The key for any business owner, e-commerce manager or marketer is to have complete knowledge of the marketing funnel. Understanding the basic know-how of the marketing funnel will help them to create strategies effectively and accomplish the organizational goals.
In this blog, we will look at 5 tips to optimize your marketing funnel for ecommerce, but before that let’s understand what a marketing funnel is and how it works.
What Is A Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel is a visual representation of the stages a person undergoes, from the moment that they discover your business till the moment that they take an action, be it a purchase, subscription or any other service offered by your business.
A marketing funnel consists of several stages, which we will look at in the later sections.
Did you know that only 2% of sales are done at the first contact moment? An average customer takes up to 5 to 8 contact moments before they make a purchase.
Optimizing your business’ marketing funnel by planning effective strategies and pushing through each stage of the funnel can help you generate higher revenues by converting new leads into paying customers.
How Marketing Funnels Work: The Stages
There are 4 stages in a marketing funnel that a person goes through. The objective behind identifying these stages is to create optimal marketing strategies that help you push the potential customers from the top to the bottom of the funnel.
Creating optimal marketing funnels requires content. Anything put on the web that enables you to communicate with the audience can be called content. Hence, it is highly essential for a business manager to be aware of the importance of content marketing.
Each stage in the marketing funnel requires you to take various unique actions and messages to avoid losing prospects.
Stage 1: Awareness
Awareness is the first stage of the marketing funnel. This is the stage where people become aware of the product or service that your business offers. This stage can also be called lead generation.
Awareness is a result of a variety of actions like a google search, marketing campaigns, events, blogs, webinars, press releases, direct mails, trade shows, advertisements, shared content on social media or any offline action.
At this point, the mindset of the prospect is to find a solution to a problem they have. They have low value for the product that you offer. Keep in mind that the person is not yet considering buying the product or service. Use strategies to create appealing content and push prospects to the next stage.
Stage 2: Interest
The next stage of the marketing funnel is Interest. Here, you have grabbed the prospect’s attention and the prospect is interested in buying the product or service and is considering learning more. This is the research phase.
At this point, the probability of making a sale is usually low. Keeping the audience interested and providing them with as much information as you can help you in pushing them to the next level.
Craft content that caters to the needs of the audience. Having a unique selling proposition for your business can be of great help at this stage. Content ideas like posting blogs, posts on your social media, videos, downloadable guides, FAQs, podcasts, emails are few techniques that will keep your prospects interested and engaged.
Stage 3: Desire
The 3rd stage of the marketing funnel is Desire. Now that you have managed to get your prospect at the 3rd stage of the marketing funnel, you need to show them why they need the product or service that you are offering.
Emails are a great way to do this. Offering proposals like free trials, demos or placing attractive advertisements can help you build a want for the product and push the prospect to the next stage.
Stage 4: Action
Action is the fourth stage of your marketing funnel. This is where the prospect takes action. They schedule a demo, place an order or take the action that you wanted them to take.
In the end, maintaining customer relationships is important to build customer loyalty. Offer future discounts, coupon codes, free deliveries to encourage customers to buy from you again.
Let’s now look at the 5 top tips to optimize your marketing funnel fast.
5 Best Tips To Optimize Your Marketing Funnel
1. Map Out The Ideal Buying Process
Identify 3 key things in the buyer's journey:
• What the prospect wants, by tracking the movements on the site.
• What is your end goal?
• How can you convert the prospect into a buyer?
Monitoring the marketing funnel gives you a detailed insight into how prospects move on your site until they make a purchase. Given this information, you can start developing your marketing funnel.
There are different tools you can use at each stage of your marketing funnel.
2. Set Goals For Each Stage Of The Funnel
Divide the funnel into 3 different sections: Top, Middle and Bottom. You need to decide what kind of response you want from people at each stage of the funnel. Determine the content strategies according to these goals. The content you create is essential for driving prospects from one stage to the next.
