A digital sales funnel is a process that guides your potential customers from awareness to action. It helps you attract, nurture, and convert leads into loyal customers. But how can you make a digital sales funnel that converts? Here are some tips to optimize each stage of your funnel and increase your conversion rate.
Before you create your funnel, you need to know who you are trying to reach and what they need. Research your market, identify your ideal customer profile, and segment your audience based on their characteristics, behaviors, and pain points. This will help you tailor your content, offers, and messages to their specific needs and interests.
That means to create a buyers persona and understand each audience segment accurately. To tailor our content marketing strategy accordingly will help us to deliver the exact message that we want to convey.
Content is the fuel of your funnel. It educates, entertains, and engages your audience and builds trust and authority. You need to create different types of content for each stage of your funnel: awareness, interest, desire, and action. For example, you can use blog posts, videos, podcasts, or infographics to raise awareness, ebooks, webinars, or case studies to generate interest, testimonials, reviews, or demos to create desire, and landing pages, coupons, or free trials to prompt action.
Your website is your online storefront. It should be easy to navigate, fast to load, and responsive to different devices. It should also have clear and compelling headlines, copy, and calls to action that persuade your visitors to take the next step in your funnel. You can use tools like Google Analytics, heatmaps, or A/B testing to track and improve your website performance and conversion rate.
Email marketing is a powerful way to nurture your leads and move them along your funnel. It allows you to communicate with your audience in a personalized and timely manner, deliver value, and build relationships. You can use email marketing to welcome new subscribers, send relevant content, offer discounts or incentives, remind about abandoned carts, or ask for feedback. You can also segment your email list based on your audience's behavior, preferences, or stage in the funnel.
In my journey of crafting impactful marketing strategies, email marketing's significance cannot be overstated. It's akin to a direct link to your audience's inbox, enabling personal engagement. I recall a campaign where an email offered a time-bound discount on a product category of interest. The response was phenomenal – delivering precisely what they sought. This reaffirmed audience understanding and message customization's importance. Email marketing transcends broadcasting; it fosters conversations. By sharing value, displaying genuine interest, and delivering tailored content, lasting relationships develop. This personalized approach transformed leads from curious to converted, marking a pivotal shift in my strategy.
Social media is a great channel to reach and connect with your audience, increase your brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website. You can use social media to share your content, showcase your products or services, interact with your followers, or run ads or contests. You can also use social media to monitor your online reputation, listen to your audience's needs and feedback, and join relevant conversations or communities.
The last step is to measure and optimize your funnel. You need to track and evaluate your key metrics, such as traffic, leads, conversions, revenue, or retention. You need to identify what works and what doesn't, and make adjustments accordingly. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, or Google Data Studio to collect and visualize your data and insights.
Leverage your first party data well. Given that we are about to enter into a cookie less world and increasing focus on data privacy, utilising Customer Data Platform (CDP) is going to be a very crucial strategy to convert your digital sales funnel better. Since CDP creates a singular customer profile (anonymised) from multiple channels, a marketer can easily decide the best channel/message with the right context and at scale. This will help you maximize potential of your own data and also lower your customer acquisition costs (CAC) significantly.
The e-commerce funnel might just be your first stepping stone towards greatness. In the case of Amazon, which started as an online bookstore and went on to become an e-commerce platform selling a variety of items and then invited third parties to sell their products on its platform. It then went into e.g., cloud computing providing digital-infrastructure-as-a-service and in media to create original content; where will they venture next, we cannot say.