Hi there,
One of the questions course creators have about all this funnel work is:
How do I know what to work on next?
There are so many suggestions, marketing tactics, and promises… How do you choose the one that
will bring the best results?
If you’ve asked this question before, I have some good news.
With this email, we begin the tracking & analytics email series.
(By the way, if you missed my series on running email promotions, you can go back and read about How to promote without being too salesy and aggressive and How to double your sales from every email promotion.)
It’s very
easy to lie to ourselves. And building on incorrect suppositions is a surefire way to fail.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest to fool.” Richard Feynman, Caltech physicist.
Most people don’t know what their numbers are. They don’t track them and they don’t have precise data. When I ask people, they hugely overestimate what their conversion rate is for any particular stage, if they know at all.
People
don’t know how to analyse data and use it to make data-driven decisions to improve their conversions.
You might not like this, but if you want to scale your business, numbers should be your friends.
Let me explain why...
Have you heard about the 80/20 rule? This rule tells us that something that we do is almost always more important than the
rest. It’s always true. 20% of our efforts can give us 80% of the results. If we only knew what exactly that 20% are…
There are hundreds of different tactics you could work with.
There are hundreds of different parts of a funnel you can improve.
But, how do you know which exact part you should work on next? Which one will earn
you the most money?
There is no way for you to know that if you don't have data on how well each stage of your funnel is doing.
However, if you want to figure out what to work on next, it’s extremely important to know where you are.
So you start by looking at your conversion rates. This shows you what’s going on now. But it’s not enough. You need to have benchmark data as well.
When you have both, you know where you are now and where you could be. Then after that, there’s just one more step to decide what to work on first.
When you compare your current results with the benchmark data in your industry, you can see which number is furthest from the benchmarks and is likely to make a big difference. That will help you decide what to work on.
For example, let’s say your current opt-in rate on your website is 4%. You know that in your market the average is 3.5%. Your numbers are already good, you almost certainly
can improve further, but it will be really hard. So we won’t worry about that.
Let’s imagine now you have a 0.5% opt-in rate and you know 2% is normal in your market. Well, in this case, you can potentially 4x your opt-in rate. That can make a big difference. You can have a lot more people on your email list. And it should be reasonably doable, as you’re so far below the standard. So that’s worth putting on the list of options.
In an upcoming email, I’ll explain this process in detail and show you how to decide what to work on first.
The second reason why you should track your numbers is that you can react fast if some part of your funnel breaks down.
What do I mean by this?
Sometimes, you change something in your marketing funnel and it can mess up your results without you even noticing. If you
don’t track your data, you might not realize it for ages. That’s why you should track your data at least weekly.
You can look at the numbers and review them. Most of the time you’ll review them and say “this seems okay, that seems fine”, and then occasionally you’ll find a step where you say “wait a minute, what happened here?” And then you’ll know that something needs fixing.
A client of ours changed a part of their funnel. Someone in the team changed a sign-up form to be more secure, and something broke without them realising.
Luckily, we were tracking data from each part of the funnel weekly and we were
able to spot that sign-up rate dropped significantly. With that insight, they were able to dig into it and find out what the issues were. They found that they had made the password system more secure, but it broke something else. They were then able to quickly fix the problem. Without that tracking, we wouldn’t have known there was a problem in the first place.
I hope this gives you a nice overview of why tracking is so important. Without it, you’re trying to reach your goal destination blindfolded.
Your next questions will probably be: Where do I find my benchmark data? How do I analyse my funnel in detail? If my numbers are way off compared to the benchmarks, how do I decide which one to work on first? What should the tracking sheet look like? Or should I use some specific analytics tools for that?
These are all good and important questions. I will answer all of them in the next few emails. So be ready, the answers are coming :)
Don’t forget: numb3r5 4r3 y0ur fr13nd5 :)
Thanks,
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