Once upon a time in the late 1990s, I attended a science-focused high school that taught HTML for building websites. Image hosting websites weren’t a thing yet — the school just assigned each of us a set amount of storage space on their physical server in the computer lab.
As a marketing consultant, my favorite projects to work on are those where I get to build websites from scratch. From the layout and content to the copy and conversions, I love being able to help a creative and effective website come to life.
Every day, over 250,000 new websites are uploaded to the Internet, adding to the large library of resources available through Google Search. While that makes the search engine a great place for readers — it can be an intimidating one for people trying to drive traffic to their site.
Whether you’re a startup, a small business owner, or an enterprise-level company, a website is likely one of your most important assets. As a writer, my website is integral to ensuring I come across professionally to potential clients. No matter the size of the business, we leverage our sites to build reputation, to grow reach, and ultimately — to convert.
Don’t you love it when you click on an image and it leads you to a URL that provides additional context and information? Or knowing how to easily grab an image’s URL so you can quickly access it? I love that, too — which is why learning how to get a URL for an image (and learning how to add a URL to an image, for that matter) is a worthwhile task. The good news is that I’m here to help you figure it out.
Today there are over 320 million websites with an SSL certificate on the Internet — and this number is expected to increase as more search engines and consumers show preference to these sites.
There are lots of reasons businesses today need to know how to register users on a website. It can be an important avenue for generating growth and repeat customers, even for some types of small businesses. From start-up apps to ecommerce businesses or community-based sites, many platforms rely on the ability to provide secure accounts for their visitors.
When I visit a website, I never consider the distance that content has to travel or the server where the website is stored. I only care that it loads fast, which is precisely why a CDN matters.
Building a customer experience strategy is about more than just meeting user expectations. Instead, it focuses on creating memorable interactions at every touchpoint. This helps users find value in your product or service — and ultimately, helps them become loyal customers.
It’s not easy creating a customer experience strategy, however, and you can quickly grow overwhelmed with so many moving parts. In my experience, breaking it down into necessary elements can make developing your strategy feel more digestible.
I’m here to help you learn what building out your CX strategy entails, plus customer experience strategy best practices, and how to create it.
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So, what is customer experience management strategy? I’m glad you asked. Your customer experience strategy is an actionable plan to deliver a positive, meaningful experience across all touchpoints between your customers and your brand.
A successful customer experience strategy should take into account several important factors, such as:
When defining your customer experience strategy, include all departments, not just those in customer-facing roles. By incorporating feedback and insight across the company, you’ll find it easier to align the organization around the intended goal: Improving the customer experience and relationship.
Pro tip: Check out HubSpot’s collection of customer experience tools.
I’ve seen organizations make the mistake of believing that customer experience strategy is only relevant for customer-centric roles. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Customer experience impacts a company’s brand, operations, and financials. Here are three key benefits a customer experience strategy brings to the table.
Research shows that 54% of consumers would stop using a brand after just one negative experience. The worse a customer feels about your brand, the more likely they are to jump ship. McKinsey recounts the tale of one of its clients in the telecommunications industry: When it overhauled its customer experience, it cut churn rates by 75%.
This math isn’t hard, even for me. Longer-lasting customers and less churn equals more revenue. If you operate in an industry with a high customer lifetime value (CLV), one mistake could cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Instead, companies with high customer experience double their revenue growth, according to McKinsey. This isn’t an overnight solution — it can take five or more years of consistent excellence to have a dramatic effect. But the evidence is clear. Consumers are willing to pay more for products or services with a good experience and are also 15-25% more receptive to cross-selling.
Finally, customers who have a good experience are more likely to share on social media or word of mouth about your brand. CX professionals often measure this through the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service. Those who had a good experience become promoters and contribute to a positive brand reputation and growth.
You can design your customer experience strategy practically by making a matrix of the state of your current customer journey. Use the template below to get started, and follow along with the rest of this post to complete it.
Before I delve into my top tips on how to create a customer experience strategy, I want to share key elements that contribute to a well-rounded CX strategy.
