Conversion Rate Optimization Archives - Page 2 of 10

Pipeline acceleration: Why it matters and how to get started

When many people hear “pipeline acceleration,” they might initially think it’s strictly a sales term. We typically speak of pipelines as a sales concept. But pipeline acceleration is a critical business area requiring collaboration across departments for success.

From Meta to Google to Coca-Cola, the most successful companies worldwide have a long history of creating disparate teams and putting them together to achieve important goals. In 2012, Google even conducted an internal study codenamed “Project Aristotle” to study the dynamics of groups within a larger company. Some of its most important inventions have come from unexpected teams or individuals working on something outside their main responsibility.

Pipeline acceleration is one of the most important collaborative projects any organization can take on. When done properly, it can help a business achieve its revenue goals more efficiently and help marketing and sales team members work together to create less waste and redundant work.

What is Pipeline Acceleration?

To summarize, pipeline acceleration means moving prospects through the sales funnel more quickly. It’s sometimes called “sales acceleration” or “closing speed,” but the central idea is the same: getting a prospect from a qualified lead to a paying client faster.

As we mentioned above, pipeline acceleration isn’t just something for your sales reps to be thinking about. Research firm Forrester says the intent is to improve lead management “from cold to close,” but also that it “demands full joint and sales and marketing involvement, commitment, alignment and participation from beginning to end.” That means your marketing team has to take ownership of pipeline acceleration, too, even if many elements are ultimately under the domain of the sales team. For example, the sales team is typically the only part of the company that holds direct meetings with prospects, even though many other people may be involved in helping to set the agenda for that meeting or creating assets for the salesperson to use at the meeting.

Should you even bother with pipeline acceleration? Yes – for several reasons.

The Benefits of Pipeline Acceleration

You don’t have to look hard to see the obvious benefits of moving prospects through a sales pipeline more quickly – when you start experiencing greater revenue and more satisfied customers, the advantages make themselves swiftly known!

Beyond the obvious benefits of closing more deals faster, pipeline acceleration also helps create shared goals and outcomes for different team members at your company. Working towards the same goals builds a sense of unity in the organization, even if your team operates on different projects with various tasks.

Pipeline accelerations also create a deeper understanding of your ideal buyer persona. When you have people from diverse backgrounds and job functions looking to help a prospect reach a decision more quickly, it tends to create a deeper, more well-rounded understanding.

Finally, successful pipeline acceleration will increase communication in general among your firm. Since the process requires such a high degree of collaboration between departments and job functions, your team members will develop a natural rapport and working cadence with one another that will be easy to carry over to other projects. Understanding how coworkers collaborate is important for organizations of every size, even a small startup with only a few people.

You might think communication is better at smaller companies, but counterintuitively there are many examples of large organizations communicating better than smaller ones. Bigger companies tend to have more streamlined processes and workflows that can naturally guide a team into successful collaboration.

Understanding how coworkers collaborate is important for organizations of every size, even a small startup with only a few people. Share on X

These are just a few of the many reasons to implement pipeline acceleration. If you’re convinced it’s important but unfamiliar with how to get started, the next section is for you.

Implementing or Developing Your Pipeline Acceleration Program

Like any other initiative, the first step is taking inventory of where you are currently. What steps have your sales and marketing team taken to move prospects down the funnel faster? What about other departments? In this stage, try not to judge progress or worry about where you are. You want to get a sense of previous measures and their results.

If your audit has determined you are fairly early in the process of pipeline acceleration, that’s okay – it just means you may have to start with a more simplistic approach. Consider steps like holding joint meetings between departments, creating a few shared goals, or even producing an activity you can complete together.

If you’re a bit further along your journey to implement pipeline acceleration at your company, consider the tips below:

Create a living set of guidelines shared across the appropriate departments. Doing this is relatively easy nowadays with the several collaborative team platforms available, from Notion to Slack to Sharepoint. This compilation of guidelines and processes can serve as an internal wiki, helping your team document the pipeline acceleration processes but also allowing them to improve their written communication skills.
Pay close attention to metrics before and after implementing various initiatives to help promote pipeline acceleration. The numbers and data you gather should come from the same places so you can understand how it has changed based on the steps you took. This clues you into the results of your pipeline acceleration so you can better understand what is and isn’t working.
It’s about the client first. Much of the advice in this article has been about what to do from an internal perspective. In analyzing these ideas, it can be easy to lose the forest for the trees can be easy. You must always consider your understanding and communication with prospects and clients. All of the pipeline acceleration work you do should focus on learning how to better meet prospects’ needs, thereby getting them to a sales decision more quickly.

Final Thoughts on Pipeline Acceleration for Companies

It’s easy to come across an idea like “pipeline acceleration” and assume that it’s too complicated for your organization to implement or something that you’ll get to eventually but don’t have the time to focus on.

But even if you’re a relatively small company in the earliest stages of your growth journey, closing deals more quickly is critical. It will help your business get closer to meeting tangible business goals and establish a culture of communication and collaboration. That’s a worthy goal to pursue, even if your business is only a handful of people – small companies often lack the formal guidelines around communication and business initiatives that are present at larger organizations.

Looking to learn more about pipeline acceleration or get some expert help with incorporating it into your business? Our team at FunnelEnvy is ready to help. We’ve got many years of combined experience with funnel optimization, CRO, and other important elements of pipeline acceleration across several industries, from tech to healthcare to manufacturing.

To learn more about working with us and see if we’re a good fit, please fill out this short quiz.

By Raj C|2023-07-13T06:39:58-07:00July 24th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

4 Strategies for Upgrading Your Content Marketing in 2023

In the middle of 2023, it’s safe to say content marketing is no longer the innovative, groundbreaking strategy it was ten or even five years ago. According to recent research, nearly 70% of companies plan to increase their content marketing budgets this year.

And while it’s likely too late to win the first-mover advantage in content marketing (unless your industry is very niche or specialized), producing higher-quality content is arguably more lucrative than ever.

That’s because the massive increase in spending and strategy on content marketing has come partially as a response to the jump in buyers consuming content to help them along the buyer’s journey. From blog posts to industry publications and media properties, business buyers in almost every field are using content to help them evaluate options and better understand their needs.

The secret to success for marketers is to focus on the needs of your audience. Too many businesses treat content marketing like an obligation, churning out four blog posts a month because they have to. If you want to make your content better resonate with the right people, start with the steps below.

Too many businesses treat content marketing like an obligation, churning out four blog posts a month because they have to. Share on X

Assess Platform Choices

Most companies that engage with content marketing follow a similar pattern: they choose one or two platforms to create and publish content, then never think about them again. It’s easy to get caught into this day-to-day routine, but it’s vital to continually think about the places your company is leveraging content marketing.

New social media platforms and communication tools release every day. And while not all of them will be worth the time and effort, some might be. For example: when TikTok first launched, many companies doubted whether or not short-form videos featuring lots of music and dancing would be effective for marketing – especially those in B2B industries. But years later, TikTok is a popular place for all kinds of content, from the consumer ads you might expect to advice for CPAs and accounting firms.

