How to Fix Drop-Off Points in Your Funnel & Increase Conversions

Speaker 1
0:00
Hey everybody. Welcome to a new episode of our podcast series. What we've been talking about lately is marketing funnels. Simplifying those, getting a good understanding of how to build, refine and improve our marketing funnels. Today we're talking about how to fix drop off points in your funnel and increase conversions. Pretty important topic for marketers. You know, we're building these systems to develop leads and grow businesses. How do what are some of the common mistakes and awareness? Interest, decision stages and how do we fix them is what we're going to be talking about today. So specifically, how do you know if your funnel's asking too much too soon from its prospects?

Speaker 3
00:42
So I think you obviously look where people are dropping off, but even before that you've kind of separated into that awareness, interest, decision stages and you've set the metrics for those. So and I have always looked at this is customers want to have conversations, they rarely want to be sold to. This is very important when you're first starting out, especially no one knows you. You can't put an ad out there like Nike, you can't put an ad out there like Amazon unless you're at that level and then you're probably not having these conversations anyways. But the whole point here is you split these out, you measure them, is it conversational? Does it match their customer avatar, the product you're selling, what are the pain points?

Speaker 3
01:27
Once you have all those things, that's when you can start determining if you're asking too much too soon from prospects. Again, I think the initial part is awareness. That's where you're just letting people know you even exist. Interest is you're solving a problem. Decision stages don't happen until they've gone into your CRM, they've gone into their system. Even there you're still going to have to do follow up. So if you are having people just not even click on anything, you're asking too much, you're not providing enough value, you're not engaging enough interest and that's where you have to fix your messaging. It's always like basically your message is the reason people even look at it in the first place. It's what you say you're going to accomplish with their attention that's going to get them into that interest stage.

Speaker 3
02:17
And then obviously from their decision stages are they hear this message 500 times. What stands out and typically to me it is just really addressing them, following up with them, personalizing the experience all the way through. So if you can build value first you make everything else easy for them. And that's a mix of almost like a CXO experience, Customer experience optimization. Yeah.

Speaker 1
02:45
Yeah, I think the, like you said, I think the issue here, especially if you're a smaller group is trust. You're asking people to trust you. They don't know who you are. Yeah. And, and if you're doing that, then it's immediately is going to feel like a sales conversation like you said, Zach. And people don't. I, I don't know anybody who enjoys being sold to. I know a lot of people who enjoy a good conversation and a lot of people like talking about their job and what's important to them, their pain points, their aspirations, all these things. But when we, when you don't have that trust built up that people don't know who you are, they don't trust you. Yeah, you're asking for a favor. Hey, can you pay me attention?

Speaker 1
03:24
It's like, well, I don't know who you are and why would I want to talk to you right now? I, we haven't built up that relationship yet. So I, I think that makes that ton of sense. Any other thoughts there Set?

Speaker 2
03:35
Oh, just one thing that came to mind was the CTA on homepages above the fold. You know, you see some websites and they're selling million dollar SaaS products or whatever, you know, high ticket items and then right below the value proposition on the homepage, it's like book a demo. Okay. Generally, you know, at that stage the user has just met, you know, landed on your brand. So it's asking a little bit too much too soon. Just as one example.

Speaker 1
04:44
So here's a great question and something I think that plagues a lot of marketers, a lot of people. It's sales. The great question to dive into. What's the easiest or simplest way to re engage a lead who might have ghosted you mid funnel?

Speaker 3
04:59
So if you have the ability to, you should have this already automated so that if after a certain amount of days, maybe they missed a call with you. Maybe they didn't hop on the discovery call. Maybe they downloaded something and then that was it. You should basically have a very short, quick, to the point email. Almost like, you know, hey, you downloaded this or hey, you know, I know we had the discovery call. I'm sure things got busy. And this is where I think your SDR or people in sales have to have a very proactive mindset of, okay, this person has not talked to us in, you know, seven days, whatever the cutoff might be. Can I give them something useful? Can I give them something that who get their interest back?

Speaker 3
05:43
Or do I just need to send them a very quick pattern breaking email? That's just like, you know, why, you know why did we stop talking? You know what else do we need? Or you know, do you want to pick this back up? Do you want to continue this conversation? I can send you another link to another case study. I think people get afraid to have that follow up pattern.  very proactive. So you don't need a hard sell, by the way. You just need to open that door or at least kind of peek through and be like, he's still there.  too many people, once they feel that they've engaged a lead through a download orever it might be, they just kind of drop off. And that to me is kind of like a lazy sales kind of mindset.

Speaker 3
06:29
I think once that lead is through and they again provided that awareness and insight to even click on a button for you should be reaching out to them, you know, consistently without selling.

Speaker 1
06:42
Yeah, yeah. And I think it, this goes back to data, right? Is the data is going to tell you where in the funnel you might have lost them. That should give you a little bit of insight too. And broader funnel building. Is, is there an issue here? Is there a messaging issue? Are, are we following up too quickly? Not quickly enough. So yeah, identify where, what, where was that issue? Where did you lose them in the funnel? And then like you said, keep it human and keep that dialogue going. Love that. Anything else, Seth?

Speaker 2
07:15
No, I think that covers it.

