Landing Page Not Converting? Time for a Funnel

You will be set.

Your landing page is up with product pics proudly displayed. A beautiful “Buy Now” button is conspicuously featured on the page and users can get information on pricing, color selection, multiple product options, and more. You’re quite possibly succeeded in driving a small amount of traffic to your site.

There’s just one itty bitty problem: users aren’t buying. Also, you have no clue why. What the hell?!?

You beg friends, mentors, and forums for advice.

Lower your price.

The amount is too low, raise it.

You have too many options on the homepage.

The wording on that page is usually confusing.

Use a different font for the header, it’s not easy to read.

The color isn’t professional.

… etc, until your head is content spinning like a hungover coed on a Tilt-A-Whirl. Who is right? Where should I begin? Should I just pack it all in?

Simmer down, Beavis, we have a solution for you: funnels. No, not the type you used to do at college parties with uber-cheap beer and a very wet t-shirt.

We’re talking conversion funnels, sweetness.

You can’t.

There’s an easy fix, nevertheless: create a conversion funnel that presents each product point on a different page. What does a funnel are similar to, you ask? A sample funnel might be:

homepage (containing your UVP) -> pricing page (pricing info only) -> shipping page (shipping options) -> order page (very simple order form) -> credit card form -> confirmation page

With a page flow like this, it’s easy as blueberry pie to ascertain which parts of your pitch suck like a Dyson. If most users drop out on your homepage, your UVP needs help or you have poorly qualified traffic. If users are bailing on your pricing page, you need to change your price substantially up or down. Etc .

Once your funnel is set up, create a Google Analytics “Goal” or KISSMetrics “Funnel” so you can track users’ progress through it. With even small amounts of traffic you’ll easily be able to see where the largest percentage of your users are ditching.

Have a look at the offending page and formulate some sort of hypothesis about what would make the page better — higher price; shorter, more emotional UVP; fewer (or no) shipping options, etc . Then split test your hypothesis by doing the following:

1) Create a second version in the page that contains your new UVP, pricing information, testimonials, etc .

2) Set up a split test experiment using Google World-wide-web Optimizer (if demand warrants it we’ll cover this in detail in a future post)

3) Monitor users’ advancement through the split test

If the new version performs significantly better than the first, then your hypothesis is correct and you should go with the brand new version. If there is no change or it performs worse than the original page, you were wrong and it’s time to come up with a new hypothesis.

More often than not your hypotheses will have no effect whatsoever. Don’t be discouraged; this is part of the process of perfecting ones Muse. Keep going.

Repeat this until you’ve maximized the conversion rate for your funnel, then shrink the funnel to help as few pages as possible to make the purchase process faster and more user-friendly.

Some may argue that which has a lengthy funnel will hurt your conversion rate because it increases the number of hoops that a user has to go through. Nevertheless this early in the Muse creation timeline it’s far more important to get data about how your sales process will work than it is to blindly maximize conversions.

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