Using Conversion Funnels + How to Optimize Yours

Every business should be using conversion funnels to help customers find what they need. If you want your business to succeed, conversion funnels are a must. Why? Because they help guide your customers through their journey to purchase, so you'll be leading them to exactly what they need. It's like having a salesperson on hand at all times—even when you're sleeping!

Conversion funnels are split up into “stages.” Each stage consists of a set of goals that the customer must complete before moving onto the next step in the conversion funnel. The final stage of this funnel is converting, or making a purchase. This means that every time someone reaches the last step in your funnel, your business makes money! That's why it's so important to optimize your conversion funnels and make sure people are reaching that final goal as often as possible.

What Is a Conversion Funnel?

A conversion funnel is a system that helps customers traverse your sales path. Above all else, it tracks movement within the process.

A a conversion funnel has three parts:

• Top of the funnel

• Middle of the funnel

• Bottom of the funnel

Sales begins at the top with awareness of your product or service. Customers proceed to consideration through education on what you offer and its benefits. Finally, customers choose to buy at the bottom of the funnel.

Knowing the customer journey is key to improving your funnel. By mapping out their experiences and interactions with your company, you’ll be able to better understand why they succeed or fail in accomplishing their goals. With this information, you can make changes that will improve your customer experience and grow your business.

Tailor Your Funnel to the Customer

The funnel is your customer’s journey. It takes them where you want them to go.

So make your funnel a place they like to be. Make sure it has all the amenities. Make sure it has everything they need (and nothing more). If there are distractions or hindrances, remove them!

Here are the four main things to think about when looking at your funnel from the perspective of your customers:

• Does the landing page match up with what I saw in the ad? Is this what I expected?

• Is this checkout form simple and easy to use? Am I confident it will work? Do I have a good sense of what happens next, and what happens after that?

• Is this product or service likely to help me solve my problem/fulfill my desire?

• Am I being distracted by anything that could cause me to bail on this purchase?

Optimizing Your Conversion Funnel

You can think of a conversion funnel as the journey someone takes from your homepage to the product page, and then from the product page to checkout. Hopefully, they'll make it all the way to checkout and you'll get that sweet sale.

But many people will drop off at each step of this journey, so it's important that we optimize our funnel to keep people engaged at all stages of the process. That's where conversion funnel analysis comes into play.

Now that you know what a conversion funnel is, let's look at what areas of your business it can benefit. (Hint: It's all of them.)

To successfully optimize your conversion funnel and begin reaping the benefits of a better customer journey, you’ll need to understand how your customers interact with the steps you’ve outlined in your original model. The first step is to analyze the data collected from each stage. You'll want to pay close attention to each step’s goal and decide which goals are still relevant or should be changed or removed completely. Then, determine whether or not those goals are being achieved by examining engagement rates and drop-off rates.

Once you've pinpointed key areas for improvement, it's time for some good old-fashioned A/B testing! This means creating two versions of content—A and B—and testing them against one another in order to determine which performs better. The winning version will then become that “new norm” and allow you to move on to optimizing other areas as needed until you achieve maximum efficiency throughout your entire funnel.

Conclusion

If your business is online and you're not using conversion funnels to track your progress, then you are missing out on some useful data. Knowing what works and what doesn't is a big step towards improving your overall user experience. If you want your website to be a business success, conversion funnel optimization is something you can't ignore. Small tweaks and changes can turn the tide in your favor, with the right combination of calls-to-action, effective headlines, images and color schemes, along with a sprinkling of psychology.