Content Index
Introduction
A conversion funnel is a critical parameter to improve the customer journey and drive sales. But often, business owners simply miss this opportunity. Optimizing your marketing funnel can triple your profits.
According to Salesforce’s study, nearly 68% of firms do not know about the customer journey funnel or haven’t attempted to measure it. The same survey highlighted that almost 79% of marketing leads never convert. However, if you have a good conversion funnel, you may end up hitting a 2-3% conversion rate as per Wordstream. This is no mean feat!
Hence, there is a need for a customer journey funnel optimization to attract customers for taking the desired action on your website. In this blog, we will talk about how optimizing the conversion funnel can create a happy customer journey resulting in better sales and customer retention rates.
As one of the best website design companies, we have discussed:
- What is a conversion funnel?
- Stages of the conversion funnel.
- The adverse effects of a poor sales funnel.
- Steps to optimize the marketing conversion funnel to boost conversions.
So, a lot to learn and a lot to discuss!
Stay tuned till the end for an enlightening experience!
How to Negate the Effects of Poor Conversion Funnel?
Not paying attention to the conversion funnel and its respective stages leads to poor customer journey which ultimatley impracts your business. However, first you need to have a clear understanding of what is conversion funnel and its critical stages!
What Is Conversion Funnel?
What is a funnel in marketing? As one of the best website design company we will make things lucid for you!
A conversion funnel, also known as a sales funnel or marketing conversion funnel, represents the various stages of a customer’s journey before they take the desired action on your website. Using a marketing conversion funnel, you or your company’s digital marketer can drive the prospects toward a conversion point.
Now, if this process is not planned properly, hell may break loose!
Here, we have shared information about the much talked about - The AIDA model.
AIDA Model
This is one of the most popular and commonly used marketing conversion funnel model. It has fours stages as decribed below:
- Awareness: As discussed in the previous sections, this is a stage where a person first learns about your brand before becoming a lead.
- Interest: This is where businesses strive hard to create an interest among their audience. The interest consequently drives a desire among the audience to desire for a product or service.
- Desire: In the Desire stage, your company’s prospects develop desire to purchase any product or service or take any desired action. It is a stage where your prospects move extremely close to becoming a customer.
- Action: Finally, it's time to take action! This can be in the form of purchasing a product, purchasing a subscription plan, purchasing ebooks, subscribing to a newsletter, or filling up a form.
You can also check more about the conversion funnel here: What is Sales Conversion Funnel?
We will share you with the most successful conversion funnel optimization tactics to get your leads rolling. Here are the effects if your marketing strategy has not focused on conversion funnel optimization.
Effects of Poor Marketing Conversion Funnel
Here’s the negative effects of a poor marketing conversion funnel.
Hamper Amplifying Your Brand Voice
As shown in the image above, the awareness stage is one of the most critical phases in your marketing conversion funnel. This is the first stage where your prospective customers get to know about your products and services. However, a poor conversion funnel can divert your prospects to your competitor’s website!
According to a survey done by Adweek, more than 80% of shoppers perform intense online research before deciding to purchase anything. So at this stage, you must make sure to be that information source. Your website audience is random visitors who may not intend to purchase anything. However, proper messaging in this stage can induce interest and desire.
As per the HubSpot study, 37% of marketers find prospecting as the most challenging part of their job. They fail to convey the brand message properly to urge visitors to develop further interest. Hence, getting an expert opinion from a digital marketing company regarding conversion funnel optimization can help you boost sales.
Fail to Create Interest Among Your Audience
What is your approach to developing an “Interest” for your products among the prospective users or are you just waiting for the competition to eat away the meal. In case your strategy is not in place for this critical stage of the conversion funnel here is a nerve-cracking number.
Nearly 96% of your website visitors may not be interested to purchase a product from you right away. So 50 milliseconds to develop interest and retain 96% of website audience is kind of tedious and so pay attention to every tactic we will unfold going ahead.
Besides, creating awareness regarding your products and services among your website visitors is important to help them form a positive opinion about your website and show interest in your products. However, a poor customer conversion funnel makes businesses fail to create that interest with their content!
No Interest, Hence No Desire!
