Understanding the conversion funnel

In your marketing strategy, you have probably set yourself goals for generating marketing leads. This is a very important first step, and having put it in place is a very good thing. The next step is now to build your conversion funnel to guide and retain your leads. In this article, discover the method for optimizing it and integrating it into your marketing strategy. Happy reading!

Definition and composition of the conversion funnel

The conversion “funnel” corresponds to all the sales processes for your company’s product or service. It generally begins when a person takes an action related to your brand. This may be, for example, when someone arrives on your website.

The conversion funnel or sales funnel is divided into 4 stages: attract, qualify, nurture, retain. To better understand the benefit of setting up a conversion funnel on your site, we often use the example of a trade show.

When you take part in a trade show, you try to attract people to your booth. Then, you start a conversation in order to identify your contact’s main interest, with the objective of collecting a business card. 

During your conversation, you will show your prospect that you have the solution to address their problem. 

Finally, you schedule a meeting with them to make a business proposal.

The conversion funnel applies in many areas when implementing your sales strategy. For example, you can apply the principle of the conversion funnel to your website. Make it much more than a simple showcase for your business. Make your website a new source of leads.

How important is the conversion funnel in lead acquisition?

Setting up a conversion funnel in your sales strategy is an essential step for its success. Having an overall view of your conversion funnel has two advantages

• You will be able to test and optimize your conversion funnel. This way, you can identify the moment in your sales cycle when your prospects are most likely to drop off. 
• The second advantage of setting up a conversion funnel concerns your database. Indeed, thanks to it, you will be able to segment your database and thus create content according to your segments. 

We discuss these points in the following sections.

The composition of the conversion funnel

Step 1: The awareness phase or how to attract qualified leads? 

In the sales cycle, the awareness phase is the phase where your prospect is looking for information on a given topic or issue. It is during this phase that you will attract them to your product or service by using all Inbound Marketing techniques. As a reminder, inbound marketing consists of attracting your leads to your brand through relevant and personalized content. At this stage, the goal is to answer the various questions your prospects are asking themselves. To do this, you will need to put two practical tools in place: the landing page and the pop-in.

The landing page

The landing page is a specific page on your website that you will direct your future prospects to visit. Designed in line with your website’s branding, it is a continuation of your marketing strategy and allows you to optimize your prospect’s conversion. 

The objective is to capture attention and encourage action through the use of calls to action. A well-designed landing page will not only help you increase your prospects’ interaction on your site, but will also give you expert status and legitimacy in your sector. 

The pop-in

In addition to the landing page, you can also set up a pop-in on your website. Used wisely, it can be a real lead generation factor. It has the same objective as the landing page, namely to spark the person’s interest and need. However, you must be careful with how you use it. If the pop-in is used poorly, it can, on the contrary, drive your prospect away. You must therefore ensure that it is relevant enough but not too intrusive.

Creating relevant content

Setting up the previous tools is a good way to capture attention. Now you need to offer relevant content to your readers.

To create relevant content in line with your strategy, you will need to closely study your persona and understand it. A buyer persona, or simply persona, is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Understanding who your ideal customer is will later allow you to attract “leads” (sales opportunities) who resemble them. These leads will be more likely to identify with your offers or services and therefore become your future customers. In order to identify your persona as accurately as possible, you will need to identify and define several criteria. 

• the goals they aspire to: what are their missions, their strategy?
• Their possible obstacles: what prevents them from achieving their objective?
• Which communication channels do they use: what are their preferred communication channels? Social media? Newsletters? etc…
• Their timing? At what times of day are they most likely to receive your message?

Write down all the information that seems relevant to you. It will allow you to refine your content, your messages, and your communication in general. Also take your strategy into account in order to define information likely to be relevant. A supermarket, for example, has every interest in knowing the day of the week on which its persona does their shopping. 

To help you create your persona, take the time to create an identity sheet. Adding an avatar to their profile will allow you to humanize and personalize your persona.

You can find our persona kit if you want to create your persona.

Download my persona kit

Create content to meet your customer’s needs

Thanks to creating personas, you will be able to detect your customers’ real needs. Thus, thanks to quality content, you will be able to meet their goals and needs. 

