A quick glimpse behind the scene of what’s happening here on our biggest, most crazy, funnel to date.
On today’s episode Russell talks about the new Project Mother Funnel that should be rolling out in the next 30-60 days. Here are some of the awesome things you will learn about it in this episode:
So listen here to find out what you can expect when Project Mother Funnel is finally live.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. Excited to have you guys here today. If you have not yet rated and commented and subscribed to iTunes, please do that right away because I’m about to share with you some amazing stuff.
Alright everybody, so I wanted to talk to you today about an internal project we have called project Mother Funnel. I’m really excited about it, and I think I’ve told you guys a couple little secrets about it, but today Brandon Poulin from Lady Boss Weight Loss asked me, “What is Mother Funnel? Tell me about it, I want to know.” So I started telling him and I was geeking out and I’m like, alright I’m going to do a podcast on this today because there’s some cool strategy behind it and what we’re doing.
Now I want to preface this, this strategy may not be perfect for all of you guys, or at least not all of you yet, but long term it’s something that’s really, really cool. So we, as you know, launched Clickfunnels and some of you guys heard my story before. It took us five funnels before, excuse me 6, 6 funnels before it finally took off. And then when it took off it was awesome and it’s grown and it’s been nuts. It’s been literally Christmas every day since then.
Well, I’m not going to lie, there was a couple of Halloween’s in there. But for the most part, Christmas every single day. But it’s been awesome and what’s interesting though is when we first launched Clickfunnels, our goal was like conversion, conversion. How do we get as many people in as possible? And that was always the thing. That’s why we had the free trial, we had high converting landing pages, and all that kind of stuff. And it’s been really, really good. I’m not talking down against any of that.
But it’s interesting as we’ve grown, I remember when we were first launching Clickfunnels Todd told us, based on how many people were adding each day, he said, “As soon as we get to the point of about 60,000 subscribers, we won’t be able to grow anymore based on our churn numbers…” I don’t know the churn numbers, but let’s say 10% of people churn each month, at 60,000 members, that’s 6,000 people every month who are churning. And if you’re adding 6,000 each month and we keep churning….whatever, whatever the numbers were, at about 60,000 members, that’s where we stop growing. It just flat lines.
And that didn’t make any logical sense to me, until we got to 55,000 customers and then it started getting slower, and then 56 took way longer, and 57 took way longer. We’ve been sitting at 57 for the last couple of weeks and we’re getting close to 58, but everything is slowing down to a screeching halt. I’m like, “Todd, Nostradamus Todd was right again. How does he know everything all the time?” It drives me crazy. Don’t tell him I told you that.
But he seems to always be right and he was right again. So on our side I’m like, okay what do we have to do. So obviously, we’re doing a lot of things. We’re fixing, cleaning up onboarding, cleaning up the user experience, UI, some cool UI stuff coming out you guys, in the next couple of months, which is so exciting. But on my side because I don’t have any skills to do anything other than sales funnels, I’m like, “How do we do the sales funnel and change it out?”
So what’s interesting is we had this thought of like, the problem is that we have conversions so high that everybody can come in and sign up, which is good news. We’re growing but now we’re at a spot where it actually hurts us because there’s so many people coming and all that kind of stuff, so how do we flip this around?
About the same time we did some testing, we were looking at all of our different front end offers, different books, things like that. I did a podcast on this, I believe. But there’s a huge difference in what product somebody purchased immediately before they joined Clickfunnels, and their stick rate, their churn rate, there’s a direct correlation. So if they buy this product first, they’re going to stay way longer, versus this product when they left.
So I was like, holy cow, this whole pre-framing pre-suasion thing that we keep talking about, is actually true. It’s a legitimate thing. The pre-frame somebody enters your world in will have 100% to do with how long they stick, what they do, how they buy, how they ascend, everything. So I’m like, dang. We need to focus more on architecting the pre-frame. So that’s where project Mother Funnel came about, and it’s something that, it’s not new. It was called Project Super Funnel last year and we just didn’t have the team and people in place to do it.
And after we started building out this agency, finally got to the point where we have the team now. We’ve got the copywriters, the designers, the programmers, the developers, all the people we actually need to make Project Mother Funnel become live. In fact, one of them, I can’t remember who it was, was the one that coined it, “This is like a mother funnel!” I’m like, “That’s the new name.” So it’s literally called Project Mother Funnel on our Trello board.
Anyway, so this is kind of the gist of how it works. The goal is two things, number one is to actually decrease conversions to weed out the people that are most likely going to churn anyway. And then to, after we weed out those people, then to significantly affect the pre-frame somebody goes through before they sign up for the trial. There’s the concept right, so how do we do that?
So when somebody comes, you’ll see this live in probably the next 30-60 days. No, 60, the live event’s in like 28 days, hopefully it’ll get done sooner than that. Maybe we’ll go live after the event. Anyway, you come off the landing page, and on the landing page there’ll be a video and then it basically asks you which one of these markets you’re in. We’ve kind of broken Clickfunnels down into ten segments now, so someone will self select. “Oh, I’m an agency.” Or “Oh I’m in this.” Or “I’m in this.” They’ll select the type of business that they’re in.
And then after that, then we’ll redirect them, get them to opt in, take them to a sales page that’s specifically written for that market. This is the pre-frame, we’re trying to adjust and affect the pre-frame. So they’ll go through and see this pre-frame of this page, that will show them how Clickfunnels works for them. The number one cancellation reason we have outside of “It’s too expensive.” Is, which by the way is not a valid excuse, so I don’t believe it. But the number one valid excuse people have for why they cancel is because they can’t figure out how it actually works for their business or their industry, or whatever.
So this page will identify which one of these ten markets you’re in and then it specifically sells you on that. It’s like, “Oh cool, you’re in retail, let me show you how funnels work for retail.” And it sells them specifically on where they are. So it should be a frame that’s going to increase their stick rate because they’ve come through this frame, it helps them understand how Clickfunnels actually works for their business, and then they sign up for the trial.
So we lengthened the process, decreased initial conversion, pushed out a lot of those who would just churn out anyway, and those who aren’t going to churn out, and I don’t know who they are, we increased the likelihood to stick because of the pre-frame we took them through. And then after they either sign up for the trial or they don’t, then they get three emails afterwards, each email has a case study of somebody in their industry showing how it worked for them specifically and then pushes them back to their specific sales letter, so there’s three of those in a row. And then there’s other testimonials and stuff like that, but there’s a whole follow up sequence now that is specific to their market and their situation as well.
So that is kind of what Project Mother Funnel is and it’s exciting and I’m pumped for it. Anyway, you guys will see the fruits of it here in a little bit, but that’s the concept behind it. I hope that me explaining that helps some of the wheels in your heads to spin. Again, I don’t necessarily say, “Let’s decrease conversions on our page and make it harder.” But sometimes there’s a point of like segmenting the audience, weeding out the people you don’t want, and then increasing the pre-frame to make that person stick longer, and I think it’s amazing.
So there you go. It could completely flop though, for all I know. We’ll find out here soon. Anyway, it’s awesome. I hope you guys loved it. If you, again, if you aren’t listening or following, if you’re on iTunes, please go subscribe, comment, let other people know about the podcast. If you are YouTube watchers, please click on the like, subscribe, follow our channel, we got a whole bunch of cool stuff coming, and new videos that you guys are going to love.
Appreciate you all, thanks so much for paying attention and listening in, and we’ll talk to you guys again soon. Bye.