Start by reviewing your company‘s customer support baseline. The goal is to determine what’s working well for your business and where you can improve.
If you‘re unsure where to start, try checking your company’s help desk ticket data or call center data for key success metrics such as NPS, customer satisfaction score, and churn rate. If you’re scoring below expectations, dig deeper into the problem and figure out where exactly things are turning sour for your customers.
What I like: Looking at the data gives you firm, objective ground from which to start building (or re-building) your CX strategy.
Another crucial element of your customer experience strategy is a customer journey map. A customer journey map outlines all of the interactions between a customer and your business, including any pain points they encounter along the way. In my experience, this resource not only helps you identify friction within your customer experience, but helps you see how to improve it. It’s also useful to gain internal buy-in.
“A customer journey map is a tool in your toolkit as a CX leader to gain that customer understanding,” explains Jeannie Walters, CEO of Experience Investigator.
“But within your organization, it‘s also a way to invite various leaders to participate, to get them to really understand what’s happening. Journey mapping is a verb, not a noun. This is an action you take to get the insights to move forward.”
Pro tip: Check out examples and templates of customer journey maps for inspiration.
Once you know where you need to improve, the next step is sharing that information with your team and training your staff on new protocols. I know it‘s never fun letting your team know they’re falling short of expectations, especially when other groups in your department are hitting their numbers.
However, transparency reduces pushback against new policies and will encourage reps to improve their performance in the future.
Best for: Employee training has many benefits, including high engagement, great customer service, and more. You can even incentivize employee training.
Some customer expectations are predictable. For instance, your customers will always expect your team to be reliable and have a positive attitude. In addition to this, however, most customers will have multiple needs. In order to meet these needs, it’s essential that your team is flexible.
In some cases, it may be imperative to provide a speedy response. At other times, quality and clarity of support means more. It all depends on how the customer feels when they reach out to your business and how well your team can identify and adapt to their needs.
An effective customer experience strategy focuses on solving problems for the customer, whether those problems are anticipated or unexpected.
Customer success teams play a critical role in creating a frictionless customer experience. Not only do they plan for problems down the road but they also check in with customers routinely to ensure everything is going well post-purchase. In my experience, this proactive customer service reduces churn and strengthens your team’s relationship with your customer base.
Rather than requiring people to call your business whenever they need help, customers should be free to answer questions and solve problems independently with a self-serve support setup.
Self-service tools like knowledge bases and chatbots make it easier for customers to find solutions and reduce case volume for your reps. That saves your team some time to focus on the more complex issues requiring more troubleshooting expertise.
Best for: Fielding customer questions at all times, especially addressing simple, frequently asked questions so your team can focus on more complex customer requests.
If you want to truly understand what your customers want from your business, you have to ask and — more importantly — listen to them. Your customers are more likely to leave you a review if you ask at the right time, but you must take this feedback into genuine consideration and apply it to your strategy.
I also recommend you routinely collect feedback from your customers. Their needs change constantly, making it important to keep up-to-date information. Use an automated tool like HubSpot’s Customer Feedback software to collect feedback at critical touchpoints in your customer experience.
If you get complacent with your customer experience strategy, competitors in your industry will catch up and lure away your customers when you aren’t paying attention. The strategy that works this year may not work in future years as trends and consumer preferences change. Build in feedback to your post-purchase flows and incentivize customers to give feedback so you can track your performance over time.
Ready to build your customer experience strategy from the ground up? I’ll help you break down the five essential steps to create a frictionless customer experience.
Customer experience design is the process of designing a frictionless experience for the customer anytime they interact with a point of contact at an organization. It centers around improving processes that meet customers’ expectations and are easy and intuitive for them to follow and solve their problems.
Every product design process starts with the question, “Who are we designing for?” Turns out, it’s a great starting point for your CX strategy as well.
To chalk out an airtight CX plan, I recommend starting with an empathy map to understand your users. Each persona will have different needs and use cases. An in-depth assessment of these personas will reveal their desires, fears, and expectations.
