The customer journey. The purchase funnel. The buying cycle.
They’re all different terms that refer to the same idea. Every organization needs an established purchase funnel, along with a steadfast commitment to consistently analyzing and improving that funnel. Otherwise, the risk for losing prospects on their journey to becoming customers increases each step of the way.
In this post, we’ll define the purchase funnel, walk through the steps of the funnel, and explain how to utilize marketing automation software to improve your conversion rates throughout the sales cycle with the help of workflows.
The buyer's journey funnel is the phased approach a person takes as they transition from being a stranger to your business to becoming a customer. As time passes and contacts interact with your marketing and sales materials, these prospects move through the funnel toward either becoming customers or dropping out of the funnel altogether.
Image courtesy of HubSpot
Sales & marketing automation software HubSpot has a workflows feature that automates the steps needed to move more contacts through the buyer’s journey. Once contacts are enrolled in a workflow, they will be sent content and messaging based on the next action you want that contact to take. For example, once somebody has downloaded an ebook, a workflow can be triggered to attempt to turn that contact into an MQL through product-related content and invitations to speak to the sales team.
If you’re a HubSpot customer, follow these steps to set up your workflows – we’ll go through the process of how to employ workflows to move contacts into each stage of the purchase funnel a little later on. You can also read about the most up-to-date ways of building HubSpot workflows here.
While some organizations may deviate from the traditional purchase funnel for a version that makes more sense for them, the traditional funnel is broken down into the following steps:
Let’s go more in-depth on each of these stages of the marketing funnel.
Commonly referred to as top of funnel marketing, awareness marketing serves to make more people aware of your company, product, and/or services. This content contains very little (or almost no) direct mention of your products or pricing. Since awareness content is intended to raise awareness, the content should cast a wide net of appeal to promote the brand and generate blog subscribers or content leads. The more people you can capture at this stage, the more people you have in your funnel to nurture over time.
Types of awareness content include:
The workflow tool in HubSpot triggers communications to those in your funnel based on actions they have taken. That said, you won’t be able to use workflows to get strangers into the awareness stage, since contacts need to already be in the funnel to be entered into a workflow. We’ll go over how to get awareness-stage contacts into the interest phase in the next section.
In the interest stage, your job is to inform those high-level contacts about the existence and benefits of your product(s) and/or service(s). Since those contacts took the first step in the awareness stage, they have the potential to benefit from something your company is selling. The discussion shouldn’t get too salesy yet, but now is the time to determine exactly how many of those awareness-stage contacts could one day go on to become customers.
Examples of interest-stage content include:
Arguably, workflows are most commonly used to get contacts from the awareness stage to the interest stage, as these two stages contain the most amount of contacts. Here are a few tips to generate more interest from your existing crowd of contacts:
When it comes to the consideration stage, the purchasing discussions can really get started. By this point, your contact has taken an action that your team has determined warrants buying behavior. These actions, often read as someone “raising their hand to ask to talk to sales,” include requesting a demo or a consultation from your team. Types of consideration content can include a pre-recorded product walk-through, customer testimonials, and video case studies.
Workflows are an effective tool to increase your interest-to-lead conversion rate. You can make this happen with the following best practices:
When somebody enters the intent phase, that person has expressed more explicit buying behavior. While there’s still some time and work to be spent nurturing these leads, the transition from your marketing to your sales team is virtually complete at this point. That said, marketing can still be of enormous help here by creating sales enablement collateral to help close more deals.
Typically, this kind of content includes watching a customized demo and reading some product-specific whitepapers or one-pagers.
When contacts reach the intent phase, it’s probable that they’re seriously considering making a purchase from your business. Use your workflows to get those in the consideration stage into the intent stage by following some of these best practices:
The decision stage is the final step someone will take before becoming – or not becoming – a customer. Any content sent to a prospect in this stage should be sent with the specific intention to turn the prospect into a customer. These should be competitor comparison sheets, an ROI prediction, or even a sales quote.
Getting contacts from the intent phase into the decision phase requires even more individualized communication – but workflows can still be of use here. Consider utilizing workflows in this capacity:
The conversion stage, or the purchase stage, is the moment when your team can finally celebrate the welcoming of a new customer. The work of your sales and marketing teams ends here, but the work of your customer success team begins.
At this point, content sent to this customer is not meant to entice them to become a customer, but to prepare them to become a successful and satisfied one. Make sure you send over onboarding materials and content, such as:
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The outline above showcases how the funnel is traditionally used in marketing – but the funnel has been adapted for other departments and a more specific use.
Two of the most common examples of purchase funnel variations are for content marketing and email marketing, which we’ll explain in the sections below.
The content marketing funnel looks more specifically into the role content plays in the purchase funnel. Traditionally broken down into three parts – top, middle, and bottom of the funnel – this framework sees content’s tie to the product increase as contacts move through the funnel.
Examples of what you might see in each stage of the content marketing funnel include:
The email marketing funnel takes a similar approach to the content marketing funnel, but places an emphasis on customer retention following bottom-of-the-funnel efforts. Because they are so dependent on email marketing, workflows tend to be a perfect fit for this type of funnel. As outlined by Campaign Monitor, the four-step process for an effective email funnel focus on:
No matter how developed your marketing funnel is at this time, there’s always room for improvement. A minor increase in conversion rate between any two phases of your funnel can have a drastic improvement on your bottom line and customer retention rate. That’s why it’s essential to invest in optimizing and maintaining a strong customer purchase funnel.
This task is an ongoing one, so rather than keep your team occupied with it, why not let us handle it?
Mole Street is a Certified Elite-Level HubSpot Partner equipped to improve your contact-to-customer conversion rate. We use data to build out actionable plans and run campaign experiments to help scalable companies predict and achieve aggressive goals.
As an Elite HubSpot Partner Consultancy, we’re experts in the HubSpot product and will ensure your team is using this software to its fullest potential to get more people into – and all the way through – your marketing funnel.