The first thing we need to do is to identify the leak.
Where are people falling out?
If we think of our funnel as a physical funnel and it had holes within it, as we pull water into the top of the funnel, if we had holes, water would pour out, it would fall out.
It’s more important to us to plug those leaks and that’s what we call closing the loop with things like remarketing and activities like remarketing, rather than just trying to fill up with more water.
We need to be able to identify where people are falling out of the process.
Who is closest to crossing the finish line?
I believe that it’s easier to get someone who is closest to cross the finish line rather than people who are furthest away, which might sound obvious.
But I think a lot of people believe that the largest gain, the largest distance covered is the goal and it’s not.
For example, if you have someone who is ten meters away from the line and someone who is one meter away from the line, most people will try and get to the person who is ten meters to closest to the line to get even closer, because that would be a gain of what ten meters.
Someone who is a meter away, there’s almost an implied assumption that they’re so close anyway, won’t they convert some point like any way out there in volition?
It’s also considerably cheaper, all things being equal to get someone who is closest to the finish line over the line.
When we talk about this in terms of conversions, I believe most people look at remarketing.
They think, if I’ve got a group of people, a thousand of which haven’t been shown the contact form or the sales page or the landing page or the squeeze page or whatever, but I’ve got 10 people who have been to that page and haven’t converted, most people will look to the larger audience and think if they haven’t seen it, showing them that it’s the biggest gain.
When in actual fact, getting someone over the line and showing it just to 10, Facebook allows you to advertise to 20 people a month, that’s how small the audience size can be.
Actually, even that’s not strictly true. I think it’s 20 people over 180 days if I remember correctly.
The conversion, it looks like you’ve already done so much work. You’ve tried to get them there in the first place.
Maybe they’ve got there because of Google or their own volition, or you emailed them and it’s been like, “Oh my God, am I really going to have to spend more money on getting them to convert even though they’ve been on the page?”
Surely that’s just someone who hasn’t converted and that’s not the case.
We’ve often talked about the fortune is in the follow-up. You absolutely should be focusing on people who are closest to the finish line.
Of course, down the line, we can look at advertising to people who haven’t seen the offer, but I would much rather interact and spend money on converting someone who has seen the offer and is more likely to convert rather than trying to convert more people or pick a distance.
What we need to do is identify a group of people who are closest to crossing that finish line.
It’s far more simple than you might think. If you have a hundred people visiting your sales pages, it’s a pretty good indicator that those people are closer to buying.
People who have already been on a sales page, clearly have seen some reason to click through. They’ve taken some level of interest to click through.
Therefore, why wouldn’t we just focus on them?
That’s what we’re going to be working on, identifying a group of people who are closest to making that conversion.
Yes. The audience size might be smaller and it might be tempting to think, “But if I advertise to a thousand people, possibly, it actually works out cheaper, but potentially for essentially the same amount then wasn’t it more likely that those will convert?”
What we’re doing here is, first of all, we’re identifying individual kinds of campaigns that we can run to a group of people. S
We could run this one-off or we could run this over a month or whatever, and we can run it to people who have just done the action.
Also in future, any further people who land on that page by their own volition and who get there through other means and other activities, we’re going to close that loop.
We now know that in the future, every single time someone lands on our contact page or a sales page or a checkout page or whatever that next action is they’re going to see an advert.
We’re going to close the loop.
This means that when we do begin to attract more traffic and we do begin to scale our business, particularly as funnel businesses, as service-based businesses, that we’re actually making our budgets more effective in the future.
