Great customer journeys lie at the heart of increasing revenues. Give your customers a memorable experience, and they’ll come back for more. In most cases, creating a memorable experience that drives sales comes down to anticipating what a visitor wants and giving it to them at the right time, whether through content marketing, email nurture flows or social media ads.
As customers interact with each portion of your funnel, they offer you feedback in the form of interactions with your content assets. Incorporate this feedback as a standard part of conversion funnel analysis, and you’ll notice a marked increase in sales.
Here are three processes that supercharge your understanding of customer behavior and the role your conversion funnel plays in them.
Category and market analysis
Before diving into customer-specific attributes, it’s important to understand the wider context: What is the market like, and is your product category facing adverse trends? Broad market trends affect consumer behavior, and you must leverage them.
For instance, if your competitors have begun packaging related products increasingly or have switched to a new revenue model like subscription boxes, consumers will expect the same from you. Changing competitor strategies will impact your prices and margins. From the previous example, a subscription box changes your business’s economics entirely.
Market and competitor analysis helps you stay ahead of the curve and anticipate changes before they adversely impact you. You can change product lines, pricing, related product suggestions, and identify cross-sell opportunities. As a result, you’ll remain abreast of the market’s latest trends and offer your customers a memorable journey.
Broad market analysis also offers you the chance to optimize your funnel. For instance, if you notice your leads dropping off in the middle of your funnel and that you’re lagging behind your competitor’s benchmarks, you can take steps to plug the leak.
Metrics such as conversion ratios and click-through rates help you measure engagement and the quality of the journey your customers are experiencing.
Touchpoint analysis
Every conversion funnel has multiple customer touchpoints. For instance, your customers might visit your website from SERPs or social media pages. They might click and consume content on your website, consume more content, download a lead magnet, and finally make a purchase or request a callback.
The greater your conversion rate at every touch, the more products you sell. Every touchpoint offers you a wealth of data and forms a portion of the larger customer journey. Dive deep into the metrics on offer at every step to decipher which portions of your funnel work and which ones don’t.
For instance, if the majority of your visitors leave after landing on your website, your content might not be aligned with what they’re searching for. Even if your sales are high, losing the majority of your initial traffic is never a good sign. You’ll lose your organic Google ranking positions over time and incur high CPCs on social media.
Examine your content quality and engagement rates. Keep tabs on your customer acquisition channels as well. Prioritizing the channel that offers the highest conversions is a great move. You’ll generate higher ROI from your marketing efforts and can acquire the majority of your market on that channel.
Diving deeper into the most effective touchpoints will also give you clues about how you can customize your customer’s journey. For instance, you can create channel-specific content that prospects will love, boosting engagement rates.
Look at onsite search trends to discover what your visitors want. You can make product decisions by looking at this data. You can focus resources on popular products and develop accessories for them instead of creating a wide catalog.
Demand analysis
Onsite searches also offer you insight into product demand. When paired with broader SEO analysis, you’ll discover high-converting products and market trends. Product preferences also dictate the journey you’ll create for your visitor.
For instance, if the average product ticket size is small and checkout times are low, you can eliminate many touchpoints. A consumer is less likely to need nurturing when being sold such products. Big-ticket items need more touchpoints, and you’ll have to develop more complex journeys.
You’ll have to nurture them via email and qualify them for needs using polls. Audience segmentation also becomes important at that stage. Demand analysis is the starting point of all these tasks. Seasonal variations occur in most sectors. During lean times, you might have to add more nurturing steps to the customer journey to encourage a sale.
As always, metrics will help you figure out the efficacy of your sales efforts. How well are customers reacting to your changes, and are they demanding more? Engagement metrics at every step and demand trends will help you answer these questions.
For instance, declining internal search numbers may point to waning demand. Correlate this data with broader market analysis to check whether your competitors have released an upgraded version. Alternatively, you might be experiencing disruption on your favorite marketing channel.
Boosting journey quality
When combined, these three types of analysis will give you enough information to figure out what your customers want and how you can give it to them. Make sure you bring context to each data point when analyzing trends. If you do it right, you’ll have no problem creating a funnel that delivers an exceptional buyer experience.