Hint: the death of autowebinars, the rebirth of the VSL, a sneaky hack from Agora, an idea from Brad Callen that made him $35 million in 1 funnel, and a design tweak from Bryan Moran that makes 63% of your traffic more likely to buy… :)
On this episode Russell talks about some of the changes to Google Chrome causing problems to autoplay videos, and what he sees the future of funnels being like. Here are some awesome things to look forward to in this episode:
-- What kinds of problems the disabling of autoplay in Google Chrome has caused and how they are trying to work around them.
-- Why Russell thinks that the future of funnels means going backwards a little to more a video sales letter format.
-- And why making your site mobile friendly before desktop friendly is more important now than ever.
So listen here to find out what Russell’s funnel vision of the future would look like.
...just know that’s what’s happening with your people, that’s where they’re consuming this stuff. They’re at work all day and they’re sneaking out and that’s when they’re looking at stuff. So it’s harder and harder to watch videos because of that. It’s easier because of their phone, but it’s harder to actually watch it because of where they’re at and how they’re interacting with stuff. So I think copy is coming back where people need to be able to read stuff. The next thing in my funnel vision, these are all funnel predictions, that’s why I’m calling it funnel vision. Where are we going?
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What’s everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we are going to go and I’m going to give you some funnel vision.
Hey so I was actually planning on recording this podcast while I was heading to work today, but I decided to ride my bike, two days in a row, which is exercise. I also woke up this morning early and wrestled, which is actually real exercise because riding a bike is pretty easy compared to wrestling.
So it’s like 9 in the morning and I’m ready to pass out already. It’s been a fun a day.
What I wanted to share with you guys on my ride today, that now I’m sharing from the office, was my thoughts. I’ve been up for the last 48 hours really excited because I’m always, I get excited about figuring out the next thing and where the funnel world is going and what tweaks and changes we need to make personally.
And over the last little bit there’s been a lot of stuff that’s been changing, so it’s gotten me thinking what’s happening, what needs to change, what’s shifting?
So one of the big things that I’m sure that you guys have heard about and it’s GDPR, I’m not going to talk about that, that annoys me so I’m leaving that on the table for now. I’m sure someday we’ll talk about it.
But what I’m talking about is Google Chrome not autoplaying videos anymore and what kind of impact that’s going to have on your guy’s businesses, because I do think that this is actually really important. Where I think GDPR is stupid.
But this is actually important and I think it could actually be a really good thing. So a couple things, we always would autoplay videos. I’m a big, big believer in autoplaying videos.
But after the viral video launch we did with Clickfunnels we split tested video autoplaying versus video not autoplaying and then not autoplay we tested a bunch of different thumbnails to figure out which thumbnail gets people to actually click the button the most.
And what we found, and it’s not all videos, but if you go right now to Clickfunnels.com we are shifting it to Mother Funnel soon, but you’ll notice the video does not autoplay, it’s because that is the test that won.
That thumbnail with the play button beat out the autoplay video, which was so fascinating or interesting, because I wouldn’t have assumed that or guessed that, and I wouldn’t have bet money on that a long time ago. I would have thought that is not the case.
So that was interesting, but one of the keys, because we tested a bunch of different things, the key was actually have the video place holder image, the right image that’s clickable, that actually gets people to click on a button.
So right now, if you don’t know Google Chrome and other places updated their thing so now all your autoplay videos don’t autoplay anymore.
So I’ve been going to a lot of people’s pages, and if your video doesn’t autoplay it starts on some really weird thumbnail that YouTube or whatever video service you’re using just picks and a lot of times it’s the wrong one. So I think one of the biggest things you guys need to do right now is go back to all your pages that have autoplay videos and realize that for most of your customers it’s not autoplaying anymore and then look at the thumbnail.
And what I recommend doing is what we did with the Clickfunnels homepage, is we went and actually, John who runs our ads, he ran a whole bunch of thumbnail images to see which thumbnail got the highest click through rate, and that became the actual thumbnail on the video. So don’t just put a random thumbnail up there, spend some time doing ones, testing ones with copy that say “Click here to push play.” Testing things like that because it actually has a huge impact on if people will actually click play or not.
