Introduction

Your business might be raking in the same number of web page visitors, but the number of customers you retain can be wildly different comparatively. The businesses that get the most out of their marketing efforts are often those who understand and actively use the concept of a marketing funnel. In this blog post, we’ll look at funnels and how they help you increase your customer loyalty and potentially skyrocket your conversions. We’ll also look at your customer journey — what it means, what it can do for your business, and some stats to back its importance.

Image by Clicks and Things with marketing funnel and leads icon, and the inscription, “high converting funnel for your business”.

What is A Marketing Funnel?

Sprout Social defines a marketing funnel as “your customer’s journey with you.” A good marketing funnel maps out the stages that a potential customer goes through from the point where they get to know about your business till they become your biggest fans.

A marketing funnel is a model of the customer journey. It represents the buying stages people go through after becoming aware of a business, service, or product.

Customer Journey?

Every customer you have now started out as a stranger. There was a time when they had never heard about your business or used your product before. This is usually how it plays out for most customers:

• They first realize that they have a problem. (eg. I’m hungry)

• Then, they stumble upon or search for a solution. (eg. A pizza would be great right now)

• They find a brand that matches (eg. This pizza place has really good reviews. Maybe I should try them)

• They may look for deals, packages, or other smaller factors

• At this point, they purchase. Henceforth, they are now familiar with your business’s name, and what you do, and have a fair idea of what your service is like

• They can either stay on board as loyal customers or opt out

This period (from when they realized they had a problem that needed solving to become loyal customers) is often called the customer journey. Knowing your customer avatar, and where they are at their journey can help you understand what to offer them and how best to present it to them.

Tailoring your messaging and actions to your customer journey is a form of personalization. This helps you meet the customer where they are in their journey, address their concerns, and make them feel like they are understood, all things that are increasingly important in business in this era.

According to Statista, in a 2022 survey among senior marketers worldwide, 95 percent of respondents rated their personalization strategies as (somewhat or very) successful. Only five percent of responding marketers thought of their strategies as unsuccessful.

Summary of the stages

Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Intent, Evaluation, Purchase, and Post-Purchase

So, How Does A Funnel Fit Into All Of This?

A funnel helps you to visualize and understand each part of the customer journey better. It makes it a lot easier to create a clear blueprint that fits with your customer in each stage of their journey. This helps you to:

• Provide a better overall experience for your customers

• Increase the chances of them being loyal to you

• Reduce the cost and the disconnect that ineffective ads or content can cause

• It’s much easier to track your metrics and understand their behavior, interests, challenges, and triggers when you have a good funnel in place.

• According to Growbo, businesses that optimize their sales funnels can significantly increase their conversion rates

How To Create Your Marketing Funnel

Identify Your Target Audience

Earlier, we discussed how important knowing your customer avatar can be to this process. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it’s hard to take them along on a personalized journey. So, before you continue on this journey, take a look at your customer base. What does your average customer like? Their likes, dislikes, average age, interests, et cetera. Now, pretend you have only one customer. Create a detailed story about this person — their name, demographics, income level, behavior, pain points, greed, fears, and motivations.

This might seem a bit extreme, but it’s not. The clearer you are about who your customers are, the more likely you are to create better services and content they care about.

Create a Customer Journey Map

Making a visual map of your customer’s journey can really help put a lot in perspective. That’s why many pro marketers use this to either highlight a particular section of the customer’s journey or to gain a better perspective of the different points you interact with them. This can help you spot many inconveniences, issues, or barriers slowing your sales. Or it can help you speak more directly to your customer.

Tips

• What you say in critical moments like after a customer visits your site, clicks on your email CTA link, or downloads your lead magnet can make all the difference.

• Include your feedback on social media, customer service, websites, et cetera into your customer journey map.

Develop Your Content Strategy

Now that you know your customer avatar and the main touchpoints in your customer’s journey, you need to speak to them at the point of the journey they’re in.

Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

The ultimate rule for writing copy (content) successfully is this — Join the conversation that’s already going on in their head.

New customers who haven’t heard about your brand are less likely to get excited at an ad that says, “[Insert your business name here] is offering a 15% discount]”. Yes, everybody enjoys a good bargain, but at that point, the message your customer needs at this point should be directed into finding them a solution. Awareness content like value-packed blog posts, infographics, and social media posts that address the problem at hand will be more beneficial (and more likely to grab their attention). At the end of the content, you can add a (Call To Action) link inviting them to take a closer look at your content or brand.

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

Once your customer avatar gets acquainted with your work, they enter into the middle portion of your funnel. At this point, it may be useful to start introducing engagement content like newsletters or webinars. These posts are a lot more detailed and personalized. And they are a great way to get (or engage with) people on your email list. These posts can double down on a particular issue they have that your brand solves and address it with even more value. In the end, you can explain how your product is the best solution to do this. Then, include a Call To Action (CTA) asking them to act (eg. sign up, check this out, get on a call with us, et cetera.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

At the end of the funnel, it is important to have content that convinces the customer avatar to make the purchase. These can take the form of an email campaign, product demo, or case study. It might include pricing information, testimonials, and other details that may push them over the edge. Here, you need to sell — but don’t be salesy or tacky. You’ve been patiently guiding them all through their journey to getting to know you so make sure that the image you’ve portrayed so far still carries through even as you sell.

