Optimize your funnels
- Optimizely Web Experimentation
- Optimizely Personalization
With its support for multi-page experimentsmulti-page experiments, Optimizely Web Experimentation lets you experiment and improve the funnels that provide valuable, qualified leads to your site. If your organization is not currently using funnels, Optimizely Web Experimentation can help you develop an effective funnel process through experimentation and iteration.
Types of funnels
- Acquisition – Brings in new leads and converts them to customers. These often use special offers or giveaways to persuade prospects to provide an email address or other contact information.
- Activation – Targets new customers who have not started using your product. Tech companies often use activation funnels during onboarding to help new customers understand the capabilities of the product.
- Monetization – Increases the CLV of existing customers.
Use Optimizely Web Experimentation to run experiments on your funnel to improve the conversion rate and track the impact across the visitor's journey.
Note
See Design an effective hypothesisDesign an effective hypothesis and 10 common experiments 10 common experiments to learn more.
Where to optimize the funnel process
Optimizing any step of the funnel has the potential to improve your overall results. If you are new to funnel optimization, here are a few good places to start:
- Calls to action (CTAs) – A funnel gets your prospects or visitors to do something. How you ask for that action can impact whether they do it or not. Experiment with copy length, tone, word choice, and placement of the CTAs on the page itself. For example, many people find that shorter, more direct CTAs work better than wordier ones. If you want to test a shorter CTA, create a new variation in your experiment. Add the page where your CTA lives and use the Visual EditorVisual Editor to quickly edit the text.
- Landing pages – Landing pages are standalone pages that serve one specific purpose, such as to generate leads or promote product-specific offers. Organizations often have several landing pages live at any given time, each targeted to a specific offer or customer segment. Because a landing page is a visitor’s first touchpoint with your offer, optimizing the experience for them is vital. Any component of the page – content, tone, navigation, layout, visuals – could be the difference between getting visitors to click through to your offer and having them click away from it. As with your CTAs, optimize your landing pages by working in the Visual Editor to test ideas and hypotheses that could help drive traffic through your landing pages and encourage the user behavior you want to see. Experiment with as many different ideas and combinations as you feel comfortable with. Optimizely Web Experimentation users who run more variations per experiment see statistically significant results more quickly and more often.
- The offers themselves, especially in an acquisition funnel – Are you offering something of value in exchange for your visitor’s information? Is it relevant to them? Does it relate to the product or service you offer? Have you considered splintering - breaking off smaller pieces of your core product and presenting them as standalone offers? You can experiment with different offers to find a winner quickly. The more offers you test, the more likely you are to find a statistically significant winner.
- Optimizely Web Experimentation pages – Optimizely Web Experimentation reusable templates are called pagespages. You add pages to any multi-page experiment to hold your experiment’s content. You can experiment with different approaches for the pages further along in your funnel process, especially if you have noticed your existing funnel is experiencing high rates of drop-off at specific stages.
See Multi-page funnel experiments to learn more.
Optimizely Personalization
After you achieve proficiency with basic funnel optimization techniques, you can optimize your funnels further by personalizing your content - especially your CTAs and offers - to your visitors.
- Retail and ecommerce can use personalization to connect offers and CTAs to previous products or product categories the user has viewed or otherwise expressed an interest in.
- Media sites can use it to show users content similar to what they have seen previously.
- Tech companies can personalize funnel content to relate directly to the visitor’s specific business vertical.
- Travel sites can personalize based on prior destinations or on the specifics of prior trips (offering discounts at a hotel they have stayed at before, or on car rentals, and so on).