How to Improve Your Customer Journey Funnel Step-By-Step

Effectively converting visitors to your website or app into leads or paying customers is what makes for a great conversion rate. In this guide, we’ll be focusing on how to set up conversion tracking and then lay out proven strategies on how to improve your customer journey funnel conversion rate.

What Is Conversion Rate?

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who take the desired action, such as signing up or making a purchase. As a business, you not only want to drive traffic to your website or shop, but you also want to convert that traffic into subscribers or paying customers.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of improving that percentage.

How To Calculate Conversion Rate

In order to calculate the conversion rate, calculate the number of conversions first. This is the number of people who take the desired action on your website or app. This can be a top-level goal such as making a purchase or a lower-level goal such as clicking on a Call To Action (CTA) button.

Next, calculate the number of visitors. This is the number of people who visit your product. Then, divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors. This will give you the conversion rate.

Analyse the Customer Journey Funnel Performance

As a first step, it’s important to understand the current performance of your customer journey funnel and where there is room for improvement.

How many users who enter a journey within your product end up converting today? To understand this, the first step is to put in place the right tracking.

Set Up Customer Journey Funnel Event Tracking

In order to track the entire customer journey funnel, you need to track every touch point of the user.

For an e-commerce business that could be: Visit the website, view product, add item to cart, go to checkout, and make payment. Events can be click actions of users, page views, or other custom events that you define.

There are many tools to choose from for event logging. If you want to go with a free option, we suggest using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

While GTM can be used for event tracking, GA is suitable to create a funnel dashboard. In GTM, there is the concept of triggers and tags for firing events and starting workflows.

• Triggers: An event that fires when a user performs an action
• Tags: The workflow you can start when a trigger is being fired. Eg a user clicks on sign up (trigger) which then sends an event to GA (tag)

Define Funnel Conversion Goals

The advantage of the above setup is that once events are tracked with GTM, you can create workflows independently without support from engineers.

For instance, if you run paid ads and want to see how successful they are, you can send a conversion tag to Google Ads from GTM. This way you can measure campaign effectiveness based on your conversion goal.

Create Report/Dashboard

In GA you can then create a conversion funnel dashboard via Explore > Funnel Exploration.

The chart tells you the number of users or events at a certain step of the journey. It also provides information about how many of them dropped out in the next step. Users who complete the last journey step are the conversions.

Identify Gaps

The funnel report with its drop-off number gives a good insight into where there’s room for improvement.

For instance, if you see a significant drop-off rate in the purchase step, it’s worth investigating why that’s the case. Perhaps payments are failing or users don’t have any of the provided payment methods.

Understand The Why

The quantitative funnel analysis is really just the first step. It tells you what is happening, but it’s not telling you why it’s happening. To understand this, you should enrich your data with other qualitative and quantitative data.

For example, use Hotjar for heatmaps. These will tell you how users use your website, where they click, what they’re looking at, and what they ignore.

Use Google Analytics to understand user flows. Understand which pages users visit, from where they arrive, and where they go next.

Besides those product usage data, also gather qualitative data by conducting user interviews or surveys. We have used UserTesting to recruit potential and existing users. You can either let them explore your product by themselves and provide feedback or you can interview them directly.

To get immediate user feedback when they use your product, you can also use Hotjar and their survey feature.

Strategies on How To Improve Your Customer Journey Funnel Conversion Rate

Once you’ve assessed the current conversion funnel performance, its gaps as well as why it’s happening, it’s time for the next step – Coming up with ideas and opportunities to improve the situation.

Proven Strategies

We have learned a lot working in startups, growth companies, and corporates across many industries. Here are 7 proven strategies for your inspiration:

Social Proof

It’s important to create trust between your business and your prospects. They want to understand who is behind a company, whether it’s trustworthy, and whether other people have used your product to their satisfaction.

If you can prove that others have tried or bought your product or service and can recommend it, there is a good chance it’ll increase your conversion.

Therefore, add customer reviews and testimonials to your website that are real and relatable.

Mobile-friendly

Mobile phones are oftentimes the primary device of users coming to your product. It’s therefore key to optimize for mobile experiences. Especially when you want to rank well in search results. Google for example has strict requirements for every website to adhere to mobile usability standards, e.g.:

• An adequate font size that is legible on phones
• Elements cannot be too close together to people can easily click them

Our recommendation, therefore, is to always test your website on mobile devices before publishing and adhering to usability guidelines.

Clear UX and CTAs

Being able to easily navigate and find the things your users are looking for are essential. Create clear, legible, and prominent CTAs so users can easily navigate and go into the desired journey.

Get rid of convoluted blobs of text and other distractions that create cognitive strain on users. Keep it crisp and to the point to get your message across.

Quality traffic

Perhaps you’re getting a lot of irrelevant traffic from users who are not your target audience. They clearly won’t convert well. Therefore, it’s important to invest less in those channels.

Instead, focus on high-quality and relevant traffic. Utilize the conversion funnel report for this as well. If you see that traffic from LinkedIn for example brings in more relevant traffic, adjust your ad spend accordingly.

Clear value prop

It’s important to clearly articulate your product’s or service’s value proposition. Potential customers need to understand what you offer them and how it solves their pain points. Don’t bury the lead here. The value proposition needs to stand out. Ideally, within the hero on your landing page.

Also, try to use easily-digestible language and avoid buzzwords or overly technical jargon. You don’t want to cognitively overload users who just arrive on your website.

Additional payment methods

Imagine a user who wants to buy a product in your e-commerce shop and is in the last step – the payment. They want to pay with PayPal and don’t have a credit card. However, your webshop doesn’t support PayPal so the user drops out.

It’s crucial to understand your users and their preferred payment methods. Add the missing ones so every user can pay for the products the way they want to.

Personalisation

Imagine you’re selling your products in multiple countries or even continents. Selling a product or service in Japan compared to western countries is different and should be catered for. The messaging, layout or even pricing should ideally be tailored to users’ expectations and culture.

Therefore, it’s recommended to personalize the experience according to your target audience. It doesn’t stop at geographies, this could also apply to different industries or acquisition channels. For example, users from Instagram would get a different experience than users from LinkedIn.

A/B Testing

Our strategies have worked for us in certain situations in the past but highly depend on a lot of factors. This is a caveat that there is no one-size-fits-all.

We recommend that you come up with your own ideas and hypotheses based on the identified gaps in your conversion funnel. Then, validate these hypotheses by running A/B tests.

A/B tests help to understand the impact of a certain change. By comparing the previous experience with the new one, you will gain more confidence that this change actually caused the potential improvement.

👉 Make sure to check out our more detailed guide about A/B testing Unlocking Growth with A/B Testing

Measure & Iterate

Your A/B test should reach statistical significance to understand whether the conversion impact has a strong correlation to your change and is not just by chance.

You can then build up on this. Try out a different copy, placement of CTAs, or imagery. Continuous discovery and improvement are crucial for any business to strive for the best possible experience.