Unfunnel your funnels, unsqueeze your squeeze pages
A lot of audience-first businesses push a lot of their traffic to a squeeze page and then put their best content behind an email wall.
If you do this, it might be because you think it’s a good way to start a relationship with a user, direct the conversation, or because it’s the status quo.
And it “works.”
Of the 1 to 4% of email signups you get on that lead magnet that happen to want your top of funnel offer, maybe 2 to 10% of those happen to be at just that right starting point in their journey that your email sequence is resonant, relevant, and persuasive enough to result in a sale for a higher level solution to an associated problem. (If you’re getting a higher optin rate, that raises different concerns.
The issue here is few-fold.
It skews your publicly available content to being salesy
People are smart. We all recognize sales copy when we see it. When your site(s) are a series of clickfunnel or leadpage landing pages, it shows.
It focuses on current success while ignoring future opportunity
You know, the other ~98% of users on your site.
The math isn’t great when you flip the way you look at it. With 10,000 visitors a month, a 1% optin rate and 2% sale rate on those optins would result in… 2 sales. Further 10x your sales with conversion rate optimization thingz and now you have 20 sales. Yawnzers.
Hiding your content guts the natural leverage that comes along with having a content driven business on the web
Everything we know about websites requires ease of content access to create leverage and increase visibility.
Ease of access by nature allows for these things: your further ability to accrue links, therein referral traffic from other sites, social shares by having an easy way to share a link, you know, all signals search engines rely on to determine whether to further increase visibility on your content by serving it when most relevant.
Not to mention less predictable opportunities like speaking engagements, book offers, partnerships.
It assumes everyone is at the top of your funnel
Your original goal of growing an audience and influencing change with your products is handicapped by a top of funnel offer.
Trying to squeeze people at different levels of understanding or different points in their purchase journey or drawn to certain hard edged problems and squeeze them into your main funnel offer is like herding cats.
Personally, if I’m ready to buy something, I don’t really want to wait on a two week email launch sequence with fake scarcity to get it.
If your optin rate is 2%, it’s because the offer doesn’t fit the other 98%.
The takeaway?
They aren’t unqualified, you don’t have low quality traffic, your audience isn’t “cheap,” it’s simply that the vast majority of people who happen upon your site aren’t feeling the one offer you’re presenting.
By unlocking your funnels, you let people explore, self-select what’s of interest, choose what’s relevant, ultimately seeing more relevant optin offers at different points in the funnel and across funnels.