“Empathy maps are a visualization that capture and communicate our understanding of a set of users,” shared Kate Kaplan, Insights Architect for Nielsen Norman Group. “There’s a traditional structure to empathy maps: four quadrants that capture what the user says, thinks, feels, and does.”
Through qualitative or quantitative means, capture your customers’ thoughts and emotions around your brand and product/service.
Conduct user interviews, listening sessions, and surveys to get a pulse of different personas. Translate your research inputs into the empathy map canvas.
Best for: The insights derived from empathy mapping can help in identifying and prioritizing user needs. I suggest creating cross-functional workflows for the design, product, and customer success teams to collaborate on using these insights to improve the CX.
Once you’ve mapped the ideal customer journey, analyze it properly to identify opportunities for enhancing your CX strategy.
Look for points of friction or areas where customer expectations aren‘t fulfilled. I also recommend checking if there’s scope for reducing unnecessary touchpoints to simplify your customer experience. Evaluating the time spent in different stages of the journey is crucial for streamlining the CX plan.
Most importantly, in my opinion, you need to find the crucial moments of truth in the customer journey — when users form a perception of your brand. These are the make-or-break moments in your CX. Optimize them to eliminate potential issues.
Lastly, assess all the transitions within your product when users change settings or switch devices. You’ll want to close the gap to make these transitions seamless.
Creating and fine-tuning your customer experience strategy is an ongoing process. But one way I’ve found to set solid foundations for your CX strategy is by implementing user feedback early in the process.
Embrace an iterative approach to building your customer experience and involve beta users to test your progress. Encourage and incentivize transparent feedback to make sure you’re moving forward in the right direction of creating a delightful CX.
Here are a few ways to collect feedback early on:
The bottom line is that it’s always better to modify your customer experience design as long as it takes your team to create the perfect one instead of deploying a problematic CX flow that frustrates users.
Given that your CX flow will change constantly, it’s important to set up systems to implement these changes quickly.
I recommend creating smooth workflows to maximize collaboration between all involved stakeholders and speed up the process. Leverage automation and AI tools to streamline the change management part of your customer experience strategy. This will also empower your team to spread enhancements at scale.
I think another critical step here is creating a culture of CX excellence. Train your employees to stay on top of customer expectations, present ideas for improvement, and drive innovation in product development. Enable your employees to support your customers.
Pro tip: Check out these AI tools for customer service to see if any can fit into your tech stack.
Building a CX strategy isn’t a one-and-done process. You have to constantly measure the ROI of your customer experience and shift gears when necessary.
As you gather insights, I find it best to connect them back to your overarching strategy.
“A lot of customer experience programs actually started with a measurement program or a feedback program, but they weren’t connected to that bigger strategy,” shares Walters. “This isn’t just setting up a customer feedback program or a day in the life of the customer. All of that is great, but it has to be tied back to the strategy.”
Customer success managers can collaborate with marketing and product teams to analyze user behavior, both within and outside the product. Not sure how you can find relevant insights about your customers? HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics platform is just the solution you need.
With this tool, you‘ll get granular visibility into the entire customer journey with real-time data on which campaigns or touchpoints are driving revenue. This data can also help you make smarter decisions — whether it’s for timing different aspects of your CX or for identifying the most crucial touchpoints.
To help you define a comprehensive, cohesive customer experience strategy, I’ll help you explore some of the best practices to keep in mind for your business.
Business communication plays a major role in shaping your customers‘ experience. If you’re not meeting customers where they are, you‘re missing out on an opportunity to engage them when they’re most interested or in need of help.
In my experience, to succeed in this area of customer experience means your business must first determine which channels your customers are most active on so you can adapt your approach and serve them there.
From there, it’s crucial to familiarize yourself with the channel — social, email, live chat, or something similar. Ask yourself: How are my customers communicating on this channel already? And how can I use this information to make my outreach feel more organic?