Imagine that you are a company that sells construction materials to other companies. An analysis of your persona has shown you that your customers want quality materials and that they are afraid of being disappointed by the quality of your products. You will be able to focus your communication on articles such as “Which materials have the best quality on the market?” Materials that you of course have in stock, you understand the logic?

Did you know that 60% of buyers become interested in a product after reading content about it (UFC-Que-Choisir)? During the first stage of the conversion funnel, you will therefore attract people to your website. Can you imagine the power of your website if 60% of internet users who come to your site and read your content become interested in your product? The main challenge of this technique is how to attract qualified leads to your website.

Web tracking

Web tracking consists of understanding your prospect’s behavior on your website. You will be able to optimize your content and refine your lead’s needs according to the feedback you obtain thanks to this tracking. You will obtain very valuable information such as the most-read articles, the least-read ones, or even newsletter subscriptions.

Using such a tool requires good data management. Make sure that the data you use is protected or that the software you use complies with the GDPR regulation.

Using social media

To attract your prospects to your content, you can use social media. It allows you to promote your relevant content to your community as much as possible. You can even combine the use of social media with targeted advertising campaigns based on the targeted marketing lead. These campaigns will allow you to attract qualified prospects to your content. They will also allow you, like web tracking, to identify the content people like and the content that does not work.

A/B Testing

Finally, to complement all these elements, you can also use the A/B testing method. This method will allow you to simultaneously test two methods or several versions of the same content in order to determine what works and what does not.

Keep in mind that the objective of this phase is to attract as many prospects as possible to your website. You must address the issue of your campaign.

Step 2: The consideration phase or how to qualify your lead

This phase comes second in the sales cycle. Your lead is aware of their issue and is looking for a lasting solution. You will therefore nurture them with relevant content to convince them that you are the solution to their problem. It is also an inbound marketing technique called lead nurturing. Your objective: convert your lead into a customer

Lead nurturing is very often accompanied by lead scoring. This consists of assigning a score to your prospects according to their behavior toward your brand. For example, a prospect who subscribes to your newsletter will have more value than a prospect who only reads your articles. This is how you will be able to manage your leads and know the right time to contact your customer.

Obtaining information about your prospect

Before nurturing your prospect with relevant content, you will need to obtain more information about them, whether it is their first name, last name and above all, their email address. The objective will be to obtain data in order to be able to qualify them. Whereas in the previous step, quality articles were enough to attract your lead to your website, you must now offer them higher-value content, called premium content, to collect their data.

At this qualification stage, you will need to take into account one of the fundamental principles of Inbound Marketing: “give before giving again”. Since you know their needs, you will be able to create content that will help your lead move forward in their thinking. They will willingly provide information about themselves if the resource you offer addresses their issue. 

This premium content will allow you to start the conversation with your prospects and thus begin your lead nurturing campaign.

Step 3: The decision phase or how to nurture your lead

You now have information about your lead and know their expectations regarding your product. However, it is possible that your lead wants to be reassured about your solution. At that moment, your lead is considered an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead, or a sales opportunity qualified by marketing). This is when you will nurture your prospect through lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing consists, as its name suggests, of feeding your lead relevant information. To properly understand this notion, a distinction must be made between cold leads and hot leads. Some leads are not yet ready to invest in a solution and others, for their part, are ready to implement a solution.

This information often comes from blog articles, business cases, white papers, or webinars. The previous steps allowed you to understand your customer’s needs. So it is now up to you to create content based not only on the benefits your tool provides but also on your lead’s needs. To do this, you will maintain the relationship with your prospects by distributing quality, personalized content to leads. You must position yourself as an expert in the issue encountered by your leads.

The objective behind lead nurturing is to engage your leads, stimulate them, and avoid losing their attention as much as possible. Ultimately, your prospect must invest in your solution to address their issue.

Each lead can be qualified according to the stage of their thinking. The closer they are to making a purchase, the more precise and relevant the content targeting them will be.

Segmenting your database using lead scoring

You have probably understood by now that, in order to send the right content, to the right person, at the right time, you need to segment your customer database. For example, you can segment it as in the previous example via a cold/hot lead system. You can also segment your database according to the behavioral and/or demographic data of your contacts.

If, for example, you sell sports equipment, you can create a segment for all the people who have shown interest in winter sports equipment. 

