Forget funnels, it´s your content stupid!

Understanding why people perform a converting action is the most vital key to making any substantial changes in your conversion rate. Here is a way to get started.

Forget Funnels, it´s your content stupid!

It is common knowledge that 95% of all users leave a website without conducting any conversion action. They leave and many will never return.

This is the reason why conversions are so vital for any company. In this context conversions can be anything that keeps your users in the loop, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a product PDF or filling out a contact formula.

Understanding why people perform a converting action is the most vital key to making any substantial changes in your conversion rate.

The old way

Until now your options on how to improve your conversion rate have been focused on conversion tools such as A/B testing, funnel analysis and studies of heat maps.

They will tell you how to optimize your GUI components, which of the two texts performs the best, and where to best distribute the content elements on your page. But if you choose the devil’s advocate approach you could say that is only scratching the surface. A change of button color or different heading wording is not really what moves your conversion rate substantially.

Forget the Funnels

Any communication expert will tell you that communication has to do with understanding your audience. You need to understand where they are conceptual, and how they think and act. This means you should focus on topics such as:

• How many different user journeys lead to my conversion goal
• Which user journey performs the best?
• What have the converting users been interested in?
• How is the converging user’s interest different that non-converting users?

You would then be able to do the changes on your site that is needed to boost your conversion because you base it on an understanding of your user’s behaviour and intents.

Our Case Study

Canecto has made a revolutionary new tool that can do just that, and it has worked wonders on our website.

We only have one core purpose of our website, and that is to sign users up for our service. The only thing else that matters is our support and the other elements that target our current user base. Everything is up for question and should potentially be removed or changed if it does not work for our purpose.

So, at Canecto we want to optimise our sign-up flow, that consist of four pages:

• Front-page
• Product page
• Try for the free page (our conversion goal)
• Price page

Step 1: Understand user journeys.

We used the Canecto app findings to map our users’ core journeys. We learned that the most three significant once were:

• Direct -> Try for free
• Frontage- -> Try for free
• FrontPage -> Price -> try for free

There was a combination of 12 different journeys that lead to conversions in this goal, and the top three accounted for 80% of the traffic that converted to sign-ups. What we learned here was that the users that signed up signed up very fast. They did not need to read our blogs or learn about our company. If you did not get our concept in 2 minutes, then you would never get it.

Core learnings:

• Our blog does not convert users, so do not spend time on it
• Do not do retargeting ads – either users get it fast, or they never will
• We have issues with our product page – people do not convert if they have visited it, so it needs to be completely redone.

Step 2: Know your user’s interest

The Canecto app also monitors user interest. It makes it possible to get a picture of what users who have converted were reading on our site, and what interest areas are unique to them compared to non-converting users.

We learned that where our converting users stood out the most were an interest in our cookie policy and our legal texts. This was a surprise because we did not expect them to be interested in the trustworthiness parts of our brand – you should think that product info was more relevant to them, but it was not. So, we might need to focus more on the trust factor in our communication to get more conversions.

Step 3: Adjust your marketing efforts

Understanding your user’s onsite behaviour makes it possible to do a much more price off-site marketing effort. Canecto has a marketing leg that can tell us how different channels perform against our conversion goals.

From our insights, we know that:

• Do not do any retargeting – if they do not get it the first time, they never will
• Organic sear is irrelevant for us – those users do not convert because they are low involvement traffic
• PR works well for us, so more content on guest blogs would be a good idea.
• Facebook ads are ok, but not more than that
• LinkedIn does not work at all, so only do the low hanging fruits

So, we have a pretty good idea on how we should move forward with our activates. We even have some lead as to what to write on the guest blogs because we know we should target first movers, give them brand trustworthy and quick fixes to their problems because of the think and act fast.

Step 4: Change your content and navigation

The case has identified different core areas where we should change our content:

• Re-do our product page.
• Be very careful with any change on the front page – it works well now, but needs to be more mobile-enabled.
• Put more sales focus on the technical pages of our site. The users who read it are highly motivated, so we need to do what we can to get them to the sign-up page (not the product page).

This approach is properly quite new to a lot of people, but we think it makes lots of sense. It has focused on users and how they interact with content, and it is so far away from trying to improve the conversion rate by making a button bigger and a different kind of blue.

PS: Our conversion rate has been better every week since we started this journey. We are not quite there yet, but we know where to focus and which order to do the modifications in.