Shaping your funnel – part 1

In this video, we’re going to look at your customer funnel. How you bring in customers, engage them and monetize them and we’re going to look at how to apply the methods we’ve been learning how to use this week to that problem. I’m going to use this AIDAOR framework that we’ve talked about earlier. There are a lot of pieces here but it’s really important to break this up into actionable chunks, otherwise it’s really hard to collaborate with all the people you’ll be working with on this problem because you’d probably working with sales and marketing folks, perhaps other product managers or different levels of abstraction or in related areas. And if we don’t decompose this problem, it’s really hard to solve.

And solving it is super important because you gotta bring in customers and you gotta make the product work for them. For each of these we’re going to look at both qualitative and quantitative angles on this. The why and the what as my friend, Laura Kline, expert in likes to say. And that’s important because there’s a bias towards a quantitative. It maybe how you get your performance measured, it’s easy, it’s visible, it’s easy to show and explain to people but to really really move the needle on those a lot of the time you need to update or deepen your qualitative understanding of what’s really going on with the customer. So let’s start with attention.

A quantitative angle on this would be if we advertise on Google AdWords Ads, what is our click through rate on those. Or as we see, with how encounters this at the right time and she sees it on LinkedIn and how many people click through from these things, we can probably have used the tracking code for trusted friend who posted this and look at the click-throughs on that. And we are over stimulated. So getting people’s attention is one thing and keeping it is another really hard thing and that’s what this interest step is about. Doing well here means doing less. And so for example, this is a landing page, a draft landing page, that I had created for Enable Quiz.

Notice, that there’s a very simple proposition here, and there’s a very clear call to action. Getting to this level of simplicity is difficult. And like anything that’s really difficult in this area, it helps to test. One way that’s really great is the five second test. You can take this page and put it in front of someone for five seconds and then take it away. And ask them a series of questions. In this case, for example, you might ask them, who is this for, and what does this product do, and what is the next step? What can you do from this page? And see if they answer the way you’d expect. You can do this on emails as well.

They won’t be able to read the whole email in five seconds, but probably somebody’s going to make a decision. But whether to continue with an email in the first five to ten seconds. I hope the simplicity and the quickness of that test will encourage you to try a lot of things because I think, in my experience certainly, that is the only way to get a good outcome here, is to try a lot of different things and see how they work out.

Here we see Helen encountering this landing page after she clicked through on the link that her friend posted. And the next step here is desire. What is the underlying desire that we’re not just maintaining, but we’re stimulating and stoking. So that the customer has the drive to get through, they’re motivated enough to continue with the process of buying our product. Other than moving from interest to action, which do have relatively clear events associated with them that you can measure. Desired is not, but that’s what I like about it. I like that it forces us to step back for a second and ask, what do we really think is propelling the customer, or the user to the next step here?

Because ultimately we make decisions on a highly emotional basis. And if we’re not connected with how the customer feels about our product and the underlying desires we’re fulfilling, even if this is a very practical thing like enable quiz, we’re probably going to struggle to really move the needle on some of these things. In the case of Helen, we think that she wants a win. The hiring technical talent is a key activity for her firm, she wants to do more to help them with that. Well, we’ve talked about the first part of this funnel, and in the next video, we’ll talk about the second half.