The steps that lead your valued potential customers to your brand are vital to know. If your marketing and sales strategies are working, these customer journeys should end in conversion.
A conversion funnel is a marketing tool that can help you understand and analyze these customer journeys. Analyzing your conversion funnel can reveal insights into how your customers are interacting with your brand and its products. Ultimately, this will help you plan more successful conversion optimization strategies.
Let’s look at the basic elements of a conversion funnel, why conversion funnels matter, and how you can optimize your conversion funnel to improve your customer journey, reduce cart abandonment, and encourage returning customers.
What is a conversion funnel?
In customer centric marketing you want to put yourself in the shoes of your leads, and make sure you give them everything they need to convert to customers. This is conversion, in essence a conversion funnel is a way of visualizing your customer journey.
A conversion funnel shows the various touchpoints a customer will pass through. If properly analyzed, it gives you an insight into where the road was bumpy, any potentially off-putting or less than optimum steps, and where you can make improvements.
The five elements of a conversion funnel
There are five basic parts to a conversion funnel, as shown in the image below:
Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
Loyalty
Each is important and has its own challenges. We’ll look at them one by one.
Awareness
Awareness is the stage where potential customers encounter and are attracted to your business. Customers are drawn to the brand through various marketing channels. For example, blogs and podcasts, online ads such as google shopping ads, print, radio and TV ads, social media, affiliate marketing, and email campaigns.
This is your main conversion touchpoint, a crucial entry point to your conversion funnel. In terms of hooking potential customers, the awareness stage is akin to discovery calling; using words and your brand voice to entice new customers to choose your brand.
Interest
This next touchpoint is where you want leads to choose your business over your competitors. It’s where the quality of your content really matters.
By content, we mean what you put on social media and other channels, the way you present the brand in video, website and ad content. You can optimize your funnel with effective content, by making sure there is a clear and appealing brand identity and message in everything you post or advertise. Your content should lead customers naturally to the next touchpoint.
Desire
This stage is where you show customers exactly what you have to offer. Make sure your product descriptions, images, website copy, videos and blogs are of good quality, as well as engaging. Remember that website design can increase online customer retention; in other words, a good website can significantly increase the desire to shop with your brand.
You must grab potential customers’ attention and show them through positive reviews, case studies, and other examples that your products are the best in quality, price, and service. Offer prospective customers free shipping, discounts, and extras. Give them help and advice and great customer service. In short, make them want to shop with you.
Action
At the action stage, you want conversion. This is the ultimate aim, having brought your potential customers so far along the conversion funnel.
But things can go wrong here; cart abandonment, online ordering can hitches or poor customer service. Make sure communication between customers and business doesn’t let you down. Can customers contact your brand easily? Do you have an online phone number, as well as chat functions? Make sure there are no obstacles to conversion.
It’s also important to know that a sale is not the only form of successful conversion. Getting a customer to sign up for a newsletter, to open an account, or to download content is also a successful conversion.
Loyalty
Loyalty makes re-engagement far more likely. A brand that a customer has had positive interactions and experiences with (even without having made a purchase) is one they will return to.
Retaining loyal customers is a better use of a business’s time, marketing efforts and budget. Loyal customers can skip the first stages of the conversion funnel and go straight to making purchases. Crucially, they will have a memory of the first time they encountered the previous stages, and without a good experience from awareness through to action, they will never become loyal customers in the first place.
Lastly, sometimes inspiring loyalty comes down to being a brand that offers more. Clients and customers want safe and easy ways to communicate, collaborate, and interact with their trusted brands. For a service-based business, investing in a private cloud-based collaborative space such as clean room data can make partners and clients feel safe and valued. Having good communication channels and mechanisms can really boost brand loyalty and trust.
Why do conversion funnels matter?
As we have seen, a conversion funnel is a crucial pathway from inspiring interest to making a sale and retaining customers.
Without a clear and easily traveled path to your business’s virtual front door, you will fail to build a client base, brand awareness, and, most importantly of all, to grow as a business.
With a clear idea of the stages of a conversion funnel, you can begin to analyze the effectiveness of each step from the point of view of gaining customers. Analyzing your conversion funnel is a vital activity for any successful business.
Analyze your conversion funnel
Start with the big-picture issues first. What are the main problems or hitches in the initial stages of your conversion funnel?
Look at the engagement data for each step. Look for trouble spots like a big drop in numbers between the landing page, the product page and the shopping cart. This might highlight less-than-optimum product images and descriptions.
Let’s look in more detail at typical problem areas.
How are your potential customers finding you?
Keep tabs on your online marketing efforts, check which social media posts are attracting the most attention, which platforms seem to resonate with your target customers. Also, look at the customers’ responses to questions like: ‘how did you hear about our products and services?’
Leverage online conversion funnel tools to see where touchpoints are working well or less well for your business. This way, you can get hard data to show where customers are coming from to reach your brand.
Check where the majority come from, is this where the majority of your marketing efforts are focused? If you are doing things right, take note, it’s important to be as aware of where you are succeeding as well as potentially failing.
When and where are potential customers being lost?
Online tools can also reveal where customers are dropping off. What could be influencing them to go no further along the conversion funnel?
Look at metrics such as your cost per acquisition (CPA) rate, your drop-off rate and your conversion rate per marketing channel.
What obstacles or off-putting steps are you unwittingly throwing in the way of your customers? This data can show where tweaks and tactical changes should be made.
What action can you take to drive conversions?
Having looked at the data, you next need to create an optimization plan. This plan requires firm goals, such as: more sales, accounts opened, sign-ups to newsletters etc.
Decide what you need each touchpoint to achieve in order to reach these goals. Make a clear plan for changes to make.
Prioritize the most important touchpoints for your business. It could be that the initial awareness stage is the most crucial, that the subsequent stages are well laid out, but lack of initial traffic means they can’t do their jobs in terms of driving conversions.
Lastly, revisit the data and get fresh numbers once changes are made. Track progress and constantly reassess.
Best Practices
Analyze your conversion funnel regularly, and include your whole marketing and sales teams. Whether your business is small or large, make sure you have your best minds on board.
Be sure to include remote team members, consider enterprise video conferencing solutions to bring them into the discussion. Getting as much input and informed views on each stage of the conversion funnel as you can, will give you a more comprehensive take on where it is winning or failing.
Remember that each stage needs to inspire action and movement. Keep your stages as simple and clear as possible. Decide what action you want for each step, and decide if this is likely to happen. If not, find out why.
Make a clear action plan for improvement. Set time limits and goals as a team. Always review improvements using fresh data and analysis.
Final thoughts
A conversion funnel should be a hitch-free journey to your website and brand. If you keep this image in mind, it will help to stay focused on making sure each stage is driving customers smoothly to the next.
Don’t be afraid to walk through the steps yourself, get feedback from trusted industry partners, and look objectively at how your brand is bringing in leads and turning them into conversions of any kind. If it isn’t, use analysis to find out why.