In the marketing conversion funnel, everything happens in a cyclic order. If you are not able to communicate your brand’s message properly and create that interest among your leads, they will not develop a desire to show more interest in your products. In the event, they may not return again to your website. Thus, your business and customer base is not going to increase further.
The End Result, Poor Lead Conversion!
As per Wordstream, an average landing page conversion rate is about 2.35% across all industries. However, the top companies are converting at least 5.31% or more. This is possible due to proper marketing conversion funnel management. With poor conversion funnels, your conversion rate may dip to less than 1% to nil.
With a poor customer journey funnel, your business will fail to communicate its brand’s message properly. As a result,
- Your visitors will not be aware of your products.
- They will not develop that interest and desire to purchase or take an action.
- Finally, they will not convert as per your set goal.
- Also, you can be sure that these visitors may not return to your website any sooner.
The end result is that your visitor will not convert into your customer!
However, you can get expert opinions from a website design company to help out conversion funnel marketing.
It’s time to check the techniques to optimize a customer conversion funnel.
You may also like to read: How to Build an Effective Sales Funnel?
If you need more tips on building a sales funnel, do get in touch with a professional web development company!
13 Proven Ways for Marketing Conversion Funnel Optimization
(Source - Pinterest)
Here we have shared the important steps to optimize your marketing conversion funnel and uplift user experience.
Goal Setting
The first step in marketing conversion funnel optimization is setting up a goal in Google Analytics. Now, how to create a goal?
Follow the following steps:
- Goal Name: First, name your goal. This will help you to recognize when looking at your data reports. For example, “White Paper Download” or “Free Trial Subscription.”
- Define The Funnel: Google Analytics allows you to add ten of your web pages in a conversion marketing funnel. This is will help you to find where your users are exiting before completing the your set ‘goal.’
- Give the Goal a Value: For ROI calculation and other Google Analytics metrics, you need to decide on your goal’s worth. For example, if 10% of users download a report (on which you spent $500), the download value may be $50 (by calculating 10% of $500).
Pro Tip: Goal setting is required through out all the phases of your marketing conversion funnel. For each phase there will be a different goal which you need to figure out and set up in Analytics accordingly.
Discover From Where Your Best Customers Come
This is one of the critical steps before optimizing your marketing conversion funnel. The behavior of your leads vary. Some exits right at the top of the funnel, whereas some exits at the bottom. But, when you figure out the touchpoint of your leads pouring in, you have begin in the right direction. Ask yourself the following questions:
- How this touchpoint is quite different from various other touchpoints?
- What elements of your page are resonating with your audience?
- Which are obstacles that are hindering conversions (if any)?
- How many steps your audience need to complete before converting?
Pro Tip: You can get answers to all these questions using heat map tools like Crazy Egg. Also, you can take help from a website design company to know the channels from where you are receiving more customers and the ones where you are lagging.
Optimize for Conversions During the Awareness Stage
People visiting your website don’t intend to buy all the time. In addition if you don’t make your presence felt, nobody will know that you exist. If customers don’t know about your products, why will they buy?
The most common methods to build awareness at the top of your marketing conversion funnel are:
Blogging
Blogging is one of the seasoned methods to start optimizing your marketing conversion funnel to make your brand known to your audience. For that:
- Write engaging content on anything that relates to your products or services.
- Don’t shy away from including even loosely related topics. For instance, if you selling mobile phones, it’s likely that your audience will have an interest in knowing about mobile covers, selfie sticks, and other accessories.
Leverage Social Platforms to Create Brand Awareness
You will be amazed to know that more than 4.62 billion people worldwide use social media. A study has found out that 70% of users purchase a product after watching YouTube Reviews. Such is the power of social media!
- If you want to amplify your brand voice, start utilizing social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and others.
- Create an official page and group on Facebook for example start publishing interesting posts about your products, any events, customer testimonials, and things like that. Follow the same process on other social platforms.
Pro Tip: Use social media dashboards like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and others to track the various levels of engagement in your social posts. You can also cross-promote your social pages on your blogs by simply asking your audience to follow your social pages for the latest updates about your products!
PPC Campaigns
As per the study, PPC ADs helps in boosting brand awareness by 80%.
- You will have to pay only when people click on your ad.
- PPC campaigns help to attract visitors to your landing pages where you can convert them by capturing their email ids. It is one of the best ways to optimize the marketing conversion funnel to improve brand awareness.
