A marketing funnel is an essential part of the marketing process. It can help you know how your customers go through the buying journey and purchase. 

Knowing your target audience can help you to create a robust funnel marketing strategy. By making data-driven and informed decisions, you can ensure customer satisfaction in the long run. 

Understanding the customer funnel can help you to connect and engage with customers effectively. 
In this blog, we will give you in-depth information on the marketing funnel and how you can optimize it to increase your conversion rates.

What is a Marketing Funnel?

The marketing or purchase funnel concept has been in the marketing industry for more than 100 years.

The purpose of the consumer funnel is to segment the shopping journey of the buyers into stages. It can help marketing strategists to plan and execute marketing tactics more effectively. 

The marketing or advertising funnel is based on the ‘AIDA’ model. We have explained this model in detail below.

• Attention- This is the stage in which marketers aim to grasp the attention of prospects through content marketing, such as blogs, social media posts, brochures, etc. 
• Interest- You can display case studies at this stage and show your prospects how you have helped other businesses. By exhibiting that you are the best in the market, you can pique the potential customers’ interest.
• Desire- Now, once your customers have got interested, you need to gain their trust. You can put out client testimonials and make them believe that your product/service fits their needs.
• Action- This is the last stage in which the customers take the final action. You can offer free trials or demos to demonstrate your prospects that your product or service is beneficial for them.

The marketing funnel can also be simplified into three stages that we have mentioned here.

• Top of the funnel (TOFU)
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU)
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)

Marketing Funnel Stages

The traditional marketing funnel is a linear model; however, it doesn’t work the same way it seems. 

The customers’ behavior is unpredictable. It’s not the case that they jump on the top of the funnel and end at the bottom. 

Many prospects just slip from the middle of the funnel and never end up becoming customers. 

Nonetheless, if the marketers try to understand the customers at different stages and keep them interested. Then, the chances of prospects becoming customers increases.

Now, we will give you detailed information on the three marketing funnel stages of the traditional marketing funnel model.

1. Top of the funnel (TOFU)- Awareness

This is the first stage where potential customers get aware of your product or service. At TOFU, marketers need to focus on getting the attention of the target audience. 

Marketers can take simple steps to create brand awareness, such as:  

2. Middle of the funnel (MOFU)- Consideration 

The middle of the funnel stage consists of customers who have engaged with your brand consistently in an effective manner, such as subscribed to your channel, followed your brand’s social media or signed up for a webinar, etc.

In this stage, marketers need to gain the prospects’ trust and exhibit that they are better than their competitors. They can use the following tips:

With WebMaxy Analyzer, you can also take customer surveys to know precisely what people think about your website. You can ask questions like-

• What are you hoping to find today?
• From where did you hear about us?
• Do you have any questions about our product/service?
• Would you like to give us some suggestions?

WebMaxy Analyzer offers many pre-designed survey templates that you can use to conduct customer surveys.

3. Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)- Conversion

The BOFU is the last stage of the marketing funnel, and here the prospects convert into customers. 

However, converting prospects into loyal customers isn’t that easy. You can use the following steps for that:

An important fact to keep in mind is that every customer goes through the marketing funnel differently.

You must plan or optimize your awareness consideration funnel based on how your users want to buy, not on how you want to sell. 

In the below section, we have given the top 5 ways that you can utilize to make your marketing funnel more effective.

Top 5 ways to make your Marketing Funnel more effective

Marketers must improvise their marketing funnel to get the desired outcomes. We have given here the best ways that you can use to modify your consumer funnel. 

1. Know your Target Market

To amplify your conversion rate, you must know your target market first. By understanding your target market, you can create personalized marketing experiences. 

You can build an effective funnel strategy by knowing your customers’ needs, wants, and pain points. 

2. Utilize an Omnichannel marketing strategy

Nowadays, customers use many different platforms. By putting up a robust strategy on a single channel, you can’t be sure that it reaches your entire target market.

Using an omnichannel marketing strategy can help you to reach the maximum of your target audience. It can increase brand awareness and ensure the inflow of leads into the marketing funnel. 

3. Create engaging content

Good content is key to attracting visitors and audiences. Often, people see some interesting content online and end up landing on a website.

By posting well-researched articles or blogs, marketers can get the attention of their target audience and improve conversions.

4. Build strong customer relationships

Acquiring a new customer costs more than retaining the previous ones. Therefore, you must maintain good relationships with your existing customers.

You must ensure that they are happy and satisfied with your product or service. Take follow-ups and ask them to provide their valuable feedback.

5. Publish Client Reviews and Testimonials

According to a study, posting client reviews and testimonials on websites and landing pages can increase the conversion rate by 270%. 