Reachability, in my opinion, can serve as a helpful competitive advantage if you execute it properly. It‘s important that your business has a handle on your customers’ preferred channels and is providing reliable, consistent service through them.
As customers become more empowered to discover solutions and information on their own via the internet and social media, the demand for increased service convenience grows. For businesses to remain in good standing with customers, they must prioritize start-to-finish online support.
Think about it: If a customer has a question on the weekend, why should they have to wait until Monday to reach out? Do you have a 24/7 live chat feature enabled to meet their Saturday needs? If you don‘t, you’re making a mistake.
I think something as simple as having a polished, up-to-date knowledge base makes all the difference in allowing customers to help themselves without needing to reach out to your team.
Customers are interested in building trust with the companies they do business with. Building trust requires consistency in your processes, policies, and actions from every team that influences the customer experience.
To help cultivate this culture of trust with your customers, I recommend you double-check that policies are up-to-date, reasonable, and carried out consistently across every scenario and buyer persona. (If you need help developing your buyer persona, you can use HubSpot’s free tool to do so.) You don’t want to have a situation where something like a return or exchange causes friction with your customers, making it difficult for them to make a purchase in the future.
No matter how much work goes into perfecting the back end of your customer experience, it’s important to remember that customers ultimately bought a product or service from your company. As a result, they expect it to be valuable and high-quality.
Refine your products and services based on customer feedback provided by an NPS survey, focus groups, or one-on-one customer calls. Solving the root of the issue with a product or service you sell can create a better customer experience overall. It doesn‘t matter how outstanding your customer experience strategy is if your product isn’t functional.
I think Nordstrom, a luxury department store known for its impeccable service, is a great example of offering customer experience tools aimed at improving purchasing convenience. Nordstrom allows their shoppers to order clothing with either curbside or in-store pickup.
It also notifies customers via optional texts, email, or store app notifications when their order is ready for pickup. Shoppers don’t have to wait and guess when their order is prepared. Instead, they provide a quick-and-easy — and ultimately, painless — customer experience.
This system solves convenience by allowing customers to try on clothes when and where it’s convenient for them. I like that it also gets people in the store, exposing them to thousands of other products they might be interested in purchasing.
But this is just one example of how your brand can leverage and invest in purchasing convenience as part of a customer experience strategy. Something as simple as having accurate pricing and packaging information on your website can effectively eliminate purchasing friction.
At the end of the day, you don’t want to make it difficult for people to give you their money.
Another thing that Nordstrom is using its new customer experience tool for? Data.
By learning about location and style preferences through the Nordstrom Reserve Online & Try On In-Store program, the retailer can incorporate personalization in a scalable way. And customers love personalization.
To provide the best possible customer experience, businesses should collect information throughout the customer relationship that can be used to provide relevant suggestions or more informed support in the future.
In the eyes of the customer, personalization (when done right) can serve as a sign of respect for their loyalty and business. It also signals that your business is interested in strengthening the relationship by continuously working to provide better service, suggestions, support, etc.
While there are many avenues for collecting and leveraging customer data, I think a simple solution such as a shared inbox for your customer success or service department is a great first step. By creating a transparent, universal space where folks can turn up past customer conversations or requests, you’re laying the foundation for more contextual communication and outreach.
Ever landed on a website that was a disaster to navigate on mobile? I have, and if you‘re anything like me, you didn’t stick around for very long.
Back in 2015, mobile internet use passed desktop use for the very first time. Since then, mobile usage continues to grow, making mobile optimization a high priority for businesses looking to provide a simple and seamless experience for customers and potential buyers.
In an effort to amp up your business‘s ease of use, I recommend focusing on simplifying website navigation for all browser types. After all, you can’t expect customers to wait until they get to a desktop to uncover the information they need, right?
A great example I’d like to reference here is Amazon. In my opinion, Amazon embodies simplicity and ease of use in its checkout process by enabling Amazon Prime members to buy an item with just one click:
Even more importantly, it also offers a quick and easy way to uncover product info and answers to common purchasing questions within the same screen:
Pro tip: If you need examples of outstanding mobile websites, I’ve got you covered. And if you need help figuring out how to optimize your website for mobile users, I’ve got you covered there, too.
