In our earlier posts in this five-part series on optimizing your sales funnel through testing have brought us to a fourth important step. After collecting data (hyperlink to Blog 1), prioritizing what and where to test (hyperlink to Blog 2), and identifying Key Performance Indicators (hyperlink to Blog 3), it’s time to consider how many different variations of a funnel step you want to test at the same time.

When considering variations to test, keep in mind that the more variations you have, the less traffic each variation within that test will receive.

For example, if a page in your sales funnel is receiving 100 visitors per day and you have two variations that you are testing against each other, each variation will hypothetically receive 50 visitors. If you have three variations, the number of visitors each variation will receive drops down to roughly 33. This means that in order for your test to achieve a significant result, you will have to run your test longer.

How long?  

The length it takes to run a test depends on a number of factors, such as how many visitors a test is receiving and the size of the variant(s) improvement. In other words, if a variant is significantly beating the control and the test is receiving a good amount of traffic, you will receive a significant result quicker than you would otherwise.

Typically when you use a Testing Platform (like Convert, Google Optimize, VWO or Optimizely), the software will calculate the confidence interval.

(Confidence level inside of Convert, a recommended testing platform) 

At a minimum, we recommend running a test for seven days or a full business cycle, regardless of the results and confidence interval. However, your test may very well take longer depending on the volume of visitors your test is receiving. 

The bottom line is that when planning your tests, take into consideration how much traffic you are getting to the sales funnel pages. The more traffic your page is getting, the more variations you can test.  If your page is not getting a lot of traffic, then you probably only want to test one or two variants.

In our next and final post in this five-part series on testing for sales funnel optimization, we will get into the nuts and bolts of implementing your test.

In our previous two posts, we covered the beginnings of how to optimize your sales funnel through testing. Once you’ve started by collecting data and have figured out the area of your sales funnel that needs the most optimization, we get to the most important step – figuring out what Key Performance Indicator(s), or KPI(s), you want to improve. 

A KPI is a metric that is used to measure the performance and progress toward a business goal. 

Examples of Key Performance Indicators include: 

• Funnel Step Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who visit Step 1 of your sales funnel and move on to Step 2
• Purchase Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who visit Step 1 and end up purchasing a product later on
• Open Rate Percentage and Click Rate Percentage: The percentage of people who open or click an email
• Cost Per Conversion (CPC) or Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• Bounce Rate: percentage of people who land on your website and leave immediately

After you have your KPI(s) for your test, use them to create an objective.

An objective for your test might be “to improve my lead capture page conversion rate,” or even “to improve my lead capture page conversion rate without lowering my sales conversion rate.”  (In the second example, two KPIs are being used.)

Once you’ve figured out what your testing objective is, then you can start figuring out what element(s) on your sales funnel step you are going to test. There really isn’t a set standard in terms of what specific elements of a page you should prioritize, but anything you decide to test should answer your test’s objective.

When working with a brand new page, we try to test more wholesale changes, such as different layouts or designs, or even a completely different copy angle. This is because when you are launching a brand new page there is no set baseline, so it’s a good opportunity to figure out a starting point.

But once a page’s starting performance has been established, the changes that you test should be more subtle.

Using Qualitative Visual Reporting tools such as Heatmaps, Scrollmaps or Visitor Recordings can help you figure out how people are interacting with your page. A good place to start is often testing specific copy tweaks, like headlines. Copy can have a huge impact and is fairly easy to implement.

At the end of the day, before you launch any test, you need to be able to develop a hypothesis that reflects your overall objective. 

Example hypotheses include:

“Headline B will have a higher conversion rate than Headline A,” 

or

“Using an orange button instead of a green button will improve conversion rates.” 

The bottom line is that anything you test should be rooted with the objective of improving your Key Performance Indicators.

In our next blog post in this series about optimizing your sales funnel through testing, we will focus on planning how many variations of a funnel step to test and minimizing the length of time it takes to run a proper test.

Let’s say that Step 1 of your sales funnel is your lead capture page and Step 2 is your sales page, and you decided to test both steps at the same time (see diagram below). If your sales increased by 10%, which test can you really attribute the increase to?

