Struggling to drive conversions? Not only does it frustrate you, but it also wastes precious time and money you’ve spent promoting your product.
But what if there was a proven strategy to cut through the digital noise, generate sales, and grow your business? A well-thought-out conversion funnel helps with all three.
With an optimized conversion funnel, you can surpass the average 2.35% lead-to-customer conversion rate and draw users into your content until they become loyal customers.
However, managing a conversion funnel can be challenging, even for marketers. You must be thoroughly familiar with funnel stages, understand their purposes, and know how to design each stage effectively – this guide covers all of that.
Continue reading to explore the funnel fundamentals and reveal how to optimize the conversion funnel marketing to boost your revenue.
The conversion funnel represents your prospect’s journey from being completely unaware of your product to becoming a loyal customer – a conversion-driving journey that’s only possible when you connect to the right customer with the right strategy at the right time.
A good customer conversion funnel involves optimizing emails, social media content, online ads, and other marketing channels to drive sign-ups, purchases, or demo requests. As marketers build and optimize their funnels, they enhance their targeting, sales messages, and content value to the next level. It results in higher ROI, supporting ongoing business growth.
Take a product tour and discover how Phonexa can help you fine-tune your marketing efforts and drive more conversions.
There’s a common misconception that these three funnel types are identical. The following table clarifies their differences:
| Type | Objective | Key Metrics |
| Conversion Funnel | Focuses on the user’s journey that leads to a specific action – sign-up, download, purchase, or other goal. | Conversion rate, click-through rate, cart abandonment |
| Sales Funnel | Studies and leverages the most effective practices to increase sales. | Sales qualified leads (SQL), deal close rate, sales cycle length |
| Marketing Funnel | Covers the funnel stages beyond the sale, developing strategies to retain customers and turn them into brand evangelists. | Website traffic, engagement rate, and email opens |
While funnel types set distinct objectives, their structures are alike. Notably, the most comprehensive model is the marketing funnel, which encompasses both conversion and sales funnels.
ToFu is where your potential customers first encounter the problem that your product solves while knowing nothing about the product itself – you must change that.
Your task is to provide valuable information through queries that may lead people to your site. For example, if you sell fitness programs or sportswear, you can target users who search for “How to run faster?” with:
Additionally, infuse your content with some branding while avoiding aggressive advertising. You may use unobtrusive banners with your logo, or mention your product at the article’s conclusion.
For the ToFu stage, your main goal is to establish your brand as a helpful resource and build trust between you and your customers. Then you can move further.
As your customers get to know you better, you may want to address their desires, fears, and needs to create a deeper connection. Blog posts and social media content are perfect for that, while also allowing you to achieve the primary goal of this stage – collecting users’ emails.
As emails accumulate in your database, engage readers with targeted email campaigns that maintain an emotional connection, present new product benefits, and anticipate readers’ concerns.
Pro tip: To achieve these objectives more effectively, tailor your email marketing to specific audience segments and track the results.
The impact of your marketing efforts at this stage spans increased user engagement and potentially improved conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel, both of which are crucial to advertising.
The bell tolls, the final stage of the funnel begins, and your leads are one step away from becoming clients. You only need to push them with your sales pages and email campaigns that emphasize product features and include a clear CTA.
That said, there’s certainly a correlation between the product cost and your selling approach. Generally, the higher the product price, the more benefits you must communicate to the reader to encourage a purchase.
| “If you’re trying to go after a bigger ticket item, people that have that kind of money to buy that kind of item are going to be able to see right through your content.” – Jeannine Crooks, from Amplify Webinar |
Failing to sell through the initial BOFU communication doesn’t eliminate your opportunities. Continue providing your prospects with useful information while promoting your product without being overwhelming – any next reminder email or ad can lead to a purchase.
Now that you know what the conversion funnel is, its stages, and how it differs from other funnels, you’re ready to grasp the funnel optimization strategies.
Any professional marketing campaign starts with thorough audience exploration. Here are the basic audience attributes to consider:
Knowing these points provides you with relatively clear prospect portraits that you can segment into groups. Afterward, you can personalize content to resonate with specific audiences, thereby accelerating the rate at which they progress from the top to the bottom of the audience funnel.
Studies show that most website traffic originates from search, driven by search engine optimization (SEO). Thereby, you can’t overlook it – maintaining and improving your website SEO is crucial to expanding your audience.
These basic guidelines will help your website rank higher:
| Keywords | Use Ahrefs or similar platforms to determine keywords that generate sufficient traffic without facing excessive competition. |
| Meta tags, headers, and URL structure | Keep all three concise and catchy to facilitate the highest click rates and a smooth user experience. |
| Linking | Interlink your pages and source backlinks from authoritative domains to gain search visibility. |
| Images | Compress them for better performance and include alt texts that benefit SEO and allow users who can’t load the image to learn what’s on it. |
When posting, ensure that your content provides value, especially at the top of the conversion funnel. Supporting pages with useful tips, statistics, or non-generic guides establishes your brand as a helpful resource, increasing the likelihood of future purchases.
Nike is a good example of a brand with valuable content. In its “Expert Advice” section, you can find success stories, podcasts, and other content with world-famous athletes who wear Nike items. This is both informative and promotional, leveraging associative thinking to drive sales.
According to Baymard Institute, the average abandonment rate for online shopping carts is 70.19%. Given how confusing forms and checkouts are, they’re likely the cause. To eliminate it, you must reduce the number of fields users complete when ordering – information that doesn’t benefit product delivery is redundant and may cause client drop-off.
Another effective conversion funnel optimization practice is to reduce friction by offering more payment systems. If your clients can choose between multiple credit/debit cards, e-wallets, bank transfers, or cryptocurrency payments, their convenience – and thus the likelihood of the purchase – increases.
Finally, drop-offs may occur due to the slow site loading speed. If your pages take 3 – 5 seconds to load, your hardware can’t handle the traffic, and you must invest in better website hosting. Using a robust server guarantees a quick and lag-free experience.
Consumers are still driven by primal desires, with social acceptance being one of the strongest.
Here’s how to leverage social proof for conversion funnel optimization:
The power of social proof is evident on the USA Plumbing Service website, which dedicates a separate site tab for testimonials showcasing positive feedback from past clients. Although many overlook this page, it plays a crucial role for those who heavily rely on social proof before making a purchase.
If your conversion funnel aims to generate inbound calls, you need specialized software to automate the process and adjust attribution. With the help of Phonexa’s Call Logic, you can distribute calls in real time, use dynamic numbers, and leverage the predictive modeling technology to make decisions based on your past data.
Book a demo and explore how Phonexa’s solutions can elevate your performance marketing and drive revenue growth.
Although the above guidelines are important, in marketing, data is what drives the results. It’s crucial to understand users’ on-page behavior, which reveals friction points you must eliminate for conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Here are the actionable conversion funnel metrics you need:
Where do you get this data?
Through specialized software, such as Phonexa’s HitMetrix, designed for conversion funnel analytics. HitMetrix translates behavioral data into proven marketing strategies, leveraging heatmaps and session recordings to visualize the user journey in a clear and intuitive way.
Here’s how you can unlock profound on-page user journey insights with HitMetrix:
You can unleash your full performance marketing potential with the help of Phonexa’s proprietary software suite. It grants you a bird’s-eye view of your lead journey with LMS Sync, while Call Logic helps you capture, route, and convert your callers.
All solutions are packed into a neat dashboard, which means that you don’t have to juggle multiple systems to grow your bottom line – you get a steady stream of qualified leads by operating a single control panel.
Designed for brands, lead generators, and performance marketers, Phonexa serves as a go-to platform for tracking and distributing leads. Whether you’re an affiliate or advertiser, lead flows might get quite complex, with the depth of data insights playing a crucial role.
For example, you might resell leads to a larger affiliate or even an advertiser to maximize the value of consumers who go through your sales funnel. If so, Phonexa’s all-in-one performance marketing software suite will be an invaluable tool for your business, enabling granular insights on your leads across your marketing and sales funnel and beyond.
Here’s why not only advertisers but also large-scale affiliates choose Phonexa:
Get Phonexa’s all-in-one performance marketing software suite at a single price:
| LMS Sync | Lead tracking & distribution software |
| Call Logic | Call tracking & distribution software |
| E-Delivery | Email & SMS marketing software |
| Cloud PBX | Cloud phone system |
| Lynx | Click tracking software |
| Opt-Intel | Suppression list management software |
| HitMetrix | User behavior recording & analytics software |
| Books360 | Automated accounting software |
Build your plan now, or take a product tour to explore Phonexa’s innovative solutions.
Funnel optimization is a complex process designed to increase the number of conversions driven by your funnel. To optimize your conversion funnel, you must improve the content across your emails, websites, and social media channels based on the stage they represent in the funnel.
While sales, conversion, and marketing funnels differ slightly, guidelines for their optimization are similar. For sales funnel optimization, you must analyze and segment your audience, create content that is useful and relevant, and implement effective SEO strategies – all to generate sales.
It depends on many factors, starting with your product price and finishing with marketing expenses. However, you can approximate the conversion funnel optimization with 2.35% average lead-to-customer rate statistics. Thus, if your product costs $100 and 200 leads are in your funnel, you can estimate your profit using the following formula: (200 × 2.35%) × $100 = $470.
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