When thinking about your approach to channel flexibility, I think “omni-channel” is the term to keep in mind.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, omni-channel is defined as an approach that provides customers with an integrated, seamless experience — even when moving from desktop to mobile or a social media channel to live support.
In an omni-channel world, the customer experience should be the same across platforms and channels — and it should contain proper context when applicable.
If you‘re looking to streamline channel flexibility as a key part of your customer experience strategy, get your team together to talk about what you want the customer experience to look, feel, and sound like across all channels. From there, you’ll have the common ground you need to begin employing a more fluid, contextual experience.
No business wants its service to feel robotic. But the truth is, as your business grows its customer base, it will be more difficult to provide the same personalized service that you did when you were only managing a handful of customers. That‘s not to say keeping your standards up is impossible, just that you’ll just need a little help. Luckily, artificial intelligence (AI) can help.
When used correctly, I think AI features add tremendous value to the customer experience and create incredible convenience for your customer support team. Our State of Service Report found that 75% of service leaders already use AI, and 83% say it makes it easier to respond to service requests.
For instance, a chatbot can field customer inquiries on your website when your agents are away. Even if the bot just redirects customers to your knowledge base, it still points them toward a potential solution and allows your company to be accessible 24/7.
AI can also help customer service and support reps to be more effective. In the HubSpot Service Hub, for instance, the software can summarize your voice conversation with suggested action points and allow you to tag a teammate.
Pro tip: HubSpot offers an AI-powered tool called ChatSpot which is free AI-powered assistant to help supercharge your work.
Proactive customer service doesn‘t just have to be the responsibility of your customer success team. Instead, everyone at your business can play a role in the customer’s experience after they purchase a product.
For customer service teams, reps can alert the customer success manager (CSM) if someone has reached out multiple times with complaints. Rather than expecting the CSM to spot this individual on their own, frontline reps can easily look at the customer‘s ticket history and recognize whether or not they’ve had continued issues with your brand.
What better way to learn about the customer experience than from their own social media?
Social listening is the monitoring of your brand’s social platform presence for direct mentions of your business. It can be used to observe trending topics in your industry, your competitors’ behavior, and hear if your customers’ needs are being fulfilled.
Using websites like Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and more, you‘ll see what customers have to say about your company. I’ve found that if you’re attentive enough, you can discover the pain points in the customer journey and other insights that can positively impact the customer experience. You can also choose from several tools to track direct brand mentions for your business.
Employee training shouldn’t be a one-and-done part of their onboarding. Instead, I think it should happen routinely to make sure your staff is equipped to exceed expectations.
First, start with your culture by giving your employees the same stellar experience as you do your customers.
“We want to embed customer experience throughout the employee journey, blending our CX mission and messaging into the entire journey. If we can connect a great customer experience with an empowered and engaging employee experience, then everybody wins,” says Walters.
“Connecting a great customer experience with an empowered and engaging employee experience creates a virtuous cycle where everybody’s happy.”
I know it’s important to offer knowledge training about your product, but what about preparing them for the face-to-face customer experience? Routine team training can look like conducting role-play scenarios or simulations to see how each employee treats potential customers in different situations. Some role-play scenarios include:
What I like: Role-play training workshops give employees a chance to critique each other on what they’ve done well and where they can improve in their communication, attitude, and presentation of your product/service.
Building an excellent CX flow isn’t a game of guesswork or intuition. You have to strategically measure the impact of your customer experience strategy and make enhancements based on data-backed evidence.
That’s why you have to track how users are interacting with your product and analyze the effectiveness of your customer experience. Here are a few essential metrics to achieve this:
Tracking these core CX metrics gives you a pulse of your customers and flags any gaps you need to address in your experience.
You‘ve done the legwork to create a great customer experience. But as user needs evolve, you’ll have to invest more effort in optimizing this CX flow. Constantly evolving your strategy ensures your CX is aligned with expectations.