Pro Tip: Go for page-level targeting.
Boost Your Conversions During the Interest Stage
After making your prospects aware of your products and services it’s time to drive them further deep into the marketing conversion funnel. But do not push your audience to take an action. Rather, guide them through towards your conversion point by engaging them to take small actions on your website.
You can start engaging your leads by
Landing Page Optimization
(Source - Airbnb)
As per a study, targeting and testing landing pages increase leads by 220%. Another study done by Marcus Sheridan shows that addressing customer queries can increase conversions by 80%. But businesses often miss this point. So, optimize your landing page in a way so that converts most of your leads. You must analyze the following basic elements of your landing page:
- Analyze your landing pages first.
- Analyze all its elements starting with the content headlines.
- Try out different headlines to figure out which one attracts your audience most.
- Optimize your landing page content by providing a solution to a certain problem that matters!
- Create more meaningful user-centric landing pages. As per the study, websites with 40+ landing pages achieve 12X conversions.
- Curate your CTAs smartly to ensure max clicks.
- Analyze page color, fonts type, and size, and try different variations.
- Analyze the effectiveness of your signup forms and modify them accordingly.
- Simplify your payment gateways.
Pro Tip: You can use heat map tools like Crazy Egg, Mouse Flow, Lucky Orange, Unbounce, and others. You can also perform usability or A/B testing. Also, a professional website development company can help you analyze the effectiveness of your landing pages.
Optimize Your CTAs
Check the well-articulated CTA for Spotify.
CTAs are quite critical as they ask your audience to take any action. From curating a powerful CTA to its placement on your webpage, it takes a lot of work.
- Audit and test the usefulness of your CTAs regularly.
- Ask yourself the following questions:
-
- What do I need my audience to do?
- Does my audience need to fix an appointment with me?
- Do they need to share their details by filling out a contact form?
- Does my audience need to subscribe to the newsletter?
- Do they need to download an eBook?
- Based on your need optimize your calls to action.
- Always attach some benefit with your CTA. For example, include some words like ‘Free Trial’, “No Question Asked Money-back Guarantee”.
Pro Tip: You can get expert opinions on how to curate conversion-driven CTAs from a professional website design company!
Optimize Your Contact Forms
Often businesses skip optimizing contact forms. These forms act as opportunities to add new visitors to your subscriber list and also increase conversions.
- Many companies include a contact form at the bottom of their page or content to boost their database.
- As per WPForms, using words like ‘Click Here’ or ‘Go’ instead of ‘Submit’ increases conversions by 30%.
- After you receive the information you can shoot engaging emails about your products or services.
Pro Tip: Use Lightbox Popups to get max conversions through your contact forms.
Also, read this Case Study……
Brian Tracy converted 6.8% of its visitors using Lightbox Popus coupled with exit-intent technology. Brian Tracy also implemented content upgrades. These content upgrades are lead magnets specific to what an audience is reading at a particular time. The end result is Brian Tracy could achieve a to 11.8% conversion of the leads.
Optimize Your Funnel in the Desire Stage
After you have made your prospect aware of your products and created an interest among them, it's time to pre-qualify them further to help them understand whether you are the right choice for them. Yes, you will have to answer their questions about your products to create a sense of trust among them. So, you need to optimize your marketing conversion funnel accordingly by following the below steps:
Start Emailing
As per Content Marketing Institute, 81% of B2B marketers find emailers as are the most effective content marketing tools. So, start educating your prospective customers with intricate details about your products and services.
- Analyze your email headlines and copies.
- Try out different variations.
- Analyze whether users like HTML format or Text format for emails.
- Curate your emails based on your findings.
- Focus on the benefits of using your products.
Pro Tip: You can use e-mail marketing tools like Mailchimp, Sender, and others to generate automated and customized emails. Else, you can get expert suggestions from a website design company to come up with the best-suited email campaign for you.
Drip Marketing and Autoresponder Series
Through drip marketing you can send ‘drips’ to your customers over a period of time. Drips are pre-written email messages to customers. After that use an autoresponder series to move your prospective customer directly to a conversion point.
CRM Integration
Customer Relationship Management software helps businesses to track various interactions with both current and future customers. This tool helps to identify the position of your website visitors in your marketing conversion funnel.