Split testing confusing.  Example of cross pollination. 

Did an increase in leads generate more sales? Did an improvement in the sales page itself produce the sale? Is there a combination of variations that produce more sales when they interact with each other?  

You just cannot definitively know.

This is called “cross-pollination,” and when starting out with testing, it’s something that you ideally try to avoid. When beginning to plan your tests, you need to look at the data that you have been gathering from your tracking tools to identify what the high-priority weak spots of your sales funnel are.

It’s often good to start at the top of the funnel. If visitors are not making it past Step 1 of your funnel, they are not ever going to see Step 2, Step 3, Step 4 and so on. So in this scenario, your sales funnel is “clogged,” and Step 1 should be the first place you look at to optimize your funnel.

If Step 1 is performing well, however, but Step 2 is performing poorly, then begin with Step 2. 

The bottom line is that you should use your data to paint a mental picture of what is going on within your funnel from a 1,000-foot view.

Once you have a better understanding of where you would like to see improvement in your sales funnel, then you can focus on what exactly it is you will be testing.

In our next blog, we’ll focus on identifying metrics and objectives for your tests and why this is the most important part when it comes to optimizing your sales funnel.

Why Messenger Bots?

Facebook Messenger Bots are completely changing the internet marketing game. No longer is it the day where you HAVE to rely on sending people to your website. 

You can now run Facebook Ads directly to a messenger bot and subsequently you can capturing the lead without the lead even leaving Facebook. 

This lowers the risk of leads leaving your page(s) before taking any action.

Another HUGE benefit of Facebook Messages, is that it is reasonable to expect 70-80%+  open rates on messages sent through messenger bots. 

You can even now accept payments through a ManyChat Messenger bot. 

I truly believe Facebook Messenger Bots are truly the next generation of Marketing Automation.

So how can you incorporate these Messenger Bots with your existing online marketing automation strategy?  

Using Them With Infusionsoft:

In this tutorial I’ll show you how you how to add your ManyChat Subscribers to Infusionsoft and how you can send messages on Facebook Messenger through Infusionsoft’s campaign builder using ManyChat.

This integration works using a combination of Zapier and Infusionsoft tags which will fire off ManyChat Sequences when ever a tag is applied.  

By doing this you can build a multi-channeled communication approach that is in sync with each other. 

Video Tutorial: 

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What You’ll Need For This Is:

• Infusionsoft as a CRM/Marketing Automation Platform (If you don’t have it already click here) 
• ManyChat as a messenger bot platform  (If you don’t have already click here) 
• Zapier as the integration between the two (If you dont have already click here) 

Note: Even though this tutorial is about using ManyChat with Infusionsoft… you can essentially do the same thing using Active Campaign. 

Hope this Infusionsoft video tutorial helps.  If it did or if this inspired any new marketing automation ideas please leave us a comment below with your thoughts!

​An often debated comparison in the digital marketing technology that I see is:

I’m in both customer Facebook groups and this debate comes up fairly often and I often find myself tempted to go on a long Facebook comment rant about the subject.

(Typically I am about 80-85% successful at holding myself back)

To start it is important for me to note that I’m an Infusionsoft Certified Partner and I primarily run Prior Marketing Solutions using Infusionsoft.

However, I am also an ActiveCampaign Certified Consultant and many of my past and current Infusionsoft and ActiveCampaign customers also use ClickFunnels.

Which will lead me to the biggest theme of this post.

Both are good at different things and are not necessarily mutually exclusive of each other.

That being said… lets meet the challengers:

ClickFunnels:

When Russell Brunson introduced ClickFunnels to the scene a few years ago, it was positioned itself as an easy “all-in-one” Digital Marketing solution for small businesses. Specifically it is meant to easily build out a wide variety of different sales funnels.

Everything about ClickFunnels is simplified (on purpose) and it is designed for entry level entrepreneurs. (Granted, many experienced marketers and entrepreneurs choose to use it)

ClickFunnel’s core Drag-and-drop landing page builder feature is very solid, easy-to-use and comes with a lot of pre-built designs. You can also build out order forms & make sales using their builder.

This landing page builder is combined with the ability to map out different “Funnel Steps”, as well as the ability to test out different landing page/order form variations.