We’re not suggesting you add new platforms to your marketing once a month or once a quarter. We recommend you keep an ear to the ground so you know about new media that might fit your content marketing well before your competitors.

Consider the Human Element

We’ve used people, emotions, and other parts of the human experience in marketing for centuries – remember the famous carousel scene from the TV show “Mad Men”? In it, a team of executives from Kodak suggests naming their new slide projector “the wheel” because of its shape. But Don Draper looks deeper to understand that consumers don’t care about the product’s shape; they care about the nostalgia it creates upon viewing old photos.

We often get objections from clients and prospects that sell to other businesses: “Nostalgia is great, but I’m selling software for specialized manufacturers. What does that have to do with humans?” Remember that no matter how dry or industrial your product seems, there’s always a way to connect to humans because they’re the ones ultimately making the buying decision.

One of the best ways to help you incorporate more of a human touch into your content marketing is to interview previous clients and ask them how their situation changed. Your product or service likely had a quantifiable impact on their business, affecting the people working there. Depending on your relationship with the clients you speak with and the nature of the conversation, you could publish the conversation as a case study in audio or video format.

Plan a Pivot Away From Personal Data Marketing

Over the last decade or so, the world of digital advertising has followed a relatively straightforward model. Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook collect data about the people using their platforms, then sell companies on the ability to use that data to maximize profits. While this model raked in billions of dollars in advertising money, it also created an unpleasant situation where companies needed to lean on an intimate knowledge of search and social media users to sell to them more effectively.

In the last three or four years, signs have emerged that this model is starting to disappear. In late 2021, Facebook (now Meta) announced they would no longer offer “sensitive” ad targeting categories like race, health conditions, and specific political ideas. Similarly, in a major iOS update from 2021, Apple required apps to ask permission to track user data, a request many users denied.

The writing is on the wall: in the coming years, third-party personal data collected by advertisers will no longer be the gold mine of advertising it might have been in the early 2010s. If you’ve been relying a lot on advertising data or a similar source, you need to consider how to pivot your strategy away from this resource. User data will always be available, and this shift won’t happen overnight, but it’s still critical to prepare now so you aren’t caught off-guard by something accelerating this trend.

Think About User Intent

One trend in the current era of content marketing is optimizing for user intent. In 2023, there’s so much content out there for almost every industry that the biggest challenge for both B2B and B2C buyers is finding out which kinds of content will help them meet their professional needs. It’s fantastic if your site has a great content library, but it isn’t living up to its potential if you don’t organize it well.

In a recent article for the Content Marketing Institute, strategy chief Robert Rose points out that organizing content by “e-books, white papers, videos, etc.” asks them to choose the kind of experience they want before knowing the topic. Instead of this traditional method of organization that often results in challenges for first-time users, take a deeper approach to your content’s organization and accessibility by grouping it by customer intent.

And if you’re unsure where to start when grouping content by intent, try applying the pillar strategy to content you create for two or three of your most common buyer scenarios – copy them exactly from an existing client, if you need. Start with the buyer’s situation as your pillar foundation, and expand from there.

Last Word on Updating Your Content Marketing Plans

Even in the buttoned-up industrial sector, today’s internet is noisier than ever. Your content marketing strategy of producing a set number of monthly posts is a great start, but it’s not enough to help you reach the top of your field regarding content. To truly reach your intended audience, your content has to focus on their needs and meet them on the platforms they’re already comfortable with.

Are you interested in expert advice on improving your content marketing plan or developing a new one? Our team at FunnelEnvy is ready to help. Just click here to fill out a short quiz so we can learn more about how we might be able to help take your content game – and other elements of your digital marketing – to the next level.

By Raj C|2023-06-14T07:58:04-07:00June 26th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

The 4 Top CRO Tips For 2023

It may have taken a couple of decades to perfect the modern internet, but nowadays, technology is getting more advanced by the day. Recently, we’ve been hearing a lot about how AI and blockchain will revolutionize how we do business. It’s critical to stay current on these developments as they relate to your business.

But at the same time, many of the strategies doled out on how to respond to advancing technology look surprisingly similar to “the old way.” Often, tech just asks us to use existing principles of sales, marketing, and business with a new platform or tool.

In this article, we’re diving into four ways to think about conversion rate optimization (CRO) given everything we know about how technology is advancing this year – and beyond.

Revisit Your SEO Practices

We don’t always associate search engine optimization (SEO) with conversion rate optimization. The premise of SEO is getting new traffic to your site, after all. Smart marketers know they should consider user intent long before someone even lands on their page.

Smart marketers know they should consider user intent long before someone even lands on their page. Share on X

That’s because the more people who get to your page, the better – as long as they have the right intentions. Having good enough SEO to attract visitors who aren’t interested in your offering might produce some good vanity metrics but ultimately won’t help you drive business goals. To rectify this issue, you need to consider SEO to attract the right traffic.

You can assess the way you incorporate keywords on different kinds of pages to see if it still makes sense for your intended audience. Don’t forget to examine your fundamental keyword strategy, too. Since most SEO success often comes from going for longtail keywords, if your target audience has changed, your longtail keywords may also change.

Audit the Forms in Your Funnel

Form optimization is a long, dynamic subject matter that could fill up its own blog post (or a whole series). But the foundation of it is the same as it’s always been: go through all appropriate forms and make sure there are no obstacles, distractions, or errors that arise. Ideally, you can break this down into two parts: first, audit your forms internally from a technical perspective, making sure they work with the right software and functions in your business – like a CRM or marketing automation tool.

The second part of the audit is about your users’ perspective. If possible, try to get a person outside your internal marketing team, preferably a prospective customer or someone with similar characteristics. You’ll typically get more cooperation with this form testing when you offer to compensate participants, even if it’s a simple thing like a small discount or virtual gift card.

Here are a few questions to keep in mind as you go through the testing process:

Are people completing your forms in the amount of time you expected?
Is relevant information on form pages easy enough to find?
Are any parts of the form unclear or confusing?
Does the form’s language resonate with users?

Test Load Times and Technical Elements

Load time is a significant factor in getting people to visit your site and convincing them to convert. According to statistics by Google, an increase in load time from 1 second to 5 seconds can increase a page’s bounce rate by 90%. If a critical page of your funnel is loading slowly, it can hinder your marketing efforts.

There are plenty of tools available that can help marketers improve load speed and related technical slowdowns. Google’s PageSpeed test is a good starting point – based on your results there, you’ll either want to develop a plan to cut down on elements slowing down your page or ensure protocols are in place to keep the page loading at optimal speed.

Depending on the nature of the technical challenges you’re running into, you may require outside help. Certain changes to your domain settings may need to be handled by your hosting provider, while more advanced changes to the site itself could require specialized help from a developer.

