14 Funnel Optimization Tactics To Increase Conversions

AIDA Model

This is one of the most popular and commonly used marketing conversion funnel models. It has four digital marketing funnel stages, as described below:

• Awareness: This is a stage where a person first learns about your brand before becoming a lead.
• Interest: This is where businesses strive hard to create an interest among their audience. The interest consequently drives a desire among the audience to purchase products or services.
• Desire: In the Desire stage, your company’s prospects develop a desire to purchase any product or service or take any desired action. It is a stage where prospects move extremely close to becoming customers.
• Action: Finally, it's time to take action! This can be purchasing a product, purchasing a subscription plan, purchasing ebooks, subscribing to a newsletter, or filling up a form.

We’ll share the most successful conversion funnel optimization tactics to get your leads rolling. You can also refer to the marketing funnel guide to help you work from scratch. Here’re the adverse effects if your marketing strategy has not focused on conversion funnel optimization.

Hamper Amplifying Your Brand Voice

As shown in the image above, the awareness stage is one of the most critical phases in your marketing conversion funnel. This is the first stage where prospective customers learn about your products and services. However, poor conversion funnel optimization can divert your prospects to your competitor’s website!

According to GE Capital Retail Bank, 81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying. So at this stage, you must make sure to be that information source. Your website audience is random visitors who may not intend to purchase anything. However, proper messaging in this stage can induce interest and desire.

As per the ZenDesk Sales Statistics for 2023, 40% of marketers find prospecting the most challenging part of their job. They fail to convey the brand message properly to urge visitors to develop further interest. Hence, getting an expert opinion from a digital marketing company regarding conversion funnel optimization can help you boost sales.

Fail to Create Interest Among Your Audience

What is your approach to developing an “Interest” in your products among prospective users, or are you just waiting for the competition to eat away the meal? If your strategy is not in place for this critical conversion funnel optimization stage, here is a nerve-cracking number. 

According to PR Newswire, nearly 92% of consumers will visit your brand's website for the first time for reasons other than making a purchase So, 50 milliseconds to develop interest and retain 96% of the website audience is tedious and so pay attention to every tactic we will be unfolding going ahead. 

Besides, creating awareness regarding your products and services among your website visitors is important to help them form a positive opinion about your website and show interest in your products. However, poor customer conversion funnel optimization makes businesses fail to create that interest with their content!

No Interest, Hence No Desire!

In the marketing conversion funnel, everything happens in a cyclic order. If you cannot communicate your brand’s message properly and create that interest among your leads, they will not develop a desire to show more interest in your products. In the event they may not return again to your website. Thus, your business and customer base are not going to increase further.

The End Result, Poor Lead Conversion!

Wordstream shows an average landing page conversion rate of 2.35% across all industries. However, the top companies are converting at least 5.31% or more. This is possible due to proper marketing conversion funnel optimization. Poor conversion funnel optimization may decrease your conversion rate from less than 1% to nil. 

With poor customer conversion funnel optimization, your business will fail to communicate its brand’s message properly. As a result,

• Your visitors will not be aware of your products.
• They will not develop that interest and desire to purchase or take action.
• Finally, they will not convert as per your set goal.
• Also, you can be sure these visitors may not return to your website any sooner.

The end result is that your visitor will not convert into your customer!

However, you can get expert opinions from digital marketing experts to help you out with conversion funnel optimization. Else you can also refer to how to build an effective sales funnel.

It’s time to check the techniques to optimize the conversion funnel.

1. Goal Setting

The first step in marketing conversion funnel optimization is setting up a goal in Google Analytics. Now, how to create a goal?

Follow the below steps: 

• Goal Name: First, name your goal. This will help you to recognize the goal when looking at your data reports. For example, “White Paper Download” or “Free Trial Subscription.”
• Define The Funnel: Google Analytics allows you to add ten web pages to a conversion marketing funnel. This will help you to find where your users are exiting before completing your set ‘goal.’
• Give the Goal a Value: For ROI calculation and other Google Analytics metrics, you must decide on your goal’s worth. For example, if 10% of users download a report (on which you spent $500), the download value may be $50 (by calculating 10% of $500).

Pro Tip: Goal setting is required throughout all the phases of your marketing conversion funnel. You need to figure out a different goal for each phase and set up Analytics accordingly.