These Funnel Steps are then trackable to where you can easily see the strength and weaknesses of your sales funnel.

In my opinion – this core functionality is great. (Although, their split-testing feature is very basic and often buggy)

Where ClickFunnels falls off is their OTHER features…

ClickFunnels also offers email marketing automation,  membership website and affiliate tracking features.

Without getting into way too much detail… these features are simply novelties and will present a lot of challenges to users when tested with any level of scale.  These features are very basic and provide very little (if any) ability to do anything outside of a kindergarten level use of these features.

But again,  it’s core functionality (landing page / order form builder) is very solid, especially when you are first getting started. 

Also I think it is important to note, while Infusionsoft’s customer support team doesn’t have reputation of being “best-in-class”… they are still way better than ClickFunnels’s team.

Simply put… ClickFunnel’s customer support team is absolutely awful. And every funnel is self hosted on their servers so if something goes wrong, you aren’t left with many options. 

I personally have found that if a CF technical support issue requires a sliver critical thought or is at all related to an issue caused by their platform… 85% of the time they are either not able to help or end up escalating the issue to their developers (who most of the time won’t fix your issue in a timely matter).

I don’t think it’s fair to say the customer support thing is a “deal breaker”… but it’s definitely something to consider.  

Infusionsoft:

To start, Infusionsoft is hands down a more superior CRM (Customer Relationship Management Platform) & Marketing Automation platform  than Clickfunnels.

3 things that are typically good to look for in a good CRM are:

• What data about your leads and customers does the CRM store?
• How well does it track leads through a sales pipeline?
• What kind of reporting can you get out of it to make management decisions?

Infusionsoft does a great job with all of those categories and for the most part, when a feature is not available natively (built inside of Infusionsoft) you can fill in the gap with a 3rd party tool.

Simply put… ClickFunnels is not a true CRM. It stores minimal data about a customer. It has sales pipeline functionality and reporting is extremely basic.

What makes Infusionsoft extremely powerful is that it is also a very good marketing automation & e-commerce platform.  This means your CRM, Email Marketing & E-Commerce are all in the same place, and “infused” with each other. 

In terms of Email Marketing Automation… Infusionsoft also has Clickfunnels beat. ClickFunnel’s marketing automation potential is not anywhere near as robust as Infusionsoft’s, which allows you to communicate to very specific groups of leads/customers in different ways than each other. 

Overall Infusionsoft, provides a lot more E-Commerce Reporting  & “background” features compared to Clickfunnels, but from a design and ease-of-use perspective,  ClickFunnel’s landing pages / order forms beats Infusionsoft’s Landing Pages / Order Forms.

However, Infusionsoft has put in a significant amount of resources in developing their own drag-and-drop landing page builder.  I wouldn’t say that their new builder is quite at the level as ClickFunnel’s… but they are definitely getting closer.

… And rumor is Infusionsoft plans to release a drag-and-drop order form feature in the next few weeks/months.

If you can’t wait that long, then Infusionsoft has a HUGE market of 3rd-party integrations.

(Spiffy is an easy way to make to make your Infusionsoft Order forms way nicer)

In fact you can easily integrate Infusionsoft with ClickFunnels.  (and this integration is not half bad).

Comparison of Infusionsoft & ClickFunnels:

Membership Websites	3rd Party Tool Required (Memberium is Awesome)	Bad
Marketing Automation	Very Good	Bad
Integrations	Very Good	Bad
Email Marketing	Good	Bad
CRM	Very Good	Basic
Reporting	Very Good	Basic
Ease-Of-Use	Small Learning Curve	Easy
Sales Automation	Very Good	N/A
Affiliate Tracking	Good	Very Bad
Customer Support	Decent	Very Bad
Landing Pages	Good. Work In Progress	Very Good
Order Forms	Bad 3rd Party Solutions Can Improve	Very Good

In conclusion:

Infusionsoft is a better “all-in-one” marketing platform than ClickFunnels.

Honestly, ClickFunnels should not be in the “all-in-one” space. If they were to focus more energy on growing their core landing builder/order builder feature, as well as stabilizing their API and customer service situation I would be a much much bigger fan.

