Conversion Funnel: What is it and how to optimize?

Conversion Funnel

A conversion funnel is an e-commerce term used to visualize the sales funnel and understand the journey of the potential customer from the moment they are subjected to your digital marketing campaigns, navigating your e-commerce website, and finally taking the desired action or buying your product. 

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The process is referred to as a funnel because as a marketer you guide the customer to take the route from the top of the sales funnel towards your conversion point. Optimizing your conversion funnel and making it more effective with time is a continuous process. You will have to analyze your customer's behavior, industry trend, competitive analysis and keep on improving this cycle to make it easier for your customers.

What is a conversion funnel?

What is Conversion Funnel?

The conversion funnel is a form of sales funnel and is used in the e-commerce industry to analyze and visualize the flow through which your potential customers get to know about your website, land at your landing pages, and then take the ultimate decision to purchase your offerings. 

In simpler terms, you create digital marketing campaigns to let your target audience know your business's products and offerings. After this stage, your focus should be to keep your prospects interested in your offer. You could take the help of compelling ad copy, images, layout, and retargeting to keep your prospects thinking about you. 

The next step is when your customer cannot resist your offer and finally desires to purchase your offerings. Product descriptions, photos, videos, reviews, testimonials, demonstrations, etc., could again help you in this step. The final step is when your customers finally purchase your product, and you would need to create mission statements, blog posts, email campaigns, etc., to lead the customers ultimately pass down through this funnel.

Top of the funnel:

If we take an example of a person who wants to buy an email service subscription, they will look at first on Google with no clue about their exact requirements, needs, and what they will get. In such a case, the user would start by researching the product and would certainly be unsure about the product's technical requirements or exact needs. This is the stage referred to as the top of the funnel. It will help if you run SEO & PPC campaigns or social media advertising campaigns to let these top-of-the-funnel potential customers know about your existence and your offer.

Middle of the funnel:

In this stage, the customer knows about the major brands available in the market they could ultimately buy from. They could have also signed up for their email newsletter to be updated with their content marketing campaigns which could ultimately help them decide the best one. At this stage, you could expect your customer or prospect to at least have some expectations, and they would ultimately lower the options by removing the brands they don't see as valuable. You will have to keep yourself updated and show your value to these prospects.

Bottom of the funnel:

Most probably, the customer already has decided the brand they want to go with. This is the time to get social validation in reviews, testimonials, videos, and demos. You need to have a solid content marketing and search engine optimization campaign to prove yourself an authority in your niche.

What are the five major levels of your conversion funnel?

The conversion funnel performs the best when you better visualize the various steps or levels that your customer will have to travel and complete before taking your desired action.

Awareness:

The primary step of optimizing your conversion funnel would be to bring traffic in. It means that you need to raise awareness and authority of your business in your niche. You must start with analyzing the current status of your website and recognizing the digital marketing channels that bring most of your quality traffic now. If you see that a specific keyword in your paid search campaign drives you most of your traffic, it means that you need to focus on search engine optimization as well to rank your landing page for that particular keyword.

Interest:

Even if you succeed in bringing traffic to your website, your job is only half done. You need to entice excitement into your visitors for your product and services. You must try to collect your visitors' emails so that you can connect with them at any time. Your website needs to have creative content, irresistible offers, and visually appealing designs that could make your customer stay at your website.

Desire:

In this step, the customer already has some interest in your product and could develop a desire to have it. The website traffic that has moved down to the final stage is the qualified leads. You need to nurture these leads to create personalized content and offer free shipping or discounts to keep them engaged and wanting your product.

Decision:

In this stage, the customers would end up buying your product. Now, you need to provide them with a fiction-less experience, so they don't find any resistance while opting to purchase your product from your e-commerce store. Now, you must have outstanding customer service to let these customers return to your e-commerce store again and preach advocacy.

Post-Purchase Stage:

It is a no-brainer that acquiring new customers is way more costlier than retaining your previous customers. It means that you need to have very good customer service, awesome products, and a need in your customer's life so that they would end up purchasing your product again and again. When the same customers keep on purchasing from you, the lifetime value of these customers increases, and the cost of acquiring a new customer decreases. Also, when you have a low churn rate, you are destined to succeed.

Strategies to optimize your customer funnel:

1. Be specific with your customer persona to avoid targeting low-quality traffic

customer persona

Image(Courtesy): Amywright

You need to understand who is your ideal customer. Creating a customer persona could help you understand your audience, their behavior, preferred digital marketing channel, and how they like to communicate with brands. It would help if you also created an empathy map as it will allow you to know the challenges, goals, and the desired outcome that your customer wants. Knowing your customer persona in detail would allow you to create better-paid search campaigns and target the right keywords in your SEO campaign.

2. Retargeting could help you get way more conversions

Retargeting

Retargeting is the process of marketing to the people who have already visited your website. Think about this scenario for a moment, if a particular person has already visited your website, then there is a great chance that they have at least some interest in what you have to offer. Now, they could be treated as qualified leads who need to be nurtured well. Hence, you must retarget these people and send them discounts and offers to push them down the funnel.

3. Capitalize on the power of social media

social media marketing

Social media has become the number one preferred digital marketing channel for many e-commerce marketers. Social media has the power to connect you with your preferred target audience at a lower cost and allow you to get way more brand awareness. Facebook could help you narrow down your target audience based on several factors like demographics, age, location, behavior, and response to triggers. Similarly, if your product needs to be delivered to a professional audience, you could also use LinkedIn. Social selling has become so popular nowadays that you cannot ignore it.

4. Showcase social validation with reviews, demo videos, and testimonials

social validation

In the e-commerce world, you need to make sure that your customers believe you. You must showcase reviews, demo videos, and testimonials on your website so that you build credibility and authority in the eyes of your potential customers. Your customers don't get the chance to see or feel your product physically. In such a case, along with the images, the social validation factor becomes crucial.

5. Run A/B tests to see which ad copy variant performs the best.

A/B Tests

The digital world is competitive and crowded. In such a case, to make a difference, you need to have a very good ad copy so that your advertisement makes a difference in the timeline of your potential customers. You need to use high-quality images and videos, catchy headlines, and descriptive subtitles or subheadings to ensure that your prospect finally ends up clicking on it. You could test several ad copy variants by changing the images or videos of all the titles to see which one brings you the most audience.

How to optimize your shopping cart abandonment rate?

shopping cart abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is the process when a potential customer is attracted to your product, and they add the product to the shopping cart but leave the website before completing the purchase. Shopping cart abandonment has become a significant issue for marketers in the digital world because there is no control over their customers. 

Here are the 5 tips to improve your shopping cart abandonment:

1. Have transparent pricing and bring simplicity to your customers

2. Shorten the e-commerce checkout process to bring the best user experience

3. Build authority and credibility in your domain and install security features in your e-commerce website.

4. Retarget customers using social media advertising or email marketing

5. Accept payments from all the possible and popular methods

Conclusion:

The conversion funnel, which is a visual representation of your customers take steps in their customer journey, has a great impact on your sales and revenue. Hence, you must take all the right steps to optimize the customer journey and let them have the best customer experience so that they end up buying from you and spreading word of mouth about your business.

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