Diagnosing funnel problems
If you have a problem in your funnel, you need to know why it’s happening and who to turn to so you can get it solved. By being familiar with all the roles and tactics of marketing, you’ll be able to get the right help.
Funnel problems:
High website bounce rate
Website bounce rate is when someone lands on your website but them immediately leaves without spending time looking at the content or continuing to other pages. Google’s definition of bounce rate is the percentage of single page view visits to a website. Bounce rate averages vary greatly across industries but here is a general benchmark:
26% to 40% is excellent
41% to 55% is roughly average
56% to 70% percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website.
Over 70% is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.
This article goes into more depth about bounce rates
What could be happening:
You’re attracting the wrong audience to your website because your content or PR articles are focussed on something unrelated to your product or was too “click baity”.
The right audience is visiting your site but they are either confused about why they arrived there
The right audience is visiting your site they aren’t convinced by the offering
Who can help:
PR, demand gen, product marketing, and content marketing will need to work together to identify why this is happening. Maybe PR ran a thought leadership piece that was completely unrelated to your product offering. Maybe demand gen is running an ad that gets a high click rate, but then the landing page they arrive at is poorly executed or irrelevant to the ad. Maybe the product landing pages are not speaking to the visitor’s Job to be Done or doesn’t clearly explain what the product is.
Bounce rate is fine, but visitors aren’t signing up or requesting a demo
Your website is not clearly communicating the problem you solve. Perhaps you do a great job of explaining why you exist, but don’t clearly communicate what you do and how you do it. Or maybe you dive head first into how every feature works, but aren’t compelling anyone to care about why you exist.
Visitors are converting, but need more leads
This is a great problem to have! If you have a low bounce rate and a strong visitor to sign up conversion, it’s time to pour some fuel on the fire to reach a bigger audience. Land some press pieces, give talks at conferences, run smart ad campaigns, create competitor landing pages.
Self-service: Check-out/cart abandonment
If someone made it this far into your funnel but then abandoned there could be a price to value misalignment. Maybe your product is priced too high.
SaaS: Maybe you need to review your packaging (which features go in which plan) or offer a very limited free plan to entice people to get started. Maybe this is a big decision and they can’t just put in a credit card but want to talk to sales or need to bring in other decision makers at the company.
E-Commerce: Maybe people are getting sticker shock once they see taxes and shipping fees. Or maybe they don’t have clarity on how long their purchase will take to arrive.
Trials don’t convert to paying customers
This could be a product issue and you need to go back to the drawing board to better understand exactly what users need to solve their job to be done. It’s also possible that marketing and sales over promised the product offering. Maybe the website is stunning but the product experience is not consistent.
Paying customers have low product usage
Track this carefully so you can get out in front of unhappy customers before they churn. Maybe there is a bug that they reported but hasn’t been fixed. Maybe their priorities have changed and they no longer need certain features. Maybe they are unaware of features that exist (or were recently shipped) that will add value to them.
