a golfing magazine. Why? Because the latter is read by older men who have disposable income and a desire to communicate a certain status with their car. Obviously, teen girls don’t have either of those things.
This is fine for a offline brand, but how can you make sure your product is matched to your audience? Study your traffic stats.
This image shows a few weeks of traffic from some old guest posts I did here at ProBlogger. As you can see, the red arrow shows a post that had a bad bounce rate, and the green arrow shows a post with a better (lower) bounce rate.
As you can see, even traffic coming from the same source can vary wildly in terms of expectations and satisfaction levels with what the users find on your site. Fortunately, we have other metrics to review.
A key metric is your users’ demographics—you’ll need to know how old your blog’s users are, whether they are male or female, where they live, and so on.
While this basic information may seem elementary, you’d be surprised how often bloggers find new data hidden in their user stats—data that can point to fairly obvious changes that can help to boost conversions.
For example, if many of your blog’s readers come from an area that’s suffering high unemployment at the moment (for example, Spain), you might need to consider changing your pitch for a product to make it either seem more relevant and valuable, or more affordable to your target audience. You might consider lowering the price—so that more people can afford your product—or increasing it, to create a stronger impression of value and ensure that you get a better margin on the sales you do make.
Don’t go making any decisions yet, though! We still have some more reviewing to do.
Question 2: Are customers happy with your current offering?
The next thing you’ll need to do is to ask for feedback from satisfied and unsatisfied customers. You absolutely need to find out whether your offering is hitting the mark. While conversion statistics are one thing, they don’t give you a clear idea of what the customers who did convert actually wound up thinking of the product or service once they used it.
If you don’t seek their feedback after the point of conversion, all the hard work you do with product creation and conversion optimization could be going to waste.
Here are just a handful of the steps you can take to tap that information from your customers:
- Use Survey Monkey to survey them: It’s a good idea to occasionally send out a survey asking customers what they like and dislike about your offering (be it a free or paid offer), and inviting constructive feedback. Obviously you don’t want to keep surveying the same users, so you need to take care not to try to survey the same customers about the same offerings over and over.
- Set up an automatic email in Aweber: Aweber allows you to send out an automatic email called a Follow Up. The idea here is that after a few days of their signing up to your list (either through your subscription form, or as a result of a purchase on your site), subscribers receive and email asking whether or not they enjoyed the subscription product. If you like, you can take this opportunity to encourage them to pass it on to their friends, but in any case, be sure to ask them to email you any feedback or ideas they have to improve the offering.
- Email people who unsubscribe: Aweber also allows you to keep a list of all the people who unsubscribe from your list. It’s a really good idea to email them just once to tell them you’re sorry to see them go, and to ask why they’re leaving. Their feedback will often be a lot more honest than those who still like your stuff. While the criticism can be hard to take, this feedback can be a goldmine for understanding your offering’s shortcomings.
Now, this all sounds great, right? Well, here’s the problem: sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about. More specifically, they say one thing, but mean another. For this reason you have to be very careful about the questions you ask readers through any kind of survey. For example, if you ask a generic question, you probably get a generic—and inaccurate—answer.
“Did you like my eBook?”
“Yes it was good.”The words “good” and “yes” here tell us nothing. This feedback doesn’t mean that the user shared your offering with their friends. It doesn’t mean that it totally blew them away and they’ll be a loyal subscriber forever. It means nothing.
People have changed their careers after reading Pat Flynn’s free ebook. People share it around and talk about it constantly on his Facebook page. That’s the kind of feedback you want. And to get it, you’ll need to ask more specific questions, like these:
- Did you share the product with your friends?
- What was your favorite part of this product?
- What was your least favorite part of the product?
- What did you do differently after you read the product?
You could also considering surveying customers about the conversion funnel itself, with questions like these:
- What was it that made you want to subscribe/buy this product?
- Did you think the subscription/purchase process took a long time?
- Was it a hassle to receive the product/subscription?
- Did you have any trouble accessing the information, or using or sharing the product files?
- What did you expect to get? Did you receive it?
At least with questions like these, you’re going to get some clear feedback on which aspects of your offer work, and which don’t.
Question 3: How might you use this information to tweak your offering?
The next step is to tweak your product or offering based on the lessons you’ve learned.
Now, I’m not talking simply about matching your offer to your audience here. Rather, you need to look at ways to improve the quality and presentation of your offer, based on what your target market is interested in, and what you know is and isn’t working for the members of your current audience.