Potential customers tend to trust client reviews and testimonials more than they trust what a company claims. 

By adding customer reviews and ratings to your website and landing pages, you can enhance your funnel conversions.

Important Marketing Funnel Metrics

Here, we will give you information on the key metrics that can help you measure your marketing funnel’s success.

1. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

CPA refers to the amount of money spent to acquire each new customer. It is used to examine the effectiveness of paid advertising, social media marketing, and other paid marketing efforts.

You can calculate CPA by dividing the total cost of your marketing campaigns by the number of conversions.

                                                          The total cost of the Marketing Campaign

 Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) =   __________________________

                                                                      Number of Conversions

If the CPA or the cost is more than the profit, then you can consider ending that campaign. 

2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV or CLV)

Customer lifetime value can be defined as the total amount of revenue that a company can expect from a customer throughout the business relationship. 

This metric is vital for SaaS (Software as a service) companies as they get most of the revenue from their subscribers.

CLTV can help you give insights and predict how likely the customer will continue your service.  

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) = Customer Value  X  Average Customer  Lifespan 

, where Customer Value= Average Purchase Value X  Average Number or Purchases 

Nevertheless, CPA and CLV values are affected by many factors, like the pricing of your product, how much your customers are willing to pay, etc. 

3. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the number of sales that occur at the end of the funnel. Most marketers measure the conversion rate just in the end of the funnel.

However, you can calculate the conversion rate at each stage of the funnel through micro-conversions. For instance:

1. Top of funnel stage: How many website visitors convert to MQLs?
2. Middle of the funnel stage: How many marketing qualified leads sign up or convert to subscribers?
3. Bottom of the funnel stage: How many leads convert to customers?

By measuring the conversion rate at each stage, you can know the bottlenecks in your strategy and plan accordingly.

4. Conversion Rate Per Channel

Each marketing channel is different and has distinct goals. Analyzing the success of each channel can help marketers know various data-driven factors.

Different marketing channel teams should have a clear idea of what conversion means. The most commonly used marketing channels are:

• Website (Organic search)
• Paid advertising (Social media, SEM, Podcasts)
• Email marketing
• Influencers 

Evaluating the conversion rate per channel can help marketers know what’s working and what’s not. 
Now, in the next section, we will give you information about the best tools that can help you increase your marketing funnel conversions.

Tools to increase your Marketing Funnel Conversions

With the above metrics, you can measure the quantitative data of your marketing funnel. But what about the qualitative data? How does your customer exactly think or feel in their buying journey?

We have mentioned below the best 3 WebMaxy Analyzer tools that can help you collect qualitative data and increase conversions. 

1. Heatmaps

Heatmaps can help you understand your users’ behavior. You can know how they interact with the various elements of your website. 

Heatmaps display the most clicked areas with red and the least interacted areas with blue. With WebMaxy heatmaps, you can explore and identify the page components that receive the maximum response. 

Once you discover the key areas of your site, you can make alterations based on that. You can create heatmaps for your most visited pages like the homepage, landing page, etc. 

Afterward, even when you have made significant changes, you can look at the heatmaps again to check their impact on the conversion rates. 

2. Session Recordings

Session recordings can help you see your website visitors’ complete journey. You can know how a user interacts and engages with your website. 

With WebMaxy live session recording, you can identify the problems or issues that your customers encounter throughout their journey on your website. 

You can uncover many issues like perplexing design, website bugs, missing elements, etc. For instance, you can know an unclickable design element that people are clicking out of rage and then exiting that page. 

You can use the session recording feature for significant pages like category pages, product pages, guides, pricing pages, case studies, etc.  

3. Surveys

Surveys are a great way to get feedback from customers directly and quickly. You can get answers to your many crucial questions like what they like or prefer, whether they are satisfied with your service, etc. 

Taking surveys is an effective way to engage with users at each stage of the funnel. You can learn and understand how you can improve their experience and boost conversions. 

However, taking the surveys at the bottom of the funnel stage is the best. You can take a survey after-sale or NPS survey to know the customer satisfaction level. 
WebMaxy Analyzer offers many pre-built survey templates with well-researched questions that you can use immediately. Try WebMaxy Analyzer free trial version to access them now.

Conclusion

A marketing funnel can help marketers understand and evaluate the customer journey closely. By understanding the customers, marketers can easily optimize the marketing funnel.

Using qualitative and quantitative data can help you reveal many valuable insights. WebMaxy Analyzer is a user behavior analytical tool that provides in-depth analysis of your website visitors.

You get various features in it such as session replays, heatmaps, form analysis, survey & polls, funnel view, and user insights. 

Schedule a call with our experts to know more information about the WebMaxy Analyzer, or email us at [email protected].