Mastering Customer Journeys with Marketing Funnel Analytics: A Comprehensive Guide

Every marketing campaign aims to keep customers engaged enough to convert. But how can you make sure you’re providing smooth customer journeys? The answer is through mapping customer journeys using marketing funnel analytics. In this article, we’ll give a deep dive into this technique. We’ll explore how you can use funnel analytics to support your strategy.  

What is marketing funnel analytics? 

Marketing funnel analytics (also known as funnel analysis) involves monitoring user journeys and identifying the average steps to user conversions. 

Effective funnel analytics means you can spot where prospects are falling off the customer journey. You can then go on to optimize user journeys and create smoother experiences. This ensures that the maximum number of customers progress through the funnel. 

Eventually, they’ll become either marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) or sales-qualified leads (SQLs). They are then passed on to the sales team, who will further nurture MQLs, or pursue sales with SQLs. 

The stages of marketing funnel analytics  

Every marketing funnel is split into distinct sections. Understanding each customer journey stage is crucial for marketing funnel analytics. Of course, every organization will have a slightly different funnel. Below is a generic example of steps in a marketing funnel. 

Awareness – A customer first becomes aware of your offering after viewing marketing materials. They’ll now go on to further research your business and product offering. This might involve reading reviews or blog posts on your website.  Consideration – Customers are no longer simply interested. They can now visualize how a product can fit into their day-to-day lives and relieve certain pain points. At this point, they may compare your offering to competitor products.   Conversion – A customer now has enough information. They’re confident in your product and make a purchase.   Loyalty – Your goal should be to ensure they stick around and buy again in the future. This means continuing the conversation with customers. You might send follow-up emails about your latest releases, deals, or company news.  Advocacy – If you build up enough loyalty, customers will become fans of your brand. They’ll go on to advocate for you, sharing your products with friends and family. 

The benefits of marketing funnel analytics 

Hopefully, you now understand the concept of marketing funnel analytics. But why should you invest your time in the process? Below are some of the top advantages. 

A birds-eye view 

Marketing funnel analytics provides a birds-eye view of the customer journey, revealing how consumers interact with your brand. This means you can identify the sorts of content that garner the most engagement. 

For importantly, you can spot the barriers preventing users from progressing through their journeys. You can spot ‘exit pages’ i.e. pages on your site where the users are leaving in high volumes. 

By addressing these issues you’ll miss out on fewer conversions and increase the chance of creating long-lasting customer relationships. 

Offer more personalization 

One thing for certain about the modern consumer is that they enjoy personalized experiences. Many businesses are finding value in catering to this need. A recent study showed that 89% of leaders viewed personalization as crucial to their business’ success in the next three years.

One of the top advantages of funnel analytics is that it enables us to look at our customers in a more granular way. You can understand the different types of people that make up your audience (we’ll talk about this in more detail later). 

This means you can create unique experiences for your different subsets of customers. You can create content that they’re likely to respond to. Ultimately, you can build more engaging overall experiences. 

Gauge the success of your marketing 

Is your current approach headed for success or failure? Without funnel analytics, you’re building marketing strategies in the dark. Funnel analytics can provide a variety of insights into your campaign. These include: 

The marketing channels that drive the most engagement.  The effectiveness of your landing page.  The types of users that are most likely to convert.  Any issues users encounter when navigating your website. 

These insights can be valuable. By paying close attention to your funnel, you can adapt your strategies and increase your chances of success. 

Support stakeholders 

When you justify your approach to skate holders it’s best to avoid providing a blizzard of statistics. Funnel analytics can help you to convey insights in a more easily-consumable way. Funnels act as useful visualizations that can be shown during presentations. 

You can easily demonstrate how your analysis helped to optimize your campaign. With stakeholder support, you can further pursue strategies that will enhance customer journeys. 

How to carry out marketing funnel analytics

As we’ve established, there are many benefits to funnel analytics. Now, let’s look at our step-by-step guide to help your approach.  

Build buyer personas 

Earlier, we talked about how many potential buyers make up your audience. Each customer group will behave in slightly different ways. They’ll consume different media, and use your products for different reasons.  

If you treat all your customers in the same way, you’ll struggle to move them along the funnel. Building buyer personas is an important step in understanding the different groups within your audience. 

A buyer persona should include the following information: 

Demographic details – Ask questions such as, ‘Where is a customer located?’ ‘What is their age group?’ ‘What is their income level?  Interests – Consider the media that the customer consumes, their day-to-day hobbies, and other activities they might engage in.  Pain points – What issues does a customer face that your brand or product can address?  Traits – Your customer may be an extrovert or introvert. They may be likely to respond to certain types of humor more than others.  Competitors – Does a customer purchase products from your competitors? If so, what do you offer to persuade them to switch to your product? 

Rinse and repeat this process until you’ve identified the different personas within your audience. Then use customer journey analytics to find the average journeys of each persona. How do they differ from one another? How can each journey be refined? 

