Otherwise known as sales funnels, conversion funnels have always been key facilitators of a swiftly growing business fit for increasingly competitive markets. Effectively in place to provide a go-to set of conversion/sales best practices and automated processes, funnels that see the highest levels of success typically revolve around key areas of marketing and sales collaborations, which are –
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
While the top of the funnel revolves around consumer-centric research and discovery, marketing and sales teams must work seamlessly together to provide middle-funnel conversion efforts including email newsletters, etc., and, ultimately, bottom-funnel reviews, remarketing efforts, and sales pushes that drive conversion in the right direction.
The success possible from a well-implemented conversion funnel has become especially fundamental in a post-Covid world where businesses are not only reeling from significant profit losses, but also having to entirely rewrite their business narratives in a marketing landscape that’s changed beyond recognition. Luckily, the fundamentals of a funnelled marketing approach haven’t changed. What has changed, however, is the ways and places in which conversion funnels can prove most lucrative. With this in mind, post-Covid conversion funnels very much rest on the ability to reassess, and make space for, the following crucial considerations during implementation and beyond.
Getting to know your customers (again)
To ensure the success of consumer-led top-funnel processes, companies have always needed to understand who they’re targeting and why. This hasn’t changed, but with consumer habits and interests shifting exponentially, companies who slip back into consumer profiles developed before the pandemic are guaranteed to struggle.
Companies need to approach this brave new world with entirely new consumer profiles in mind, especially as mindsets shift towards a range of previously below-the-surface focuses, such as –
- Decreased mobility due to remote work
- Significant increases in digital adoption
- Increasingly conscious online purchases
- Changes in socialisation
- Increased health concerns
Only by assessing old consumer profiles according to these changes can companies understand how their target audience has changed, what companies are best appealing to those new market openings, and how they can ensure that their name appears at the top of that list.
Disregarding loyalty (at least for now)
While it would be a significant oversight to altogether discard consumer retention processes that have historically been as much as 5-25 times more affordable than new conversions, returns to the market, at least, could benefit from a step away from previously implemented loyalty processes. This is because, in a pandemic world where need very much outshone consumer privilege, loyalty the world over took a notable hit in place of new shopping experiences that, in many cases, opened consumer eyes to the benefits of stepping outside buying comfort zones. This is especially notable in areas like India, where as many as 96% of consumers have invested in new buying behaviours since the start of the pandemic. In the UK, especially, as many as 81-88% of the 63% of consumers who broke from their buying norms report a desire to carry on doing so.
None of this is to say that customer loyalty shouldn’t still be a priority but, with far more consumers now open to new and untested buying experiences, companies could also benefit from dedicating more of their budgets to the winning of brand new conversions which, perhaps for a limited time only, are increasingly affordable to achieve.
Making the most of free marketing outlets
While some businesses saw profit increases due to new ways of selling during the pandemic, losses as high as £30bn across particularly damaged sectors like hospitality mean that countless companies are trying to relaunch marketing efforts on shoestring budgets. Luckily, as those pandemic success stories prove, seeking the best finance team for growing businesses means that even startups that have struggled throughout this period can easily bounce back stronger than before. That said, at a time when every penny counts, expensive and potentially poorly received marketing efforts may not be as worthwhile as you imagine.
Remember, consumer interests and behaviours have shifted a great deal and, with 72% of consumers increasing social media usage during this period, previously lucrative physical media marketing or paid ads are unlikely to prove as effective as free marketing across social platforms. As well as drastically cutting marketing budgets that previously rested at around 10.5% of overall revenue, this ensures more concise, effective marketing that cuts right to where your consumers are. By focusing on this right now, you stand the best chance of getting profits rolling well enough to once again supercharge efforts for conversion elsewhere.
Prioritising actionable analytics
Ultimately, the real value of any conversion funnel has always come from the ability to analyse performance, processes, and how consumers interact with your conversion efforts in action. Now, especially, the ability to narrow down on analytics that makes it possible to both assess the performance of your funnel in the moment and in comparison to previous findings, is a non-negotiable aspect of continued success.
Whether achieved through the use of in-house software or tools like Google Analytics, visualisations and other methods that help you to directly assess funnel performance with regards to conversions, returns, and even consumer losses, can transform your marketing approaches overall. What’s more, understanding where your funnel is succeeding/failing right now can drastically help with the implementation of key performance indicators (KPIs) that can both drive what you’re doing, and paint a lucrative picture for the future of business, and marketing, overall.
Conclusion
Sales, like everything else, are a very different matter since the world was shaken with global lockdowns and cultural shifts the likes of which this generation has never seen. For marketing and sales teams alike, this has led to largely redundant processes that, where recovery is concerned, simply aren’t up to the tasks that they set out to achieve. Instead, complete overhauls of conversion funnels with Covid-incited shifts in mind is the only way to stay ahead, and continue competing, in a sales landscape that, though different, is ripe for the picking if you know where to look.
