The Russell Brunson Show - Funnel Vision: Looking Into The Future Of Funnels...

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

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. Transcript - https://marketingsecrets.com/blog/funnel-vision-looking-into-the-future-of-funnels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With TD Direct Investing, new and existing clients could get 1% cash back. Great! That's 1% closer to being part of the 1%. Maybe, but definitely 100% closer to getting 1% cash back with TD Direct Investing. Conditions apply. Offer ends January 31, 2025. Visit td Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Today, we are going to go and I'm going to give you guys some funnel vision. So the big question is this. How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn't cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own pockets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and our services and the things that we believe in out to the world, and yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing Secrets. 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. And I also woke up this morning early and wrestled, which was actually real exercise because riding a bike is pretty easy compared to wrestling. So yeah, it's like nine in the morning and I'm ready to pass out already. It's been a fun day. But what I wanted to share with you guys on my ride today that now I'm sharing through the office was my thoughts. I've been up the last 48 hours, like really, really excited because I'm always

like, I don't know, I get excited about like figuring out the next thing and how, like where the funnel world's going, what tweaks and changes we need to make personally. And, um, over the last little bit, there's been a lot of stuff that's been changing. And so it's like gotten me thinking like, okay, what's happening, what needs to change, what's shifting. So one of the big things, um, I'm sure you guys have, um, heard about, and it's not GDPR. I'm not going to talk about that. That just 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. Like what kind of impact is that going to have on your guys' businesses? I do think this is actually really important where I think GDPR is stupid.

But this is actually important and I think it's actually could be a really, really good thing. So a couple of things. We always would autoplay videos. Like I'm a big, big, big, big believer in autoplaying videos, but after the viral video launch, we did with ClickFunnels, we split tested, um, uh, video autoplaying versus video, not autoplaying. And, um, and then not autoplay. We tested a bunch of different thumbnails to figure out what's thumbnail gets people to actually click the button the most. And what we found is not all videos, but, um, if you go right now to clickfunnels.com, we, and we can, we are shifting it to mother funnel soon, but you'll notice the video does not autoplay. It's because that was the test that won that thumbnail with a play button beat out autoplay

video, which was so fascinating and interesting. Cause I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have assumed that or guess that, or I wouldn't have bet money on that a long time ago. I would have thought that was not the case. And so that was interesting. But one of the keys could test a bunch of things. The key was actually having the video placeholder image, the right image that's clickable to actually get people to click on a button. So right now, if you don't know, Google Chrome and other places updated their things. So now all your autoplay videos don't autoplay anymore. And 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 can do right now is go back to all your pages that have autoplay videos and realize that for most of your customers, they're 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 like put a random thumbnail, but like spend some time doing ones, testing ones with copy that say, click here, push play, testing, things like that, because it actually has a huge impact on if people actually click play or not. I mean, you could have produced this amazing video that, you know, that's the most amazing

thing in the world, but if nobody's clicking play, then nobody's actually seeing it anymore. That's number one. Number two, um, I think that copy longer form copies coming back, um, in an interesting way. Um, because I think nowadays less people watch a video, especially if they are on your phone. I think about how most people are probably surfing the internet when they're taking their bathroom breaks and they're sitting in a stall next to like five other dudes or ladies. I'm sure it's the same thing for you guys. I have no idea. But for the dudes, like I literally see people in the urinals holding a phone in one hand and holding their business in the other hand. And it's, it's, it's horrible. That's in the urinals. I'm not even

sure what's happening behind closed doors, but I guarantee they're not in there just meditating. Like they're in there reading and surfing and swiping and all sorts of stuff, but they're not doing what the audio on because they're in a stall next to 22 other dudes at the airport. Right. And so, um, just know that's what's happening with your people. That's where they're consuming this stuff. They're at work all day. They're sneaking out and that's when they're looking stuff. And so it's harder and harder to watch videos because of that. Um, it's easier because of their phone, but it's harder to actually watch it because of just where they're at and how they're interacting with stuff. And so I think copy is coming back where people need to be able to read stuff. Um, the next thing in my funnel, but these are all

a whole bunch of predictions. That's what I'm calling funnel vision. Where are we going? I've been watching Brian Moran, who's the owner of SamCart, and his styling on how he does stuff is so fascinating now. All his pages are like single column

so that they look the same on mobile as they do on desktop. And at first I was like, why is he, because I have these huge, I have three huge monitors on my desk. I look at his page, it's like this little skinny column like sales letter. I'm like, why is he, because I have these huge, I have 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 mobile-y as it does desktop. And think how much more powerful it is 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. Even his order forms are skinny one column things. His upsells are skinny one column things. And so for me, you'll see the next set of funnels I come out, we're all going to be very similar style to that because I think it's brilliant.

So Brian, if you're listening, you're brilliant. There you go. All right. So I think that's the future. Skinny, narrow columns, copy driven. I just do think there's a, I think there's a case for both though. I think having video and copy, but knowing like 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 to be able 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, for those of you guys who haven't been studying your marketing history, guess what was pre before, excuse me, before auto webinars. What we all did before our webinars were video sales letters. Okay.

