Consumers are becoming less sensitive to brand advertising, which they find too intrusive. So, how do you attract visitors to your website and convert your prospects into loyal customers? Rely on the conversion funnel – or sales funnel – which is a fantastic tool for analysis and action! In this article, Trustt gives you the keys to better understand the conversion funnel and use it to boost your marketing strategy.
What is a Conversion Funnel?
Before becoming a customer of your company, internet users go through several stages. Each of these corresponds to a stage in the conversion process. This marketing concept is called: conversion funnel or sales funnel! It refers to the purchasing journey that internet users will follow to become your customers.
As a brand manager, your role is to bring internet users to your website to present your product or service offering, then guide these visitors throughout their purchasing journey. The objective? To ensure you convert as many of them as possible into customers.
To start, you must define the objectives you wish to achieve by implementing this conversion funnel.
For example:
- Ordering a product on your website;
- Converting visitors into identified leads;
- Downloading an e-book;
- Making contact via a form;
- Or subscribing to your newsletter.
The conversion funnel is composed of 4 key stages:
- Awareness: making your site known to potential buyers;
- Consideration: triggering visitor engagement;
- Conversion: gaining the trust of prospects and guiding them to the sale;
- Loyalty: retaining your customers in the long term.
This purchasing journey takes the shape of a funnel and represents the gradual decrease in the number of visitors at each stage. Indeed, you cannot convert all your website visitors into loyal customers, but your goal is to put everything in place to transform as many as possible.
To retain your customers over time, you generally enter into an inbound marketing approach.
Inbound marketing is a strategy that aims to naturally bring visitors to your brand to convert them into customers later.
How to Implement a Marketing Strategy Based on the Conversion Funnel?
Here are the stages of the conversion funnel (or sales funnel) and the marketing actions you should implement to achieve your objectives.
1- Attract as Many Internet Users as Possible to Your Website
During this first stage, your objective is to attract the right prospects to your website. For now, your prospects don’t know you yet, they are in an information-seeking phase. Here, you must ensure you are visible so they can find you easily, and that they want to discover your brand and your products or services.
Here are the marketing mechanisms to put in place to interest internet users at this stage:
Personas
This is of course the basis of any Inbound marketing strategy. Before you start, it’s important to take stock of your audience. You must know them inside out! Who are the people you’re targeting?
As a reminder, a persona is a semi-fictional person who represents the typical portrait of your customers and prospects. You have as many personas as target segments.
Take the time to carefully determine the typical portrait of each of your personas (first name, age, profession, interests, place of residence, needs, motivations, buying habits, etc.)
This is a central element if you want to implement a profitable marketing strategy, generate leads, and convert them into customers.
Web referencing (SEO)
To attract as many visitors as possible, you need to ensure that your prospects can find you easily, and be on the first page of Google and other search engines. To boost traffic to your website, it’s your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy that needs work. Note that SEO doesn’t just involve keyword research. SEO includes a large number of criteria such as:
- The architecture of your website,
- The optimization of content on each page,
- The structure of pages,
- Tags (title, H1 and Hn, meta description,…),
- Backlinks and crosslinks,
- URL optimization,
- HTTPS,
- Website loading speed,
- Responsive design,
- Etc.
Content marketing
At this stage, internet users are searching for information on Google to find answers to their questions. You must therefore succeed in attracting and interesting them enough by offering them quality content that meets their needs.
Therefore, regularly publish (optimized) content on your blog and social networks. This content must be useful, original, and unique. Your goal is to raise awareness among your visitors, even to move them so that they want to continue and identify you as a reliable source of information.
2- Encourage your visitors to interact with you
Now that you have put everything in place to attract internet users and they are visiting your website, you need to make them want to take action! At this stage of the conversion funnel, your goal is to convert your visitors into identified leads.
Here are the tools you can use to convert them:
Call-To-Action (CTA)
These call-to-action buttons are very important to keep your visitors on your website. They should be placed in several locations: in your blog posts, your product pages, your homepage, etc. Also provide easy access to your contact form so that your visitors can get in touch with you if they wish.