You can produce this amazing video, that’s the most amazing thing in the world, but if nobody is clicking play then nobody is actually seeing it anymore. So that’s number one.
Number two, I think that copy, longer form copy is coming back in an interesting way. Because I think nowadays less people watch videos, especially if you’re on your phone. I think how most people are probably surfing the internet when they’re taking their bathroom breaks and they’re sitting in a stall next to five other dudes, or ladies, I’m sure it’s the same thing for you guys, I have no idea.
But for the dudes, I literally see people in the urinals holding their phone in one hand and holding their business in the other hand, it’s horrible. That’s in the urinals. I’m not even sure what’s happening behind closed doors, but I guarantee not just meditating. They’re in there reading and surfing and swiping and all sorts of stuff.
But they’re not doing it with the audio on because they’re in a stall next to 22 other dudes in the airport right.
So just know that’s what’s happening with your people, that’s where they’re consuming this stuff. They’re at work all day and they’re sneaking out and that’s when they’re looking at stuff. So it’s harder and harder to watch videos because of that. It’s easier because of their phone, but it’s harder to actually watch it because of where they’re at and how they’re interacting with stuff.
So I think copy is coming back where people need to be able to read stuff. The next thing in my funnel vision, these are all funnel predictions, that’s why I’m calling it funnel vision. Where are we going?
I’ve been watching Brian Moran who is the owner of SamCart and his styling on how he does stuff is so fascinating now. All his pages are single column so they look the same on mobile as they do on desktop.
At first I was like, why is he, because I have these three huge monitors on my desk, I look at his page and it’s like this little skinny column like sales letter. I’m like, this is so weird. But then I realized it looks the same mobilly as it does desktop, and think how much more powerful if you’re designing that way, where the experience is the same on both.
As opposed to trying to design and customize and split test two different things. Even his order forms are skinny one column things. His upsells are skinny, one column things.
So for me, you’ll see the next set of funnels I come out are all going to be a similar style to that, because I think it’s brilliant. So Brian if you’re listening, you’re brilliant. There you go.
Alright, so I think that’s the future. Skinny, narrow columns, copy driven. I do think there’s a case for both though. I think having video and copy, but knowing a big percentage of people will never click play.
If they’re not going to click play, therefore what does the copy need to say in order to do the whole entire sales process as well? So there you go.
The next thing is if you look at automated webinars, you know pre-automated webinars, those of you guys who haven’t been studying your marketing history. Guess what was pre, before auto webinars? What we all did before auto webinars were video sales letters. For the most part, video sales letter have definitely gone down in usage as I’ve watched the Clickfunnels community as more people have been focused on webinars and automated webinars to do their sales process.
The problem now, if you look at now that videos don’t autoplay, if you have an automated webinar….we had this issue with Clickfunnels for a week or two because when someone’s doing an automated webinar, there’s like an invisible dib over the video file so someone can’t click to pause the video. That’s technically how this thing actually works.
So what happened though is now no videos are autoplaying, so when someone comes to a page and there’s an auto webinar, and they couldn’t push play because there’s this invisible dib blocking it so nobody can start or stop the thing, so it feels like an automated webinar.
So for like a week and a half, two weeks none of our, and I’m sure you guys probably saw this too, none of our auto webinars would work because people, the autoplay wouldn’t play and they couldn’t click on the button and people would come to this page and you just couldn’t do anything.
So we did some hacks and some workarounds for people with auto webinars to happen, which is a little pop up and they have to click it to push play.
So those things are working now, but I think they’re way less effective than they used to be. In fact, we saw on the software secrets webinar, sales drop from last month to this month dramatically. It’s like, what was the big change? That was the big change, autoplaying verses now somebody’s got to click to play. It just kind of changes things.