- Leverage your CRM to figure out which email campaigns your prospective customer must receive next via retargeting and cookie detection.
- Cookies ensure that you can use the information about your customers to improve their content and offer various personalizations.
- Use cookies with CRM software and email marketing for customer campaigns to get returning visitors repeat visitors.
- You can also create special promotions for those prospects who have opted in.
For this step, you can hire a professional website design company to sail you through.
Optimize Action Stage for Greater Conversions
Finally, the most critical phase of your sales funnel. This is simply to sell your services! T
Time to make the ask!
According to a study an average customer needs to pursued at least 7 times before they make a decision to purchase!
Give your customers an abundance of opportunities often to purchase your product, here are a few to mention:
E-Commerce Promotion
If you are an e-commerce platform selling certain products, you have to proactively offer your products regularly. This is an important step for e-commerce businesses to optimize the marketing conversion funnel for increasing conversions.
- Make it simple for your customers to find your products easily through Live Chats.
- Attach some benefits like discounts or free shipping.
- Email subscribers about your latest products, share user reviews, and other promotional content to nudge your visitors to take an action.
- Don’t forget to give reminders at regular intervals.
- Use a clear CTA.
You will also get a detailed insight from here on - Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips
If you are still not convinced, approach a website design company to promote your e-commerce business!
Social Media Monitoring
We have discussed about the importance of using social media during the awareness stage of the funnel. But, social media can be beneficial through out various stages of the funnel. People after knowing about your brand might have questions about your products and offerings which they will ask on social platforms.
- You need to cater to them pro-actively to close a deal.
- This is possible through active social monitoring.
Pro Tip: Try out the A/B test or Split Test for sure. You can use a few social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Nexalogy, Mentionlytics, and others.
We are sure by now you are quite aware of the best tactics to optimize your conversion rate, however, planning and implementation are the keys. Professional web design services play an important role herein.
How Can JanBask Digital Design Help!
We create website designs that matter!
At JanBask Digital Design, we aim to provide the best website design service to make each experience an everlasting one for your customer. So, they keep visiting you again & again!!
Whether it's a startup or an established brand, our professional web design services are tailor-made for every industry as we aim to:
- Boost your brand value and identity.
- Create a visually stunning digital transformation of your business.
- Enable you to exercise authority in your line of work.
- Enable you to get qualified leads that convert.
Let's Design Together to Make a Difference!
Conclusion
When it comes to marketing conversion funnel optimization, it is always important to strategize and test every stage of the funnel. Testing will get you actionable data for analysis and to take necessary action for optimization.
Understand your requirements first and then execute the strategies. Make sure your customers feel aligned with your business and want to return. This is how you will build and grow your customer base.
Working with a professional web development company will get you cutting-edge website design services to improve conversions by customer journey funnel optimization.
Also, do share your story if you have already implemented the above steps to optimize the marketing conversion funnel and yielded good results. If not, it's time to give us a buzz and get going with lead maximization.
P
Nice motivational blog, really helpful for upcoming entrepreneurs and listed tips are valuable and worthful.
N
What a blog, I like it!! I am planning to start a business but was very confused about how to increase conversions by creating marketing funnel. But this blog will surely help me.
B
Thanks for giving such great ideas to create effect conversion funnels. I was looking for such a post for a very long time.
B
Earlier I was really confused as to whether I should start a business online or not and whether I will be successful. However, this blog on how to optimize conversion funnels to increase sales has cleared all my doubts.
S
Must read blogs for people willing to optimize their conversion funnels
S
In how many months can I see effective results if I follow your ideas? Please let me know!
P
Do you guys help in setting up a small business? I wanted to know because I want to hire your team for my organization as I am not familiar with the process well and will require professional help. Please let me know!
L
My friend and I were seeking information on conversion funnel ideas for a long time but could not find anything relevant. Then one of our colleagues shared the link to your article. I must say you have shared some effective ideas, I am impressed with!
J
Overall a nice blog, I was seeking information on the same for many days but could not find anything relevant. Then I came across your blog and found it really interesting and impressive. Thanks team!
C
I am new in the small business and also don’t have much information about conversion funnel and how to optimize it. Also, the team that I had hired didn’t respond well. Can your team help me with some more effective and useful marketing ideas!!