This is the first post in a five-part series that will tell you how to get started with testing different elements of your web pages as a way to optimize your sales funnel. In this article we will discuss the importance of starting with data. Stay tuned for more posts to come! 

If you’re in the business world, chances are you’ve heard of Testing as a tool you can use to optimize your sales funnel.

Testing is an easy and effective way to optimize your funnel to work to your advantage. By testing variations of pages against each other, with different copy or button colors, for example, you can make sure your pages are set up in the optimal way to help people more easily reach the desired end goal – buying from you!

But where do you start?

Start with your numbers. Before running any kind of test, you need to make sure that you are currently tracking how people are moving through your sales funnel.  

How many people are making it to the first step of your funnel?  

What percentage of those visitors are making it to the next steps?   

How much is a visitor to each funnel step worth?

When you build a sales funnel, the first thing you need to do before launching it is make sure you have tracking set up on every page. There are free tools, like Google Analytics and Google Optimize, that at the very least, you should automatically install on every page. They can be implemented fairly quickly and are great tools to have at your disposal when collecting data.

There are also paid services available for:

Testing Platforms: including Convert, Optimizely, and VWO

Advertising Pixels: including Facebook, Google Adwords, etc.

Tracking scripts from your CRM: including Infusionsoft by Keap, or Active Campaign

Visual Tracking Tools: including CrazyEgg or HotJar

It’s also a great idea to track your leads within CRM/email marketing tools, so if you use any of these, make sure you are segmenting your lists by as many funnel steps a lead makes it through as you can.

For example, make sure you have a list (or a tag) set up for leads that opt in to your funnel. Then another for anyone who buys your funnel’s first offer, then another who buys the second offer, etc. You might even consider one for non-buyers.    

Bottom line: When considering running a test to optimize your sales funnel, remember that you need to collect a good amount of data before you being to ensure success.

If you don’t start off the testing process with analytics (or at the very least the means to collect future data),  then all of the subsequent steps will fail. 

In our next post, we’ll delve into how to identify the best place to perform your test and why choosing the right place to optimize your funnel is key for maximizing your results.