Create your marketing funnel 

Earlier we showed an example marketing funnel. It’s now time to build your funnel based on the perceived user journey of each of your personas. you can follow our earlier example or choose your specific stages for the individual stages of your funnel. 

Think about how individual personas act differently at each stage of your funnel. Let’s imagine a scenario where two different personas enter the ‘Awareness’ stage. Persona A is of an older demographic, they consume media largely offline. Persona B is younger and spends a lot of time on social media platforms. 

Persona A enters the awareness stage after viewing a marketing flyer mailed to their house. Using the web address on your advert, they head to your website to learn more about your brand. They might view blogs or read testimonials on your site. 

Persona B becomes aware of a product after viewing your short on TikTok. They like what they see, and stay on the platform, searching for information about the product. They view unboxings and reviews of the item. 

Both personas had the same goal: to learn more about your offering. They acted, however, in very different ways. Understanding these differences is a key part of mapping out your different marketing funnels and conducting user behavior analysis. 

Choose your metrics 

You should have a much clearer idea of each of the stages within your marketing funnel. Now, you need a way of measuring customer behavior within each stage. It’s important to choose relevent customer journey KPIs that provide useful insights into user behavior.  

Examples of metrics, and their use cases, can be found below: 

Conversion rate – The percentage of customers that perform valuable actions. This is a crucial metric for measuring the success of your goals.  Share of voice – How much of the debate around a particular topic is controlled by your business? With a higher share of voice, more prospects will become aware of your brand.  Pages per session – The average number of pages viewed when a customer is on your website. Helps to indicate whether your site provides positive user experiences.  Net promoter score – Rates how likely customers are to become ‘cheerleaders’ for your brand. Customers provide a rating of 1-10 depending on how favorable they feel about you.

Pick the right tools 

Funnel analytics becomes much easier if you have the right tools. ​​Software such as Funnelytics can map a profitable marketing funnel. 

The tool comes with a variety of helpful features. Users can easily map out your marketing funnels using a simple drag-and-drop system. You can also generate results and profits without the need to create spreadsheets. This saves much time, providing funnel strategies in minutes rather than hours. 

Funnelytics also makes your insights easier to share with stakeholders, due to its many visualization options. You can create more professional presentations and convey your key message more clearly.

Find optimization opportunities 

To retain customers you need to consider how content plays a role at each stage of the funnel. Ultimately, you need to be delivering the kinds of materials that customers are searching for. Whether it’s blogs, social media posts, or product listings, content needs to be fresh, relevant, and optimized for search engines. 

To achieve this, you should begin with an assessment of your keyword usage. Are your keyword lists up-to-date and accurate and bringing the right types of customers? There are plenty of free and low-cost solutions to support your research. Google’s Keyword Planner is one popular free example. 

Try to identify keywords for each stage of the funnel. For instance, For the awareness stage, you should aim to create content for people unfamiliar with your brand. This might include blog posts, videos, or infographics. You can achieve this by using a video maker like Adobe Express.  Look for relevant keywords to structure your content around. 

To further optimize your content look at page elements. Are images high resolution? Have you included alt text for visually impaired users? Is meta text the appropriate length, and does it contain the right keywords? 

Lastly, consider whether content is structured in a way that persuades users to continue their journeys. Calls to action (CTAs) should be placed strategically. They should be the correct size and accessible to users on all devices. Effective CTAs are also crucial for conversion. Among the top email marketing content ideas are those that drive urgency and prompt immediate action. Think of your CTA as an essential part of getting the results you want from each campaign.

Define your lead scoring model

Not every lead that enters your funnel will be worth pursuing. It’s far more cost-effective and efficient to focus your resources on the most leads. For that, however, you’ll need a lead scoring model. 

Lead scoring works by assigning a number to each lead based on a predefined set of characteristics. The following factors should influence your lead scoring: 

Demographics – How closely does a lead align with your target audience? A strong match with your buyer persona means a customer is highly likely to be interested in your offering.  Online interactions – How did a lead behave when visiting your site? Did their behavior suggest a wider interest in your product or brand (for example, did they sign up for your mailing list)? Engagement – Leads that engage strongly with your brand on social media or email are much more likely to convert. 

Try Funnelytics today 

Marketing analytics should be an essential part of every marketing campaign. By overlooking this technique, you might be missing out on lots of potential conversions. Analysis can deliver the insights you need to deliver the best user journeys. 

Unfortunately, the process of manually building funnels can be highly time-consuming, Luckily, you can cut the process down to a matter of minutes, simply by using Funnelytics. Our platform enables you to generate funnels quickly and thanks to predictive forecasting, pursue marketing campaigns with greater confidence. 

Best of all, you can access a free 14-day trial to try Funnelytics for yourself. So, why not give marketing funnel analytics a try?