Sales funnels are not a new concept. If you’re not familiar, they’re a marketing concept that maps the various steps in a user’s journey. At each step along the journey, there is a chance for drop-off. In other words, the number of users who start the journey is typically a much larger number than those who complete the journey. This is why they’re called funnels.

Conceptually sales funnels make sense — more people enter a mall than leave the mall having bought something. While funnels have been around for a long time, they are as important as ever today in our interconnected world.

So, why are sales funnels so important you ask?

The more you know.

When analyzing user behavior, it’s important to have clear goals for audiences and to be able to measure those goals. If there are no goals how is success defined? If there’s not a good way to measure clear goals how is success calculated?

I wanted to start my discussion of funnels by looking at them for their ability to help retroactively. The funnel concept helps us identify the weaknesses along desired our user journey.

Let’s use a real example from one of my clients. They are in the competitive skincare industry and are trying to grow their ecommerce sales. Over the past year, their traffic has increased, but the number of people purchasing their products has not.

To figure out what’s going on we’re using sales funnels that shows each step a user has to take to complete a purchase in their ecommerce experience. In this case, there are about 8 steps (assuming users starts on the homepage). We started the analysis looking at areas where we’d expect a low drop off rate. For example, the last 2 steps in the user journey (the last step in the checkout process -> the confirmation page).

Usually, there’s not a single issue that causes users to abandon their journey. That’s why funnels don’t give answers, but they provide a starting point. Then it’s up to the team to ask the right questions.

In the client example I just gave, we made a few technological tweaks and saw an increased conversion from the last 2 steps. Then we moved on to other areas of the funnel.

Sales Funnel Automation

There’s a lot of great martech out there that allows organizations large and small to use the sales funnel approach as a framework for marketing automation. Above we discussed how sales funnels can help shed light on issues retroactively, but they also promote proactive engagement with audiences.

Think about it, using sales funnels can help automatically qualify leads, can trigger emails or calls that are relevant to where the user is in their journey. I’m working with clients on these types of projects as well.

One of my ecommerce clients is focusing right now on increasing positive reviews for their store. This proactive process requires more planning and strategy up front. As part of the push to increase reviews, we made a couple of decisions, based on behavior.

1. Users who purchase the same product more than once probably have a higher opinion of the product than someone who just purchased for the first time.
2. First time users are likely to use the product based on the suggested usage as they are trying to find a product that can become part of their life.
3. Users who have already left a review are likely to leave another review.

After we identified the direction we wanted to go, we expanded our sales funnels by connecting them to our CRM. This allows us to know if customers are return customers or first-time customers ( as well as other information). From here we created rules that targeted users based on their long-term journey with the organization. This included automatically emailing return customers who’ve purchased the same product more than once for reviews. To encourage this behavior we used content and imagery.

I can’t share too many details about the setup or the results, but will share that since launch we’ve seen an increase in reviews across the most popular products. We’ve also seen an increase in first time customers as well as social engagement.

Sales funnels have lots of benefits that allow organizations to be both proactive and reactive. Both of which are important.

Stay tuned for future posts about some of the martech my team and I use to help our clients better engage and analyze user behavior.