Instead, I think they mislead their customers & market base by positioning themselves as a Infusionsoft competitor, when in reality they are not. 

Overall, in terms of fire power, I don’t think Clickfunnels come anywhere close to most of the features that Infusionsoft provides. 

NOW That Said – ClickFunnels + Infusionsoft is not a bad combination by any means.  They compliment each other well.

PERSONALLY.  My favorite technology stack for Sales Funnels is: 

• Infusionsoft – CRM, Marketing Automation + 
• ThriveThemes / Architect – For Landing Pages
• ThriveCart (Unrelated to ThriveThemes) – For order forms

What is your opinion about these two marketing tools?  Agree? Disagree? Comment below:

If your sales funnel is like a road map, metrics are a lot like the step-by-step directions you take to get from where you started to where you want to end up. Metrics are a snapshot of the present – they tell you where you are, how effective your past choices were and what you need to do to make sure you end up in the right place moving forward. When it comes to designing and optimizing the perfect sales funnel, there are a few core metrics that you’ll absolutely want to start using.

Conversions

Your conversion rate allows you to essentially take a macro look at how your sales funnel is performing. Remember that this is just one small part of a much bigger picture, but to be fair – it’s a pretty important part. Out of all of the people that you have the attention of, conversions will tell you how many of them were really buying into what you have to say and how many couldn’t wait to go find someone else to listen to.

You can use conversion rate to break down all of your individual channels and see how they’re doing. If you send 1000 emails and get 10 conversions, for example, your conversion rate is 1% – not great. Getting 500 conversions from those same 1000 emails would be a conversion rate of 50%, however, which is pretty spectacular.

We use Improvely, Google Analytics and Infusionsoft Data to gather conversion data, however there are plenty of tools out there to help you gather this data. If you use funnel builders like ClickFunnels, this data is built in.

CLV (Customer Life Time Value)

CLV or Customer Lifetime Value is a number that essentially breaks down how much money you’ll make from a particular customer over the lifetime of their relationship with your company. As the general success and efficiency of your sales funnel increases, this CLV metric should be increasing at the same time. If it’s not, you likely have a serious issue somewhere along the sales funnel that you should identify and correct as soon as possible.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

Customer Lifetime Value is hugely important to know so that you can compare it to another important metric – Customer Acquisition Cost. If you’re spending $100 to acquire a new customer but the average customer only has a CLV of $75, you’re essentially losing money on the deal. These two metrics have a direct relationship – as you work to increase one (CLV), you should be working to decrease the other (CAC) at the same time.

Revenue Pipeline

Revenue pipeline is an important metric to understand because it helps make sure your sales funnel is still headed in the right direction. Based on data like lead close rates, average revenue per sale and more, revenue pipeline can help you take a look into the future and project the average value of each lead based on current information.

As you make adjustments to your sales funnel, you can use revenue pipeline to help get a sense of their effectiveness in real-time as other metrics increase or decrease as a result.

DPL (Dollars Per Lead)

Dollar Per Lead (also known as Revenue Per Lead) is the total revenue from all sales made to a specific lead group divided by the total number of leads from that group. For example, if a total of $10,000 in revenue had been generated from a specific lead group and the number of leads in the group was 100, the calculation would be $10,000/100 which equals $100 per lead. The total revenue should include all sales made to date including sales made via an offline process (i.e. tele-sales, live event sales, etc.)

It is important to know your DPL for two reason. First, assuming that you know your customer acquisition cost then by knowing your DPL you will know if your marketing campaign is ultimately making you money or not. If you’re spending more money to generate a lead than you are making from that lead it’s time to tweak the campaign or even shut it down. Second, by knowing your DPL you can create a revenue model that will allow you to project revenue over a given time period. Revenue forecasting is a key component to scaling a business.

ROI (Return On Investment)

Return On Investment is the bottom line metric used for any marketing campaign. It is simply the total amount of profit (Revenue Minus Cost) generated by sales made to a specific lead group divided by the total marketing cost it took to create those leads. If $100,000 of revenue was generated at a cost of $50,000 the ROI would be 100% (ROI is always displayed as a percentage.) Any ROI over 100% means that the marketing campaign created at least double your investment.