It may be helpful to address any last questions or objections your avatar may have at this stage as well. At this stage, they probably already trust you to some degree, but concerns about things like the price or payment plan might come up. You’ll start to identify some of these Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) as time goes on.

Implement Lead Capture Mechanisms

If you’re going to get your customer from one stage of their journey to the next, you need to be very intentional with the following:

• Your landing page

• Forms

• Calls-to-action (CTAs)

a) Landing Pages

Creating a landing page for each specific product, service, or offer you have available is very important. A landing page is a single-page website that is aimed at getting the avatar to take one single action. eg. register for an event, buy now, et cetera.

Why You Need To Use More Landing Pages (With Stats)

• According to OmniSend, landing pages are the least popular type of signup form, but they have the highest conversion rate (23%).

• DataBox reports that 35% of B2B marketers claim that landing page was the most successful method for collecting newsletter subscribers.

• According to Unbounce, landing pages are statistically proven to be a more effective channel to address buyer fears and can increase conversion rates by 80%.

Having tailored landing pages can make each part of the customer’s journey feel more personalized, and can be a much more effective way to get them to take action.

b) Forms

When you need to collect some sort of data, whether it takes the form of a survey or a qualification form (to make sure they are a fit for your high-ticket product). If you are using the form to collect data, it’s often best to keep the question fields as few as possible if not the customer avatar may get overwhelmed. You may also benefit from giving them freebies like discounts to motivate them to complete the form.

Or maybe you are using it to qualify your leads (for your high-priced exclusive service, for example). In this case, asking a few more questions upfront can be beneficial. You still have to make sure that they are all relevant. But you can use this as a way to filter for the exact kind of leads you want to work with.

Either way, make sure the form is user-friendly, simple, and isn’t lengthier than it needs to be.

c) Calls To Action (CTA)

One of the biggest mistakes anyone can make in marketing is omitting a clear, personalized CTA from their content. Here’s why:

• According to WiserNotify, using a specific, clear CTA can increase conversion rates by 161%.

• HubSpot reports that personalized call-to-actions perform 202% better than basic CTAs.

The Call To Action (CTA) is the action you ask your target audience to perform after landing on your content. eg. click the link, like and subscribe, read more, etc. When you don’t have a clear action you’d like them to take, your page visitors are a lot more likely to leave after seeing your content or page.

Knowing where your customer is on their journey can help you personalize your CTA even more so that you can have other link buttons that say something a bit more different from the usual “Contact Us” or “Click Here”.

Tip

Automate a chunk of the process of guiding your customers through their journey with these personalized landing pages, forms, and CTAs. When you have these in place for the different stages, products, and customer avatars you have in your business, you’ll have yourself a streamlined process that collects the information you need, keeps your customers engaged, and saves you lots of time and effort in the long run since it becomes mostly automated.

Nurture Your Leads

Use your funnel and your knowledge of the customer journey to build a relationship with your customer. You can build a stronger, more loyal customer base by:

• Being in touch with them, and making sure that your interactions with them always add as much value to them as you can. It can be through helpful guides, engaging content, or a good deal. And actively seek out (and respond to) feedback

• Use your email autoresponse software to create tailored experiences for your customers based on their behavior and actions

• Make sure you have the right content for each stage of the customer’s journey through the funnel

Optimize for Conversion

You’ll need to keep tweaking and testing even after you track your customer journey map and touchpoints. A part of having a well-converting funnel is testing — after all, targeting and testing correctly can boost conversion rates by 300% or more. (Persuasion Nation)

You’ll need to do:

A/B testing or Split testing

Experiment with your headlines, CTAs, and so on. It’s usually much easier to do this when you have an even split (that is, 50% with CTA 1; the other half of your audience will see CTA 2)

Analyze your funnel closely

Look closely at each point of the funnel. Which parts do customers drop off the most? What might be causing that, and is there something that can be done about it? Looking closely at the funnel will help you understand your customer’s preferences, and help inform your business strategy.

Refine, Refine, Refine

Make changes if they prove themselves after a while. Many businesses stick to setting up a system, but they don’t monitor, analyze, or implement their findings. You’ll get a lot of feedback throughout the funnel — make sure you make changes to the funnel accordingly. This can help create significant growth in conversions in your business.

Measure and Analyze Results

Don’t lose sight of the numbers. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at each stage of the funnel will help you keep track of your level of performance. The breakdown can really help identify areas that you can improve in each segment of the funnel

Conclusion

A well-structured funnel can be extremely beneficial to any business. Not only does it systematically attract and keep the customer’s attention, but it can also teach you a lot about what works for your customer base. Creating a mapped-out funnel can go a long way to building lasting relationships with your customers — and it gives you the option to automate a chunk of it. This means that, once it’s all set, it’ll be easier to render a personalized feel to your offering without having to study each customer individually.

With this knowledge, some automation, and some analysis and testing, a business can potentially increase its engagement, sales, and quality of leads even with the same number of page visitors coming in.

Now tell us — which business are you into, and how do you think a marketing funnel can help you grow significantly in the next few years?