What Is A Sales Funnel And Why Do I Need It?

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Whether you’re reading our content or having face-to-face meetings with us, you’ll hear us throw around the term “sales funnels” a lot. I’d like to take a minute to break this term down for you, in case it’s not something you’re familiar with already.

I look at websites all day every day, and one thing I run across fairly often when looking at small business sites built by local firms is that there is no discernible sales funnel.

Maybe this sounds nitpicky, like I’m looking for any little thing to criticize.

Sure, this is a subtle weakness. What many people don’t realize, though, is that the absence of a sales funnel can actually cripple your online presence and make your whole site a giant waste of money!

Even a great-looking site with the most modern functionality is severely handicapped without this important feature!

So what am I talking about? I am talking about your website’s ability to do its job.

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Tools of the Trade: Our Favorite Marketing, Productivity, and Organization Apps

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It takes a lot to make Inbound Marketing work, and I'm not just talking about content creation and SEO. Success for our clients takes varying degrees of planning, meeting, scheduling, drafting, creation, publishing, and invoicing, and each of those tasks have their own info and processes, and of course it all varies from client to client as well.

In order to keep everything straight and keep chaos from ensuing, we have some incredible tools that help us excel in all that we do. What does it take to keep this engine running? Take a look into our toolbox:

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How LucidChart Used Kissmetrics to Drive Growth

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LucidChart, a SaaS-based diagramming application with over 9 million users, wanted to make sure their site was more than just pretty to look at. They wanted to ensure that it was leading users down the path to purchase. This is how they used Kissmetrics to leverage the behavioral data their users were leaving behind and increased conversions by 30%.

The initial step LucidChart took was to dive deep into data to better understand and evaluate the customer journey across their site. They learned what users were doing, where they were going and where they were dropping off across their site. Using insights from Kissmetrics they found key areas in the journey where they could drive efficiency and which pages they wanted to test a redesign.

After creating the new pages LucidChart used the Kissmetrics Funnel Report in correlation with the A/B Test Report to determine the effectiveness variation of the new pages both as a stand alone and part of the customer journey. Until they locked in on the best performing pages and process to drive conversions.

Funnel Report

Growth and marketing teams use our Funnel Report to see where dropoffs occur before conversion. This report is entirely customizable and can be used to track any conversion path you’d like. Furthermore, you can segment the data based on lead source, location, referring links, etc.

Used for illustration purposes. This is not LucidChart’s data.

LucidChart was able to track different segments across the customer journey and compare one another as well as use the A/B Test report to test the new design against the old.

A/B Test Report

With this report, you’ll create your test in an A/B testing tool, such as Optimizely, and track the results in Kissmetrics.

All data is imported from A/B testing tool and stored in Kissmetrics. Note: this is not LucidChart’s data.

What makes this Kissmetrics report unique is that you’ll be able to see how a test impacts any part of your funnel. Want to see if a new headline on your homepage leads to more purchases? Or see how a test in the middle of the funnel impacts the bottom line? Get your answer in just a few clicks in Kissmetrics. Having both reports coordinated in the same tool allowed LucidChart to measure the effectiveness of the new pages’ impact on the customer funnel with the old pages.

The Results

The outcome? By combining the power of the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report with the Funnel Report, LucidChart discovered that 2 pages in particular, their new homepage and new product page, were driving a huge 30% increase in conversions.

“Insights from Kissmetrics drove a 30% lift in our conversions. All of our key customer behavior data lives in Kissmetrics, for both our product and website, so we can quickly identify and take action on any roadblocks across our growth cycle. Kissmetrics is essential to Lucid Software’s growth efforts.”

Spencer Mann, VP of Growth at Lucid Software

Every time a prospect visits your site or uses your product they’re leaving a digital trail of their behavior – showing what they’re doing, where they get stuck, what they like, don’t like and why. There’s tremendous value in that data and it’s critical for driving growth.

Kissmetrics enables you to capture and leverage all that behavioral data to increase conversions, acquisitions and retention.

About Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics’ Customer Engagement Automation platform helps product and marketing teams turn insights into growth. Our software is comprised of 3 key features:

• Analyze: A set of behavioral reports and metrics. Monitor your growth KPI’s across the customer lifecycle. And dive deep to understand user behavior and discover key insights.
• Populations: Segment your users based on key growth initiatives and track their progress.
• Campaigns: Behavior based email automation. Fully customizable editor puts you in complete control of customer engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics. Request a demo below to learn more.

About the Author: Jonathan Cabin is a Growth Analyst at Kissmetrics focused on initiatives that create sustainable growth. His background covers sales, project management and marketing. In his free time you can find him surfing, golfing and asking his boss for time off to travel.

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How to Get E-Commerce Customers Coming Back After Their First Purchase

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Getting prospects to convert to customers is one thing. But how do you get customers to buy again and again after the first purchase? This is where attentive, customer-focused emails come on. Despite some heralding the “death of email” over more modern platforms like texting and social media, good, old-fashioned email remains one of the best ways to seal the deal, engage customers and encourage repeat purchases.

So what kinds of emails should you send? How often should you send them, and what should they contain? Here are a few of the best examples of e-commerce follow-up emails and why they work so well.

The Repurchase Reminder

Oftentimes, when you make a purchase on a website, they email you immediately after encouraging you to buy again. This marketing strategy is rooted in the idea that customers are likely to come back and purchase while your brand is still fresh in their mind. But oftentimes, companies send emails out immediately and when the customer (naturally) doesn’t respond, they no longer follow up.

If your repeat purchase numbers are flat-lining and your emails are stale, why not wait until more time has passed (depending on how often the customer uses the product) to remind them? Here’s a great example from Sephora, which reminds the customer to restock based on how much time has passed since their first purchase:

Sephora reminds the user to restock based on their past purchase. (Image Source)

Another creative spin on the restock email comes from Clinique. Since their data likely shows that women tend to shop online for beauty products more than men, they wouldn’t have as much luck sending a shaving gel refill reminder to men — so they advertised a refill reminder for him, to her. See how they did it:

An advertisement for men’s shaving gel — targeted to women, who are likely the ones shopping for beauty products. (Image Source)

We Miss You!

One alternative on the restock/repurchase follow-up email is tailored to the bargain hunter, like this email from Starbucks. There’s no better way to stay top-of-mind than with a coupon, and many customers actively wait to purchase until they get a deal. Knowing this, why not reach out with a discount?

This reminder from the Starbucks Store gets right to the point with a discount for customers that haven’t shopped in awhile. (Image Source)

Bodybuilding.com sends customers an email if they haven’t repurchased after about 3 months:

Another common tactic is to follow up with customers asking them to review their recent purchase. Again, this is extremely common and almost expected — but customers don’t always have the time at that very moment to write up a lengthy review. So how do you get them clicking? Here are some creative ideas that take feedback to a new level.

Going Beyond “How Did We Do?”

For the customer who doesn’t have time to write up a huge review, but the company still needs their feedback data to work with, I present to you the Amazon 1-click review:

Amazon encourages busy customers to simply click to review the size of garments they’ve purchased online. (Image Source)

Of course, you’ve likely received plenty of emails asking for your feedback, and even some that go the extra mile by giving you a discount coupon, entering you into a contest and much more. But this one is noted for its pure simplicity plus its unobtrusive style. It doesn’t get in the way — one click and you’re done.

And speaking of Amazon, you already know that they’re the e-commerce leader simply because of how much they test, monitor, tweak and track everything about their site. One of the more famous changes was adding in the “Customers who bought X, also bought Y” feature. Now much more commonplace on e-commerce sites, this “Frequently purchased together” option often encourages greater purchase volume per customer.

But what happens when they don’t purchase all of the items together? Is emailing them about it a lost cause? Not exactly…

Frequently Purchased Together (But It’s Not What You Think!)

Not all “Frequently Purchased Together” emails have to be a sales pitch. And if the customer didn’t buy them when they were originally presented, there must have been a reason.

Of course, the reasons why customers choose not to buy could be a whole other blog post in itself, but knowing what you know, why not steer the customer more toward educating them about the product add-ons or accessories rather than simply presenting them?