Speaker 1
07:18
Okay, awesome. All right, what's one overlooked reason? Leads drop off between the interest and decision stages of the marketing function funnel.

Speaker 3
07:28
So I think there's two sides to this and I think marketing and sales will battle each other on this one. The message to get their interest was not specific to what they're actually selling. And then once they did get into the funnel, what they thought they were going to get or maybe the follow up Sequences, whatever it was just didn't match up to the overall message. So if you have people dropping off between interest and decision, this should be something that you're consistently optimizing as well. So if you're optimizing at the top end of, you know, your awareness and insights and what you're going to give them and then when they finally get in, they aren't getting what they thought they were going to get, then you have confusing messaging. Something's unclear, something's missing.

Speaker 3
08:16
So there is the sales step process and then the marketing process to get there. So basically if an interested lead were to stall out, there's something wrong with the customer experience or they just weren't expecting that they weren't getting what they felt that they were going to get and they moved away or they found someone else, whatever it might be. So it needs to be very obvious for them throughout the entire process, like, what do I need to do next? Right. What are they going to do for me next? If you can do that, then you'll be able to move them forward in a much more streamlined way. You're always going to have that drop off. But if you see patterns where it's a very sizable amount, you should be optimized there.

Speaker 3
09:06
Overall, I think the biggest reason for that drop off is just a disconnect in the user experience versus the message that brought them there in the first place.

Speaker 1
09:16
Yeah, yeah. Going off that messaging, I've seen that too where if you have a lot of interest and not a lot of people in decision making process, you might be talking to the wrong people. You're based all off that messaging. You might be talking about what's interesting to you and might be right. Getting people in who are, who have that similar interest or it might be like same job titles, coworker, something like that. You might be talking to the wrong people. So, and hence that confusion when they get to the next step, the decision making stage, they're like, oh well I'm not, I don't want to buy this. I'm just interested in what you have to say. I've had some clients with that too where they write big email list.

Speaker 1
09:57
A lot of people in their funnel, a lot of followers on social media xyz. But very few of them were decision makers. Very few of them were the buyer Personas that we actually want to be talking to. So that would be one other word of caution is if you're seeing a big drop off there between interest and Decision, make sure you're talking to the right people and that they're qualified leads. Right. Are these the decision makers or the influencers who are going to have a part to make and decision to bring you on or not?

Speaker 3
10:25
Yeah, I think another big thing is if you're offering, you know, a $10 million service, but they find out that it's actually a $10 service that can be a drop off. So again, messaging is so important and not selling right away. I know we talked about that a little bit earlier, but the idea that you want to give them a conversation allows them to decide between the interest and decision and allows you to split test a lot easier.

Speaker 1
10:52
Yeah, love it. All right, and then lastly to wrap up our discussion here, how do you balance urgency in your funnel without pushing leads too hard? Right. How do we help close people without being too salesy or being ingenuine?

Speaker 3
11:08
I think defining outcomes of what it means to achieve success with whatever offering. So it shouldn't be, you know, this is available for the first 200 people. You're going to get people that need to be there a little bit more desperate if you want to have the more better, you know, avatar to come through. You want to make sure that if you were to start today after going through our framework in three months, here are the results you might see. Give them a visualization so that they can see that. But you can do things like we only take on X clients a year due to the nature of the service, or maybe it's a product. Right. That's where you can kind of fit that in. But they need to visualize.

Speaker 3
11:57
And this is, again, I think the mantra of this whole podcast is conversations. So conversation of here's what we'll get you, here's what we envision for you. Here's your success, here's our success with you. And they're going to see that and say, well, this is what I've been looking for. This is obviously one of the pain points. And if were to solve this pain point for if this, you know, marketing group or product group, whatever it is, was able to solve this pain point, then I can actually visualize that it lets them take the next step as well.

Speaker 1
12:30
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Any other thoughts there, Seth?

Speaker 2
12:37
Yeah, just in general, think about your target audience and what you're selling. You know, I've seen marketing funnels for, you know, what would be a high ticket B2B SaaS audience. Try to use like a click funnels type, push them down, set the urgency, have the timer ticking down. And it's like, I'm a high ticket B2B buyer. This does not look professional. I'll trust your service. Right, so just think about the context and the tactics you're using given your market and your offering.

Speaker 1
13:16
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You gotta know who you're talking to. Yeah, but yeah, like you were talking about earlier, like if there's, you know, what's the value and what you're providing, people are usually, if you're talking about something valuable to your audience, you're usually talking about a pain point. Right. That they want to avoid or an aspiration that they want to achieve. If you're communicating that pretty well, people are going to be motivated to take action on that. People want to achieve their goals. They want to avoid things that are painful for them. Right. So if we're communicating that appropriately, we, I think we can balance that urgency with that human touch a bit. But yeah, definitely a balancing act and definitely something you have to be thoughtful about. We want to nurture people through.

Speaker 1
13:59
We don't want to be pushy Chevy to salesy XYZ conversation. Like you said, conversations is the name of the game. So. Great. Well, thank you for that and thank you to everyone listening. Appreciate your time. Next week we're going to be diving into marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads. And how do we handle the handoff between the two? So thanks again and we will see you soon. 
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