Are you experiencing high rates of lost leads, and looking for ways to increase your conversion rates? Look no further than your conversion funnel. Last month, we discussed exactly what a conversion funnel is to help familiarize you with the terms this marketing tactic entails. Now, let’s do a deeper dive into exactly how you can optimize your conversion funnel for maximum results.
While optimizing your conversion funnel may seem like it could be a difficult process, it is in fact fairly simple. Every stage of your funnel can benefit from optimization, giving you ample opportunity for helping to reduce lost leads and increase conversions. It helps to think of the process as a deep dive into what motivates, persuades, and even prevents leads from turning into customers, so that you can give them the best possible experience during their buying journey. Optimizing your funnel means thinking about what each customer wants or needs during each phase. You can accomplish this by following these tips.
Top of the Funnel: Awareness
If you are having issues even getting people into the funnel, you need to take a look at how the users who are getting into the funnel found your business. Find out which channels are getting you leads, and which are underperforming. If you’re spending money marketing on channels that aren’t getting you leads, then you should strongly consider moving most if not all of that budget to the ones that are working.
If you aren’t sure how customers are finding you, try sending out a survey to your existing customer base to ask what led them to your website. Also, keep an eye on trends that indicate how people are finding businesses like yours online in order to identify new opportunities that you may not yet be utilizing.
Middle of the Funnel: Consideration
Even after leads have made it to the middle of your funnel, it still requires you to put in additional effort to get them to the bottom. If this is the area where you are losing leads, take a look at how people engage with your site in order to learn more about your business. Is the navigation simple and intuitive? Is your content relevant and informative? Is your product and pricing information visible and easy to find? Are there visible options for people to reach out to you with questions? All of these are important questions you need to have answered. Some additional areas to look for improvement include:
- Including a FAQ page
- Updating product photos and videos
- Utilizing blogs to answer common questions or concerns
- Search option
- Newsletter capture
- Offering discounts or coupon codes
- Check pages for loading speed
- Fix any broken links or elements
Bottom of the Funnel: Conversion
This is the final stop for leads, where your tactics should be turning them into customers. This step is about reducing friction to make the buying process as easy as possible in order to increase the rate of conversion.
Optimizing this stage of the funnel is all about making all of the purchasing steps easy on the customer. Make sure that your product pages are built out, with relevant information and clear, engaging images or videos. Walk through your checkout process, if your site has one, to make sure it’s easy for users to navigate all of the way through. You can also utilize emails to follow up with people who have abandoned their carts.
Once you’ve pulled a user through your funnel and had them convert, your work doesn’t stop. Foster trust and loyalty by re-engaging them with relevant information about their purchase, following up to check on their experience, sending promotions, and adding them to your newsletters if you have them. Not only does this help keep customers coming back, it can also lead to valuable word-of-mouth leads.
Tailor Your Funnel to Your Customers
The key to success with any conversion funnel is making sure that it is tailored to your customer’s habits and preferences. Understanding this, and making changes to your funnel to suit, helps to reduce the number of lost leads and increase conversions. Find the channels that generate you the most leads, and focus your efforts on those rather than stretching your budget too thin across platforms that are underperforming. And, above all, aim to reduce friction for your leads as much as you possibly can.
If you’re looking to improve your conversion funnel in order to increase sales, we are here to help. Gulf Coast Web has decades of experience in managing digital marketing and web design services for business across all industries. Our staff consists of highly-trained web design and digital marketing professionals who are both passionate about their jobs and excel at what they do. And unlike many other design agencies, we have a content writer with over 10 years of experience on-staff to handle everything from website copy to blogs to social media posts. Contact us today to book a consultation with our team. We look forward to outlining exactly how we can help you grow your business with our digital media agency services.