Diversify Funnel Media Types

Are you using only long-form content and headers on every page throughout your funnel? Does your main landing page use the same video you’ve had for years? Unless your forms and funnel elements are already converting at a very high level, it’s always valuable to improve your content by diversifying its delivery. While prospects in certain industries may be more predisposed to specific kinds of content, no rule says you can’t switch it up.

Video content is becoming increasingly popular in many industries, particularly with the rise in popularity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels. There are also infographics, audio presentations, photos, etc. You might even want to consider the presentation of your content with elements like parallax scrolling and carousels. Even if you aren’t drastically changing the information you include when you make these adjustments, you’ll find it could still add a significant bump to your conversion rate – especially on pages and funnel elements that may have been struggling previously.

As you look to add new kinds of media to your mix, remember that you’ll need to track everything in some way. If you’re adding a new kind of video, for example, be sure you have the right software tools to track important metrics and incorporate them into the rest of your analytics.

Last Thoughts on CRO for 2023 and Beyond

The tools we use to conduct business have come a long way from the pen, paper, and snail mail days. Startups can access a wealth of information about people they’ve never met or interacted with. Technology is capable of helping a company achieve some truly inspiring things today.

Yet despite all the advancements, many of the fundamentals about selling remain strong; possibly even strongerr than in the pre-internet days. When you receive messages, emails, and notifications at every turn, the fundamentals stand out as even more important now. The core tenet of conversion rate optimization is getting more people to raise their hands and signify interest in your product or service. To do that, you need to attract more of the right people, remove technical blocks that prevent them from converting, and experiment with different types of content that can better educate them on why they need your offering.

Looking for some help implementing these or other CRO tips into your existing marketing campaigns? At FunnelEnvy, our optimization specialists have spent years studying what it takes to get people interested in our clients’ products and services. We’ll bring an objective eye to your digital marketing efforts while using our decades of combined experience to help you overcome any challenges you may be facing.

To get started, just click here to fill out a short quiz that will help us learn more about your organization and how we may be able to help you meet your marketing goals.

By Raj C|2023-05-03T22:23:27-07:00May 15th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

How to Incorporate UX Principles into B2B Funnels

There’s something of a paradox happening in many business marketing circles today: everyone wants to ensure their funnels are well-optimized for the user experience, but relatively few marketers can tell you what user experience (UX) actually means!

The truth is, there’s a good reason for this paradox: UX is a huge umbrella term that can encompass several different things to many other groups and individuals. This article will focus on some of the UX concepts most relevant to B2B marketing funnels. The key to successfully incorporating these ideas is thinking about how they may apply to your funnels and marketing campaigns.

Let’s dive in.

Incorporate as Much Feedback as Possible

According to their definition, The Norman Nielsen Group says user experience “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” The key term there is “user.” Some misguided or inexperienced marketers might believe they can optimize their user experience without input from their prospects. This approach simply isn’t possible if you want to maximize the improvement of your funnel UX.

For the best results, remember the idea of a specific audience and diverse methodology. In other words, you should have a highly detailed target persona already mapped out before you seek feedback from anyone – otherwise, you’re just wasting everyone’s time. Be as specific as possible about the kind of people you want to take UX information from because this data will ultimately shape your product or service’s development.

Once you’ve settled on a specific type of audience, do your best to offer them several methods of providing input on your funnel and other marketing elements. In an ideal situation, you can build intimate relationships with prospects by creating a community centered around their characteristics and business objectives. Think about what HubSpot did to grow its Inbound.org community, a forum for marketers to share experiences and tactics for the inbound methodology. At its peak, the site was bringing in over 300,000 visitors per month.

Consider building a community within your customer group, even if it’s on a smaller scale. In the era of remote work, plenty of tools are available to bring people together, including Slack and Discord. You can use a more traditional forum-based system for your community – whatever fits best into your operating methods and your customers’ preferred ways of learning about potential business solutions.

Consider building a community within your customer group, even if it’s on a smaller scale. Share on X

Think About Your Microcopy

Adobe defines “microcopy” as “tiny tidbits of copy found on websites, applications, and products.” You probably run into dozens of examples of microcopy every day – think about form fields, button text, disclaimers at the bottom of a page, headlines on popular articles, etc. Even the captions on your images can technically be considered microcopy.

These items may seem pretty small individually, but taken together, they can have a severe impact on the perception of your funnel by users. We already know headlines are important, given statistics indicating that an average user only reads about 20% of the content on any given website. You can find similar studies on the importance of key microcopy within your funnel, such as the call to action found on a button at the end of a form.

While your specific approach may vary depending on the type of microcopy you’re looking to optimize, generally speaking, it’s wise to eliminate as much as possible: the shorter, the better. Most of your prospects don’t have time for unclear or lengthy instructions. Be concise and direct with your microcopy.

Review Your Funnel for Unnecessary Elements

As marketers, there tends to be an obsession with adding the next “thing” that will make your stack even better. In describing his 1980 Los Angeles Lakers team that failed to defend its championship, the legendary coach and executive Pat Riley coined the term “disease of more.” Each player wanted more accolades, money, and playing time, to the point where it started harming the collective team.

Thinking about this in a marketing context, we see parallels to software, email scripts, video courses, new form options, etc. There are lots of shiny “widgets” we can add or tweak with the idea that it will improve our funnel. In reality, several of these add-ons may not be necessary to make prospects convert. Some of them may even negatively impact your funnel’s conversion rate.

One of the best things you can do to optimize your funnel’s UX is to go through the entire thing (start to finish) and see if you can identify unnecessary things. Do your best to put yourself in the shoes of a prospect, trying not to think of it as a marketer. Think about forms, text, images, menu items, footers, headers – anything and everything should be considered. The fewer elements you have on the page, the more likely it will push visitors to the result you desire.

Even with this mental exercise, fully adopting your prospect’s mindset may be challenging. It may be better to ask a trusted customer or outside consultant to give you accurate insights.

Test Constantly and Seek Outside Perspective

Whether you incorporate these or other tactics to improve user experience, it’s important to remember the fundamental tenet of conversion rate optimization (CRO): always test your changes. Collecting data that shows the performance of a new strategy or idea in your funnel builds a concrete foundation from which you can understand what’s working and what isn’t. UX ideas can change quickly, but data will ground your funnel in the specific concepts that get results.

We also suggest that you seek perspective beyond yourself and, if possible, beyond your entire organization. As much as you can try to embody the mindset of your ideal prospect, you’ll never fully be able to get there simply because you aren’t that person. Even if you are a doctor-turned-marketer offering a product or service to the same kind of doctors, you still have the mental experience of developing and selling that offering, which colors your judgment and beliefs.

The best way to overcome this challenge is to get outside help with your UX optimization. Even if you don’t have the means (or desire) to hire an outside contractor to help you, there are options to get an external opinion. You might consider reaching out to a loyal customer, as well as some newer customers, for help evaluating the current elements in your funnel and any ideas you are thinking about implementing.

