Your sales funnel is a key part of attracting new members to your community; and so it's no surprise that some membership owners have a constant itch to tweak and tinker with every little detail.
However making constant adjustments to your funnel is seriously counter-productive and could actually be hurting your business.
So, how often should you adjust your membership sales funnel?
Adjust your membership sales funnel once a quarter (at most)
Once a quarter is the upper limit of how often we think you should start tweaking your sales funnel.
That doesn’t mean that you should ignore your sales funnel for the rest of that time, but try to be a little more ‘light touch’ about it.
You need to have an awareness of your vital statistics, to be checking in on the surface level, but try to avoid the temptation to dive down the analytics rabbit hole.
Personally, it's not uncommon for me to check out our Google Analytics stats at least once a day.
But that's only ever on the mobile app, which gives little more than a basic overview.
Thanks to its reduced information load, we can’t go down the rabbit hole and lose hours of our time obsessing over the most minute of data points.
So, keep your finger on the pulse so you can be sure everything is working as it should, but leave the big surgery for every three months (or longer).
Adjust your sales funnel based on data, not desire
When the next quarter comes around, we think it’s best to look at the hard numbers – not a feeling or changing for the sake of change itself.
Essential numbers we, and many other membership site owners look at, are:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Best-performing emails in each campaign
On our best behaviour, we make decisions based solely on that data.
If, when it comes to your next review of your sales funnel, you find that things are working well… Keep them that way!
Adjusting your sales funnel shouldn’t be done at a set time because you’ve said you will, you should change when the data shows that you need to change.
That might be once a quarter or once every five years.
Don’t worry about the frequency of your adjustments, focus on the responsiveness of your adjustments.
Good work takes time, but great work is timeless
With The Membership Geeks, we’ve used our plugin comparison guide since day one. Of course we have updated the content of it but, in its role as a lead magnet, it hasn’t changed in 5 years.
Why?
Because it hasn’t needed to.
It converts solidly. We’ve tested others but this is still as high performing to this day as it ever was.
If we were obsessed with constantly tweaking our sales funnels, over-thinking or second guessing every component, then we might have shelved the plugin comparison guide in the belief that we could get something to perform better.
This is why it’s important to avoid changing for the sake of change every quarter and why you should take the time to look at and analyse your data to determine when you should change things.
The best thing you can do after setting up your sales funnels is to step away and let them do their thing.
Another important point that should hopefully persuade you to give your sales funnel some breathing space, is that any changes you do make to your funnels will need time to start working.
Any significant changes you make will take months to start moving the needle and provide you with sufficient data to make comparisons.
If you’re tinkering and tweaking every week, the changes you make won’t have had enough time to have a discernible effect.
Membership sales funnels are often over-analyzed
The question of how and when we should adjust our membership sales funnels is especially important for online business owners, as we have a tendency to overdo things a little.
We always want to check on and tinker with our funnels – something could be slightly wrong or might not be quite performing well enough. In the broad digital space, the desire to stay in control of a few variables is especially strong.
Being desperate to squeeze one or two percent more performance out of things, though, can be a recipe for self-sabotage.
It’s very possible to over-engineer and overthink automations by chasing that mythical perfect sales funnel.
Don’t get carried away with the granularity of the changes that you make and the tests you perform.
Unless you’re getting millions of visitors to your sales page every month, don’t worry too much about the colour of your opt-in button!
The differences you’re going to be able to make with such granular tweaks and changes are so negligible when you have relatively low traffic, that it won’t be worth your time.
A 0.02% increase in conversions is great if you’ve got 1,000,000 visitors each month, but for sites with hundreds or thousands of visitors, the increase in income for the hours you spend making changes won’t make for a pretty hourly rate!
Trust yourself and trust your sales funnels
We don’t want to lecture or preach – you should know that we’re saying all of these things based on our own experience!
We think the reason people obsess over making such tiny tweaks is that once you’ve got all your automations in place and the time comes for you to sit back and let it work…
It’s very hard to want to stop and relinquish control!
The best thing you can do after setting up your sales funnels is to step away and let them do their thing.
Your skill, research and intuition have gone into creating great funnels.
Let them play out for a while and then make informed decisions – try to avoid that temptation to tweak and change things regularly.
It’ll be worth it, we promise.
