A conversion funnel shows the steps that a buyer takes from when they land on a page until they make a purchase. What is a conversion funnel and how can it be used effectively? Let’s take a look.
The AIDA model refers to the traditional way of tracking the customer journey. The four classic stages people move through during the buying process are awareness, interest, desire, and action.
- Awareness: First, a person discovers your brand and becomes a lead.
- Interest: Next, you build their interest in your product.
- Desire: Then, your goal should be nudging prospects from simply thinking they like something to actively wanting it, possibly by making proposals or carefully placing glamorous adverts for repeat exposure.
- Action: Finally, you encourage a prospect to take the desired action? turning them into a customer.
This is because a funnel shape indicates that there are more people at the top of the funnel than there are at the bottom. This is because not everyone who visits your website will convert to a paying customer.
The problem? This view of how people move through the stages of a sales cycle is inflexible and not very realistic.
This means that the sales process is rarely straightforward or simple. Oftentimes, people will revisit various stages of the sales cycle before they’re finally ready to make a purchase. People need to be nurtured before they buy a product. As a marketer, you must understand the behaviors, personalities, and needs of your target market to convert them into paying customers.
How to Create a Conversion Funnel
There are eight main steps to creating a successful conversion funnel, which is a blend of AIDA and less restrictive techniques.
1. Determine Your Ideal Buyer Journey and Map It Out as a Funnel
A conversion funnel is designed to help you increase your conversions by creating an effective buyer’s journey. To increase your conversions, you must first identify your starting point (where you are now) and your end goal (where you want to be). In other words, you must identify three things:
- what your typical buyer’s journey looks like right now
- what your end goal is, or what action you want a prospect to take
- how you can improve your existing buyer’s journey in order to increase the likelihood of leads becoming paying customers
If you know what you want your final result to be, you can plan a path to get there. If you create a visual representation of your funnel, it can help you to stay on track and achieve your goals.
2. Set Goals for Each Stage in Your Funnel
Divide your funnel into three sections: the top, middle, and bottom.
What do you want to achieve at each stage of the funnel? For example, increasing traffic at the top, boosting engagement in the middle, and increasing conversions at the end.
3. Make a Content Plan for Each Stage in the Funnel
A marketing plan is necessary to maintain movement of potential customers through each stage of the funnel (top, middle, bottom).
Top
The first stage is focused on building brand and product awareness. You want to create excitement and encourage people to find out more about your company and how your products can help them.
Use content that will capture your audience’s attention and introduce them to your company’s story. This can be done through videos, short blog posts, and social media posts.
Middle
Gaining someone’s trust is essential in convincing them they need your product.
A customer in this stage may stay for a while, so content should be focused on being valuable, informative, and reliable, such as with case studies, video tutorials, and downloads.
Bottom
The final stage should be focused on creating a desire in the prospect to buy your product, sign up for your service, or take any other action you wish. The marketing strategies that could be used at this stage include offering free trials, sending emails with information that the recipient can act on, and including calls to action in marketing materials.
4. Implement Strategies and Create Content to Generate Awareness
At this stage, you want to build excitement around your brand and product. Why should a customer care about your company? How do your products solve the problems they have? Answer these questions to help build a content strategy for this stage.
Do some competitor research, too. You can learn a lot from other companies’ landing pages, social media channels, and blogs. How are they reeling in potential customers?
5. Generate Interest and Desire
While the AIDA model labels “interest” and “desire” as two separate outcomes, they are actually the same thing.
If you want to generate interest or build desire, you need to create compelling content. As you increase awareness for your brand, you are also demonstrating why people need your product. As a result, people will be more likely to want your product.
6. Encourage Users to Take Action
The goal of a funnel is to convert a lead into a customer by encouraging the required action. If you feel that this step in the funnel is not necessary for your business, you can skip it. However, here are some ways you can optimize your strategy for this stage if you choose not to skip it.
7. Keep Customers
Great marketing is not just about finding customers. It’s about retaining them, too. Here’s why.
- Acquiring new customers can cost up to 30 times more than retaining customers.
- Your existing customers are, roughly, 50 percent more likely to try your new products.
- 40 percent of sales, on average, can be attributed to repeating customers.
Next-sell
This is a sales technique where you offer a customer a similar product to what they just purchased, usually at a discounted rate, in order to encourage them to buy again. This not only allows you to communicate with your customer and make them feel valued, but it is also a way to potentially increase revenue.
Create Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are beneficial to retaining customers, with 81 percent of millennials spending more money when enrolled in a loyalty scheme. Although loyalty programs are not new, you will need to be creative if you want your program to be successful.
