Basics of digital marketing - Website marketing through conversion funnels

A conversion funnel
The conversion funnel is an online marketing term directly related to the objectives that we set ourselves when we launch an online store and, in general, a website or blog, especially if its objectives are commercial.

This funnel determines the different phases or steps that each of the visitors to our website has to take until they meet a certain objective: usually to become a registration or lead or to make the purchase of a product or service.

The different phases of conversion funnel
In general, we can distinguish 5 basic phases or stages in the conversion funnel
 

• Acquisition. It consists of publicizing our brand or service through online marketing strategies (content generation, SEO optimization, and sending traffic from social networks to the website) in orders to attract the largest possible number of users to our website or blog.
• Activation. It's about gradually gaining the trust and interest of the audience.
• Retention. The goal is for users to spend as much time as possible on our website and to retain them. For this, it is essential that they become records or leads, to have their data and be able to track them.
• Sale. It is the most important conversion, consisting of transforming the audience into real customers.
• Reference. It is an after-sales objective with which we must treat that customers who have already bought from us feel satisfied, do it again and recommend us.

Conversion funnel utility
A first-order metric
In the first place, the funnel or funnel helps us to know a very important fact: what is the percentage of losses of users of our website in each of the steps defined until we achieve the objectives that interest us.

In other words, of the anonymous users who come to our website, only a certain percentage will end up leaving their data in a record (conversion to leads). And, of these, a smaller number, after a series of follow-up or maturing actions, will end up buying a product or hiring a service from us, thus becoming a real customer.

We can see that the term 'funnel' is very successful, since the number of users and potential customers that enter our website is in principle very large (wide part of the funnel) and a part of them is lost due the path (narrowing of the funnel).

Conversion funnel helps us make the best decisions
Obviously, when we start a content marketing or online marketing project, we want to achieve maximum profitability. Our objective must be that the percentage of losses is the lowest possible. Or, to put it another way, that the maximum possible users are overcoming the different phases of the funnel.

In this aspect, the conversion funnel can be of great help, since in addition to its purely metric function of determining the users that we are losing; it can also help us to optimize the different phases based on making the best decisions in each of the steps that the user takes.

An analysis of user behavior in the different phases of the marketing funnel will allow us to:
 

• Know when users fall out of the funnel. For example, a very high percentage of abandonment when users leave their data in a form may be indicative that it is not well marked or built.
• Detect errors and areas for improvement. Continuing with the previous example, the key to improving conversion may be to create a more visible, attractive or simply simpler form.
• Have a much clearer idea of where exactly we need to focus our efforts.
• Calculate the return on investment (ROI) of our campaign.

One of the most common mistakes in an online marketing campaign, and, is to focus efforts on attracting the largest number of customers, that is, placing users in the widest phase of the funnel.

The definition of a conversion funnel, with its different stages and objectives set and actually achieved, can make us understand that it is possibly more profitable and efficient to attract a more interested type of user with our product in order to reduce the percentage of drops during the different phases of the process.

This focus on a higher quality client has a lot to do with the accurate and exhaustive definition of an ideal target or buyer persona.