To optimize your CX, I recommend you establish feedback loops to regularly collect input from users. Whether it’s minor bugs or major inefficiencies in your product, give users a space to share their candid feedback whenever they want.
On top of this, you can also connect with power users to understand how your product is helping them achieve their goals. Use this conversation to identify pain points within the platform and map the scope for improvement.
Finally, remember to pay close attention to user sessions to find real-time insights on where users get stuck or feel confused.
These few tactics will give you much to work with to optimize your customer experience. Work with the design, engineering, and customer service team to eliminate all roadblocks and create a frictionless flow.
Rome wasn‘t built in a day — and you shouldn’t expect your customer experience strategy to be either.
My advice? Work on defining and streamlining your customer experience design, but do so under the notion that things will need to evolve as your business and customer base grows.
I’ve discovered that as I learn what it means to communicate with customers on their terms and collect data along the way, I find it’s easier to make informed decisions about my overall customer experience strategy. I hope you discover this, too!
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
The 2000s and 2010s were a great time to sell products and services online. Few people know this about me, but I used to sell handmade jewelry through eBay, which helped put me through university.
Back then, there were really only two customer requirements: I needed to guarantee the pieces were unique and provide fast delivery. I wouldn’t have to attract leads. They would find me themselves, send me a quick message, and click “buy.” The competition for certain services and products was so slim — or even non-existent.
This is so different from what I’m seeing today as a full-time freelance marketer. It takes weeks, if not months, to acquire new customers. And you have to be very persistent (and creative) to find and convince leads to choose you over others.
To win in today’s market, you need all decisions to be well-thought-out — and that’s what creating a customer acquisition funnel will help you with.
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A customer acquisition funnel is a path that a potential client goes through from learning about a company’s product or service to becoming (and, ideally, staying) a customer.
It has four main stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention, which I discuss further in this article. By knowing which phase a potential client is in, companies can tailor their marketing strategies, sales processes, and communication tone accordingly.
The reason why it’s called a funnel is because it resembles one. You start off with a broad group of potential clients, which becomes smaller and smaller as leads start learning about your offer and, ultimately, convert into clients.
As someone who runs a business, here are the top reasons why I believe it’s important to have a customer acquisition funnel.
Most humans understand things better if we can visualize them (I know I do). This is one of the perks of creating a customer acquisition funnel.
You can map out the different stages, explain their key characteristics, and create a code of conduct for your entire team. For example, they’ll know that they shouldn’t push for a sale when a lead is still familiarizing themselves with your brand — and, conversely, will know when it’s time to act.
Part of creating a customer acquisition funnel is about deciding on the criteria of when a lead is deemed ready to pass to the next stage. You’ll have a scoring system which will let you alert sales reps that a person is finally ready to talk business.
Think of potential clients taking certain actions like visiting pricing pages, using a free trial heavily day after day, participating in a webinar, etc.
If leads drop out at a certain stage or even after viewing a specific asset, you can examine the reasons.
For example, let’s say that you speak to leads who drop out from the pricing page. You find out that they decided to buy from competitors because it was hard to tell what was included in your offer. Knowing this, you could work on a more transparent pricing strategy.
Having a customer acquisition funnel gives you the comfort of some predictability in an economy that has been all but predictable these past few years.
Over time, you’ll be able to see how many leads you’ve generated in the previous quarter (or any other relevant period), how many of them went on to each consecutive stage, and who eventually converted.
Additionally, since the customer acquisition funnel also covers post-purchase activities, you’ll see how much you currently make from return buyers and what potential there is to generate sales through cross-selling and upselling to existing customers.
If you search online, you’ll see that there are different versions of customer acquisition funnels. The reason for this is that some businesses adjust it to fit their unique circumstances or industry.
For the sake of this piece, I decided to show you universal categorization, which all these variations come from.
This stage begins when someone first learns about your product or service and ends once you’ve been able to make them consider buying from you.
