On your website, when customers visit and takes a certain action, such as filling out a form, making a purchase, or signing up, it means they have moved down the marketing funnel.
There are various marketing funnels, such as the one shown on TrackMaven. However, the marketing funnel we will be focusing on contains four elements: Awareness, Consideration, Intent and Decision (ACID).
For example, looking at Apple’s website, they do a great job at moving customers down their purchase funnel. At the awareness stage, customers learn about the brand through a simple slideshow of pictures, nothing too in-depth, and it creates curiosity within the customer.
As they go further and look into the specifications of the Apple product, they move into the consideration phase, as they are interested in the product and willing to find out more. Apple provides specific details and a clean design on their page, making it easy for the customers to understand.
After the Consideration phase, the customer moves into the Intent phase, where they decide for themselves whether it would suit their needs or something they would like to have. A successful consideration phase would be the customer adding the laptop into their “shopping bag”, which is shown in bright blue on the bottom right corner on the Apple website.
After going through the three stages, the customer ends up in the Decision stage, where they decide to purchase the product or not by clicking “confirm” after they have placed all their credit card information.
This process sounds easy, however, it is very difficult to achieve. Ask yourself: What are the reasons why I won’t buy an Apple Macbook? Within this marketing funnel process, most customers are continuously looking at other laptop websites, such as Asus and Microsoft, to find one that matches their wants (ex: better prices). They may even decide that they really don’t need a laptop anymore. So, in the end, it is how you capture your audience, through effective and engaging strategies within each stage of the marketing funnel. With a successful marketing funnel, your customers will move smoothly from the top to the bottom.
Cheers,
A.
That was an interesting article. I was looking on your page of scheduled webinars, and what about offering a webinar on segmenting your list? It seems that to use the marketing funnel idea you need to segment subscribers, so you’re not sending new subscribers something that should go to your “Advocates”. I’d love to see a webinar that really goes over how to use the funnel & segmenting together. Thanks.
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