Marketing Funnel Mastery: Don’t Block Your Buyers!
A block at any stage will kill your entire business. Take this seriously!
Prevent, find and clear blockages in your business funnel; ANY blockages can kill your business. Don’t try to be perfect, concentrate on improving the status of your lowest-performing stage.
Your Real Competition is the Top 25%
Many people make no more effort than downloading a free app, and do many things wrong. Around 75% of active sellers at any given time on Fiverr are mostly clueless or barely trying, and simply waiting for something to happen. They are not your competition. Your goal is to compete in the top 25% of sellers who are making an effort. And of those sellers, 80% are making at least one serious mistake or oversight. Your goal is simply to make a complete effort and avoid mistakes. That will place you in the top 5% overall (you will see in your gig statistics phrases such as “Better than 95% of Sellers”).
If someone a little better than you stays the same and you improve over time, you will move up, and get more and more profitable orders. If many improve and you stay the same, you will fall behind and Fiverr won’t give your gig many impressions.
Reputation and Ranking Factors
What causes Fiverr to show your gig to a buyer searching for a seller? Your Fiverr reputation affects whether your gig will be shown, and how often.
But the specific ranking factors are in this order, as of late 2021. Many lesser factors are not listed:
- Keyword Relevancy (Targeting)
Example: If they’re buying video and you’re selling audio, you won’t be matched. Keywords exist in many places. - Buyer satisfaction (Reputation)
More than just your star rating and completion rate, includes private reviews and other factors. - Recent Orders (Recency Weighting)
Shifting your rating more towards “What have you done lately?” - Performance with First-Time Buyers (A measure of your service.)
This became more important in May, 2021. Most First-Time Buyers need significant help. - Conversion Rate (Moving prospects through your funnel)
How many orders you receive as a percent of impressions or clicks. - Click-through Rate (Getting viewers to take action)
Total impressions divided by clicks - Special Designations (Generally awarded manually, not automatically)
Your gig may be labeled as “Business Seller”; “Fiverr’s Choice Seller”; “Pro Seller”; “Top-Ranked Seller” (TRS). Although TRS has publicly-known requirements, Fiverr’s Editorial team must review and decide to award it. - Penalties
Many of these are accounted for under “Buyer Satisfaction”. Examples of penalties:
8.1 Receiving a negative private review without compensating positive private reviews in the last 60 days.
8.2 Using availability mode for more than 14 days of time off in any 365-day period.
8.3 Dropping below a 4.7-star rating in the last 60 days.
8.4 Dropping below a response rate score of 90% in the last 60 days.
8.5 Dropping below an order completion rate score of 90% in the last 60 days.
8.6 Dropping below an on-time delivery score of 90% in the last 60 days.
8.7 Receiving a warning in the last 30 days.
8.8 Having a long-term negative trend indicator, such as “Regularly gets negative private reviews”
Tips
Keyword Tag Targeting First
- Make your Gig Image about your service not your name.
- Fiverr gives a lot of weight to keywords in the title and tags; keywords in your description are not as important.
- Find tags from your analytics not just under the “impressions” tab but also “orders,” “clicks,” etc. and work in tags that don’t appear in your title.
- Don’t double up on tags in your title.
Set Policies to Maintain Reputation
- Have a “How to order” section in your Gig description and your FAQs
- Have other FAQs as well, such a “What constitutes a Revision?”
Inform customers (in a friendly and professional way) if they are not following your how-to policies or FAQs. Note in a message to customer service what the specific issues are.
Stages of the Marketing Funnel
You need to reach buyers, and convert them to customers. Conversion rate at each stage of the funnel tells you how many buyers reaching that stage moved on (converted) to the next stage.
Example: 100 people see your ad (stage 2) and 50 click on it—50% of viewers clicked. We usually call this percentage the Click-Through Rate (CTR) (as shown in Advanced Analytics. Let’s say 25 of those 50 clickers place an order (stage 5). Again you had 50% move to a later stage, in this case clickers to customers.
