If you have a great product, run marketing campaigns one after the other, and offer discounts across all your stores, are you guaranteed to gain new customers by the droves? Any e-commerce company will know from experience that customer acquisition can be quite the moving target and a bit more complicated than one might think.
So, how do you turn a potential lead into a loyal customer? It starts with having a clear view of your customer’s journey.
And to acquire this kind of visibility, it’s essential to have a good understanding of your conversion funnel. More than just a graphic representation of how a lead enters and exits the buying process, your funnel is your blueprint for crafting just the right interventions and applying them at strategic points in the relationship, in order to generate awareness, increase interest, intensify desire, and propel the potential customer toward taking that final action.
Lead your prospects as quickly and as seamlessly as possible toward the final outcome, by following these four easy steps for building and optimising your conversion funnel.
1. Map out the ideal purchase process for your customer.
Imagine how your best customer moves from being just visitor (first interaction) to becoming a buyer (final stage). This visual exercise takes you through every channel that can potentially direct them to your website, the links they click on to explore individual product pages, the prompts that nudge them to fill their cart, and finally making the purchase using their preferred mode of payment.
Each visitor may choose to chart her own path, thus, creating numerous possibilities and opportunities for you to optimise the steps from visit to purchase. However, the more knowledge you have of these potential scenarios, the more accurate you can be when creating strategies to attract customers. Plus, you become better at removing those dropout points where they may exit the process before making a purchase,
2. Set up your goals and conversion in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics serves as your dashboard, where you can map out, monitor, and measure the success of your funnel. The data that Google collects will tell you where your leads usually find you, which campaigns are truly working for you, and where they’re potentially abandoning the journey.
For example, Google Analytics can tell you that, on a particular page on your website, many of your visitors are bouncing off from your ideal conversion path. On closer inspection, you might find that your content isn’t working so well or that your call to action is not doing its job. Should you revise your pricing? Craft a more compelling CTA? Add elements to retain customer attention? Set up your funnel goals differently? All this is actionable data that can pinpoint very specific actions that your brand should take, in order to increase your conversion rate.
3. Create content that delivers on your conversion goals.
Content is still king, no matter how the landscape may have changed. Does your content represent your brand in the best way possible? Is it aligned with and reinforcing your value proposition? Does it properly address the needs of your target customers at those critical points where conversations can spark?
Each stage in the funnel has its own content requirement. Based on your findings in the second step, update your content accordingly and turn it into a more compelling bait, to drive leads from the first stage of your funnel all the way to the last. In the upper funnel, for example, you will need lead magnets like infographics, downloadable guides, blog articles, and guest posts. The goal here is not necessarily immediate conversion; what you want is to provide information about you – your brand, your products, your services.
Toward the middle of the funnel, case studies and testimonials from your loyal clients can help sell your brand and demonstrate your brand’s edge over your closest competitor. By this stage, your lead will have a more acute understanding of their needs and in turn a greater desire to buy. They want to know if your company is a good fit and need to be convinced why they should give you their business.
When the lead reaches the last phase of your funnel, this is where a good and strong nudge is needed, in order to encourage them to take action. Make conversion a no-brainer by highlighting the best package on your pricing page, offering a live demonstration, enticing them with a free trial or one-hour consultation, or providing a compelling quotation page that asks for the most basic information.
4. Find all the leaks in your funnel and seal them shut.
Why aren’t your customers signing up to your mailing list or requesting a quote? Maybe you should offer a free trial, instead. People love free stuff, don’t they?
Well, what does your data say? When set up correctly, Google Analytics will highlight any issues with your funnel, so that you can take the necessary steps to minimise the impact of leaks. For example, you might find that visitors who sign up for a product demo convert better than those who go for a free product trial (as was in the case of HubSpot).
Of course, no conversion funnel is completely foolproof. At every turn, your content can fail, users can lose interest, and leaks are bound to happen. Google Analytics is an important part but still only one part of your toolkit. In order to retain as many of your qualified leads as possible, you need even deeper insights that Google Analytics alone cannot provide. For this, you need a conversion rate optimisation (CRO) plan that works.
Having a great product and advertising it everywhere will not automatically generate conversion. Let Digital Excellence help you put a proper CRO strategy in place, so you can identify the right places to collect your data and better understand why your best leads aren’t converting. Let’s chat and together identify ways to remove any obstacles, motivate your leads to turn into customers, and optimise the conversion path that works best for your brand.