When your sales and marketing terms align towards achieving a common goal and work efficiency alongside each other, your brand benefits by making more sales and closing more deals, so the better your purchase funnel, the more profits you’ll generate.
By optimizing your purchase funnel, you can generate more revenue growth by pushing a higher percentage of potential customers through every stage, thus making your marketing efforts yield better results.
And the more you understand what a purchase funnel is, how it works, and how you can optimize yours, the easier it becomes to convert new leads into paying customers.
Let’s now take an in-depth look at a purchase funnel, help you understand how it works, and share some proven insights to help you increase your conversions.
What’s A Purchase Funnel?
A purchase funnel evaluates your customer acquisition process to help you understand how prospective customers discover your brand, products, or services and how they eventually become paying customers. The purchase funnel, also known as the sales funnel or marketing funnel, has five primary stages: awareness, interest, preference, consideration, and purchase.
The primary goal of a purchase funnel is analyzing conversions from one stage of the funnel to the next. The strength of the sales funnel is the ability to zero on your weaknesses and strengths. For example, after analyzing your marketing funnel, you may realize that you have a strong brand awareness—represented by a high number of website visitors—but your ability to convert leads into paying customers could be low. The funnel enables you to see and act on this invaluable information.
Further, the more prospects who enter and exit, the stronger your purchase funnel is, and the more sales you will generate. Thus, a well-optimized purchase funnel increases your conversion rates. Sounds easy, right?
How to Guide Your Customers Through Your Purchase Funnel to Increase Conversions
Most online businesses struggle to convert their web visitors into customers. If you’re in this boat, we’ve got your back!
You’ve probably researched your product lines, optimized your site, and you’re marketing like a champion. But we’ve got some additional solutions to ensure your website visitors convert into customers before they leave your site.
1. Create Awareness of the Problem Your Product Solves
The awareness stage is where prospects interact with your brand for the first time. It’s when they know who you’re as a brand, learn about the services or products you offer, and learn what makes you different from your competitors. Note: they’re most probably not considering buying what you’re offering at this stage.
At this point, the prospect’s mindset is to find an answer to a question or a solution to a problem they may have. Thus, if you want to increase your conversions and generate more sales, create awareness of the problem your product solves.
Creating awareness by describing how your product solves your customers’ problems adds value and shows that your brand understands your customers’ needs. This marketing strategy helps you emphasize the benefits of your product. Instead of listing various features, you’re creating awareness by showing your target audience how your product can improve their lives by solving their problems.
Consumers are more receptive if they feel you’re helping them. Therefore, leveraging problem-solving and value selling techniques improves trust with your target audience and can boost your sales.
Building awareness by problem-solving also helps your brand stand out from the crowded marketplace. That’s because you’re offering proof to your prospects that your product can make their life easier. Also, you’re connecting the dots between your customer’s problems and needs and your product as the solution.
Advertisements and digital marketing campaigns that solve customers’ problems speed up the sales cycle by guiding your prospects through the purchase funnel and encouraging them to take action. Also, they help your target customers become more aware of their needs and problems they need to solve. Customers will most likely consider your product and the value it will bring to their lives. Providing proof that your product or service solves their problems can ultimately encourage them to purchase what you’re selling.
2. Get Your Target Audience Interested
Those prospects that move through your purchase funnel to the interest stage will now look to figure out whether your product or service is right for them and whether it’ll fulfill all their needs sufficiently.
If you have guided a potential customer through the awareness stage and into the interest stage, you’ve captured their attention, and you’ve made them realize they have a need or problem and are now looking for the best solution to their problem. The interest stage is a research phase, where you get the chance to educate and inform your target audience about what the best solution looks like and how your product or service could solve their problem.
Here, a sale still isn’t usually in the offing, and the prospective customer needs to identify your brand as a strong contender. This is your chance to prove to them that your product or service fits the bill.
You need to help your target customers identify you as the perfect solution. You can do this by establishing trust and building a solid relationship. Further, having a unique selling point is the key to creating interest in your target customers and communicating your message effectively.
For instance, if a prospect has determined they need to create a better landing but have no developer resources available. Your purchase funnel could generate interest in that prospect by demonstrating how your solution could help them and highlighting easy-to-use templates. By creating interest in your target customers, you can help them identify your product as a contender and increase their chances of purchasing what you’re offering.
3. Understand How to Sell to Your Audience
Brian Hansen notes, “when you invite your customer’s journey into [every decision], you can craft marketing…that perpetuate[s] value.”
Optimizing customer experience is an excellent way to foster customer loyalty and generate more sales. However, the most significant barrier to converting leads to paying customers is the lack of an in-depth understanding of the consumer in the first place.
Having a thorough understanding of your target audience is the key to guiding them through your purchase funnel, creating more engagement, and increasing conversion rates.
To understand who your target customer is and know how to sell to them:
- Leverage intelligent customer engagement. A great customer experience is critical in improving customer retention and conversion rates. Thanks to digital tools, engaging with your audience in real-time is now easily accessible. You can gather good customer insights by leveraging Facebook Messenger and email. Your proprietary insights from interacting with your target audience, no matter the channel, can help you understand them better and ultimately generate more sales. Work with your customer support teams to look for patterns and act on the insights you collect.
- Create robust customer personas. Many online marketers make the mistake of using generic demographics, such as profession, age, and location, to create their customer personas. Unfortunately, these data points don’t offer enough information to create content that resonates with your target customers on an emotional level. One way to get a deeper understanding of your customer preference is to leverage the Acquisition tab on Google Analytics to see industry blogs, professional forums, and social media outlets your web traffic comes from. Then, apply this information to your buyer personas so you establish where and when to sell to your target audience effectively.
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