Funnel Reporting: Understand and Visualize Your Customer's Journey

What is funnel reporting?

Marketing funnel reporting is a tool used to track the customer journey for a business or brand. Funnel reports provide detailed insights into a customer's behavior from the moment they enter your sales funnel until they choose to exit it or make a purchase.

Sales funnels can help you determine which pages or areas of your website result in the most engagement and which pages cause visitors to exit your website altogether. Funnel reporting can provide in-depth marketing reports, allowing you to see how engaging your funnel is and the conversion rate for each funnel you create.

When building an outbound or inbound marketing funnel, it's important to keep the following stages in mind:

Awareness

The first step involved in creating a successful sales funnel is awareness. Whether a customer hears about your business from a friend, sees a billboard of your company, or clicks a link online, it's important to remain aware of how your visitors find your website or brand.

Interest

Once you have established an initial connection with a prospective customer, they'll begin to learn more about your brand. Pages such as an About Us page, a Story page, or a FAQ section can cement your business as trustworthy and authoritative. Always ensure that information about your business is easily accessible to those visiting your website for the first time.

Decision

After your prospective customers become comfortable with your business, they may consider purchasing. At this stage, speaking with a sales representative or receiving additional guidance can be useful in closing the sales pipeline.

Action

As potential customers consider buying, they'll need to take action one way or another. It's important to consider what options they have and whether or not there are incentives to make a purchase. This stage of the funnel is one of the most important, as it provides you with valuable insight into how consumers engage and interact with your marketing.

Types of funnel reports

Whether you're interested in automated reporting or a custom sales funnel report, familiarizing yourself with the most common types of funnel reports is essential.

Before calculating your marketing spend or creating new marketing strategies involving funnels, learn more about both inbound and outbound marketing. Understanding the differences between inbound and outbound marketing can help you obtain qualified marketing leads in any market or industry.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing includes utilizing various forms of content to attract interested users to your website or online store. This can include infographics, long-form content, videos, and social media posts.

This type of marketing focuses on building a brand using digital content across multiple platforms. It's much less invasive than outbound marketing and can provide informative and educational content to your audience.

Additionally, inbound marketing can be quantified and measured over time, providing insight into your audience for further optimization in future campaigns.

Outbound marketing

On the other hand, outbound marketing is considered much more aggressive than inbound marketing. With outbound marketing, marketers maximize their reach with digital ads, events, direct mail, cold-calling, billboards, and broadcast advertisements.

Outbound marketing is extremely useful, as it lets you cast a wide net and learn about sales prospecting and your potential customers. This form of marketing is beneficial for promoting brand awareness and can help you obtain immediate results with the right campaign.

Ways to use a funnel report

Whether your goal is to increase website traffic, boost sales, or gain insight into your customer acquisition cost, you can learn plenty of valuable information with funnel reports.

Here are a few ways to use a funnel report:

• Top Paths. Monitor and track the top conversion paths in your customer journey. Discover which channels helped draw traffic and leads.
• Time. Determine how long it takes for a user to convert to a customer using an in-depth sales funnel report. Knowing the time required to acquire a customer can help calculate your customer acquisition cost, marketing qualified lead, and the lifetime value of your customers.
• Assisted conversions. Learn about the marketing channels responsible for generating leads, website visitors, or sales.
• Path details. Spend time tracking how many times a visitor accesses your website before making a purchase.
• Comparison tools. If you have created more than one sales funnel, you can compare top conversion marketing paths and paths that assisted in generating leads. This will help you learn more about your customers' behavior throughout their journey on your website or brand.

How to build a funnel report

Once you've collected adequate data, you can build a funnel report. Your funnel report will walk you through how customers discover and access your website. After choosing the right funnel report platform, you'll need to gather key pieces of information and filter what's most important.

Input data

When building a funnel report, you must have access to accurate and high-quality data. This data may include the number of sales you've generated recently or the number of visitors who accessed your website in the past 30 days. Include as much data as possible when working with full-funnel reports, as this will provide the most accurate output.

During this process, you'll also be able to make various building blocks that separate the stages of your customer funnel.

Filtering data

Filtering your data is vital for excluding useless or irrelevant information. Filtering data you're not interested in will save time and help you focus on the metrics that matter most. Your filtering capabilities will depend on the platform you use to generate the report.

Familiarizing yourself with key performance indicators (KPIs) using examples of KPIs will also help you choose relevant metrics for your business and customer journey. As a result, you can hone in on the data you collect to optimize future campaigns.

Organizing your report

Once a basic sales funnel report is generated, you can organize the data further. This includes selecting various marketing methods that have been used in the process of capturing leads or generating sales.

Organizing your data using filters will help you learn more about your customers and their preferred method of discovering information, reading content, or making purchases.

The importance of visualization

One of the benefits of using a sales funneling platform is the ability to visualize the data you've included in your sales funnel report. From monitoring your website's traffic to tracking the number of newsletter subscribers you've recently received, there are many different metrics you can turn into comprehensive and easy-to-digest charts.

You can also visualize data for customers who have made an inquiry or are considered return customers. The options are endless once you've defined specific filters and the building blocks for your marketing funnel report.

You can review funnel report examples to see how others are using visuals and graphs to interpret data.

Reviewing results

Once you can fully visualize the results of your marketing efforts, you can note potential weaknesses in your funnel and focus on areas that are thriving.

Discover where most of your website visitors are coming from and which customers are most likely to make a purchase based on their original lead. Learn more about whether or not social media is optimal for your brand's marketing strategy or if your sales perform better with an outbound plan in place.

Noting the positives and negatives of all areas within your funnel will provide you with additional insights for other marketing campaigns. The more you understand your customers' journey, the easier it will be to create successful campaigns in the future.

Use funnel reports to enhance the customer journey

When it comes to enhancing your marketing, incorporating inbound and outbound funnels into your business model is highly recommended. Funnel reporting is extremely valuable for learning more about the customer journey, allowing you to see the paths consumers take from beginning to end.

With Mailchimp reports, manage and monitor metrics over time to optimize your campaigns and future marketing funnels.