The newsletter
Encourage internet users to stay informed about your news by offering them to subscribe to your newsletter. This way, you can regularly inform them about your news and the publication of new articles on your blog. Maintain contact so they don’t forget about you.
Free downloadable content
Still with the aim of continuing to interest and convert your visitors into leads, offer them high value-added content such as the possibility to download white papers on specific topics in exchange for opt-ins. Make sure these downloadable contents are clearly visible and highlighted on your website.
Effective landing pages
Landing pages are the entry points to your website. They address a specific issue that corresponds to internet users’ searches on Google. Your visitors can also land on them after receiving an email, clicking on a call-to-action, or following a social media post. This is why it’s important to work on them well (message and design) in order to convert the internet user into a qualified lead. Don’t hesitate to integrate a contact form to collect information about your potential customers.
The chatbot
It can be interesting to set up a chatbot on your website to avoid losing your visitors! At the slightest question, your prospects can interact with you and ask all their questions. This way, you reduce the risk of them leaving your website too early, not having found an answer to their questions.
Lead nurturing
This method involves contacting prospects who show interest in your product or service offering through a series of pre-written messages. Your goal: to move your prospects even further down the conversion funnel.
3- Convert your leads into customers
At this point, your visitors have become qualified leads. They are potentially interested in your products or services. It’s now time to convert them into customers and consolidate your marketing strategy.
Here are examples of marketing levers to use to encourage them to make a purchase:
Lead scoring
To ensure that your prospects are mature enough in their buying journey, you can use lead scoring.
This technique involves rating each of your leads (hot, cold, irrelevant) based on their behaviors, actions, and prioritizing the most relevant leads.
Smart content
Based on the profile of each qualified lead and the information you have previously collected, you know more about who they are, their needs and expectations, their interests, etc. It’s time to bring each of your prospects to purchase through personalized content published when they need it.
Email marketing
To convert your leads into customers, send them personalized content directly related to your product or service offering. This way, you will gradually gain their trust and make them want to make a purchase.
In these email campaigns, you can, for example, send:
- Personalized commercial offers,
- Promotion codes,
- New products,
- Relevant advice,
- Invitation to a trade show,
- Etc.
4- Retain Your Customers
This is the final stage of the conversion funnel, and one of the most important! To sustain your business, it is crucial to retain your customers for the long term.
Your goal now is to maintain contact with your customers to successfully transform them into brand ambassadors. These customers will not only be loyal but will also speak positively about you to their circle, which will increase your visibility tenfold.
The following levers should be activated:
Customer relationship
Keep in mind that your consumers’ expectations evolve. Always stay attentive to them, support them, and adapt as much as possible to each of them to bring them maximum satisfaction.
Customer reviews and satisfaction surveys
Your customers’ feedback is precious! By questioning them, you learn about what they like in your products and also the improvements to make to continuously optimize your offer. Moreover, by requesting your customers’ reviews and publishing them on your product pages, you allow your prospects to learn more about the quality of your products, which can facilitate new conversions.
Trustt has developed a unique review module to integrate directly into your e-commerce site. Thanks to Trustt’s software, you collect complete and authentic reviews to enrich your product pages and thus increase your conversion rate.
Personalized offers
It’s important to regularly reward your customers for their loyalty through specific promotional offers such as: discounts, gifts, invitations to private sales, etc.
Of course, this list is not exhaustive. There are other marketing levers to activate to retain your customers such as: maintaining connections via social networks, inviting them to exceptional events, social selling, etc.
You now have all the keys in hand to set up a conversion funnel on your website that will allow you to maximize conversions. Don’t forget to continuously adapt and evolve your conversion funnel based on the data you collect throughout the purchase journey. Consumer behaviors are constantly evolving, as are web trends. Thanks to the ongoing analysis of data collected via tools like Google Analytics, you can keep an eye on what works or doesn’t work on your website. Thus, you can continuously optimize your digital marketing strategy.