Recently on my blog we talked about whether or not the free ebook giveaway is dead or not. Most people agree that it’s not, but we all agreed that the poor quality ebook is dead. People are looking for better and better quality all the time.
This is where the psychology of marketing comes in to play. Here are two examples in which we can look at the behavior of an audience and try to better shape our offer to suit them:
- Mothers: Studies have shown that women who are mothers respond poorly to promotions and products that use hype to sell their benefits. These women are highly practical and intelligent, but they’re also tired and overworked. They just want honest, trustworthy products and landing pages that don’t “over-promote”. Women in general don’t like unrealistic marketing.
- Male teenagers: Studies have shown that male teenagers, on the other hand, are more likely to be interested in quick fixes. A generation of boys raised with video games, mobile phones, and the web generally show less patience and a greater desire for instant gratification than other market segments.
As you can see, it’s not just about aligning your offer with your market: it’s also about making sure your product pitch, and presentation to your target market.
For example, your offer might be an ebook. Great. Now, let’s imagine you’re targeting the younger male audience segment mentioned above. Tweaks you might make to your product and its pitch include:
- Using short chapter and section titles.
- Using imagery to communicate quickly wherever possible.
- Keeping the design and layout simple.
- Making sure the product delivers instantly, and communicates that it does so both in its body content and through any marketing materials.
- Using instant, easy-to-use marketing tools like video, which suits the instant-gratification needs of the target audience as well as the fact that they’ll be more likely to access the offer through a smart phone or tablet.
By this point, you should have a list of potential ideas that you can use to try to boots conversions by tweaking your offering.
Trial and continuous review
The most important thing that I learned from my sister is that we should be constantly assessing and changing our product and pitch. Trends change, competitors come along, and people’s interests shift.
You probably won’t make all the changes on your shortlist of ideas for improving your offer. That’s fine—you can test the ones you feel will give you the best impact, then check your results and consider the rest of your list (which you may have added to!) in light of those results.
How can you choose which elements to change? The feedback you obtained from existing customers, coupled with conversion and market data, should give you a push in the right direction, but often these decisions come down to your own intuition or “feel” for your target audience, and what they want, like, and need.
Don’t be afraid to change aspects of your offer, and don’t be afraid to ask people hard questions about your product. The best products in the world have all got there because of constant improvements.
Once you have your new product and offer prepared, you’ll need to tighten up your funnel to ensure you’re not leaking potential conversions. Tomorrow, Darren will take us through that process.
But for now, I’d be interested to hear what you’ve found out about why readers aren’t signing up for your product or service offering. And if you made tweaks to it, what did you change? Share your stories with us in the comments.
The Blog Tyrant is a 26 year old Australian guy who plays video games at lunch time and sells blogs for $20,000 a pop.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Boost Conversions Step 1: Review Your Offer
Переслать - Conversion Optimization: Our New Series
Of all the topics that bloggers ask me about, conversion optimization is among those at the top of the list.
All of us have conversion goals of some sort. It doesn’t matter whether you’re aiming to make money blogging, or you’re in it purely for pleasure, you’ll probably want to grow a subscriber list at the very least! Some of the blogger’s most common conversion goals include:
- grow signups to an email subscription list
- attract Facebook fans and Twitter followers
- boost downloads of free products, whitepapers, and samples
- increase sales of products and services.
These days, competition within the blogosphere is only getting stronger, and readers are only getting more savvy. Most of us have good data on our blog usage, but of course boosting conversions isn’t just a matter of statistics.
From your audience to your offer—and everything in between—there’s a lot to consider. So, for the rest of the week, we’re dedicating ProBlogger to the challenge of boosting conversions, with a series that’s been put together by some of your favorite experts.
This series assumes that you have some kind of conversion goal, and some tools in place to make that happen—even something as simple as a Sign Up form in your sidebar. We’ll take you through four steps to improving those conversions, as we look at:
- Reviewing your offer.
- Revisiting your conversion funnel.
- Revamping your communications.
- Running A/B tests, then tweaking and refining your marketing.
We’ll be publishing just one post a day, since each one is fairly detailed, and you’ll probably need some time to digest them. The first one, by The Blog Tyrant, will publish later today, so don’t miss it.
Before that, I’d like to hear from you. How are your conversions looking right now? What tactics have you used to improve them? What’s worked—and what hasn’t? Share your experiences with us in the comments … and keep an eye out for the first part of our series a bit later today.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Conversion Optimization: Our New Series
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