1. Your marketing efforts will be more efficient
Acquisition costs are arguably the biggest marketing costs a business will incur over its lifetime. Considering that it’s generally more cost-effective to convert a higher percentage of current visitors than to pay for more, it’s imperative to optimize your marketing funnel and site experience. A well-structured system for optimization allows you to be nimble in setting up, testing and implementing your optimization efforts. Testing, when done right, is safe and controlled, without concern of damage or any long-lasting impact to your site or business, affording you the ability to take risks and to discover improvements you may never have anticipated (or otherwise felt comfortable trying). Additionally, optimization serves to plug leaky funnels and customer bases— invariably yours has holes, everyone’s does—so your overall marketing spend is efficient and importantly, retention continues to improve. Effective retention efforts enable you to build a lasting relationship with customers and increase the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer base. You can think about marketing funnel optimization as a compound interest rate—a little bit each month adds up, driven by three vital activities:
- Endeavoring to consistently reduce your customer acquisition costs (CAC).
- Improving retention and thus LTV.
- Supporting word of mouth (WOM) referrals, the best and cheapest form of acquisition.
2. Your marketing operations will be more efficient
Before measured funnel optimization became standard practice, generally speaking, when you wanted to test something you had to take a leap of faith, implement it at great time and expense, and if it didn’t work out well, you then had to change it back at great time and expense. These days mainstream testing tools allow you to quickly and easily set up split tests and gather clear results without permanently implementing anything, which means you’ll feel emboldened to try new things.
3. You will make smarter decisions driven by data not your gut
With structured funnel optimization, you run experiments designed to collect data and validate decisions before taking a leap. Following this approach methodically and comprehensively, ultimately gets you better results from your optimization choices over time.
4. You’ll know a lot more about your TARGET AUDIENCE than ever before
Truth be told, no two customer groups are the same which is why it’s vital to test and experiment to figure out what your group prefers. Gaining these insights affords you the ability to better guide any future efforts around development, design, campaigns and programs, as you’ll already know what your customers want and, critically, which choices will likely boost conversion.
5. Your SEO will improve
Marketing funnel optimization can improve your SEO by helping you identify what you need to fix in order to reduce the deleterious effect high bounce rates (aka “pogo-sticking”) have on your ability to rank in organic search. “Pogo-sticking” is defined as a user bouncing back and forth between the search engine results page (SERP) and the sites listed there. In essence, a user conducts a search and clicks a site option listed on the SERP but quickly, upon arrival determines that the site they chose isn’t what they’re looking for so they quickly click the back button to go back to the SERP list. They then choose another site option from the list and on and on. This pattern is called pogo-sticking and it’s something that can hurt your rank in organic search. Why? Remember Google wants searchers to discover the right content quickly and easily, and pogo-sticking implies the opposite. By using structured optimization to test and improve your landing pages with respect to bounce rates, you can avoid the adverse effects of pogo-sticking.
6. You’ll make more money
Marketing funnel optimization won’t result in thousands of dollars in additional revenue right away but it will steadily add incremental revenue that you’ll notice over a period of time. Of course, any given test might identify that golden opportunity garnering immediate and significant impact, but generally speaking, the benefits of optimization more often reveal themselves over the long haul. The sum total of lots of small improvements that together result in much higher conversions and revenue. Let’s look at an example. You change the location of a form on a page which earns you two extra leads per month. This may not seem like a lot but consider the following:
- Over the course of a year that’s 24 more leads.
- If you close those leads at a rate of 10%, that’s 2+ more new customers.
- If your average customer is worth $200K then that little change might amount to more than $400K in additional revenue. Year over year, this accretive effect adds up.