An example of a Thank You follow-up email from BabyFirst. (Image Source)

Since, in the example above, the customer is shopping for baby-friendly TV shows, the company naturally recommends a couple of DVDs that a baby or toddler might like, as well as a coupon and directions on how to get it for free.

The Warranty Expiration Notice

This type of email normally applies in cases where you sell parts or electronics that are under warranty. When making a purchase, customers sometimes don’t opt for the extended warranty, preferring to rather stick with the original manufacturer’s timeframe. But reminding them that the original manufacturer’s warranty has almost expired, and inviting them to extend the protection on their purchase might be just the thing they need to keep their original purchase in good working order:

An official-looking email regarding a car warranty.

Here’s another example offering an enhanced warranty on a lamination machine:

A warranty announcement included on new products. (Image Source)

The “Just Looking” Reminder

With all of the email examples showcased so far, you’d need the appropriate data based on what the customer bought previously. But what if they haven’t bought yet, and are only looking? Are you out of luck? Not at all. Provided you have the prospect’s email address, you can still send them reminders, even if they haven’t added a product to their cart:

Recommendations on shirts and a reminder based on shirts and slacks previously looked at, from Calvin Klein. (Image Source)

Here’s another example that reminds the user of the products they browsed in case they want to take another look and don’t want to have to sift through their browser history:

An email reminding the user of the products they looked at. (Image Source)

Use Demographics to Sell

As opposed to many of our other example, these emails do not rely on previous purchases. They start fresh with new product recommendations based on the demographics.

For example – has it been raining in Minnesota for the past few days? Find all your prospects located in Minnesota and send them an email showcasing your umbrellas.

Many of your prospects are likely either searching for one because a) they don’t have one or b) the one they have is old, has holes, etc.

This can go beyond weather. Many political radio broadcasts will have “doomsday” meals when the inevitable apocalypse comes. When Barack Obama was president, Glenn Beck and many other conservative pundits advertised “4-week emergency food supplies”:

Image Source

Does this profit off irrational fears? Yes.

But it also means understanding your audience. If they’re afraid, what are they willing to buy? Sell it to them. If it’s snowing, what are they willing to buy? Offer it up for sale.

Marketing is all about targeting the right people, when they are most receptive to your product. What better product to advertise to those that fear end times are near?

New Product Recommendations Based on Past Purchases

Finally, we have the “new product recommendations” email. Rather than always notifying customers every time you have new items in stock (and hoping they might like some of them), why not segment the new product announcement emails based on what the customer has purchased previously? They’re much more likely to buy, and they’ll welcome the added personalized attention!

Despite the different products and industries, all of these emails have one major thing in common — and that is a dedicated — almost fanatical attention to customer orders, browsing habits and preferences. And although you may be doing a great deal of e-commerce by email, there are still, as these emails demonstrate, new ideas and approaches that can be capitalized on.

Do it all with Kissmetrics Campaigns

Kissmetrics Campaigns is a behaviorally-triggered email platform. Combining our behavioral analytics with Kissmetrics Campaigns makes it easy to find segments that need converting, and targeting them is done in a few steps. And best of all – it’s all done within Kissmetrics. There’s no need to export and import lists and mess around with APIs or databases. It’s all done in the same platform.

 

And if you are using these strategies in your email announcements and customer lists, how have they worked for you so far? We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments. Share them with us below!

About the Authors: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

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8 Overlooked Mobile Design Best Practices You Need to Implement

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93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could potentially be seeing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.

It follows, then, that you should be working as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than having a marketing funnel that’s totally ineffective on non-desktop devices.

To give you some guidance, I’ve put together 8 mobile design best practices you need to be following. They’ll help you streamline your visitors’ user experience, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.

1. Get Rid of Your Navbar

On mobile, real estate is at a premium – I think of my iPhone screen like a map of downtown Manhattan, where every pixel costs a pretty penny. Check out how much space a mobile navbar can take.

This means you need to maximize what you’re getting out of your website on mobile.

One easy way to do this is to drop your navbar on mobile.

On a laptop or desktop, your navbar can be incredibly helpful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to browse the pages on your site, making it simple for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.