Of course, working with a group of experts with years of collective experience working on UX improvements for clients can also be helpful. We’ve helped startups and software companies in several industries increase their conversion rates by making their funnels more user-friendly and accessible so that prospects only see what they need.

If you’re interested in getting some UX assistance from the FunnelEnvy team, click here to fill out a short questionnaire, learn more about our pricing and determine if we’d be a good fit to work together.

By Raj C|2023-01-25T21:39:06-08:00February 6th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

How to Optimize Your Funnel for Today’s Generation of B2B Decision Makers

Technology, especially digital tools like email, electronic signatures, and marketing automation, has significantly impacted our business operations. But one of the more underrated elements of business change is the evolution of the people involved. Every generation is different from the previous one, and while you shouldn’t hold preconceived notions about individuals solely because of their age, it is possible to draw broad conclusions about age groups as a whole.

In today’s B2B tech and software world, many buyers are from the millennial age range – born between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Studies have shown that this group has a distinct preference for a few specific styles of sales and marketing. Generally, incorporating these concepts into your funnels can help even if you aren’t specifically targeting a millennial prospect.

Self-service

One of the nice things about the digital era is that it has removed several time constraints that may have previously restricted business transactions. If a prospect desires, they can load a company’s website at midnight and learn about their offering’s important features and benefits. In previous eras of business where buyers relied on suppliers to learn about a potential product or service, this model wasn’t possible.

According to research, many buyers want to do business precisely this way. Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Survey reported that the number of self-directed sales interactions in a typical transaction has now surpassed the number of human interactions. Other data shows meetings with potential suppliers now represent a relatively small portion of the B2B purchasing process: Gartner research says B2B buyers spend only 17% of the purchasing process on meetings with potential vendors.

It may not always be possible to show off everything your service or product can do in a way that facilitates self-service, but it’s an important ideal to endeavor to meet. In fact, buyers may get frustrated or abandon your site entirely if you don’t have the right information accessible to them whenever they want it.

Personalization

Not only do buyers want to be able to access sales information at any time, but they also have a strong desire for a customized buying process. Accenture reports that over 7 out of 10 B2B buyers want a more personalized, “consumer-like” purchasing process. This customization can manifest itself in several ways, but the foundation is always the same: a deeper understanding of your prospect’s buying journey. You must be more aware of each prospect’s specific challenges, needs, and biggest concerns throughout the purchasing process.

Buyers may get frustrated or abandon your site entirely if you don’t have the right information accessible to them whenever they want it. Share on X

Another reason personalization is essential is the increasing quantity of decision-makers involved with B2B purchases today. As budgets tighten and hiring slows in uncertain economic conditions, companies are more frequently assembling buying groups to ensure they spend their dollars wisely. More people involved in buying creates a greater demand for personalized content throughout your funnel.

Finally, remember to include a personal touch in each funnel stage. From top-funnel content like blog posts and white papers to your final product demonstrations or purchase negotiations, it’s critical to stay mindful of your prospects’ needs. Understanding their desires requires a skillful blend of early-stage communication and consistent research about your audience.

Responsive Design

Making sure every element of your funnel can be viewed and consumed properly on all devices is vital because of prospect tendencies. Certain studies show that over 4 in 10 B2B buyers use mobile devices during the purchase process. Consuming content is typically one of the primary uses for mobile devices, though, in certain industries or segments, consumers might also use them for communication with suppliers.

Another reason you should ensure your website and all other parts of your funnel load correctly on mobile devices: it’s essential for technical elements of your marketing. A website that loads on mobile devices is critical for search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is also a significant element of most B2B marketing campaigns today. In other words, if your page doesn’t load on an array of mobile devices – especially tablets and smartphones – you risk alienating your prospects and negatively impacting your visibility on search engines.

Form a Human Connection

This tip is especially applicable for persuading B2B buyers of all generations – though some evidence suggests creating personal relationships is even more important with millennial and Gen Z purchasers. Of course, a buyer needs to obtain a service that fulfills their company’s objective, but beyond that, today’s buyers want to feel a more human connection with their suppliers. It’s part of why many purchasers today – both in consumer and business – emphasize spending money with companies that align with their worldview and contribute to solving significant global problems.

You don’t have to offer a cutting-edge software solution to solve a grand problem like climate change to be more human. There are plenty of ways to incorporate personal relationships into more conventional types of business. One easy tip is to try and schedule in-person or video meetings whenever possible, as opposed to communicating via phone or email. These relationships make creating a rapport with prospects much easier, which is especially important for most B2B sectors.

Implementation Tips for Funnel Optimization

Now that you have a better understanding of the specific elements to incorporate into your funnel, it’s vital to take some time to consider how you can use this information in your own funnel. The first thing to know is that it’s impossible to do everything at once – you shouldn’t rush to make sure you meet all of the requirements for the current generation of B2B buyers. Whatever steps you take to make your funnel more appealing, put your company’s authentic spin on it. Don’t try to be something you aren’t just because you think it might broaden your audience. That approach often backfires, alienating your core customer group who appreciates your service for what you do and don’t provide.

Finally, we suggest incorporating technical benchmarks to help determine whether or not these changes were successful. It’s easy to throw out broad suggestions like, “we need to personalize our content to attract the right audience.” But when you can quantify the improvements made with a statement like, “after personalizing our content, the conversion rate on our funnel’s main landing page increased by 6%,” it offers much more value when it comes to informing the rest of your marketing strategy.

Are you looking to get some assistance shaping your funnel to be more in line with the current generation of buyers? The team at FunnelEnvy can assist. We have lots of experience helping clients tighten up their funnels to increase conversion optimization rate (CRO) and bring more success to their marketing efforts. We’ve helped businesses in every sector modernize their funnels to get attention from their target audience.

To find out more about FunnelEnvy pricing and what we might be able to offer, click here to fill out a short quiz that will help us learn more about your needs.

By Raj C|2022-12-15T15:54:03-08:00December 26th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Personalization Strategies to Accelerate Conversion Rate

Once companies have established a functional system for marketing, personalization is typically the next big leverage point to increase their return on investment. Successful personalization can have a significant positive impact on conversion rate and client satisfaction. But how should you implement this idea – what’s the best way to tailor your marketing to the different segments of your audience?

Below are a few essential personalization strategies that can improve your funnel’s efficiency and make your audience feel like you genuinely understand their needs and concerns.

Update Your Personas

Before personalizing something for a specific audience, you must understand them. Most companies don’t make it a regular habit to review and update their buyer personas. A deep understanding of personas is vital if you want to succeed with personalization. Take some time to refresh your knowledge of each buyer persona you’ll be targeting. It may reinforce what you already know, but in many cases, you’ll uncover new trends or ideas related to a specific segment that might help with personalization. For example, is there a significant new industry regulation that one of your personas must now consider as they make decisions?

