Having a clear understanding of your conversion funnels is like having directions (or setting up Google Maps) to where you want to go. A good conversion funnel will make it easier to optimize your marketing efforts because you can speak the same language within your team. Objective data will also remove the “anecdote-driven” analysis that plagues many companies.
In this post, I’ll show how to build your own conversion funnel, visualize it and analyze it. Let’s jump right in and start mapping your unique funnel.
What Is A Conversion Funnel
A conversion funnel is simply the series of steps a user must take to convert. The conversion process can have multiple steps e.g. buy something, create an account or some other desired action.
That first challenge that every product and website will face is that they have a unique funnel that represents how they approach their marketing and view customer satisfaction. The other challenge is that users will not always follow your “perfectly” designed funnel and could enter into your funnel in unexpected ways.
That being said, let’s do our best to map out your own funnel. You’ll find many different frameworks online but I personally like the Buyer’s Journey framework from Hubspot[1] which has 3 stages for the funnel: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
Awareness is when the potential customer (prospect) is doing research on how to best solve their problem or opportunity, Consideration is when the prospect commits to solving their problem and Decision is when the prospect is weighing specific options and is ready to buy. The stages aren’t final and prospects may go back and forth between the stages of conversion as they learn more information.
Mapping Your Own Unique Conversion Flow
In your conversion funnel, you want to understand how different portions of your website or product fit into these 3 stages. Let’s take an ecommerce store, Indochino[2], as a case study. Indochino offers custom suits and clothes through their online and in-person stores. For this example, we’ll stick to the online portion for simplicity.
In the Awareness stage, users will be spending time on the Indochino website, going through their blog posts. Maybe they have an upcoming party which has a dress code of “Black Tie” and they don’t know exactly what that means. – Read more