I think we are going to be experiencing the death of the automated webinar, is my gut feeling. I think we’re going to be moving backwards in time to a video sales letter style page. That’s my gut reaction is telling me. I might be wrong, but I think I’m right. In fact, you will be seeing a lot of my auto webinar funnels, I’m going to be rebuilding them as video sales letter style funnels.
But if you look at how Agora does theirs, it’s really fascinating. So Agora does video sales letters, but if you leave the video sales letter it exit pops up and says something like, “Hey do you want to read the transcripts instead?” You say yes, and it shows a big long form sales letter. I’ve seen another one recently that has a video sales letter, underneath it there’s a link that says “Want to read the transcript?” So you click on that and it pops down the whole full long form sales letter underneath it.
So I think, I might be wrong, but I think this is the future of where things are going. So I’m going to be working, over the next couple of weeks, as soon as we get Mother Funnel done and launched and live and out of my hair, I have some big updates that I’m going to be making and you will see them.
I’ll give you a hint. Imagine my auto webinar. What I’ve been doing is going back through and captioning my entire 90 minute webinar. So captioning inside the video so if people are watching it without the audio they can still read the entire thing, which by the way is a huge pain in the butt. Brandon on my team did one and it took him a week.
My brother Scott’s doing one right now and it’s taking him a full week. It’s just a huge nightmare to actually caption the whole thing.
But now there’s a black bar at the bottom that has the entire 90 minute webinar captioned because I’m assuming that a lot of people are listening. A couple of things, one if they’re watching and reading, you’re hitting two modalities. So they’re listening, they’re watching, and they’re reading. So actually three modalities. So you’re more likely to get their attention. So we’re doing that with our videos.
Number two I’m going to be putting them in a video sales letter style page.
I will be having all these videos transcribed and sales letters written in a single column format, super long form and a couple of other cool things.
So watch, it’s coming. Anyway, those are some of my predictions. I think that’s some of the stuff that’s happening here in the funnel world that you should all be aware of based on autoplay videos, based on how people are consuming, based on mobile versus desktop. I don’t know if I told you guys this before, but last year was the very first year, across the Clickfunnels platform, that more traffic was viewed mobilly than it was on the desktop, which is funny because we all design for desktop.
And it’s like, why are we designing towards desktop, more than half of your customers will never see it. They’re seeing the mobile. We should be designing for the mobile experience, not for the desktop experience. I think that’s the future of where things are going.
So I think some of these examples, like Brian Moran, I was talking about before. I think that if you look at his examples of his narrow, single column pages, that’s, he honestly, I messaged him on skype, he gave me permission now to start doing that on my stuff. I said that, in fact I did a prediction call last December or January and I told people my prediction that we’re all going to start designing mobile first and desktop second.
But it didn’t really impact us as much, because habits right. We keep designing for desktop and then mobile optimizing after.
But after seeing Brian’s page, I’m like, we’re not even going to design a desktop version. The desktop version will be the mobile version. It’s interesting if you look at Brandon and Kaelin over at lady boss weight loss, it’s fascinating to me. I remember the first time I saw their pages I was like, “Why is everything on your page centered? All Your paragraphs are centered…” I was so confused.
And he told me, “Because none of our people buy on desktop, they all buy on mobile. Look at it mobilly.” I looked at it mobilly, oh this page makes sense mobilly. It looks jacked on desktop. Yet, you look at them and they’re building one of the fastest growing companies on our Clickfunnels platform.
It’s just interesting to see. There’s some insights, there’s some things, there’s some funnel vision for you guys to look to the future and see what I’m trying to see and I’ll be making adjustments based on that and feel free to funnel hack and model what I’m doing because I’m doing it with those thoughts in mind.
So there you go you guys.
I hope that helps give you guys some ideas. I hope you guys geek out with me on it because that’s where my brains at, some of those things. I’m excited. That’s it you guys.
With that said, I’m going to get back to work. I’m going to get this Mother Funnel done so I can get back to the new funnels that I want to create that are going to be so exciting. Alright, talk soon everybody, have an amazing day.
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