Also, since 25 of the 100 viewers made a purchase, that is a 25% Conversion Rate (CR) from 100 viewers to 25 customers (as shown in Gig Statistics) , or a 50% Conversion Rate for orders after clicks. (as shown in the Top Keyword tab and Advanced Analytics) from 50 clickers to 25 customers.
On the Top Keyword tab, and in Advanced Analytics, Conversion Rate (CR) means percent of orders after clicks. In Gig Statistics it means average total impressions divided by orders—clicks are not measured directly (but obviously views must click before they can order). In Advanced Analytics, Click-Through Rate (CTR) means average total impressions divided by clicks.
We’ll use the example of selling voice over services:
1. Permission: Reputation, Professionalism
KEY: • Start Perfectly • Avoid Penalties
Warning Sign: Low Impressions
At first, following best practices for creating your gig will show you are an experienced professional (branding) and affect your reputation. Later, your service, reviews, and repeat buyers will determine your reputation.
You need Fiverr’s permission before buyers will see your gig image in search results. Worst case, if your reputation drops too much, Fiverr will stop showing your gig entirely—you will get no impressions. The road is blocked at the top of the funnel.
A poor reputation and incompetent marketing elements will get you banned from contacting many buyers (few impressions) and will turn off those that do find you. Failure to professionally fill out online forms can block you from marketing. (In email marketing, a warm, personalized email beats a cookie-cutter spam cold email.)
2. Targeting: Attention and Keyword Matching
KEY: • Great Ad Images • Great Keywords and Placements
Warning Sign: Low Clicks
You have to get them to look, or nothing else matters! Next, prospects must discover you are what they are looking for—you must use language and keywords to get their searches to find you, and their eyes to recognize that your service is what they were looking for.
Show that you have what they want, from broad match to niche/exact match, or few will find you.
3. Promotion: Interest
KEY: • Help them skip to the Free Sample • Avoid Selling Field Errors
Warning Sign: Short views (bounces)
You must promote your service to buyers via differentiating features (USP), irresistible benefits, and compelling testimony … or few will click to learn more. Your key promotion fields are:
- Your gig image (must get attention before interest!)
- Your title
- The top of your description
However, your free sample media is more compelling than just words: You can use speech, music, graphics or video to promote yourself while demonstrating your quality. So help them skip to your media samples.
Biggest Mistake: Poor keyword strategy in promotional fields. Stick to motivating benefits and differentiating features; avoid cliches, wordiness, and excess repetition.
4. Free Samples: Desire
KEY: • High Quality • “Sizzle” Presentation Style
Warning Sign: Insufficient praise from prospects. You should exceed the quality of your category
Providing a low-quality product or service will block high-quality buyers from considering you. For example: quality acting, session skills, production, microphone technique, studio test quality, etc.
Biggest Mistake: Avoiding even trying to improve your quality because you got initial results with lower quality.
5.1 Buying Experience: Action
Ease of decision-making and buying generates Action. Your “Customer Experience Journey” must also connect directly to excellent service.
5.2 Service: Responsive, Professional, Systematized
If you lack a professional system (i.e. schedule and pre-set workflow, message templates, mobile notifications, etc.) you will fail some customer needs.
6.1 Public Review: Reputation
Without positive reviews your permission to market will be limited. User reviews combined with percentage of repeat buyers and some other related metrics
6.2 Private Review: Avoid Penalties!
Partly you want them to buy again (lifetime value) and promote you to others, but mostly you must achieve zero negative private reviews ever—even with positive public reviews, bad private reviews will severely curtail your permission to market your services.
7.1. Repeat Buyers: Take Action to Encourage Them.
Returning buyers not only earn you more money, more referrals and greater average LTV (Lifetime Value per Customer), they earn you a higher reputation. Encourage them to bookmark your gig, and offer coupons to buyers who have not returned in awhile.
7.2 Profit: Follow a Roadmap
The clearest signal that something is broken is that you are making much less money than others. We have a plan that is so detailed you can practically cut-and-paste month after month to upgrade your true hourly rate by raising rates and limiting extra work.
Our default strategy is to build your reputation quickly to allow you to raise your rates rapidly. But you will need to exercise CANI (constant and never ending improvement) to succeed.