Conversion funnel or sales funnel, who knows which statement. However, both terms have the same meaning. The sales funnel includes all the visitors to your website, be it a returning customer or just a one-time visitor.
Understanding this concept is key to a conversion-boosting campaign, but what is more important, you have to know how to optimize it. You will be able to read about this in the following, follow it carefully as it may be the key to increasing your traffic.
What is conversion funnel?
You have to think of this funnel as a pyramid. This pyramid includes all visitors to your website. At the widest part are the simple visitors, and at the narrowest part, you can find your loyal or returning customers.
In another interpretation, this can also be interpreted as a kind of flowchart that starts at the foot of the pyramid and ends at its apex. Now you must be wondering what kind of process? What has a simple visitor got to do with loyal customers? Two completely different groups.
You are right about that, two separate groups, but for you as a website owner, your goal is to get as many customers as possible and even encourage people to buy again. From a marketing standpoint, conversion funnel optimization means this.
Just think about it, a visitor is not basically contributing to your conversion rate, they are not taking actions that would increase traffic. This is why you need to steer your subjects from the wider parts of the channel to the narrower ones. It should float before your eyes.
Optimization process
To be able to optimize your sales funnel, you should first break it all down into parts. Do not be scared, you do not need to know specific parts here, the easiest way is to break the funnel into lower, middle, and upper parts. This is necessary because there are different people in each part that you need to reach and address in a different way, and the whole optimization process may be different.
Upperparts
At the top, some people are visiting your site for the first time, or who already know your website but have not made a purchase there yet. At this stage, it is not primarily important to direct people to the other side of the channel, on the contrary. The goal is to get more people to appear at this stage.
Why? Think about it. The more people who visit your website at least once, the more likely it is that more people will appear in the middle or top stage, which means that the number of purchases will increase which will boost your conversion rate.
Here are some tools you can use to optimize the widest part of your conversion funnel:
- Use social media: Social media platforms are great for targeting, there are plenty of filters for you to fill your channel with relevant people. Advertise your page or even a specific subpage with a link that points to your site.
- Keyword-optimized content: Create unique and informative posts or blogs optimized for a specific keyword. Why is this necessary? Because that makes it easier for people to find you. Also, at this point, it is important to emphasize that good material keeps people, if you help them, you will be one step closer to increasing your conversions.
- Use paid search ads: A great way for people to reach you is to use PPC ads on Google. With this little effort, you can get ahead of the hit lists, giving your potential customers a chance to find you. However, keep in mind that you still need to optimize your ad for a keyword. No one wants to come across a website that sells used mobiles when they are looking for “how to keep a guinea pig?”
In the previous few outlines, you have seen some ideas on how to optimize the top, broadest part of your conversion funnel. You can see that at this stage you need to pay attention to the marketing communication tools and to have quality content. Do not worry, it is easier than you think.
Middle part
You have managed to lure potential buyers to your site, now what do you do? In this optimization phase, you need to show the benefits of your website in more detail, you need to build trust. This is the key to avoiding obstacles at this stage.
It is important to mention that this phase is the riskiest, this is where jams can develop in the conversion funnel and this is where the dropout rate is the highest. But keep in mind that it is impossible to serve the needs of all people. The goal is to serve the majority.
How can you build trust? How to show the beneficial part of your page? Let us see some tips:
- Send personalized offers
- Have a detailed description of your products
- Start a loyalty program or introduce point collection systems.
- Create a comment section. Social positive reinforcement has a big impact on potential buyers.
- Enhance the user experience with design elements.
Analytics plays a prominent role in optimizing the middle part. It is a good idea to constantly run A/B tests to find the most relevant items and content or even CTAs, as this will be the key to increasing your traffic. If someone drops out at this stage then most likely you have already lost that person so try to provide the most perfect quality.
It is important to note that purchases are already appearing at this stage of the conversion funnel. However, do not settle for that much, even though you may see that your traffic has boosted, it is only intermittent. Increasing your long-term conversion rate is your goal.
Lower part
You are past the hardships; your customers have bought from you and you have also made a little more personal relationship with your customers. What else do you need to do?
A major difficulty for e-commerce businesses is that they can encourage their customers to make multiple purchases. At this stage, the use of analytical tools comes to the fore even more, since here it is no longer enough to send a personalized offer, it needs to be continuous.
You need to keep your customers’ interests and you need to be in constant contact with them. To do this, you will need a database where you can find the email addresses or contact details of all of your customers. To accomplish this, it is a good idea to create a registration interface. Believe us such a database is very valuable.
Send birthday promotions, call the customer by name, credit extra loyalty points. This is the key to multiple purchases and soaring conversion rates.
As you can see at the bottom of the conversion funnel, all you have to do is hone your work so far. It is a time-consuming job but believe us you will be happy when you will see the result.
Conclusion
Optimizing your conversion funnel is not an easy task, but you should definitely consider it. Keep in mind that the aforementioned processes run in parallel.
If you do not deal with the visitors at the top because you work in the bottom section, it can backfire later, as the individual sections affect each other. You need to pay attention to each part at once because if you do not, jams can develop in your channel, hurting your conversion rate.
The knowledge is in your hands; cut into it.
We hope we can help you.