But on mobile, your navbar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.

Now, you might be wondering how visitors are expected to browse your site without a navbar. There’s a few ways around this…

The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, pulling out from the left side of your screen to show the various menu items in your navbar.

Or, depending on the size of your webpages, you might opt to create a single-page layout for mobile devices. However, unless your website is relatively sparse content-wise, this probably isn’t the best option for your business.

2. Keep Important Elements Within Reach

Think about the time you spend on your smartphone.

I’m willing to bet you use it pretty often – maybe while you’re on the bus or waiting in the line at Starbucks (or perhaps reading this article, right now?). Now, think about how you hold it. If you’re like most of us, you’re only using one of your thumbs to interact with your screen.

You’re not alone: according to a recent study by mobile UX expert Steve Hoober, 75% of people only use one thumb to interact, too.

Years ago, the diagram below was a bible for mobile designers, giving them insight into how they should lay out content to optimize user experience for the majority of website visitors.

Image Source

Though the above may have been accurate at the time, things change quickly (and in technology, even quicker). In the last few years, our phones and screens have been getting bigger and bigger… but our hands are staying the same.

The way we hold our phones has changed – as such, screen “hot spots” have shifted, with touch accuracy dropping as we approach the screen’s outer edges.

Image Source

As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, saving secondary and tertiary functions for the top and bottom screen edges.

The position of these functions relates directly to ease of access for a user. Primary functions lie in the area that users can access easily with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent, secondary) functions lie in lower-accuracy zones and require a little more work to get to.

3. Optimize and Minimize File Sizes

You’re probably already aware of how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both user experience and the search ranking of your pages.

This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but also mobile users don’t like waiting. That means if your page isn’t loading quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.

Use a site like TinyJPG, or tools like ImageOptim (Mac only) or Photoshop’s “Export for Web” to make sure you minimize the file size of your images before you upload them to your website.

There are two primary properties that affect file size:

• Quality: Put simply, quality is exactly what it sounds like. Turning down the quality setting will reduce the sharpness of your images and increase the possibility of artifacts appearing on your images.
• Size/Resolution: Go figure – the actual size of your image has a large effect on its file size. Obviously, you don’t want to make your images so tiny that your visitors can’t see them – but if, for example, the column you’re placing your image in is 600px wide, your image doesn’t need to be 1000px wide. Resize them to fit before uploading.

4. Link Phone Numbers and Addresses

Optimizing for mobile is all about streamlining a visitor’s experience. It should take them as few steps as possible.

This means taking advantage of interactions on mobile that will help make visiting your website (and buying your product or contacting your business) a pleasant experience.

If your website is sales-reliant or if phone is an important touchpoint in your marketing funnel, one of the most important things you can do is make it easy for people to call you.

One simple way to add value to your “contact us” page is to make your phone number a clickable link. Everybody knows the pain of frantically swapping back and forth between your phone and browser apps to type in a phone number, or trying to copy it and accidentally copying all of the other content on the page, too.

Trust me, making your phone number clickable makes a big difference.

All you need to do is link your phone number like this:

And it will appear like this:

123-123-1234

This will allow users to click to call.

In the same vein, you’ll want to make sure other important details are interactive as well – for example, clicking your address should open up a visitor’s Maps application. Though most apps like Facebook will automatically set this up, you can type your address into Google Maps and copy the Share link to link it to the address on your website.

It’s these little things that help make visitors feel like they’re not missing out on anything when they visit your pages on mobile, and it saves them from having to do extra work.

To put it simply, don’t let your mobile browsing experience choke your marketing and sales funnels.

5. Design for Responsiveness

If you were around during the advent and uprise of the mobile web, you might recall that most websites actually built entirely new layouts for mobile that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.

These pages often featured minimal images, and were relatively text-heavy to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users received on their non-3G, non-LTE, non-WiFi networks.

Fast-forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has changed entirely. Screens are huge, internet connections have quickened, and tablets exist.

These advancements (and other advancements in front-end design languages like CSS) have paved the way for responsive and adaptive design.

Though there are nuances between these two types of design, their principal purpose remains the same: create a single website layout that responds and changes dynamically based on the device each visitor is using.