Even seemingly minor factors can provide insights that translate to more successful marketing. According to HubSpot, addressing concerns on a landing page can increase conversions by as much as 80%. Best of all, the information you learn will be applicable across different funnels and campaigns in the future.

Get Input From Users

It’s always easy to speculate in a vacuum about what users want or how they prefer to receive information. But the best way to understand your target audience is to hear it directly from them. That means talking to current and previous clients about a few significant concerns, including:

What are their biggest challenges at work?
Have any of those challenges changed since they started as a client?
What would make your job easier for the next month/quarter/year?
How helpful have you found other solutions in our industry?

Notice that these questions are more general inquiries about their work and business functions and don’t have anything to do with the specific nature of your offering. While getting feedback from your users about particular points of your service or product is always important, asking them for feedback about your product or service while requesting updated details about their professional needs can be overwhelming.

User surveys are valuable for personalization, but you must keep them concise and tightly focused. Share on X

Beyond that, offering some reward or compensation to users who provide feedback that enhances your personalization efforts can also be helpful. It shows you value their time and the insights they provide, even if it’s just a percentage discount or a small gift card. At the very least, you should explain how you’ll use their feedback to make your offering better and more helpful to users like them.

Source Data From Different Business Functions

Many marketing teams face a similar challenge: siloed data. Instead of understanding the lifecycle of a customer from prospect through to purchase and retention, they can only interpret the needs and concerns of prospects through the lens of marketing actions – whether or not they convert, how long they stay on a website, their job titles, etc. The problem with this approach is that it ignores crucial elements of the customer journey that are vital to the understanding necessary for personalization. Customer interactions outside of marketing can provide a richer picture of what they are looking for from your offering.

For example, let’s say you provide a software solution that helps mortgage companies streamline their internal operations. It’s valuable to know what kind of landing page, emails, and advertisements will get the attention of prospects and convert them into subscribers or customers of your business. Suppose you can access reports on their interactions with customer service or data on which areas of your tool they spend the most time. In that case, you can use this information to personalize marketing messages in your funnel further.

Focus on Key Conversion Points

When personalizing your marketing funnel, some areas are more critical than others. For example, personalization matters on a confirmation page that appears after a user converts, but it’s essential to landing page content that helps convince visitors to take the conversion action.

As you build a strategy for improving your funnel’s personalization, you want to emphasize high-leverage points that give you the most return on the time and money invested. In some of these areas, a few small tweaks in your content and visual design can be responsible for exponential growth in conversions.

What are some of the critical areas to think about when it comes to conversions? It varies depending on your offering and funnel, but the most common ones we work with on client engagements include:

Landing page forms, including things like headlines, body copy, and field text. An easy solution here is running A/B tests that pit one version of a page against another, but there are plenty of other options for improvement if you have the right data.
Social media ads that target your audience on networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms. These are important because they are often the first interaction prospective customers have with your business. A successful ad will improve brand awareness and drive conversions towards your goal.
Drip emails that nurture clients and prospects towards signing up for your service or purchasing a product or other offering. In most B2B sales cycles, prospects will want to spend some time getting to know you before even agreeing to schedule a meeting – let alone committing to a significant, high-priced purchase. If appropriately composed with the correct elements (subject line, preview text, and body content), drip emails can be one of your most effective sales tools.

Final Thoughts on Personalization

Even in niche B2B markets that don’t represent some of the fastest-growing sectors in the world, professionals responsible for business buying decisions face a lot of noise and uncertainty. Faced with many different options and marketing messages on various platforms, buyers have no choice but to focus entirely on the solutions that seem best for their specific needs.
While it can be harder for marketers to break through to prospects and pique their interests, the scenario also creates an opportunity. A well-calibrated message that speaks to prospects’ needs and pain points can cut through a lot of that noise and resonate immediately with the right audience. That means increased conversion rates, more significant revenues, and ultimately, a more satisfied customer base that stays with you for longer.

Looking for some help from conversion rate optimization specialists on personalization and how to apply it to your funnel? Fill out this quick quiz to see if our services might be a good fit for your requirements.

By Raj C|2022-08-08T05:35:44-07:00August 8th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

4 Simple Lead Form Optimization Tips

If your marketing campaigns were a military, lead forms would be the infantry. They are on the ground in the fight for more leads and conversions. Lead forms are the “tip of the spear” for a conversion campaign. If your forms aren’t in good shape, you’ll struggle to meet your marketing goals, putting a damper on revenue and constricting company growth.

Some optimization steps are relatively easy to implement if you want to get your forms in better shape. Starting with this low-hanging fruit is a great way to refresh a campaign that was once successful but has stopped performing to its previous level or as a foundation for reviewing a new campaign before it’s finalized for launch.

Here are four easy strategies to improve your lead forms to increase conversions:

Minimize Friction

When you think about friction, you might imagine tires on a rough road or a marble sliding down a chute. In physics, friction is the resistance a surface encounters when moving over another surface. In a lead form, “friction” is anything that stops a user from filling out your form.

How do you minimize friction? Here are a few suggestions from HubSpot, with additional insights about each point:

Remove extra navigation on the page with your form. Having a standard navigation menu makes it too easy for someone to get distracted while they are trying to fill out your lead form. Even if they don’t, why give them the temptation? Most conversion forms have either no navigation menu options or a single link or button that takes users back to the home page or previous form.
Use precise language in your form. It’s a shame to put in all the work required to attract a lead to your website, only for that person to leave your page without converting because you used confusing language that they don’t understand. Make sure all parts of your writing are clear and concise, from the body copy on your website to the form fields themselves. When in doubt, it’s always best to use fewer short words than a longer, more complicated one. You can use an online tool like Hemingway to grade your page’s written content and ensure it’s understandable for the people visiting the site.
Make forms shorter whenever possible. There shouldn’t be a single unnecessary field that prospects need to fill out to complete your form, especially if they complete it to download a resource or schedule an appointment with someone on your team.

There are many other great resources for conversion rate optimization online – check out sites like Shopify and CrazyEgg for more details about optimizing your forms and other conversion elements.

Use Multi-Step Forms

“Wait,” you might be thinking, “I thought I was supposed to keep my forms as short as possible! Doesn’t using multiple steps in a form contradict this idea?” It may seem that way at first glance. However, if you spend enough time marketing online, you’ll understand that some forms must be completed fully – there’s no way of getting around it. A common example in the ecommerce world is a customer information form that includes payment and shipping information. Another example might be setting an appointment to meet with someone on your team. You wouldn’t want the location or timing of the appointment lost because of an error or oversight on your form.

If you spend enough time marketing online, you’ll understand that some forms must be completed fully Share on X

If you must present page visitors with a lengthy form, the best thing to do is break it up into multiple parts so that it doesn’t feel like a massive trudge to get through. Continuing with the example of an ecommerce transaction, you’ll typically see these form pages broken up by the various phases of the transaction: purchase info, shipping info, customer name, address, etc. This split makes it much more bearable to get through instead of having all of these forms presented simultaneously.

