What is a Conversion Funnel?
A conversion funnel enables you to visualize and understand the flow through which a potential customer lands on your site and then takes a desired action (thereby converting). Your goal in the conversion funnel is to guide the prospect towards your conversion point.
Unlike a traditional funnel, you’re not just pouring people into a conversion funnel and letting them flow through on their own. You do have to make the effort to get them into your funnel, but after that you have to pull people through your conversion funnel and guide them to the next desired action. You don’t want your customers to feel stuck on any step without a clear idea of what they should be doing next. You should be very clear about the next steps that they can take at that stage in the conversion funnel.
It is possible for you to engage in conversion rate optimization at every stage of the conversion funnel in order to increase the number of prospects whom you drive towards the most important action. To make this happen effectively, you got to think about the user experience at every stage of the conversion funnel, figure out what your customers want and what you can do to give that to them.
What does a conversion funnel do?
The conversion funnel helps you understand the manner in which your visitors land on your website, interact with your business, and then make a purchase from you, thus converting into customers for your business. It even helps you engage leads, answer questions about your business, and address concerns. The conversion funnel also makes it possible for you to organize leads into categories and create customer touchpoints that can entice every category of leads to convert.
How does a conversion funnel work?
Conversion funnels work to generate more sales for your business. They capture the entire customer journey, all the way from awareness to conversion, which could mean buying a product, completing a form, signing up to a list, or another type of micro-conversion.
They work by allowing you to see how your visitors and leads behave at every stage of the buying journey, enabling you to understand where they are leaking out of the funnel, and letting you see what you can do and where you should make changes in order to increase your conversions substantially.
What are the steps in the conversion funnel?
The steps or stages in the conversion funnel are:
1. Awareness
This is the phase at which you attract potential customers to your website. You do this by raising awareness of your business and products and trying to catch your target audience’s attention. Figure out which sources are driving the most traffic to your website and you will be in a state to make more informed decisions about which tactics are going to be the most effective for you. Most online marketers will rely heavily on attracting targeted traffic through advertising, social media and content marketing campaigns, and organic search.
2. Interest
When you’re getting enough traffic to your website, your next course of action is to get your website visitors interested in the products and services that you’re offering. Creating relevant content, running irresistible promotional offers, and making use of visually striking design will prove to be particularly effective at this stage of the conversion funnel. To figure out how interested your customers are right now, you should try asking for a lower value conversion like signing up for your newsletter to get access to exclusive offers or creating an account in order to get other benefits like free or express shipping.
3. Desire
At this step, you’ll have to build trust and desire and enable your prospects to learn more about your brand and products. Once website visitors reach this stage, you can consider them to be qualified leads are you should take the effort to nurture them down the funnel. You can use email workflow campaigns and intelligent chatbots that are built to deliver targeted, personalized content in order to keep prospects engaged and make them come back to your website repeatedly.
4. Action
This is the final and most critical step in the conversion funnel. Till this stage, your leads have just been traveling through the funnel and making smaller actions, like signing up for your newsletter or downloading an eBook, they may even have attended a webinar. Essentially, you have been getting micro conversions from them till this point.
But your main goal is to convince your customers to finally make a purchase. That’s the ultimate conversion that you are looking at. This is the stage at which you want to make that happen. If a lot of website visitors and leads exit the conversion funnel at this stage, it’s an indicator that your lead nurturing techniques might not be as effective as you thought they would be.
When you actually map out your conversion funnel, you will realize that only a very small percentage of the visitors that land on your website actually manage to flow down to the final stage of your conversion funnel. That’s why conversion rate optimization is so important and you should always be trying to make improvements at every stage of the funnel. Even the tiniest tweaks and improvements can have a massive impact on your overall conversion rate and have the potential to increase your revenue substantially. If you want to optimize your conversion funnel, you will need to spend time analyzing and trying to understand your customer behavior, see where there are holes in your funnel that leads are leaking out of, understand what gave rise to those holes in the conversion funnel and see what you can do to fix them.
