Modeling Your Sales Funnel And Customer Value Path

In this article, we will discuss how to model your website into a funnel, define your customer value path, and set up effective tracking to use with your analytics software.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a representation of the customer journey from discovering your service to making a purchase. It is usually broken up into 3 stages:

• Top of the funnel: This is your acquisition source. It is driven by the promise of the value offered by your product or service (messaging)
• Middle of the funnel: This is your activation and engagement activities. It is driven by the realization of the value promised (user experience)
• Bottom of the funnel: This is your revenue generation step. It is driven by the perceived value driven by your product or service compared to your price

What is the Customer Value Path?

The customer value path is the Shortest path your Customers need to take to get Value out of your product or, in other words, realize your value proposition. It is important to be able to identify your Customer Value Path to succeed in building an effective sales funnel that churns out sales.

The Customer Value Path depends a great deal on your product or service. For an e-commerce website, it starts with visitors > viewing one or more products > adding a product to cart > initializing checkout > completing checkout. For a SaaS website, it can start with visitors > registrations > start trial > activation steps > subscription. The more detailed your customer value path mapping is, the better you can track it and tune it.

It is equally important to identify what isn't a part of your customer value path. For example, if you are an e-commerce website, a customer adding an item to a wish list shows high intent towards buying but isn't a part of your customer value path. In other words, customers can successfully complete checkout even if they didn't add an item to their wish list.

Conversion Tracking

Enter conversion tracking; the ability to track the number and percentage of customers who take a certain action, or a group of actions, on your website. This includes the actions modeled as part of your customer value path as well as key actions that show engagement or intent.

Tracking those conversions are using done by a combination of:

• Click tracking: Track when a customer clicks on a certain button or element e.g. Add to cart, video, etc.
• Destination tracking: Track when a customer reaches a certain page or group of pages. In Funnelll, you can also specify that you want to track customers who reach a certain page only if they have previously visited another page. 
• Scroll tracking: Track when a customer reaches a certain section of the page. 

The first step towards building a successful funnel is to define your customer value path. This is an ongoing exercise that needs to revisit as your understanding of your customers and how they use your product grows. 

Best of luck everyone!

About Author: Sherif Ali is the founder of Funnelll; a platform that helps you run your own high-performing marketing campaigns like a pro. No coding, complex integrations, or data science needed.