Include Social Proof

As you know, people are social animals. We are conditioned to do things others do so we remain members of our tribe. Millions of years ago, expulsion from your tribe due to non-conforming beliefs or actions meant you had to try to survive on your own in the wilderness. Though most of us no longer live in tribes, people still have a natural tendency to trust and value the actions of others.

That’s why social proof is so valuable in modern marketing. Buyers in the B2B space tend to be less swayed by social proof than consumers, but even the most rational, logic-driven purchasers can still be persuaded to purchase if they know others have done the same. It’s particularly beneficial to get testimonials or social proof from people who are respected figures in a field. Placing social proof on your forms is a great technique for quelling those last-minute uncertainties about finishing.

Consider Form Alternatives

At FunnelEnvy, we appreciate the classic elements of marketing that have worked consistently over the years. But we’re also big believers in looking forward and embracing cutting-edge technology. We suggest considering whether or not you even need to have a form to generate conversions at a sufficient rate. There are a few different options for replacing a form, but the most popular one comes to us thanks to AI and predictive language technology: chatbots.

Chatbots have grown increasingly common over the last decade – you’ve probably seen or interacted with one recently. The premise is that instead of filling out a standardized form, users can get customized assistance for their specific questions or challenges. Although this option isn’t feasible for everyone, some companies might even supplement an automated chatbot with a live customer service agent. But with interactivity and personalization looking like critical pillars of the next generation of marketing, it’s worth considering an automated chat program to replace a form.

According to Forrester, over 40% of American adults believe it’s important for retail companies to offer live chat. And while that statistic may be mostly regarding B2C purchases, the way someone likes to make a purchase in their personal life probably translates to how they prefer to make purchases professionally.

Besides a chatbot, other options for replacing a form might include an interactive calendar or another widget that allows a user to schedule an appointment or call. In many cases, these options are simply a more advanced version of a form – but they’re still worth considering to improve your conversion rate.

Final Thoughts on Form Optimization

You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel to improve your marketing performance. By making the simple adjustments above, you can get more page visitors to fill out your forms and move to the next stage of your funnel, which ultimately drives revenue and growth for the entire business.

If you’d like some input on optimizing your lead forms or any other part of your conversion funnel, fill out this quick questionnaire to learn more about how we might be able to help.

By Raj C|2022-04-20T12:40:33-07:00May 2nd, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Beyond SEO: Why Generating Traffic Isn’t Enough

Search engine optimization is a widely-promoted marketing discipline in part because of how impressive it looks to generate traffic increases. For marketing sites that rack up four or even five figures in unique views per month, it can be easy to get caught up in those numbers and focus on meeting certain milestones or a specific month-over-month growth rate.

The problem with having such a strong emphasis on traffic and visitors is it ignores the part of your customer journey that’s equally (if not more) important: converting all those visitors into paying clients. As impressive as it may seem when SEO helps increase monthly views by 50% or allows a page to rack up thousands of additional visits, traffic generation is meaningless unless it leads to a positive increase in revenue.

Understanding Visitor Intent

Ignoring those who accidentally visit your site, are just researching, or have no intention of buying your product or services, every person who lands on your page is at a particular step in their purchasing process. Their current place in the process will govern their intent.

According to McKinsey, there are six specific customer journeys that B2B marketers should be most concerned with: identifying products or services that meet a need, selecting a supplier for an initial purchase, co-developing products with a supplier, dealing with an unexpected event, using and servicing a product, and reordering familiar products or services.

You can break down these individual journeys into sub-steps that take a prospect from start to finish. As you evaluate elements of your website and marketing campaigns, remember to view them through the scope of these steps.

For example, the first part of identifying products or services that meet a need is knowing what’s out there. A B2B company can ensure its brand is identified during this step in several ways, from in-person promotion to search engine optimization based on relevant keywords. The specific methods you use to meet prospects at this point in the journey aren’t as important as addressing the consumer where they are without attempting to push them along the journey faster. Make sure to map your marketing efforts to these steps to maximize results.

Consider Your Conversion Rate

Besides the amount of traffic you generate, you’ll want to consider your conversion rate. While conversion rate is impacted by traffic generation, it’s a separate metric that helps you understand both your marketing efficiency and the quality of your traffic.

HubSpot provides a simple explanation for calculating conversion rate: divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors, then multiply by 100 for a percentage. If you receive 500 visitors and 25 of them convert, you have a 5% conversion rate.

While conversion rate is impacted by traffic generation, it’s a separate metric that helps you understand both your marketing efficiency and the quality of your traffic. Share on X

How do you go about improving your conversion rate? It varies greatly depending on what you’re selling, but there are a few general places you can start:

Blog. Posts on your site should be informative and well-written. If your blog is a thinly-veiled digital sales pamphlet for your products or services, prospects will catch on quickly and stop reading your posts for objective information and advice.
Forms and buttons. Experiment with different colors, fonts, sizes, etc., until you find one that works best to encourage visitors.
Social proof. This category is broad, so you may want to test several different elements. Consider testimonials, client interviews, security badges, and other indicators that you are a trustworthy vendor.
Facilitating communication. One critical element of marketing for B2B purchasers is a way to get in touch with an actual person from the vendors they’re considering. If the form you’re optimizing is designed for this purpose, remember to let users know they’ll be able to schedule a call or meeting with a real person.

Again, these are a few recommendations based on the general principles of B2B marketing. You should adapt and apply them in a way that makes sense for your specific brand and the audience for which you’ve designed it.

Segment Your Site Effectively

Once you’ve spent some time analyzing visitor intent, you can start to work on addressing the top needs of the most relevant traffic that visits your website.

In a B2B purchasing context, one of the things prospects will seek most is education. This is particularly true for newer clients who may not have been through several purchasing cycles like industry veterans. One of the most common ways companies provide relevant education to prospects is through consistent blog updates, where they can share news and developments that matter to buyers. This can also be accomplished through a longer-form medium, like reports, white papers, ebooks, etc.

Product demos and tests are other considerations – especially for software companies. Before committing a significant amount of their budget to a tool or application, buyers will want to see what it looks like while in use – possibly even use it themselves.

The desire for a test run in the world of SaaS startups facilitated the creation of the “freemium” pricing model. Users are given free access to a limited version of the tool or product, eventually encouraging them to move to a paid plan. B2B freemium models are typically more complex and dynamic – they might involve multiple meetings or presentations and test runs.

For best results, treat these segments like any other conversion element on your website and consistently work on optimizing them. Do prospects seem more receptive to learning from short-form blog posts on your site or longer white papers emailed to them directly? When people accessing your page are looking to connect with someone, is it better to list the phone number or create a pop-in window that allows users to click to schedule a call?

These are the kinds of questions you need to ask constantly instead of solely focusing on attracting traffic that may or may not be interested in your offering.

