How to Build a Successful Conversion Funnel

If you don’t have an optimized conversion funnel, you’re not maximizing profits.

A conversion funnel is a journey a customer takes from start to finish, resulting in a conversion. The assumed path of a customer is to land on your website from a promotion and make a purchase. However, it’s not that simple. 

Consumer behavior can be complex, and conversions likely aren’t made through one clear-cut purchase path. Maybe they see an advertisement, visit your website, and leave because they aren’t ready to commit. A few days later, they see an email from your company about the benefits of your product, visit your social media profile, then your website again and finally make a purchase. 

The path can be exhaustive, but if you understand how to guide customers through the funnel, they’re less likely to get stuck in the process.

Companies can learn a lot about what makes a customer commit to their product or service through analyzing their conversion funnel. Understanding what deters customers and what inspires them to make a purchase can improve your conversion and retention rates. This blog will take you through the steps you need to create an effective conversion funnel that leads your customer down the right path towards the ultimate goal, making a purchase.

Determine Your Target Audience and Segment the Audience

Before analyzing your customer’s purchase path, you need to determine your target audience. These are your intended customers. If you don’t understand whom you’re marketing to, you can’t optimize your conversion funnel. 

A target audience needs to be specific and relevant to your product or service. For example, a bumper car park would not focus its efforts on targeting an audience over 65. 

Start by determining what type of customers would be interested in your products. If we look to the auto industry, Porsche’s target audience is men over 40 within the upper-middle class or who earn $100,000 or more a year. Their target audience focuses on an age range and income amount, which provides them with more variables to use when targeting their marketing efforts. 

Demographics like those highlighted in the Porsche example allow you to narrow down the audience who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. It’s important to understand that you may have multiple targeted consumer groups, so don’t put all of your eggs in one basket and miss out on sales. These are the four most common forms of market segmentation:

Demographic

These are pretty well-known categories, but they provide a solid base of information to work from when segmenting customers:

• How old are they?  
• What is their family status?
• What is their annual income range? 
• What is their highest level of education?
• What is their profession?
• What is their role at their company? 

Psychographic

To segment based on the psychographic aspects of individuals is to categorize based on personalities and interests. Within this form, you can break it down further: 

• What personality traits do they possess?
• What are their hobbies?
• What life goals do they have for themselves?
• What are their values or morals?
• What do they believe in?
• What kind of lifestyle do they have? 

Geographic

The geographic segmentation is simple because it is based on the individual’s physical location:

• What country do they live in?
• What state do they live in?
• What is their postal code?
• What city do they live in?

Behavioral

Behavioral segmentation is likely to be the most helpful, but it can be time-consuming to gather the data points:

• What kind of purchasing habits do they possess?
• What are their browsing and spending habits?
• What sort of interactions do they have with your brand?
• Have they been loyal to your brand? 
• Do they comment and engage with your content?
• Have they left reviews or ratings on your products?

Build Brand Awareness

Once you've determined your specific target audience(s), it is all about building brand awareness to attract site visitors. Brand awareness can take place on a small and large scale. To reach as many people in your target market, you need to look at what techniques work best. If you’re targeting Generation Z consumers, short video advertisements on platforms like TikTok will prove most effective. 

Remember, what works for one group of consumers may not work for another. A/B testing strategies are essential to dial things in.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ultimately, the goal of creating awareness for your brand is to draw more people to your website. A higher search engine ranking will drive more organic traffic to your site. The key is focusing on search engine optimization (SEO). This will ensure that your company’s search engine snippet, title, URL, and content are loaded with keywords directly related to your offering.

A great way to boost your SEO is by creating a list of questions that your target consumer might ask and ensuring that each one of those questions is answered within your site, like on an FAQ page, landing page, or within a blog post. 

Social Media

Be sure to establish your brand on multiple social media platforms that link back to your website. Through social media, you can create unique content that will make a customer crave more. This is the best place to develop your brand’s voice and establish trust with your followers. Be sure to engage with your audience by responding to comments, hosting live streams, and uploading polls. 

Each of these things works to create loyal customers who feel they made a difference in your business or products. 

Facebook Ads

Targeted advertising through Facebook is another way to promote your business to a specific group of people. When creating the ad, make sure your ad copy is relevant to the target audience and the visuals are captivating. Consumers are bombarded with tons of advertisements these days, so find a way to stand out without going overboard. Sometimes, the most straightforward ads lead to the highest conversions.

