Conversion Funnel
The Basic Idea
Think about the steps you take when you first learn about a new brand. Perhaps you read about a product in a blog article and you’re interested to learn more. You navigate to the brand’s website, browse their product collections, sign up for a discount code, and maybe even add an item to your cart. Whether you continue the checkout process and order the product or abandon your cart and close the website, you’ve spent some time moving through the brand’s conversion funnel.
The conversion funnel is the journey a customer takes from their first interaction with a brand to making a purchase. This is not always a linear path — customers might encounter the same brand across different platforms and channels as they move through the buying journey. When a new customer finally completes a purchase, they have successfully “converted” from a lead to a buyer.
You can think of the conversion funnel, or purchase funnel, as a model that represents the flow of people as they move through different stages of your marketing strategy.1 These stages typically include an awareness stage where customers first discover your brand, a consideration phase where they engage with your brand to learn more, and a conversion phase where they make a purchase.
This funnel-shaped model illustrates the steady decline in the number of people at each stage of the conversion process, with the largest pool of potential customers entering the top of the funnel and only a small portion of those initial prospects trickling out the bottom as customers.
Unfortunately, conversion funnels are full of gaps — not everyone entering your funnel will exit out the bottom as a paying customer, and many users will leak out at various points along the way. Understanding what causes people to leave your funnel early can help you pinpoint potential issues or opportunities to nudge customers from one stage to another. This often means delivering targeted information to people based on where they are in your funnel, increasing the likelihood that they’ll resonate with your marketing and eventually convert into customers.
Trying to increase sales simply by driving more traffic to a website with a poor customer conversion rate is like trying to keep a leaky bucket full by adding more water instead of plugging the holes.
Bryan Eisenberg, author of Call to Action
About the Author
Kira Warje
Kira holds a degree in Psychology with an extended minor in Anthropology. Fascinated by all things human, she has written extensively on cognition and mental health, often leveraging insights about the human mind to craft actionable marketing content for brands. She loves talking about human quirks and motivations, driven by the belief that behavioural science can help us all lead healthier, happier, and more sustainable lives. Occasionally, Kira dabbles in web development and enjoys learning about the synergy between psychology and UX design.
