The conversion funnel is an e-commerce term that describes the various stages in a buyer’s journey.
Conversion funnels are separated into three stages,
- Upper funnels
- Middle funnels
- Lower funnels
These funnels help determine the right marketing strategy to maximize conversions.
Meanwhile, commonly heard words like “top of the funnel” and “bottom of the funnel,” mean “upper funnel” and “bottom-funnel.”
These terms refer to the interest that the potential customer has with a product and how close they are to purchasing it.
- “Top of Funnel” or “Upper Funnel”
When a consumer starts researching a product and is unsure about the technical requirements or the exact requirements. They can currently research different brands and try to understand which brand fits their needs. - “Middle of the Funnel” or “Middle Funnel” Consumers will go to popular brands and sign up for some email campaigns to get information about these brands’ products. They’ve built up expectations about what they want now. Now they’re going to ignore the brands they see as unable to deliver good value and quality to them.
- “Bottom of Funnel” or “Lower Funnel”Consumers have decided on their favorite brands and started searching for reviews and information from customers. That will let them know when they make a purchase.
Additionally, remarketing and long-tail keyword optimization will help you stay in your customers’ minds at this stage of the conversion process.
Levels of the Conversion funnel
The design of your conversion funnel depends on the business you are running. Stages include the following:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
Creating a conversion funnel means getting more people to travel through each stage and eventually, complete the last step or take the desired action.
Additionally, each stage of the tube has its purpose, such as attracting new visitors or their interest in their products. The higher goal is to lead them to the final conversion stage.
Awareness
The first step of your conversion funnel is to attract visitors. As the name suggests, you can do this by raising awareness about your business and products.
To clarify, determining the sources that are bringing quality trafficcan help you get better information on which strategy is most effective.
Most e-commerce companies rely on the attraction of targeted traffic through advertising. Mostly included social media, content marketing campaigns, and organic searches.
Interest
Once you start driving traffic to your website, the next step is to generate visitors that are interested in your business.
Content, irresistible offers, and visually striking designs are beneficial at this stage. It is also essential to take some steps to find out if your digital strategy is working. This involves deciding on metrics that can be accurately measured to assess whether the strategy is driving traffic and achieving objectives.
Desire
The next step is to build trust and desire while helping your customers learn more about your brand. Visitors who reach this funnel stage are considered highly qualified leads.
They need to be nurtured to go down the funnel. Email campaigns are built to be a trustworthy technology. To retain personalized content opportunities and return to your website.
Action
The last and most important is the action phase. At this point, your leads are going through the funnel. For e.g. doing little things like signing up for your newsletter, or downloading e-books. These actions are called micro-conversions.
However, your ultimate goal is to change your leads and convince them to buy. If most visitors suffocate at this level, it indicates that your primary sales strategy is weak.
When you map your conversion funnel, you will see that only a small percentage of visitors reach the final level.
That’s why even minor improvements at each level can have a significant impact on your bottom line.
To optimize your conversion funnel, you need to understand your customers’ behavior and identify the reasons for the funnel “leaks” at each stage.
How to optimize your conversion funnel
The easiest way to start thinking about your sales funnel optimization is to divide it into upper, middle, and lower. The task of the high funnel is to attract new visitors.
The central funnel is responsible for converting new visitors into qualified leads, and the bottom-funnel means the total number of conversion or purchase.
Each part of the conversion funnel must approach differently. Therefore, different marketing techniques have come into use.
Upper Funnel Optimization
The traffic you send to your online store largely determines the effectiveness of your conversion route.
Suppose you are creating junk traffic and attracting visitors who are not interested in your products. Due to which, the sale funnel will increase but the people will drop off immediately.
Focusing on driving quality traffic is the first step to optimizing the upper funnel. There are various ways you can test:
- Optimize your keywords for paid search and display ads
- Re-checks the target of your social media ads (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn)
- Creating unique, keyword-optimized content (blog posts, ebooks, guides, infographics, videos, etc.).
- Investing in the power of social media
Middle funnel optimization
So you were able to get people’s attention, and they came to your site, now what?
This is where the real work begins.
Middle Funnel is about building confidence with your opportunities and showcasing the benefits of your products.
Depending on how long your conversion route is, you will need many different interactions with your customers. First, you are going to earn their loyalty and move them down to the next stage of the funnel.
Second,, you will need testimonials, product reviews, case studies, community forums, price comparisons, various trading methods, automated marketing campaigns, engaging content, and much more to convince users to take the next step in the funnel.
Finally, understanding your client’s mood and expectations play a significant role in how successful your strategy will work.
Hence, it’s essential to continually run A / B tests and gather feedback and track key metrics.
Lower funnel optimization
When your lead reaches the final stage, you need to pull them into the new conversion funnel. However, you made this effort to guide the last purchase from the awareness stage. It would be a great loss to let them go now
E-Commerce businesses that can turn one-time buyers into repeat customers are on the right track to success.
The more customer data you have, the more personalized and targeted experiences you can create to keep them interested.
Moreover, once a lead has replaced, pull it back to the preliminary stage and continue building through targeted offers and email campaigns. Here, the use of drip campaigns is common, which essentially means sending periodic emails to remind the user of their interaction with your brand.
As such, this strategy helps consumers stay in contact with your brand and optimizes your conversion funnel to complement your digital strategy.