Consumer Funnel Table of Contents
The goal of marketing is to reach consumers at those moments (touchpoints), which most influence their decisions. According to the traditional approach of marketing, before making a purchase, consumers pass through a funnel. The starting point is the wide end of the funnel, where the consumers think about a list of brands they may buy from. Then they methodically reduce the number of brands, which is when the marketing is directed at them. Finally, consumers come up with a single brand they choose to buy.
The first stage of the funnel is increasing awareness of your potential customers. Customers are drawn here through different marketing campaigns. In this stage, companies implement lead generation and collect information about potential customers, which are pulled into a lead management system for nurturing down the funnel.
In this stage, marketers have to attract the attention of potential customers to their company and its products. This step also allows companies to develop a relationship with the people in their leads database.
In this stage, leads change into marketing qualified leads, and there is more probability of becoming prospective customers. Here marketing specialists can send prospects more information about products and offers by using personalised emails. They continue to nurture the prospective clients with targeted content, case studies, free trials, and so on.
Here, your potential clients show interest in your product or service. You can see this when they fill in a form or when a product is placed in the shopping cart on an e-commerce site.
This is when buyers make a final decision about buying your product or service. Marketing specialists and sales departments usually have to direct their resources to this process and pursue the potential customer to choose their product.
In this stage, a prospect buys your product and becomes a customer. It is crucial now to ensure that your customer will have a positive experience. This experience will lead to recommendations to other potential buyers and fuel the top of the marketing funnel for the next cycle.
It is worth mentioning that today some experts argue that marketers need more sophisticated approaches because today's buyers and processes are more complicated. The key buying factors result from several choices and digital channels.
These days, it is common to flip the funnel into a customer experience funnel. The most critical stages of a customer experience funnel are:
After a customer has made a purchase, the process does not stop. Now it is time to make him a repeat customer. It is done by improving retention and ensuring customers make more and bigger purchase transactions.
In this stage, customers make a preference for a brand. The key here is engagement through community development and outreach.
This is a critical stage, which will allow you to increase your customers base. If you have gained loyal customers, they are more likely to recommend your products to others.
Advocacy is the ultimate phase you can reach with your customers. In this stage, your customers will write product reviews, make posts about your products and so on. It is important here to make it easy for consumers to encourage others to buy your products. Efficient ways to do that are putting a share button in visible places, creating an affiliate program, sending small gifts or very cheap offers to your customer, etc. Remind your customers why you are the best brand and keep exceeding their expectations.
Scroll down to read our indepth Ecommerce Platforms guide. What you should know, Ecommerce Platforms features, price plans and support. Pros and Cons of Ecommerce Platforms as a ecommerce, everything is explained below.
Shopify is a software company that specialises in ecommerce software for small to enterprise level businesses.
Shopify is listed as the best ecommerce software related to Ecommerce Platforms. Shopify was founded in 2006 in Ottawa, Canada and currently has over 6,124 employees registered on Linkedin.
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