What is Digital Marketing Funnel and How to Build One

Digital marketing funnels are an essential part of any effective online marketing strategy. Understanding how they work and how to build one is key to turning your visitors into leads into customers and customers into loyal fans.

A digital marketing funnel is a visual way of representing the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your brand or website online. The funnel helps you to understand why some customers convert into buyers, while others don’t. By understanding the funnel, you can improve your marketing strategies to better convert leads into paying customers.

How do digital marketing funnels work and what are the stages involved?

Digital marketing funnels are a useful tool to help you visualize the path customers take from first finding out about your brand to converting. There are four main stages in a digital marketing funnel:

1. Awareness: The customer becomes aware of your brand or product.
2. Interest: The customer is interested in your brand or product
3. Consideration: The customer is considering purchasing your brand or product.
4. Purchase: The customer makes a purchase.

Conversions are all about getting your visitors to do what you want them to. Whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a mailing list, or just filling out a form. It varies from niche to niche and depends on what you trying to accomplish.

Let's define the marketing funnel for any e-commerce platform. The main goal for any e-commerce platform is getting a sale, so every e-commerce has a sales funnel. Let's take Amazon as an example:

• People visit Amazon.com
• They search and view a product
• If they like it, they add the item to the cart
• Finally, they go through the purchasing process to buy the product

There are several steps that a user can take to move from one stage to another with the sales funnel while they are making a purchase but that does not count as part of the funnel because it's not a mandatory step for making a purchase.

For example, a visitor can visit Amazon’s become an affiliate page while he or she is looking to buy a rug, but we don’t need to count that step in our sales funnel because it doesn't contribute to the final goal of making the sale.

The set of steps to conversion is called a funnel because, at the beginning of the process, there are a lot of people who take the first step. However, as the process continues, fewer and fewer people take subsequent steps until only a few people reach the final conversion point.

For example, not everyone sees a product buys right away, they might add it to the cart and delete it later. Or Add to the cart but never buy it because they feel like it's too expensive or they don't need it right now.

So understanding where a visitor drops off within the funnel and why and how to improve and optimize your funnel to increase conversion can give you a competitive advantage over your competition.

Also, you might think that losing customers is a bad thing, but it's not. The truth of the matter is that not everyone in your funnel will convert into buyers.

Those who do make it past the final stage of the funnel are interested in the product and looking for a solution for a problem or pain they want to get rid of.

That's why most businesses like to “widen the funnel” to market their product and service to a wide range of people.

When a business wants to grow, they need to cast a wider net and increase brand awareness or add inbound marketing which will drive more people to the top of the funnel. The bigger the top of the funnel is the higher the conversion will be on the other side of the funnel.

Different Types of Funnels:

In this article, we are talking about the digital marketing funnel and how you can build one for your business. The marketing funnel can vary based on the type of business you are running.

But the main job of a funnel is to start a marketing campaign to drive the traffic to your website or landing page that way you can turn those traffic into leads or customers by taking them each step of the funnel. Here are the few different types of funnel you need to be aware of:

• Lead Funnel
• Sales funnel
• Webinar funnel
• High ticket coaching funnel
• Video Sales Letter (VSL) funnel
• Phone funnel
• Book funnel
• Tripwire funnel

Despite different names, the main focus of the funnel is still the same – start a marketing campaign to turn random visitors into leads or clients.

Purpose of Marketing Funnels:

The purpose of marketing funnels is to guide potential customers or clients through a series of steps that will ultimately lead them to take some kind of the desired action. This desired action could be anything from making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting more information about a product or service.

You can build various types of funnels with your website, to define how the visitors navigate through your website. By doing that you can improve your website flow and turn more visitors into leads and customers.

For example, you can have an email sign-up pop that shows up every time a visitor comes to your site > Capture their email > send them to the sells page > sell low ticket items.

Building a digital marketing funnel for your business can be a great way to improve your website flow and increase conversion. There are a few things you need to keep in mind when creating your funnel:

1. Define your goal: What do you want your funnel to achieve? Whether it's getting more leads or converting more visitors into customers, make sure you know what you want to accomplish.

2. Build a funnel that monetizes traffic: Make sure your funnel is designed to generate revenue for your business. This could involve selling products or services, or capturing email addresses to build a list of potential customers.

3. Learn how to optimize your funnel: Once you have a funnel in place, it's important to learn how to optimize it for maximum effectiveness. This could involve split testing different versions of your funnel or tweaking your offer to see what works best.

Why Are Marketing Funnels Beneficial?

There are a number of reasons why marketing funnels are beneficial for businesses. First, they help to define how visitors navigate through your website, which can improve your website flow. Additionally, funnels are designed to generate revenue by converting more visitors into leads or customers.

Also, by building various types of funnels and through an optimization process you can find where the funnel is broken and in which step you are losing the most customers. That way you can do more of what works and stop doing what does not.

The name of the game is built, tested, and optimize for better conversion whether it's leads, sales, or phone calls.

A Real Life Marketing Funnels Example:

Let's compare how the marketing funnel compares to a real-life example. Before Amazon, anyone who wanted to buy a book had to go to Barnes and Noble to buy a book.

But once Amazon started selling books people would go to the Amazon online store without walking to a shop and could search for millions of books with a few clicks. Once they found the title they want, they would add the item to the cart and would make the purchase.

And the book would show up on the doorstep within a few days. Someone who would walk in a shop would do the same thing but they did not have the luxury amazon had where they could track if someone left something in the cart and optimize the cart for better checkout to increase their sale.

Also, Amazon could show the buy more books from the same author once the visitor bought a book from a particular writer. Amazon is the best and the biggest successful e-commerce website in the world because they were able to track and optimize its digital sales funnel over the year when Barnes and Noble had to close many of its stores.

That's the power of building, testing, and optimizing your digital marketing funnels over time.

Bottom Line:

Digital marketing funnels are an essential part of any online marketer's toolkit. They allow you to track and measure the progress of potential customers as they move through your marketing funnel, from awareness to purchase.

In this article, we've explained what a digital marketing funnel is and how to build one that works for your business. We've also shared some top tips for maximizing your funnel's effectiveness. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your digital marketing funnel is working hard to bring new customers into your business.