The engagement funnel, also known as the marketing funnel, is the stages a customer will go through as they journey through to purchase. It often starts from awareness and ends with loyalty and brand advocacy. In fact, 12% increase in brand advocacy leads to a 200% increase in revenue growth. In this article, we will explore the engagement funnel and how to guide customers to be brand advocates.
The stages of the funnel
Awareness
This is the first stage of the marketing funnel and is about generating awareness of your brand, product or service. People will often use different marketing strategies, including social media, content marketing, blog posts, videos and marketing influencers to spread the word. Targeted ads can also help you to reach a wider audience to raise awareness of your brand as well as SEO to improve visibility on search engines. By addressing the needs of your audience and providing them with useful content, you can help to start attracting customers.
Interest
This is the stage where businesses want to create curiosity and begin engaging their audience with their brand, using valuable content and personalised messaging. By making use of blogs to address a customer’s specific needs and problems or creating interactive quizzes to capture the attention of customers, this stage is about getting to know your customers and for them to get to know your brand.
Consideration
This is often considered one of the most important stages in the marketing funnel because potential customers will be reviewing and evaluating their options against your competitors. Potential customers want to know and feel that you have a solution for their particular pain point, or the products for their needs and by addressing these, you can provide relevant content to them. You can also do this via tailored content, messaging, case studies, and targeted offers to move them along to converting. You can also make use of providing social proof such as reviews to build trust.
Conversion
This stage is about transforming prospects into customers using clear call to actions, optimised landing pages, and personalisation. Prospects will make a final decision about buying into your product or service so to increase the chances of doing so, businesses should focus on incentives e.g. free trials and limited offers over a shorter time period. You also want to ensure the customer journey is seamless and clear, to prevent prospects from leaving the stage for a more customer friendly option.
Retention
Now that you have converted your prospects to customers, you want to ensure you are retaining these customers by providing them with brilliant customer experiences. You can use various strategies including email campaigns, exclusive offers and discounts, access to new content, loyalty programs, and free samples to ensure customers are engaged. It’s important that you take note of customer feedback, conducting surveys and track your marketing tactics using analytics to ensure you are constantly adapting to your customers’ needs.
Advocacy
Customers who are satisfied are valuable as they can provide positive online reviews, feedback comments on social media, as well as spread the word via word-of-mouth. You can encourage advocacy by offering incentives for the above. You can also create a sense of belonging and community by engaging with your customers on social media and forums, as well as using use-generated content on your marketing channels to further encourage prospects to engage with your brand, product or service.
Metrics to measure success
It’s important that you are seeing ROI for all of your marketing efforts, as well as ensuring you are adapting and changing your tactics based on KPIs.
Awareness
- Impressions: The number of times your ad or content is displayed.
- Reach: Unique viewers of your content or ad.
- Brand mentions: How often your brand is mentioned online.
- Website traffic: Total visits to your site.
Interest
- Time spent on page: Indicates user interest in your content.
- Engagement rates: Likes, shares, and comments on social media.
- Bounce rate: Lower rates suggest that visitors are exploring your site.
- Email Open Rate: Measures how many recipients open your marketing emails.
Consideration
- Downloads: Whitepapers, case studies, or app downloads.
- Add-to-Cart Rate: The percentage of visitors who add items to their basket.
- Lead Conversion Rate: Proportion of visitors turning into leads.
- Content views: Consumption of webinars, blog posts, or demo videos.
Conversion
- Sales Conversion Rate: Percentage of leads that become customers.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): The cost of acquiring a new customer.
- Revenue growth: Directly tied to successful conversions.
- Cart abandonment rate: Measures lost opportunities to refine strategies.
Retention
- Customer Retention Rate (CRR): Measures loyalty over time.
- CLV: Estimates the total revenue from a customer throughout their relationship with your brand.
- Repeat Purchase Rate: Tracks the proportion of customers making multiple purchases.
- Churn Rate: Monitors the rate at which customers stop doing business with you.
Advocacy
- NPS: Measures customer likelihood to recommend your brand.
- Referral rate: Percentage of customers who refer others.
- Social shares: Advocacy through user-generated content or testimonials.
- Review scores: Average ratings on review platforms.
Examples of brands that successfully moved customers through the funnel
Netflix
As the leading content streaming service, with 51% of United States users streaming through its platform. Netflix has a two-step sales process that encourages leads to enter their marketing funnel via a free one-month trial offer. When users click on the call-to-action (CTA) to subscribe to the free trial, they are directed to the pricing page, where different package options are provided. Next, Netflix collects email addresses from users to facilitate follow-ups if someone opts out of the paid plans. They reassure users that the process will conclude quickly. On the next screen, credit card information is gathered, converting everyone who enters the sales funnel into a paying customer unless they cancel before the trial period ends.
Tesla
Tesla offers customers an opportunity to test drive as well as providing them with educational content that showcases innovative features in their vehicles. Potential buyers move closer to conversion as they understand more about Tesla’s value proposition.
Amazon
Amazon provides a seamless e-commerce experience with personalised recommendations throughout the buying journey. With easy checkout options, one-click purchasing and targeted product recommendations, Amazon can drive high conversion rates due to this seamless user experience.
Conclusion
Successful brands focus on seamless transitions through the marketing funnel stages. By tailoring tactics to customer needs, you can ensure the journey from awareness through to advocacy is both natural and rewarding for both you and the customer. It’s about creating a well-structured marketing engagement funnel, and one that isn’t purely focussed on making sales, but creating valuable relationships and loyalty. By following the steps above, you can help transform interested prospects into brand advocates that champion and represent your brand.