Hopefully, the webpage template or landing page editor you’re using will automatically create a mobile-responsive version of your page as you build it, removing the hassle from you or your designers to manually create it.

There are a few things to keep in mind when we consider responsiveness:

• Image sizes: If images are important to the content on your page, make sure they’re clearly visible on mobile. Images that are 50% width on desktop may also show up at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.
• Layout/order of content: Depending on the way you organize the elements on your page for desktop, your content may be awkwardly ordered when you shift to mobile. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.
• Animations: Animations that look fine on desktop might not work out well on mobile. Check these over on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they’re okay.
• Video: In keeping in mind my previous recommendations regarding file sizes, think about hiding (or removing) video on mobile. It’s large, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.
• JavaScript: Though JavaScript is a wonderful and magical thing, it won’t always work on mobile – check to make sure it does.

6. Disable Popups

In 2017, Google rolled out their soft penalty for what they call “intrusive interstitials”.

In layman’s terms, this pretty much means popups. Here are a couple examples straight from the horse’s mouth.

Image Source

Basically, having popups show on your webpages on mobile devices greatly detracts from user experience, as visitors are unable to access or see the content they’ve clicked to find. To combat this, Google is penalizing pages with popups by reducing their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites.

The simple solution? Disable popups on mobile. Seriously – just turn them off.

Allegedly, some user-triggered popups like scroll or click popups aren’t penalized – but I can’t find anywhere that confirms this, so take it with a grain of salt.

If your popup is rather important, add the content in as a section on your page, within your content (or even above the fold). This will stop Google from penalizing your site’s search ranking.

7. Optimize Forms for Mobile

If you’ve ever done some online shopping on your phone, you probably know how frustrating it can be to fill out form after endless form.

While the overall typing experience on mobile has vastly improved from the days of T9, it’s still not perfect. It relies heavily on autocorrect, and can still be quite taxing on the thumbs.

What’s the lesson here? A simple syllogism: long forms require a lot of typing. Typing sucks on mobile. Therefore… long forms suck on mobile.

If you want to try to minimize the negative effect mobile might be having on your conversion rates, try making one of the following changes to your form fields.

Reduce the number of form fields on your page

It’s simple – reducing the number of form fields a user needs to fill out greatly reduces their perceived workload, which can help in reducing visitor friction.

Though this isn’t always a viable option – often, form fields are there because they’re necessary – reducing some of the less necessary ones (last name, maybe?) or combining multiple form fields into a single field (first and last name, for example) can make a big difference.

Break up forms into multiple steps

Segmenting your form into multiple steps can help you increase conversion rates on mobile.

For example, if you have 9 fields, you may want to put only 3 in the first step. When a user fills out these 3 and presses the form submission button, they’re taken to the next page to fill in a few more fields, and so on.

This not only makes converting on your form seem less intimidating initially, it allows you to collect lead information in small bits from your visitors, which can help you if they eventually bounce from your form. I’d recommend collecting at least email on the first part of your form, so you can market to them in the future.

8. Utilize Collapsible Sections/Accordions

When your content has all been collapsed into a single column on a smaller screen, it’s going to end up being much longer.

This is an issue on mobile because it suddenly makes it much more difficult for a visitor to navigate and find what they’re looking for.

An elegant solution to this is to utilize collapsible content sections, otherwise known as accordions.

Accordions are containers that hold content; they show up as only a header and expand once a user taps on them. This allows your visitors to skim your page for the content or topic they’re looking for without needing to sift through a ton of copy and images.

You’ll need to do a bit of front-end work to put together an accordion, so get your designer or developer on the line!

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, these mobile design tips have given you some insight into how you can streamline user experience for the people who visit your website (or landing pages) on mobile.

These are things that are often overlooked, which can lead to a significant decrease in conversion rates on non-desktop devices.

Follow these tips, and I can guarantee your mobile visitors will have a better experience with your site, making them more likely to convert.

Good luck!

About the Author: Carlo is a digital marketer and designer at Wishpond. When he’s not creating content or A/B testing, he enjoys making music, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and shopping for sneakers. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @carlonathan.

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