TOP OF FUNNEL (TOFU)
Since the first stage is to build awareness about the business and attract large target audiences, you may consider creating a lot of visual content and pushing it over to all your social media accounts and other channels. The focus at this stage is to grab the prospect’s attention.
The visual content can include videos, blogs, advertisements, press releases, webinars. A few tips to create engaging content is by using search engine optimization techniques and creating pay per click ads. Taking an SEO Course Online can help learn the skills of ranking higher and generate more leads.
You can also create downloadable guides for your audience if it is relevant to your business. These techniques help a business rank higher and build engagement.
Creating engaging content can help you create a lot of buzz about your business.
MIDDLE OF FUNNEL (MOFU)
Now that you have the prospect’s attention, you need to gain their trust and show them how your business is different from your competitors. This is the stage where you need to be directly promotional and build the interest of your audience.
Depending on your business, you can offer them detailed information about your product or service. Offering video tutorials, free demo sessions, downloadable guides, case studies are a few examples of keeping your audience engaged and pushing them to the next level.
BOTTOM OF FUNNEL (BOFU)
Once the prospect desires the product or service that you offer, give them the reason to take action. You can offer them pricing details, phone consultations, free trials and a call to action.
3. Earn Repeat Customers
Customer relationship management focuses on nurturing customers at every moment whenever they interact with your brand. Maximising customer experiences and building strong relationships results in more profits and increased customer loyalty.
Did you know that the probability of selling to a new customer is 5-20% and selling to an existing customer is 60-70%?
A lot of people base their buying decisions on post-purchase services. Since you know the steps that your customer followed before purchasing for the time, making a sale for the second time will now be much easier.
Hence, your goal now is to keep your customer engaged with your brand. Offering customers with delivery timelines, refunds and exchange options, coupon codes, discounts, customer support, one-day deliveries and emails about new launches are ways to keep people hooked to your business.
Ask for customer reviews and conduct surveys to know how you can improve your customer experience.
4. Encourage Users To Take Action
Using a strong call to action (CTA) is a great way to optimize your funnel. Now that your prospect is at the bottom of your marketing funnel and you want to make a sale, offer things that motivate people to take action.
You can offer things like,
• Schedule an appointment today!
• Book Now!
• Heavy Discounts!
• Start a free trial!
• Download the PDF for free!
You can also send clear actionable emails to prospects, emphasizing the products that solve their problems.
Test all your CTA strategies carefully and figure out which strategy is most effective depending on the audience and your business to nurture leads into paying customers.
5. Set Conversion Goals And Track Conversions Using Analytics Tools
Attracting high-quality traffic in the awareness stage of your marketing funnel will result in visitors turning into customers.
Google Analytics is one such tool that you can use to determine where most traffic is coming from. It is the best way to measure your site’s performance. They also offer a free marketing funnel as a part of their google analytics software.
Google Analytics lets you track all the actions of your visitors. For example, you can see the user behaviour data like bounce rates and duration of each channel. You can also track which sites bring the most conversions to your site.
Learning google analytics can prove to be extremely useful especially while conducting business activities online.
Master Marketing Funnels
The marketing funnel enables you to view the customer’s journey from a broad perspective. You can build your marketing funnel as detailed and specific as you like.
Optimizing your business’ marketing funnel is essential, without which you might start losing opportunities to capture potential customers to competitors.
Developing a marketing funnel can be very challenging. But, take out time, understand marketing funnels, leverage digital marketing techniques and integrate them together to bring about improvements in capturing your target audience.
We hope you enjoyed reading this blog post for marketer mastery!
Will you be using these tips to optimize your marketing funnel? Let us know your experience with marketing funnels on social media and make sure to share this article link now.
Karan Shah
Founder and CEO at IIDE
An ‘Edupreneur’ and the founder of IIDE – Indian Institute of Digital Education. He is a passionate public speaker and teacher for over 10 years. He has trained over 1,00,000+ students and 25+ corporates in Digital Marketing via online and offline channels. He is a Harvard alumnus specialising in E-commerce. He is a TEDx speaker and is a visiting faculty at India’s top management institutes like the IIMs.
