A beginners guide to conversion funnels

What Is a Conversion Funnel?

UXCam’s Funnel Analysis

A conversion funnel is a tool used to evaluate and comprehend the process of turning a curious consumer into a loyal customer.

The better you understand the process of the customer, the easier it is to improve the steps to increase consumer flow and, in turn, sales and KPIs.

When talking about conversion funnels, it’s best to picture a kitchen funnel with a modification.

Everything you add to a regular funnel ends up coming through the bottom. However, in conversion funnels, there are holes in every level. This leads to leaks of potential customers.

Not everyone that looks at your product or lands on your website needs what you’re selling. Therefore, your funnel is always going to have some leaks.

Your goal should be to minimize these leaks, making the funnel as efficient as possible — thus retaining as many future customers as possible.

To best minimize these leaks and optimize the process, we need to take a closer look at the process, especially from the customer’s point of view.

The customer should never feel trapped on any page and should be given a clear and easy path to the next step of the process. If a customer isn’t sure of what the next step is or how to get there, then they’ll likely walk away from your product and you’ll have lost a potential customer.

4 Levels of a Basic Conversion Funnel

1) Awareness

One of the first things you’ll need when converting consumers into clients is, of course, the consumers themselves.

Consumers can’t buy your product unless they know it exists, right?

This is where you attract possible customers and bring them into your app or website, pulling them into the funnel.

Just remember, these are people that you’re selling to. They are not just generalized segments of the population. Not everyone has the same pull, and they won’t all respond to the same prompting.

Know your audience.

When maximizing the effectiveness of this step, quantity over quality is not always the best approach. You indeed want to bring in a high number of consumers to look at your product.

But if you’re bringing in consumers that have no use for your product, you’re likely to spend more time and money trying to convert them only to be met with little success.

Focus on quality by identifying your ideal audience through funnel analysis and target them through proper marketing.

This will give you a higher conversion rate, saving large amounts of time and money you would have spent pursuing bad leads.

When determining where to best place your ads, ask yourself:

“Who is my ideal audience, and how can I best reach them?”

Use the answer to this question to help determine the most efficient and promising places to start your marketing.

Reddit is a useful tool for marketing but isn’t always appropriate for every product. Facebook is the classic go-to for marketing, but not all the target groups are active. This may lead to a low level of response.

2) Interest

Now that you’ve pulled in potential customers that are well suited to your product, it’s time to develop the consumer’s interest in your product.

Notice at this point that, as a funnel does, this level is now smaller than the “action” level. As mentioned before, each one of these levels will have leaks; not everyone that happens across your website will have an interest or a need for your product.

Now that we’ve sorted part of the poor leads out, we can focus on generating a stronger interest for the product in the consumers that we’ve retained from the first step.

Remember, it’s important to ensure a good customer experience throughout the entire process.

Consumers probably aren’t going to purchase anything until they’ve developed a certain level of trust in your company and they understand what you stand for. They will need a chance to browse your products and get comfortable with the product before moving to the next step.

Because of this, an important tool for this step is a well-designed website/app. It should grab their attention quickly, and then the content on it should hold their attention longer.

This is also a good time to consider adding a quick bait piece — some kind of freebie — in exchange for an email address or other information. This is a great way to gauge how well this level of the funnel is working. You can finally measure how many people are interested in your product.

Be sure, however, to keep all steps simple, quick and easy to follow to ensure potential customers have the smoothest experience possible. This will lead to a higher number of consumers to the next stage of your funnel.

3) Desire

Now that we have nurtured the consumers’ interest in the product, we need to create a desire for the product.

We’ve sorted through potential customers and narrowed it down to only those interested in the product, so as before, this level is smaller than the previous levels.

Now you can take those leads you earned with the quick bait in the previous step and follow up. The goal is to show the potential customers why your product is necessary.

One effective method is demonstrating how your product solves a particular problem that the consumer has. People want the solutions to problems, even problems that they didn’t know they had.

If you can make them desire your product because it’s a solution to their problem, you won’t need to promote your product all that much. A great copywriter can be one of your smartest investments at this point in the game.

Build on the previous interest phase by focusing on the details: great product pictures, detailed descriptions, and demonstration videos help customers feel confident that they know what they’re getting.

However, one thing to be wary of at this step is overselling. People, in general, don’t like to feel as if they’re being talked into anything. This creates another leak out of your funnel. Ensure that any sales pitch you have is gentle enough to make consumers feel they’re shopping independently, without feeling pushed into buying the product.

4) Action

This is what it’s all been about up to now. We’re finally approaching the finish line! The customer has the awareness, interest and desire for the product; now we just need to secure the sale.

It’s key to ensure that the customer has the smoothest experience from start to finish. This will help encourage not just the initial sale but will also reduce cart abandonment.

For example, if you’re in e-commerce, really focus on your product pages and make your checkout flow as smooth as possible. You want to do all you can to ensure that the product can be placed in the customers’ carts without a problem. When all this goes smoothly, customers are more likely to complete the transaction.

Alternatively, if your product is an app, you’ll want to ensure that there are no issues with the user experience and that your app is suited as closely as possible to the customer needs.

You’ll want to make sure that your app has as many customer-desired features as possible. There’s a catch though. Too much of a good thing is always bad, so keep your app simple. A product like UXCam makes app analysis a breeze. See more about this essential and time-saving tool here.

Now you have another happy customer and another sale. But why stop there?

Re-Engage

Your best customers are repeat customers.

They’re much less resource-intensive, as they have already been through the funnel and are already converted. They’re familiar with your product, and you’ve built a relationship with them based on that first sale.

Now that they’ve been through the funnel and completed that purchase, it’s time to nurture that relationship. Think about other funnel analysis you can do in your business that you can steer this customer towards. Encourage them to join a loyalty program or to follow you on social media so you can continue to market to them and send them promotional materials and new product notices.

Although your options at this stage are vast, it’s important to remember not to oversell them. It’s a quick way to turn a customer off from your business and damage that relationship you’ve built with them

Instead, try to approach them in various ways over a reasonable period. Spreading out your marketing to these customers will be more effective than bombarding them with emails over a short time.

Get started with UXCam’s Funnel Analysis for free.

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• Funnel Analytics: UXCam’s Revamped Conversion Funnel Feature

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