A conversion funnel is more like a mountain

With three heuristics for thinking through what you can do about it

You’ve heard of the conversion funnel.

It’s actually upside down. It looks more like a mountain.

You’re asking prospects to climb your mountain. And getting to the top takes a certain amount of motivation.

(Yes, this is a disgraceful oversimplification of CRO for funnels.)

CAVEAT. This model kinda leans in to the core mistake I see a lot of optimisers and experimenters make: that we’re running clean, controlled scientific experiments, holding variables stable – like in a lab. We’re not, and we can’t. The world is complex, and reality has a surprising amount of detail. But some oversimplified models are useful. OK back to the mountain.

In a big enough group of prospects:

One person would climb your mountain over broken glass. Motivation score: 100%

One person would never even start climbing. Motivation score: 0%

Between these extremes there’s a sinuous gradient of motivation, where most prospects have lower motivation than you’d like.

Most Conversion Rate Optimisation activities are about trying to shove or entice a few more prospects up to the top of that mountain. Just the ones who have slightly too little motivation at the moment.

To get more people to the top of the mountain, you can:

• reduce the height of the mountain

• make the climb easier

• break the climb into smaller legs with rest stops

• give ‘em a boost when they’re flagging

• make the top of the mountain more desirable

Which all boils down to one of five things:

1. make the pain of inaction more salient

2. make the promised value of taking action clearer

3. reduce the friction of taking action

4. reduce anxiety about what’ll happen after taking action

5. increase the incentive to take action now

(Inspired by JTBD’s Four Forces and MecLabs Conversion Heuristic.)

Or it boils down to one of three things:

1. do enough people “get it”?

2. do enough people need it?

3. do enough people want it enough to pay the cost?

(Inspired by Laura Klein)

Or it boils down to one thing:

At the level of explicit and implicit goals, does the perceived value of climbing the mountain outweigh the perceived costs of climbing the mountain?

(Inspired by Phil Barden)

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This “hill-climbing” thinking — combined with concepts from Estuarine Mapping — spawned two more articles: