markitechture

Conversion Secret #1: Length Matters

Bad news: Your funnel is too short

This one goes out to everyone out there obsessed with measurement. Ok you, get your mind out of the gutter, we have real business to attend to here.

The last step of your funnel is not sales

In past articles I’ve discussed the importance of favoring downstream metrics in your testing. This principle basically means that the further through the sales cycle you place your primary key performance indicator, the more valuable your test results will be. It’s not a revolutionary concept, it is simply the realization that, for example, doubling your site visitors without doubling your revenue does not represent a 100% optimization improvement of your business outcomes.

But … sales is our primary business outcome!

I believe you. Kudos for not living and dying by registration rate or (shudder) website traffic volume. Those are paragraphs in the story of your business’s success or failure, but neither ought to be a headline. If any optimization efforts do not drive sales, they are hard to defend, at best. The idea I would like to put forth in this post is simply that there are some interesting and highly relevant steps in your marketing ‘funnel’, beyond purchase conversion.

The funnel continues after sales

Here’s something you might considering doing right now. If you have a spreadsheet that you use to track customer lifecycle, for example, add two columns:

New Metric #1: Satisfied with Product

I hope that simply by adding this column to your customer lifecycle spreadsheet that two new concerns enter into view, in your mind’s eye:

1) How can I quantify the number of happy or satisfied customers?

2) How can I optimize this number?

The answer to the first question is not only big enough to be the topic for another post of its own, but large enough to be the focus of an entire profession! To oversimplify, you could start by simply taking the total number of customers and subtracting the negative-outcome support cases. Then you’d probably want to find unique customers who have complained publicly on blogs and Twitter and so forth. Maybe selecting a portion of your customer base and surveying them in depth could shed some light on your broader satisfaction rate! How else could you start to get a reliable number for customer satisfaction? I’m sure readers would love to hear each others’ ideas, so please dig into this topic in the comments if you have additional ideas or experience in this area!

How would you begin optimizing this customer satisfaction rate, once you had a decent way of measuring it? The obvious things that jump to mind include:

1) Improve your product

2) Optimize your pricing strategy 

3) Improve your post-sales customer support

4) Proactively engage customers who mention your product in social media

It’s possible to go into detail on any of these, and I’ll leave it to you to explore these topics in depth on your own; there is certainly plenty of good advice out there on each =)

The idea here is to start to think of the entire customer experience (lifecycle) collectively, and in a measurable way.

New Metric #2: Testimonial Received

It is often said that the #1 barrier to purchase is lack of credibility in the user’s mind. [Sidebar: if you haven’t already, you should check out Stanford’s Top 10 Guidelines for Web Credibility.] Once you are beyond the basics of web credibility best practices (contact info, a robust company description, etc), to improve credibility it is ne3cessary to enter the realm of social proof.

The best way to clearly message to your potential customers that your product or service can provide value to them is to show pictures, names, and quotations from satisfied customers. Nothing sells a dream better than seeing someone living it.

Let’s think about all the different types of testimonials, where they come from, and why they are valuable.

Top 5 Types of Customer Testimonials

#5: Mention in Social Media

Happy customers will talk about their experience on Facebook and Twitter. No big surprise there. Make sure you listen (for the good and the bad, of course), and reach out to those who seem to have had positive experience to elicit any of the following types of testimonials. Don’t just leave those bits and pieces of support for your product out there in the ether to disappear, think of ways to involve your happy customers in evangelical activities, without requiring much of them in terms of effort.

#4: The ‘cocktail party’ anecdote

I’ve heard that in some parts of the world people still meet face to face. People are also very hungry for things to talk about (pro tip: top 10 most-emailed NYT articles of the day is still your gold standard middle-of-the-road cocktail talk).

Surprise someone with a positive experience and your product or service will come up in casual conversation. There are few things that are better than a personal recommendation from a trusted source in terms of building credibility. That said, let’s continue on to those few things …

#3: Inbound Link

Make someone happy and maybe they will write about you on teh intarsnet. Well, this is simply all kinds of wonderful: 1) you will receive free traffic as people follow the incoming link 2) you build credibility with those oh-so-skeptical search engines, who are in the business of finding just this kind of testimonial and giving you credit for it!

If you have not created customer happiness, this will work against you just as powerfully. Create a vocal enemy on the web and you may find that their ‘misguided’ viewpoint ranks startlingly high in the search results. This may be a result of the Google algorithm’s cunning tendency to show results that betray truly varied sentiments on the first page. In fact there is a whole industry around reputation management in search (in fairness it’s probably just a specialty in the SEO business, not its own industry).

#2: Online Testimonial

You know what they are, and they work. As Dave McClure loves to say, it’s all about the motherf*cking faces. Show happy people. Let them tell your customers how their happiness is solely the result of your amazing ability to serve your market.

Don’t forget to ask for testimonials, or to provide a way for people to submit them. Just like being in a band you can forget to let people clap between songs, remember that it’s natural to allow people to testify on your behalf, and in many cases they enjoy the experience of doing so.

The lever of this type of testimonial is that it can be seen by visitors to your site or promotional materials over and over again. This is the kind of on-page factor that can actually move the needle on sales conversion rates as you try to optimize them.

#1: Satisfied Customer Joins Team

Nothing speaks more highly of a product than a customer coming to work for the team that built it. Recently I spoke with a friend who recently joined the brilliant and successful company Hubspot after several years of using the product - with compelling results - both at his job and later to promote his music blog.

He was telling me about changing jobs, and spoke about Hubspot like a kid on Christmas morning. “You know after a while I was looking at what we were doing and I said to myself, ‘holy cow, this stuff actually works!’”. Being in the area, I’ve known about Hubspot since they started, and I’ve heard lots of amazing things about them from inside and outside the company.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, bolstered my opinion of this product more than hearing my friend tell me he had quit his job to go work for them.

Adding testimonials to the lifecycle turns your funnel into snowball

Before

After

The punchline is straightforward: create happy customers and they will generate more leads for you. The funnel is not linear, the customer lifecycle should not be thought of as over after purchase, or simply continuing to repeat purchase and nothing more.

Serving your current customers better is one of the best ways to generate future customers.

What’s your conversion rate for satisfied customers and testimonials?

Find out, and fall all over yourself making it higher.