Facebook Ad Manager is very user-friendly and offers tons of insights for tracking ad performance. Upon set up, you are prompted to select objectives for each ad. Those objectives should align with the intention of the advertisement. If your goal for an ad is to create brand awareness, Facebook will show your ad to people who are most likely to pay attention and remember your ads. 

Here are some examples of objectives you can set in the Facebook Ad Manager: 

• Brand Awareness
• Website Traffic
• Engagement
• Video Views
• App Installs
• Lead Generation

If you’re not ready to commit to a paid advertisement on Facebook, you can turn a post that is doing well into a Sponsored Post or an ad to reach more people. You can “Boost” your post to get more views, likes, and comments. Be sure to engage with commenters on these posts as well.

Get Your Audience Interested

So you’ve gotten a consumer to read your blog or download your ebook, great! Now what?

Once a consumer has landed on your website, you have seconds to grab their attention and get them to stay. A lot is going on in a consumer’s mind when they’re deciding to make a purchase. So, it’s important to make sure your website is easy to navigate and actionable. If a visitor is overwhelmed upon arrival, you’ve lost a sale. 

It’s also essential to provide detailed descriptions on your product pages. The description should include what the product is, the best uses, and how it can benefit a customer. This is your opportunity to sell the item. 

Providing images or videos for products is a huge bonus. Make sure all media is high quality to improve the customer experience. 

Including an FAQ section is a great way to clear up uncertainties that a visitor might have about your product or service. 

In addition, some sites utilize chatbots that can answer questions in real-time, even better! 

Finally, it’s always a great idea to include multiple customer testimonials on your website, along with case studies. Social proof is the best form of advertising, and it’s low cost! 

Prove the Value and Generate Desire

The next step in the conversion funnel is the consideration or desire phase. You have already generated interest for your product or service in the previous step; now, these customers are considered highly qualified leads. To move into the purchase portion of the funnel, they need to be nurtured. 

Throughout this phase, you need to show your prospects how to use your product or service so they can visualize how they’ll use it in their own lives. This is also the phase of the conversion funnel where you need to prove the value of your product and create the desire for your company’s product. 

Remember that customers are comparing your product to a competitors’ product. They are looking further into the value of your product, especially regarding the cost. Optimize the “Reviews” or “Testimonials” page of your website to stand out here. Make it easy for a customer to find reviews for a product or service. 

Another way to nurture these individuals is to set up automated email marketing campaigns. Let’s say you own a clothing boutique that sells jeans. Once the website visitor signs up for your emails, send them an automated “Welcome” message, and in that email, use a quick survey to ask them about their style preferences. This will give you more information about the visitor to continue fostering the lead. 

Keep it simple, though. Don’t bombard people with too many details in the first email. In addition, always make sure your marketing campaigns are personalized. Small additions like their name in the subject line can make a huge difference.

Complete the Sale

It takes a lot of work to reach the bottom of the sales funnel. Your customer has had several touchpoints to land on your website and add your product to their cart. You have “sold” the customer on your brand and your product. You are so close, but what happens if they don’t finish the purchase? 

While this can be extremely upsetting, it's prevalent and completely fixable!  

To fix the problem, you need to understand why the purchase failed in the first place. The most common reasons for cart abandonment are high shipping costs, a checkout process that’s too long, or requiring an account to complete the purchase. 

Another barrier can be security. Your potential customer needs to know that your site is protecting all of their private information. The best way to do this is to install a TLS (also known as SSL) protocol on your website. TLS protects the data sent from a visitor’s browser from being intercepted and tampered with on the way to your website’s server. 

Installing the TLS protocol also adds HTTPS and the security padlock to your site. Both of these items tell visitors that your site is safe and secure. 

Regarding website security, it’s also vital to keep your plug-ins and add-ons up to date. Most plug-in updates include patches to close up potential security vulnerabilities. Monitor your site often for these types of issues and fix them immediately when they arise. 

Finally, run A/B or multivariate testing often to figure out what’s working and what’s not for site visitors. For example, maybe a purchase button is too low on the page, and visitors aren’t scrolling down far enough. Try moving it up to see if the button gets more action.

In Conclusion

The point of the conversion funnel is to create a plan to get and maintain the attention of your targeted audience and then encourage the desired action from them. Analyzing and optimizing your customer conversion funnel will help you better understand your target audience and what it takes to make a sale. 

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