2. Discover From Where Your Best Customers Come

This is one of the critical steps before optimizing your marketing conversion funnel. The behavior of your leads varies. Some exit right at the top of the funnel, whereas some exit at the bottom. But, when you figure out the touchpoint of your leads pouring in, you have begun in the right direction. Ask yourself the following questions:

• How this touchpoint is quite different from various other touchpoints?
• What elements of your page are resonating with your audience?
• Which are obstacles that are hindering conversions (if any)?
• How many steps your audience needs to complete before converting?

Pro Tip: You can get answers to all these questions using heat map tools like Crazy Egg. Also, you can take help from a digital marketer to know the channels from where you are receiving more customers and the ones where you are lagging.

3. Optimize for Conversions During the Awareness Stage

People visiting your website don’t intend to buy all the time. In addition, if you don’t make your presence felt, nobody will know that you exist. If customers don’t know about your products, why will they buy?

The most common methods to build awareness at the top of your marketing conversion funnel are:

Blogging

Blogging is a seasoned method to optimize your marketing conversion funnel to make your brand known to your audience. For that:

• Write engaging content on anything that relates to your products or services. You can learn more about it by referring to how to write an engaging article like a pro. 
• Don’t shy away from including even loosely related topics. For instance, if you sell mobile phones, your audience will likely be interested in knowing about mobile covers, selfie sticks, and other accessories.

Leverage Social Platforms To Create Brand Awareness

You will be amazed that more than 4.48 billion people use social media worldwide. A study has found that 84% of users purchase a product after viewing a brand on YouTube. Such is the power of social media!

• If you want to amplify your brand voice, start utilizing social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and others. 
• Create an official page and group on Facebook, and start publishing interesting posts about your products, events, customer testimonials, and things like that. Follow the same process on other social platforms.

Pro Tip: Use social media dashboards like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and others to track the various levels of engagement in your social posts. You can also cross-promote your social pages on your blogs by asking your audience to follow your social pages for the latest product updates!

PPC Campaigns

As per the study, PPC ADs help boost brand awareness by 80% and generate leads 50% more efficiently than organic campaigns. Let’s look at a few of the benefits of PPC campaigns.

• You will have to pay only when people click on your ad. 
• PPC campaigns help to attract visitors to your landing pages, where you can convert them by capturing their email ids. It is one of the best ways to optimize the marketing conversion funnel to improve brand awareness.

Pro Tip: Learn more about paid advertising platforms and go for page-level targeting. 

4. Boost Your Conversions During the Interest Stage

After making your prospects aware of your products and services, it’s time to drive them further deep into the marketing conversion funnel. But do not push your audience to take an action. Rather, guide them towards your conversion point by engaging them to take small actions on your website. 

You can start engaging your leads with the help of CRO services.

5. Landing Page Optimization

As per a study, targeting and accurately testing landing pages improves conversion rate by  300%. Another study by Marcus Sheridan shows that addressing customer queries can increase conversions by 80%. But businesses often miss this point. So, optimize SEO landing page in a way so that converts most of your leads. You must analyze the following basic elements of your landing page:

• Analyze your landing pages first. 
• Analyze all its elements, starting with the content headlines.
• Try out different headlines to determine which attracts your audience the most. 
• Optimize your landing page content by providing a solution to a certain problem that matters! 
• Create more meaningful user-centric landing pages. As per the study, websites with 40+ landing pages achieve 12X conversions.
• Curate your CTAs smartly to ensure max clicks. 
• Analyze page color, font type, and size, and try different variations. 
• Analyze the effectiveness of your signup forms and modify them accordingly.
• Simplify your payment gateways.

Pro Tip: Use heat map tools like Crazy Egg, Mouse Flow, Lucky Orange, Unbounce, and others. You can also perform usability or A/B testing. Also, a professional digital marketing company can help you analyze the effectiveness of your landing pages.

6. Optimize Your CTAs

CTAs are quite critical as they ask your audience to take any action. It takes a lot of work, from curating a powerful CTA to its placement on your webpage. 

• Audit and test the usefulness of your CTAs regularly. 
• Ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I need my audience to do? 
• Does my audience need to fix an appointment with me?
• Do they need to share their details by filling out a contact form? 
• Does my audience need to subscribe to the newsletter?
• Do they need to download an eBook?

• Based on your need, optimize your calls to action. 
• Always attach some benefits with your CTA. For example, include words like ‘Free Trial,’ and “No Question Asked Money-back Guarantee.”

Pro Tip: You can get expert opinions on curating conversion-driven CTAs from a professional website design company!

