You may be asking yourself – What the hell is a Pirate Funnel? Well, it is one of the easiest ways to accelerate your growing business. Let’s take a look at the basics.

Pirate Funnel Basics

Although it has a quirky name, it is merely a model to apportion your business operation into different segments and assist you in focusing on the right part. It’s a guideline to help small business owners and marketers find the most critical metrics. Eventually, finding the right metrics will help you simplify the complex process of growth and marketing.

It is set out by the acronym AAARRR (get it!) and helps you discover your business’s weakest point and concentrate on improving it.

To do this effectively, you have to understand your business model and your buyer’s avatar – intimately.

This funnel is a growth and marketing model that helps you scrutinize your customer journey and business growth. There are between five and six stages in the model, depending on your business. Let’s look at all the steps.

A simple way to measure this process is by putting down the number of customers that go through the whole process in a period of time. The period doesn’t matter – it could be a week or month. It just needs to be consistent across all stages.

Stages of the Pirate Funnel

Awareness

This step is about your visibility. Do people recognize your business? What tactics do you use to get your branding out and visible?

Acquisition

How effortlessly can people find you? This is about how many people get to your website. If you aren’t getting any views, nothing is going to happen further down the line

Activation

This is about how many people take that first important step, such as sign-up, install the app or make a comment on your post. Did they like what you had to offer? How many bounced?

Retention

How many return customers or followers do you have? If they aren’t returning, something wrong is happening. Look at your tactics to improve your retention.

Revenue

How many people are paying? How many are upgrading from your free offer to your paid product?

Referral

How many people refer their friends or colleagues to your business? Are your affiliates bringing in customers? Why aren’t they referring? Have you asked them?

It’s all about making the funnel work from beginning to the end – where you receive referrals. Referrals are the best because they are almost guaranteed customers.

Ask yourself three questions when looking at each stage of the Pirate Funnel

1. Is this phase of the funnel functioning well?
2. Why do I think is happening?
3. What can I do to improve it?

As you work your way through the funnel on each stage, think of the tactics relevant to your business model that can help you. They could be webinars, landing page optimization, email campaign copy…the list goes on.

Then you should A/B test each individual tactic as it’s implemented. Yes, it can be time-consuming, but you can use it multiple times when you know what works for your target audience. Don’t test numerous changes at one time.

It’s not just about upgrading each stage, so it works OK. It’s ultimately about being able to send more prospective customers from one step onto the next.

Optimizing your funnels will grow your business and help you understand the journey of your customers. Knowing the metrics to measure these stages and implementing solutions when you find a blockage will allow the tunnel to flow, bringing you more revenue and growth.