All this information will allow you to assign a score to your prospect. This score will allow you to differentiate a hot lead from a cold lead. The more you segment, the better you target, the better you convert.

To understand your prospects’ behavior on your website, we recommend using marketing automation software. It will allow you to track the behavior of users on your website.

Step 4: the retention phase or how to retain your customer?

Why retain your customers?

Often neglected, the retention stage, if well mastered, can allow you to greatly increase your ROI. The objective behind this step is to turn your customers into ambassadors. If you look at the number of customers you lose each year, you will be surprised by the results that a customer retention campaign can bring you. At this stage, your lead is no longer an MQL but an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead, or a sales opportunity validated by the salesperson)

SalesForce gives us an interesting figure on this subject “You have a 20% chance of selling to a prospect and a 70% chance of selling to a customer.” (source: Saleforce).

To put it simply, this step consists of offering your already loyal customers content or services that may interest them and that will keep them with you. The relationship you maintain with your customer is therefore very important. A customer who is regularly in contact with your brand will be more likely to stay loyal to it. 

Retention methods

You can use many tools to stay in touch and retain your customers. Your social media, for example, can be a very good way to communicate about your brand. The advantage is that on the one hand, you stay in touch with your customers, and on the other hand, you humanize your brand and add empathy to it.

There are, of course, other methods for staying in touch with your community. Newsletters, but also creating community events, making premium content available, or even implementing an ambassador program.

White paper: ambassador scenario, multiply the potential of your customer base!

It is up to you to identify the most appropriate moments to revive the relationship with your customer. When you feel that they are losing interest in your brand, relaunching them with personalized content is a very good way to capture your customer’s attention again. In this phase, your communication must be adapted to each customer.

Communicating regularly with your community and your customers can allow you to obtain valuable information. For example, your community can be a source of innovation if it suggests implementing a new feature or a new product.

If your community repeatedly reports the same issue to you, it may be because that feature is missing. There is always an opportunity in every problem.

Up/Cross selling

We were telling you that some customers sometimes want more features in your product or service. This is often the right time to offer these customers upselling or cross-selling. It is also an effective way to re-engage your customer and stay in touch with them.

• Upselling is the act of offering the same product or service with higher quality, or with extended use.
• Cross-selling is the act of offering a complementary product to the product they have already purchased

The advantage of offering this type of service is, on the one hand, to retain your prospect, but also to increase your site’s average cart value.

And now? Which KPIs should you track?

Once your conversion funnel is complete, you now need to put monitoring in place. Like every marketing action implemented in your marketing strategy, the results must be measured and analyzed. Among all the “KPIs” (Key Performance Indicators)  that you can take into account, some stand out because their importance in analyzing the relevance of your actions is essential.

• The conversion rate of each stage: how many leads / prospects move on to the next stage based on the number of initial leads. This KPI can help you highlight the stage in which you lose the most leads.
• The open rate of your emails: how many people opened your email compared with the total sent? Are your emails relevant? This KPI will tell you.
• Where do your visitors come from? Where are they coming from? Are they coming from your social media? From an internet search? From which keywords?
• What is the average time spent on the site? Which articles spark your visitors’ interest and which spark it less? This KPI is important for understanding your visitors’ needs as well as possible.
• Finally, at each stage, you can also calculate the ratio of hot leads to cold leads.

We have mentioned the main KPIs, but of course you can use whichever ones you want if you consider them relevant in your marketing strategy.

The AARRR method or how to optimize your conversion funnel

Coming from the American world, the AARRR method (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue) is another technique used to map out the conversion funnel. This method is mainly used in a growth hacking strategy. The company wants to grow quickly and on a large scale. You can draw inspiration from it to optimize your existing conversion funnel.

Implementing this strategy has advantages and makes it possible to:

• Optimize your conversion funnel and constantly adapt according to the needs of your leads/prospects.
• Obtain more precise KPIs, always with the goal of optimizing your conversion funnel or your average cart value, for example.
• Make decisions more quickly through more precise KPIs. You will take into account the most important KPIs in your marketing strategy.

Conclusion

You now have all the information you need to implement an effective conversion funnel in your marketing strategy! It’s your turn!