Since 1898 there has been a tool which marketers have relied on to provide them with a framework for consumer behaviour that allows them to better serve the needs of their potential customers. 113 years on and this tool has lost none of its usefulness and although many have evolved it and made it more complicated, the fundamental rules remain the same. The tool is called the purchasing funnel (or buying funnel). Many of you may have heard of it, some may even consider themselves familiar with it, but on my travels through the rocky terrain of ecommerce I have rarely seen it used effectively in the user attraction process.
The purchase funnel is a model used in marketing that aims to visualise and categorise the different stages an average person goes through before they purchase a product or service. There are many different types of the purchase funnel, particularly since the rise of social media marketing and other ‘people empowering’ web 2.0 tools, but the essential purchase funnel consists of five stages.
Often presented as a triangle, or a funnel (as the name suggests), the purchase funnel shows the early stage where Joe Public enters the funnel and begins the journey to making a purchase. No matter what the product or service, however big or small, many believe that every single person goes through this journey in one way or another. This presents an opportunity for marketers to utilise the different stages of the funnel to move their potential customers closer to the final stage; purchase. First of all, you must be aware of what each specific stage of the funnel is.
The Fundamental Five Stages of the Purchasing Funnel
Awareness
This stage refers to the process of actually making people aware that your product or service exists, they may not know that you specifically offer the product or service but they will know that the product is available. For example, I may not know that Internet TV exists until I read about Google TV; now I am aware I can move to the next stage.
Interest
The next hurdle is to make the person interested. This is the stage where the potential customer will consider what their specific requirements and needs are and how the particular product or service can help to fulfil those needs. Again, this stage is not about you specifically but more about what you offer. Get this stage correct and you will have a set of people who are interested in learning more. In my example, I may be frustrated that I keep missing my favourite TV shows so my interest will be captured when I consider that Internet TV can let me choose when I want to watch something.
Learn
The learn stage is pretty self-explanatory. In this stage of the purchasing funnel the user will carry out research in order to learn about what is available and get a general idea about what kind of things they should be looking for. As Brad Geddes points out in his Google AdWords book, “it is at the learn stage that users first learn your industry jargon”. For my Internet TV example, it is at this stage that I will learn the alternatives to Google TV and also how I would go about getting the service (ie. Built into a tv or as a separate box).
Shop
The shopping stage simply speaks of the stage where a consumer ‘shops around’ and learns the different features and benefits on offer from similar products and services. The user is looking for advantages between different offerings available. I may want an Internet TV box as opposed to a television set with it built in, because I have a television already!
Buy
The final stage of the purchasing funnel is where the user is now fully aware of the product or service that they want and they only need to decide where they are going to get it from. This is where things such as price, service and trustworthiness come into play and all can win you the deal at the final furlong!
The purchasing funnel can be used in almost all decisions you make online, from planning your website wireframe and web design, to planning the keywords each area on your site is going to target and also creating a logical structure to your pay-per click account.
Using the Purchasing Funnel for Keywords and Web Design
Initially you can use the buying funnel to shape the design, content plan and keywords of the website you are working on. To show you how I would go about this I am going to use an example. Let’s say that you are website that is planning on selling car stereo systems.
Currently your car stereo business does not have a website, so first we must work with our web designer to plan the content and design layout of the site. Using the purchasing funnel I would recommend to the web designer that we cater for each and every stage of the purchasing funnel. We should have an area of the site for shouting about our products (perhaps the homepage is good for this). It doesn’t need to go into detail; it just needs to show a visitor that the product exists in as quick a time as possible.
Our website design would also need to cater for people who have an interest in the product (car stereo) and want to learn more about them. A great way of doing this is to create a blog. Blogs are excellent ways of catering for the early stages of the purchasing funnel because they do not need to give a ‘hard sell’ but can give users a wealth of knowledge, from experts in the field (you) about the product that they have an interest in.
By now your site has a section to advertise your products (the homepage with quick to read elements) as well as an area for people to get a better sense of what is on offer (the blog). Next you need to take care of the shopping stage. This is the stage which many people default to when designing a website. The product category page is a great way of letting users compare different product specifics. Sites that use advanced navigation work excellently here, allowing users to see the defining features of the type of product and then allowing them to scale down their search on your site by filtering by the criteria presented, an excellent example of this in the wild can be seen at shop.bt.com. For our car stereos the user will see navigation that lets them filter by price, wattage output, brand and other relevant features. This will quickly and easily allow your user to hone in on the product that they want.
Now the user knows the specific product they want all that you need to do is sell it to them. This is where you can get the big guns out and really sell the product and your business to the user. Tell your web designer to make the product page easy to read; the price is important but so too is the delivery cost and the little extras. For our car stereos we might offer a free voucher to the user to get the stereo fitted at their local garage, if so our web designer should make this as easy to digest as possible. Finally, think about the actual process the user must go through to purchase. They should see a clear call to action (buy now!) and should have no questions about how they can buy your product quickly.
As well as the design of your site, make sure your keyword targeting plan goes hand in hand with the different areas of your site. There is no point in sending someone who has the specific model number for your product to the learning stage of the site; send them to the product page because we already know that they are clued up on what product to buy. Similarly, if a user searches for ‘what is the best car cd player for my Ford Fiesta’, do not send them to a product page that gives the ‘hard sell’, send them to a blog post that offers a comparison of the best solutions for the question they have asked.
As with all things ecommerce, common sense is an excellent ingredient. Take your knowledge of the purchasing funnel and use it to put the human touch into your website and make sure that users see the correct information at the correct time!