And, uh, and, um, for the most part, videos or video sales letters have, have definitely gone down in usage as i've watched the click funnels community as more and more people have been focusing on webinars and automated webinars to do the sales process um the problem now is you look at if you look at um now that videos don't auto play if you're an automated webinar uh we have this issue with click funnels for a week or two um because when someone's doing automated webinar there's like a invisible div over the video file so someone can't click to pause the video right that's technically how this thing actually works so what happened though is now no videos are auto playing so someone come to

a page there's auto webinar and they couldn't push play because there's this invisible div blocking it so that nobody can stop or start the thing so it feels like an automated webinar and so for like a week and a half two weeks none of our i'm sure you guys probably sell to none of our auto webinars work because people the autoplay wouldn't play and they couldn't click on the button and people come this page it was just you couldn't do anything so we did some hacks and some workarounds for people's auto webinar funnels to happen it was a little pop-up and to click it to push play and so those things are working now but i think they're way less effective now than they used to be in fact we saw on their software secrets webinar sales dropped from last month to this month dramatically. And it's like, what was the big change? That was a big change.

Auto, autoplaying versus now someone's got to click to autoplay. Anyway, it just, it kind of changes things. And I think, 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, we're going to be moving backwards in time to a video sales letter style page. Um, that's my, that's my gut reaction is telling me, um, I might be wrong, but I think I'm right. Um, in fact, you will be seeing a lot of my auto webinar funnels. I'm going to be rebuilding them as a video sales letter style funnels. Um, but if you look at, if you look how Agora does, there's this really fascinating. So Agora does video sales letters, but if you leave the video sales letter, it exit pops up and it says something like, Hey, you want to read the transcripts instead? You say yes.

And boom, it shows a whole long form sales letter. I've seen another one recently that has a video sales that are underneath it. There's a link says, want to read the transcripts. You click on that and it pops down the full long form sales letter underneath it. Um, and so I think I might be wrong, but I think this is the future, um, of where things are going. So, um, 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, um, I have some big updates I'm going to be making. Um, and you will see them. Uh,

I'll give you a hint. So imagine my auto webinar. webinar um what i've been doing is i've been going back through and captioning my entire 90 minute auto webinar so captioning the inside the video so people are watching it without the audio they can still read the entire thing so um which by the way is a huge pain in the butt uh brandon on my team did one and it took him like a week my brother scott's doing one right now it's taking him like a full. It's just a huge nightmare to actually caption the whole thing. But now there's this black bar on the bottom that has entire 90 minute webinar caption, uh, because I'm assuming that a lot of people are listening, um, with, you know, well, a couple of things. One is if they're, if they're watching and reading, you're hitting two modalities. So they're listening, they're

watching and they're reading actually three modalities. Um, so you're listening, they're watching, and they're reading. 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 an auto webinar, or excuse me, 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 other cool things. So watch, it's coming. But, um, anyway,

those are my predictions. I think that's some of the stuff that's happening here in the funnel world that you guys should all be aware of, um, based on autoplay videos, based on how people are consuming based on mobile versus desktop. I don't know if I told you as before, but last year was the very first year across the ClickFunnels platform that more traffic was viewed mobily than it was on the desktop. Um, which is funny because we all designed for desktop. And now it's like, why are you designing towards desktop? Less than half or 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. And so I think some of these examples, like Brian Moran's that I was talking about before, I think that if you look at his examples of his narrow single column pages, like that's, like he, honestly, I've messaged him on Skype, like he gave me permission now to start doing that, my stuff. Because I said that, in fact, I did now to start doing that, my stuff. Cause I said that in fact, I did a prediction call last December, January. And I told people, I think my prediction is that we're all going to start designing mobile first and desktop second. And, uh, um, but it didn't

really impact us as much cause we just cause habits, right? We keep, we keep designing towards desktop and then mobile optimizing after. Uh, but after seeing Brian's page, I'm like, man, 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 Caitlin over at Lady Boss Weight Loss, it's fascinating to me. Like I remember the first time I saw their pages, I was like,

why is everything on your page centered? Like all your paragraphs are centered. Like I was so confused. And he told me, he's like, because none of our people buy down desktop. They all buy on mobile. He said, look at it mobily. I looked mobily. I's like, because none of our people buy on desktop. They all buy on mobile. He said, look at it mobily. I looked mobily. I was like, oh, this page makes sense mobily.

It looks jacked on desktop. Yet you look at them and they're building one of the fastest growing companies on our ClickFunnels platform. And so it's just interesting to see. So there's some insights. There's some things. There's some funnel vision for you guys to look in 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. Um, uh, yeah. So there you go, you guys, I hope that helps give you guys some ideas. I hope you guys can geek out with me on it. Cause that's what my brain's at. Um, is, uh, some of those things. So I'm excited. And that's it, you guys. So with that said, I'm getting back to work. I'm getting 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.

All right, talk soon, everybody. Have an amazing day. Want more marketing secrets? If so, then go get your copies of my two bestselling books. Book number one is called Expert Secrets and you can get a free copy at expertsecrets.com. And book number two is called Expert Secrets, and you can get a free copy at expertsecrets.com. And book number two is called Dot Com Secrets, and you can get your free copy at dotcomsecrets.com. Inside these two books, you'll find my top 35 secrets that we've used to become the fastest-growing, non-VC-backed, SaaS startup company in the world.