When you’re creating your own program, consider:
- using high levels of personalization
- giving customers flexibility around how to use their reward points
- offering extra perks and benefits to loyalty scheme members
Product Updates
When you update your products, you are responding to the evolving needs of your customers. You are demonstrating to your loyal customers that you appreciate their continued support.
Other Techniques
How else can you keep those all-important customers? Well, you can try marketing strategies such as:
- introducing member-only events
- sending out exclusive emails
- running contests or prize draws
- starting a customer service RSS feed
8. Grow Customers
Finally, don’t forget to encourage your existing customers to make more purchases. There are a few different strategies you can try. Here is a list of some of the best options.
Cross-sell
When cross-selling, you can take a customer’s most recent purchase into account and suggest similar products they might want. You can upsell to customers during the sales process by offering them other items which complement the item they’re buying.
Upsell
If a customer is interested in a certain item or service, upselling offers them a more expensive alternative.
The most important part of any advertising campaign is the funnel. If the funnel doesn’t convert, the campaign won’t be successful no matter how good it is.
In the next section, discover seven ways to increase the conversion rate of your sales funnel for improved overall performance.
1. Include the 3 argument types on each page
The two different parts of the brain used when making a buying decision are the emotional and logical sides. The emotional side is used to make snap judgments and the logical side is used to weigh the pros and cons.
The limbic brain is responsible for the emotional part, and the frontal lobe is responsible for the logical part. This is important because it affects how we make the pages in our funnel.
We need to understand how marketing impacts the structure of our pages, specifically when it comes to our funnel.
Regardless of the type of page you’re sending people to, you need to be making three types of arguments:
Emotional arguments
Logical arguments
Urgency
We want to make them in this order too, because that’s the order in which someone makes a purchasing decision.
2. Benefits > Features
This means that when you’re trying to sell something, you should focus on the benefits rather than the features.
Most people write about the features of their product without explaining the benefits.
Features focus on the product/service itself. What kind of information do you need?
Some examples of features are:
- Storage up to 1TB
- Access to a free Facebook group
- Latest waterproof technology
Although those things are great, they lack the ability to show the consumer how it would benefit them, making it less appealing.
Benefits highlight what the customer will gain from using the product/service, rather than just listing the features. We build emotion into our copy by starting with the first point.
When you tell people what a feature means to them, they start imagining themselves using it, which then creates an emotional reaction.
3. Split test all pages
The key to success in any advertising campaign is extensive testing. Testing images, copy, creative types and audiences. It is important to not only test your advertising campaign, but also to continuously test the pages in your sales funnel.
You should test at least 2 variants of every page in your sales funnel in order to ensure that you are driving the most conversions possible. Tests can vary in size and scope, from complete design overhauls to something as small as changing the color of a button. It doesn’t matter what you test so much. It is essential that you conduct tests in order to determine which methods are effective and which are not.
4. Improve average order value with offers
A campaign’s success cannot be determined solely by its conversion rate. Sometimes the amount of money people are spending on your funnel can make a difference.
If you have a funnel that converts but you’re not making enough profit, you have a problem.
5. Improve the quality of traffic on the page
If your funnel isn’t converting, you might be attracting the wrong people.
You will never convert if the people visiting your funnel are not relevant. This is why it is important to test your audiences to see which ones work and which ones do not.
There are many advertising platforms available and it is easy to see which audiences are most receptive to advertisements. As I said earlier, do more of what’s working and stop doing what isn’t.
6. Increase or decrease form friction
There is a difference between the amount of leads and the quality of leads when it comes to lead generation.
Although it may be easy to gain a large number of leads at little expense, it is much more challenging to gain an equal number of high-quality leads without spending more money. It can be difficult to find the right balance between having a lot of something and having something of good quality.
The best way to find the right balance is to experiment with the number of fields you have in the form. This makes it easier or harder for someone to convert. The more questions/fields, the higher the friction. The fewer fields, the lower the friction.
7. Include social proof throughout
If theres one thing that stops people from converting, it would be the lack of trust. There is a lack of trust in the credibility of the people running the funnel, the offer being made, or the claims the funnel is making.
So, how do you build trust with people? How do you make your offer seem legitimate and like it will have a positive impact on the lives of your potential customers? Show the results that other people have achieved. Everyone in the world has problems. And they have desired results.
It is your responsibility as a marketer to demonstrate to potential customers how your product or service can be used as a means to achieving their goals. One of the most effective ways to sell your product or service is to show stories of others who have had success with it.
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