Final Thoughts on Traffic vs. Conversions

Nothing written here is intended to minimize the importance of generating traffic for successful B2B marketing optimization. Without visitors on your site, you’ll struggle to meet your marketing and sales targets, even if you have a finely-tuned digital experience that helps your prospects deal with all their relevant issues and concerns.

Focusing on traffic and SEO only becomes a problem when it takes away from other crucial parts of your marketing plan. Ignoring everything that happens after someone lands on your site will decrease your conversion rate in the long run. Even if you generate more traffic with this approach, it’ll likely be little more than a vanity metric if your site doesn’t help visitors meet their goals.

As a provider of services or products for other businesses, failing to improve your conversion rate by optimizing your on-site experience can lead to severe problems meeting growth and revenue targets. If you’re looking for help from a team of conversion rate optimization specialists with experience making funnels more efficient and improving marketing efforts, fill out this brief questionnaire so we can learn more about how best to serve your needs.

By Raj C|2022-03-22T12:59:15-07:00April 4th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Optimizing Conversational Marketing: A Data-Driven Deep Dive

Transcription

Hey everyone. I’m Arun from FunnelEnvy. I’m sure all of you are aware of conversational marketing and probably many of you have deployed chatbots on your own sites for lead capture and conversion. Now, I’ve been digging into some of the data around them myself and I wanted to share some more that I learned along the way along with some hypotheses on how you might be able to improve conversational marketing performance on your own funnel. So let’s get started. I wanted to establish some shared context first. Now, web chat on B2B and demand generation sites used to be used primarily for customer support, but increasingly whether it’s because of actual results or FOMO, you see the chat widgets all over the place as part of the revenue funnel.

chatbot

Let’s start with some shared context. Webchat on b2b & demand gen sites used to primarily be for customer support. Increasingly, whether it’s because of actual results or FOMO you see the chat widgets all over as part of the revenue funnel. Conversational marketing presents an alternative to the website funnel & forms to engage visitors in what is supposed to be a more human, interactive medium.

Does conversational marketing actually work?

The Google featured snippet here tells us that it’s the fastest and most effective way to guide prospects through the sales funnel and that it provides an authentic experience and real value for your customers. This is despite the fact that 99% of the time it’s a bot on the other side (and everyone knows it).

Let’s start with the first customer, who uses Drift on their site.

Customer Engagement with Drift

First up we’ve got a customer who uses Drift on their site. Now, we’re going to be looking at the engagement and conversion metrics based on the number of new visitors coming to the site over a certain time period and using the metrics that each platform sends to Google Analytics. Now, as you can see here, this site isn’t doing too well when it comes to chatbot engagement, less than half a percent of visitors are actually engaging with the Drift bot, but it’s doing even worse when you look at the email and phone number capture rates, less than a 10th of a percent. When you compare that to the form baseline, contact us form in this case, it’s certainly outperforming the chat experience.

Conversion with Qualified.

When we look at another customer who happens to have Qualified, we see pretty similar results. In this case, again, we’re seeing a small fraction of visitors engage with the chatbot and of those that do, we see a pretty small percentage actually proceed to book a meeting or give their email address. Again, when we look at the form conversion rates, in this case, it’s a request a demo form, it significantly outperforms the qualified chatbot.

But of course, I’ve just been showing you top of the funnel numbers and this is demand generation. So it would be a mistake to only focus on the top of the funnel leads. So in the third example, let’s fit a customer that is Intercom and take a few steps further down the funnel. Now, the top of the phone numbers looks pretty similar. The baseline contacts us form outperforms the chatbot for lead conversion. However, in this case, we segment it by known leads and try to evaluate the effect of engagement with Intercom on the conversion to pipeline or opportunity. And what’s interesting here is we get about 10% of the 4,600 or so known leads engage with Intercom.

down funnel with intercom

So a small number of engaging with Intercom, but those that do convert to pipeline at a much higher rate than the leads that did not have any Intercom interaction. So what can we observe from all of this? Well, despite the fact that Drift used to tell us that forms are dead, from this data here, they clearly are. In the data that we looked at, the top of the funnel engagement with chat is relatively low on an absolute basis and the forms on the site, static web forms outperform chat for lead conversion. But both from the example that I showed you as well as conversations that I’ve had with other marketers, chatbots can have a significant impact lower in the funnel on lower-funnel leads and accounts and their conversion to the pipeline.

Observations

So how do we think about this? Well, like everything on your site experience is all about the friction for the visitor and the value that you’re providing. It’s important to recognize that conversational marketing and chat are a form of interruption marketing. The question you need to ask yourself, of course, is, is that interruption adding or removing friction from the buyer’s journey? So some ways to think about that in the context of your visitors are, what is the context of buying stage and intent of that visitor? What are they actually trying to accomplish in that session on your site? How does that impact and affect their behavior? And finally, what value will interrupt that experience with chat have on their experience and their objectives?

So we can make this a little bit more concrete by considering visitors at various stages of your funnel or buyer journey. Starting with that top-of-the-funnel visitor, they’re typically in an awareness stage with relatively low commercial intent. Now in this stage, visitors are first trying to figure out if what you are selling on your site is even relevant to them and then maybe educating themselves and seeing if they can trust you for a future commercial decision. Now, this type of behavior is characterized by passive content consumption, and introducing or interrupting that experience with chat is likely to increase their friction in that experience.

And let’s contrast that with a lower-funnel visitor that is in the consideration or decision stage that has greater commercial intent. Typically, they’re seeking answers to very specific questions on your site. And unlike passive consumption, they’re actively trying to answer that question, and then they’re doing some focused research. And if they can’t find it on your site, that introduces friction. So in this case, reaching out to chat can actually add value by alleviating that friction of not being able to find the answer to the question on your site and connect them either with a bot or with a salesperson.

Conversations shouldn’t be limited to chatbots

So how do we think about this to improve our conversational experiences? Well, first off, when we think about the top of the funnel, recognize that the concepts of conversational marketing don’t have to be limited to chatbots. They become synonymous with chatbots, but conversations are how we as humans engage with other humans and the traditional static website form which asks for all sorts of personal information upfront is daunting. And that’s why we see a lot of conversion drop-off. But we can adapt that form to be more conversational in nature, more interactive. And when we do that through our multi-step forms at FunnelEnvy and we’ve tested these, we average about 53% improvement in lead conversion.

Strategic Interruptions

This obviously is the added benefit of keeping the visitor on the site experience on the page and presenting less of an interruption than the chatbot. If you’re going to try this yourselves, we recommend leading with some easy-to-answer questions to establish both intent and conversion momentum. Typically two to three questions, initially not asking for personal information, making them very relevant to the visitor and also setting proper expectations along the way, both in terms of the steps that they have to go through and the outcome when they fill out that form.

