Table of contents
What is a Full Funnel Strategy?
A full funnel strategy or full sales funnel marketing consists of adapting messages, content and marketing offers to the specific phase of purchase in which the customer is.
Rather than just focusing on sales, this type of strategy looks at the entire customer journey from start to finish with a 360-degree view.
What we seek is to better understand how our customers’ decision-making process works to feed each step with the right incentives, build better brand experiences and close more sales.
Why is the Full Funnel strategy important?
A full funnel strategy that covers the entire sales funnel allows you to create awareness of your brand, consideration by the customer of your products and facilitate purchases simultaneously.
However, marketing based on the traditional sales funnel is still under a linear mental framework.
And customer buying processes are no longer.
It is proven that customer journeys and sales funnels are not interchangeable concepts.
The reality is that a customer can go from not knowing your brand to activating the purchase mode in a matter of seconds if the right stimuli are given.
In this way, maintaining a sequential conceptualization of your sales funnel may be reducing your chances of closing.
For this reason, betting on a full funnel marketing approach is so profitable.
What is the key to a Full Funnel Strategy?
We need to understand that no two buying processes are the same and that for many buyers the research and discovery phase occurs through multiple channels at the same time.
The advent of the smartphone means that online and offline shopping journeys are increasingly intertwined.
In fact, according to some studies, 69% of physical store customers consult reviews on their mobile phones while walking the aisles looking at products, and it is common for users to consult their mobile phones and navigate to online stores while watching an advertisement on television.
All this makes audiences more fragmented and, above all, just one click away from leaving forever or making a purchase.
For this reason, it is essential to adopt a full funnel strategy that allows attracting customers from multiple channels at the same time and/or returning them to the purchase process if it has been interrupted.
Assuming that the purchase sequence is no longer linear but rather fragmented and multi-channel is therefore key.
From the Marketing Funnel to the Full Funnel Strategy
When we talk about “sales funnel”, we refer to the marketing funnel, which describes the path your customer may take on the way to purchase.
It is therefore a model that simplifies reality by transforming it into a linear sequence: Awareness, interest, decision and action.
Very useful for conceptualisation.
Each stage requires a different approach on the part of the marketer.
However, a full funnel marketing strategy generates awareness, interest, decision and purchase simultaneously.
It must be able to receive a user in the consideration phase and move them into purchase mode with a smooth transition and vice versa.
Moreover, in the case of not generating any conversion (sale, form filling etc…) you will have the possibility to return visitors to the website by using remarketing campaigns or push notifications.
The marketing funnel is a useful framework for engaging audiences. At the same time, customer journeys and funnels are not interchangeable concepts. Funnels are linear, but customer journeys rarely go directly from awareness to consideration to purchase.
4 Tips to Optimize your Full Funnel Strategy
We recognise that a full funnel marketing strategy has significant challenges for any business.
That’s why we always recommend implementing a web analytics tool to help you better define your full funnel marketing strategy.
And follow these tips:
1. Measuring, optimizing and planning the impact of different attribution channels
It is very likely that your web traffic comes from many different channels such as: search engines, social media, email and perhaps your own website.
That’s why it’s essential to have a web analytics tool to help you measure which acquisition channels contribute to purchase activity and sales performance.
Having a web analytics plan is essential to obtain the information with which to optimize multi channel advertising.
2. Understanding the differences between audiences across the funnel
A user who comes to your online shop or business from a PPC campaign on search engines is not the same as a user who comes from a recommendation on a social network or from a remarketing campaign.
Therefore, for each acquisition channel it is advisable to adapt its own buying process as we do with the different buyer’s persona.
3. Personalizing the consumer journey to purchase as much as possible
Your products and services can solve different problems for different audiences.
That is why it is important to understand what your company, brand or product solves for different audiences and to define specific messages for each buyer persona to make them feel that you are speaking to them.
Personalisation is a great tool to get users to identify with the brand and close sales.
4. Avoid obsessing over ROAS
ROAS is one of the main KPIs for measuring paid campaigns.
However, when using a full funnel marketing strategy, these types of performance indicators are not very reliable.
And the fact is that:
As we move up the funnel activities, we see that they generate a lower return on advertising spend than lower funnel initiatives.
Simply because the purchase intention of users at these stages is much lower.
That is why we propose to measure success with specific indicators for each stage:
- Awareness: reach, click-through rate (the number of clicks in relation to the number of impressions).
- Consideration: mentions, brand searches, detail page visits, shop traffic, average cost per detail page visit.
- Purchase decision: ROAS, ACOS, orders, cost per purchase.
- Action: product or service reviews, ratings…
- Loyalty: repeat purchase rate, subscription and savings rate, time between purchases.
This allows us to evaluate each phase for the KPI’s correctly and to buy into the different actions without damaging the overall results of the company in the long run.
In conclusion:
There are many factors that can explain the success of a full funnel strategy but none is more important than knowing the customer journey of each of your buyer personas or customer types.
That is, to know how your customers think, how they buy and why they buy from you.
For this it is very important that you have well defined your buyer personas by market segment.
And at the same time understand what motivates their purchasing decisions and where they come from.
At this point, you know that a full funnel marketing approach is a powerful framework to grow your business based on data, omni-channel and a complete view of the customer experience throughout the entire buying process.
Links and recommended reading:
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a full funnel strategy?
The full funnel marketing strategy offers an expanded vision of the relationship with the customer, allowing the results of any company to be improved by better meeting the needs of users at any time during their purchase process.
Why is a full funnel strategy important?
Sales funnels are linear but customer journeys are not. This means that users can go from “search” mode to “purchase” mode in a matter of seconds. Full funnel marketing deals with understanding and identifying purchase triggers in all phases of the sales funnel to multiply the chances of conversion.