ROI is the highest level view of the success or failure of a marketing campaign and should only be used to make decisions when taken into context with all the other metrics and data. For ongoing marketing campaigns ROI can be calculated at specific intervals (i.e. monthly, quarterly, etc) to show trends.

Qualitative Data

All of the above metrics are what are known Quantitative Data. Quantitative Data helps you identify what the strengths and weaknesses of your funnel are, and the overall performance.

QUALITATIVE Data helps explain why OR why not steps in your funnels are converting. Integrating tools like scroll, click and tap heatmaps or page recordings on your funnel pages or order forms, allow you to see HOW people are interacting with your funnel.

Studying your funnel’s qualitative data is extremely helpful when trying to identify potential funnel optimizations. It is an extra layer on top of your funnels quantitative metrics.

To collect qualitative data we suggest installing something something like HotJar on to all of the pages on your website.

Startup Stock Photos

In terms of sales, one of the most valuable tools that all marketers have in their arsenal is and will always be good, old-fashioned word of mouth. One customer uses your product or service and walks away satisfied. They tell two people, those two people each tell five more and pretty soon you’ve got a steady stream of new leads beating down your door to see what the fuss is about

In many ways, referral partners and affiliates are the 21st century, digital version of this very basic concept. Obtaining a referral partner is often something that happens organically, but businesses CAN help speed this process along through a number of important strategies.

Referral Partners and Affiliates: The Basics

A referral partner is typically a blogger, a particular website or some other type of publisher that produces content that would be of interest to the specific people you’re trying to reach. A referral partner with a significant email list that appeals to your target audience, for example, is one example of this idea in action. They could send out an email to their list that mentions your product or service and, as you already know their recipients are in your target audience, you will have a much higher click through and even sale rate than you would via more general means.

The Benefits of Using Referral Partner Strategies

To that end, referral partners can be a truly excellent source of traffic for your sales funnel. As your network of referral partners increases, so do the number of mentions your brand gets on the Web. That activity brings more eyes onto your products and services, creating more leads and more opportunities. The cycle then repeats itself as more relevant content makes its way online.

Referral links can also be a great way to help keep track of which efforts are performing to your expectations. You can track leads that come from a particular email address, for example, by setting that source up as a dummy referral partner and paying attention to the level of attention it can generate.

If you’re an existing Infusionsoft user, you’ll no doubt be pleased to know that adding referral partners inside of Infusionsoft is a whole lot easier than you may have initially thought.

To find out more, watch this tutorial that I’ve recorded that will help you shed valuable insight on this important process.

Your CRM is essential to your business, and the precision of your CRM can add levels of sophistication to your business. List segmenting and behavioral tracking are two of the most useful techniques at your disposal. Here, we take a look at how list segmenting and behavioral tracking can help you.

List Segmenting

Obviously you want to keep up with your contacts; however, it becomes much easier to market to those contacts if they are segmented by metrics of your choosing. This is what Infusionsoft offers with its list segmenting feature, a slightly hidden, but especially useful, organization feature.

Infusionsoft specifically allows you to segment your lists and connect them to other aspects of your CRM; for instance, you can send automated emails to only a certain segment that you have designated beforehand.

Behavioral Tracking

Getting in touch with your customer base once you have integrated them into your system is an ongoing job. If you want to maintain your relationships, you need to know what trends people are following and why. Behavioral tracking gives you an inside track as to what your audience is doing. When you combine the tracking features of a robust CRM program with list segmenting, you get a very powerful tool that can help you hone in on marketing strategies for a precisely targeted audience.

Putting the techniques of list segmenting and behavioral tracking together can save a business a great deal of money in both acquisition and maintenance strategies. Many large scale companies are using these techniques, and the best performers in the SMB market have already embraced the new organization that segmentation and tracking bring to them. It is also a great way to narrow down the people who are most important to market to if you have a limited budget with which to work.

The partnership of Memberium and Infusionsoft can help you track the behavior and the interests of your customers through list segmenting inside your membership site. With statistics at your fingertips, you will be able to make better decisions about how you use your audience.