Strategic Interruptions

Now, when you do choose to interrupt with chat, do it strategically, don’t settle for the standard out-of-the-box transcripts that you get, welcome to our site, do you have any questions? You can be very effective with the chat by understanding and answering and handling common or, and specific questions or objections from that visitor. If you can identify visitors with specific intent and a common example is if they’re on the pricing page lingering there, they usually have a specific question and are close to making a decision. You can very effectively intercept them, interrupt them with chat and answer those questions, or even connect them to a sales person to get them over the line.

Of course, they don’t have to be on a specific page. You can use data to identify known leads, target accounts, even use real-time predictive scoring to identify those high-value, high intent visitors and answer their questions and get them in front of a salesperson faster. One thing to think about might be to reduce the interruption by have them opt into that chat experience through an online and onsite CTA.

Key Takeaways

First off, know your own numbers. I presented some examples from what I observed, but certainly, you should know your own chat and conversational marketing engagement and conversion rates, not just at the top of the funnel, but all the way through by buyer stage and to opportunity and revenue.

Secondly, recognize that forms aren’t dead. And you can apply those same interactive conversational marketing principles outside of your chatbot and to your onsite experience. When you do choose to interrupt, do it strategically, check, and be very effective to handle common questions and intercept those high-value, lower-funnel leads and accounts.

And finally, recognize that not everyone is going to engage with chat even further down the funnel. So there are ways to use the investment in chat to improve your onsite experience. You can do that by studying your chat transcripts, understanding the common questions, objections that your visitors have, and testing different site experiences to better meet those.

If you’re going to go to the trouble of targeting lower funnel visitors with chat, you can also use that to personalize the site experience and change your offers and content to better meet the expectations and needs of your lower funnel visitors. So with that, I want to thank you for listening today.

By Arun Sivashankaran|2021-09-01T05:29:34-07:00July 10th, 2021|Uncategorized, Conversion Rate Optimization, B2B|0 Comments

Customer Journey Analytics Optimizes Demand Generation Marketing

To do it successfully, you need visibility into every step of your customers’ journeys and the means to track and analyze their data to understand what motivates them now and in the future. But how do you do that? Fortunately, customer journey analytics provides valuable insights into your visitors’ behavioral patterns and preferences throughout their entire customer journey. These insights allow you to create enhanced customer experiences that motivate visitors to reach the endpoint in your sales funnel.

What exactly is customer journey analytics, and how can you use it to optimize your lead generation marketing strategies? Let’s find out.

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

As the name suggests, customer journey analytics is an application that explicitly analyzes customer journeys. This application involves tracking and analyzing the way your customers use various channels to interact with your brand. It analyzes all channels — used currently and in the future — that your customers touch directly.

These channels could include:

Channels with human interaction, such as call centers
Two-way interaction channels, such as display advertising
Channels that are fully automated, such as mobile devices or websites
Third-party operated channels, such as independent retail stores
Channels that offer live customer assistance, such as joint site navigation or live chat

Why Do I Need Customer Journey Analytics?

Even as customers’ journeys have grown increasingly complex, today’s customers expect their business interactions with your brand — across multiple channels — to be on par with CX leaders such as Amazon and Google. If your customers’ journeys aren’t seamless every step of the way, they will become dissatisfied and quickly move on to a competitor. Conversely, studies show that positive customer experiences drive revenue growth.

Studies also show that investment in customer feedback management isn’t enough to improve your CX levels. This failure is attributed to the fact that feedback is generally only requested at points along the journey. Unfortunately, this means that only some of the customer journey is captured, misrepresenting your customers’ overall experiences.

This incomplete data reduces your ability to gain a complete picture and accurate insights into your marketing strategy performance. It also leaves you at a disadvantage for enhancing customers’ experiences and tying customer experiences to tangible business outcomes.

Customer journey analytics is the bridge between your customers’ behaviors and your business outcomes. A customer journey analytics program enables your business to track, measure and improve customer experiences across several touchpoints and time periods, encompassing the entire customer journey.

Leveraging customer journey analytics enables demand generation marketing leaders to answer complex questions, such as:

What causes our customers’ behaviors?
What past interactions or journeys have our customers undertaken that led them here?
What paths do our customers take on their journeys?
What are the most likely outcomes for each customer or journey?
How will these journeys and outcomes impact our business outcomes?
What are our customers’ goals?
How do their goals align with our business goals?
How do we add value for each customer and enhance their customer experience?

What Are the Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is a vital ingredient in an effective customer journey management program. It is the piece that analyzes comprehensive data and generates actionable insights. The insights gained from this type of customer management program are valuable for both customers and businesses alike. Here’s how.

Optimized Customer Experiences

The insights gained through effective analyses of your customers’ journeys enable you to optimize each step along the way for a seamless overall experience.

Ongoing Measurable Performance Results

In addition, ongoing analytics allow you to continuously measure demand generation marketing initiatives’ performance across multiple channels and define the appropriate KPIs to measure each journey.

Data Analyses From Numerous Channels and Timeframes

When you look at customers’ journeys across several channels and timeframes, authentic pain points become evident. Identifying these pain points enables you to take action and positively impact your customers’ journeys.

How Can I Optimize Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is typically optimized by leaders in customer service, analytics, marketing and CX. These leaders adopt customer journey analytics platforms to improve their demand generation marketing strategies and performance measurement capabilities.

These teams optimize customer journey analytics to:

Amass customer journey data
Resolve multi-channel customer identities
Analyze innumerable interactions throughout countless cross-channel journeys
Identify CX pain points and their root causes
Verify potential customer journey enhancements
Quantify CX investments’ ROI

Customer Journey Mapping vs. Customer Journey Analytics

As a demand generation marketer, you may already implement customer journey mapping and feel that it provides the same insights as customer journey analytics. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While journey mapping focuses on qualitative insights, customer journey analytics is more quantitative and incorporates a much larger scope.

Static Snapshots vs. Continuous Detail

Journey mapping provides only static snapshots of some of your customers’ journeys and lacks the required detail to represent the multitude of your customers and their unique behaviors.

Static vs. Time-Based Data

Customer journey analytics is driven by time-based data, allowing you to see how customers’ journeys change over time. The ability to continuously measure complex multi-channel customer journeys and touchpoints along journeys help marketers predict customer journey successes.

Trial and Error vs. Real-Time Testing

Without visibility to up-to-date data on each interaction along the customer journey, businesses are left to experiment with new enhancements on the entire customer journey. Not only does this potentially waste time and resources, it means marketers will be waiting for aggregated results that don’t pinpoint where the issues are.

Customer journey analytics provides marketers with the visibility to see how customers respond to improvements along several touchpoints and time periods. In addition, this application enables marketers to test and track the success of customer experience interaction improvements in real-time.

Powered by machine learning and AI, customer journey analytics enables marketers to identify pain points along the entire customer journey that negatively impact CX. These insights allow data-driven businesses to prioritize opportunities for customer journey optimization and drive revenue growth.

By Arun Sivashankaran|2021-07-09T02:19:14-07:00July 8th, 2021|Conversion Rate Optimization, Digital Marketing, Analytics, The Funnel, Uncategorized|0 Comments

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