Happy Sunday! Hope you had a wonderful long weekend celebrating America’s birthday if you were doing so. I also hope you crushed some hot dogs.
Ok let’s get into today’s issue. In DTC and on Twitter, we talk a lot about ad creative, and a good amount about landing pages. But we hardly ever talk about funnels, so let’s do that today.
If you can’t tell, I think we should focus less on individual components and more of the entire journey which we will call the funnel.
I initially got into marketing and direct response marketing by learning a lot from Russel Brunson, Frank Kern, Dan Kennedy, etc and nearly everything those guys in the Direct Response world taught was through the lense of funnels.
So what is a funnel? A funnel is the entirety of the journey that a customer goes through. It encompasses the ad or ads they see, the page they land in (landing page), the angle and offer on that page, the next step from that page, and any other stops along the way.
While a lot of your traffic is going to go to your homepage, and for returning customers it should, but you should be creating acquisition funnels for a majority of your new customer acquisition efforts.
Have you ever gotten an ad for something and then clicked and wondered if you were on the wrong page? Or got an email for shoes but you clicked and saw pants? Yeah that is exactly the experience we want to prevent.
We want a very cohesive click to landing page to cart to checkout experience that will not only be super clear but always have the best chance of converting each consumer by having all of the right elements along the way and none of the “wrong ones” that could risk losing the conversion.
So you want it to be clear by matching the offer or angle of the ad.
You also want it to be clear by having good copy and social proof on the page. Things like press quotes, reviews, and testimonials should be tested.
You want it high converting by testing removing things like a full navigation and you want to only keep as many steps to checkout as needed.
And you want to raise your AOV and thus RPS by adding upsells in cart, checkout, and maybe even post purchase.
They say that creative is the new targeting, I really think funnels are the new targeting. You can definitely create funnels that appeal to different stages of traffic. A funnel that is straight up going to a PDP with an offer may with a static ad with the discount on it is going to deliver to a warmer audience, whereas a 5 reasons why listicle or advertorial with problem focused messaging will deliver to a colder audience.
We also talk about creative diversity.a lot, but I want us to focus on funnel diversity, At JRB we’ve been placing a huge focus on creative diversity, but now we are also focusing a lot on funnel diversity. I find a lot of teams (us included) test a generic landing page and if it wins they roll that out across all their ads for that product. But I think we should be thinking about having different funnels to reach different types of prospects at different points in the funnel through a variety of types of landing pages.
So what are the types of funnels that brands should try to have live?
Straight to PDP
Product focused/ Trojan Horse
Listicle aka x reasons why
Quiz funnels (can be combined with any of these)
Advertorial (both third party and first party)
Video landers (until we have a better name)
Video landers for creators
Now like I said you want as many live as possible. But one of these styles of funnels that I am the most excited about right now is the video funnel for creators. I've talked about this before. Our creator/infleuncer ads do pretty well, which I am pumped about. But right now we drop them on our main Miracle Balm and WTF landing pages. They do ok, but I have a theory that a different style of funnel will work better for these kinds of ads.
So we're going to test a little different style of funnel for these that we're working with Fermat for (who was also nice enough to sponsor this issue). We've got a bunch we're testing with Fermat, including:
3 listicles
2 video landers
1 creator/ influencer video lander
We're planning on launching them this week, so I'll be sure to share results of how they do.
You've probably seen Fermat all over, they're blowing up and for good reason. They're working with some of the fastest-growing and most respected DTC brands like Jones Road Beauty, True Classic, Mindbodygreen, Ubeauty, Armra, Nood, and more. Simply put, Fermat lets you create funnels as easily as you create ads.
That means they are easy to make and edit/test, can be spun up in minutes without needing a developer, can be diverse, customized, and can be super easily tested.
I love the idea of not just having one homepage. but having tens of different funnels and shopping experiences that can be personalized to the user and pre-click experience.
Plus you can rapidly test a bunch on these funnels without needing to touch your main site, and then you can test or deploy those on main site as you wish.
I highly recommend you check out Fermat if you're serious about scaling. Check out an example of our video funnel here and book a call to see what Fermat can do for you.
I hope you enjoyed this one. I'll be sure to follow up with results of these tests; be sure to check out our ad library later this week.
I'll be speaking at Grow NY on Tuesday. I have to rush back to work, but come say hi if you will be there.
Talk soon,
-Cody