7. Optimize Your Contact Forms

Often businesses skip optimizing contact forms. These forms create opportunities to add new visitors to your subscriber list and increase conversions. 

• Many companies include a contact form at the bottom of their page or content to boost their database. 
• As per WPForms, using words like ‘Click Here’ or ‘Go’ instead of ‘Submit’ increases conversions by 25% to 30%.
• After you receive the information, you can shoot engaging emails about your products or services.

Pro Tip: Use Lightbox Popups to get max conversions through your contact forms. 

Also, read this Case Study……

Brian Tracy converted 6.8% of its visitors using Lightbox Popus coupled with exit-intent technology. Brian Tracy also implemented content upgrades. These content upgrades are lead magnets specific to what an audience reads at a particular time. The end result is Brian Tracy could achieve an 11.8% conversion of the leads.

8. Optimize Conversion Funnel At The “Desire” Stage

After you have made your prospect aware of your products and created an interest among them, it's time to pre-qualify them further to help them understand whether you are the right choice for them. Yes, you will have to answer their questions about your products to create a sense of trust among them. So, you need to optimize the conversion funnel accordingly by following the below steps:

At “Desire” stage, you’re convincing your potential customers to buy your product or service at this stage. Therefore, you can offer discounts, trials or special offers to them or you could try to sell the product directly to your customers. 

• Create a sense of urgency.
• Make sure that your prospects trust your product or service by leveraging reviews.
• Validate it using an honest guarantee.

9. Email Marketing

As per Content Marketing Institute, 75% of B2B marketers find emailers the most effective content marketing tools. So, start educating your prospective customers with intricate details about your products and services. Keep the following things in mind when doing email marketing:

• Analyze your email headlines and copies.
• Try out different variations.
• Analyze whether users like HTML format or Text format for emails.
• Curate your emails based on your findings.
• Focus on the benefits of using your products. 

Pro Tip: You can use e-mail marketing tools like Mailchimp, Sender, and others to generate automated and customized emails. Otherwise, you can get expert suggestions from digital marketing experts to develop the best-suited email campaign.

10. Drip Marketing and Autoresponder Series

Through drip marketing, you can send ‘drips’ to your customers over a period of time. Drips are pre-written email messages to customers after that, use an autoresponder series to move your prospective customer directly to a conversion point.

11. CRM Integration

Customer Relationship Management software helps businesses track various interactions with current and future customers. This tool helps identify your website visitors' position in your marketing conversion funnel. 

• Leverage your CRM to determine which email campaigns your prospective customer must receive next via retargeting and cookie detection.
• Cookies ensure that you can use the information about your customers to improve their marketing strategy and offer various personalizations. 
• Use cookies with CRM software and email marketing for customer campaigns to get returning and repeat visitors.
• You can also create special promotions for those prospects who have opted in.

You can hire a professional digital marketer to sail you through this step.

12. Optimize Action Stage for Greater Conversions

Finally, the most critical phase of your sales funnel. This is simply to sell your services!

Time to make the ask! 

According to a study an average customer needs to pursue at least 7 times before they make a decision to purchase!

Give your customers an abundance of opportunities often to purchase your product, here are a few to mention:

13. E-Commerce Promotion

If you are an e-commerce platform selling certain products, you have to offer your products regularly and proactively. This is an important step for e-commerce businesses to optimize the marketing conversion funnel for increasing conversions. 

• Make it simple for your customers to find your products easily through Live Chats.
• Attach some benefits like discounts or free shipping.
• Email subscribers about your latest products and share user reviews and other promotional content to nudge your visitors to take action.
• Don’t forget to give reminders at regular intervals.
• Use a clear CTA.

Get detailed insight through eCommerce conversion rate optimization tips.

If you are still unconvinced, approach a skilled digital marketer to help you promote your e-commerce business!

14. Social Media Monitoring

We’ve discussed the importance of using social media during the awareness stage of the funnel. But, social media can be beneficial throughout various stages of the funnel. After knowing about your brand, people might have questions about your products and offerings, which they will ask on social platforms. 

• You need to cater to them proactively to close a deal. 
• This is possible through active social monitoring.

Pro Tip: Try out the A/B test or Split Test for sure. Use social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Nexalogy, Mentionlytics, and others can be used. 

We’re sure by now you’re quite aware of the best tactics to optimize your conversion funnel. However, planning and implementation are the keys. Professional digital marketing for small businesses plays an important role herein.