It takes a variety of tactics to generate that genuine interest, which is why some sources break the awareness stage into two smaller phases: discovery and interest.
The “discovery” part is like getting your foot in the door. Your goal is to make them notice your offer through channels like traditional or social media, content marketing, or paid ads, to name a few options.
Once they’ve interacted with your message and want to find out more, you’re in the “interest” substage. Your goal here is to build their engagement through relevant (and non-salesy!) content, for example, by having them sign up for a newsletter or follow you on social media.
Just like the first stage, this one is also commonly broken down into smaller ones, i.e., “research” and “intent.”
In the first substage, your potential client begins looking for more information about your offer. They might start off by reading testimonials on your page or looking at comparisons, like this Hootsuite vs. Loomly example.
But, after that, they’ll want to turn to third parties for a 100% non-biased opinion, too. They might search for opinions through branded hashtags on social media or on comparison sites like G2 if you’re in B2B. If the opinions are flattering, this will propel them into the “intent” phase.
This late-consideration stage is when things get particularly interesting. How so? It’s a make-it-or-break-it moment, where the lead is almost certain that you’re a good fit for their needs. But the ‘almost’ part means that they need that final argument to take action.
Companies that identify this critical moment correctly usually reach out with a great proposal like a free demo (or free samples) to convince leads to give the product a try. I was surprised to see that only 4% of SaaS businesses don’t offer a free tryout — it certainly hints at something!
This is where your leads are ready to become customers. It can take them just a few seconds if you’re an ecommerce store, and all it takes is to finalize their purchase.
But, if you offer B2B services, it could be a bit more complex, like adjusting the offer to your client’s needs. Here’s where your sales team should be proactive and show their dedication to making the clients happy.
Yes, retention is an integral part of the acquisition funnel, which makes it different from the classic, three-stage sales funnel which ends with the conversion itself.
This is the end of the sales process but the start of the (hopefully long-term) post-purchase phase. You want to keep your clients satisfied and engaged with your product to secure recurring revenue for your business. Think of offering special discounts and superb customer service. Many businesses also introduce a referral program to get new clients through recommendations and keep customer acquisition costs low.
Now that we’re clear on the theory, it’s time for some practice.
Here are the steps I recommend taking, along with examples of actions you could set up to keep leads moving through the funnel.
Before you ideate your acquisition strategy, you need to identify your buyer personas and segment them into groups (that is, if you haven’t done that already).
Think of who your ideal customers are based on data like demographics, psychographics, and their common goals and pain points. I recommend looking at your existing clients, if possible, and checking what common traits your long-term, high-value customers share.
You need to be clear on whom you’re targeting (and where they can be found) as you’ll tailor your entire funnel for these different potential customer groups.
Consider different channels, both online and offline, where you could cast your net and generate leads. The exact channels will vary based on whether you’re in B2B or B2C, but you could consider:
Once you have the audience’s attention, focus on deepening their interest. What works for your buyer persona? Try answering the following, to the best of your knowledge:
This will help you decide whether you would be better off sending personalized tips via email, sharing free assets, or maybe building social proof by sharing user reviews in your content. If you do the latter, just make sure you don’t push for a sale.
Think of how you can make your competitors pale in comparison to what you offer. Remember how I said you should give customers a gentle nudge at this point? Give the following tactics a thought:
Now that you’ve encouraged leads to become customers, your main priority is to make it as easy as possible. Be sure to add a clear, visible CTA: “buy now,” followed by a simple checkout process. Remove any unnecessary steps or information to create an enjoyable checkout experience and avoid anything coming in the way.
Now’s the time to keep your customers engaged to retain them. This part is where your customer service and product teams will have the most influence. For starters, make sure to:
Now, let’s see how this could play out in a realistic scenario. We’re going to put ourselves in the shoes of an online fitness coaching business.
Your buyer persona is someone between 30-55 years, who leads a sedentary lifestyle and suffers from a — quite literal — pain point, i.e., back problems. These individuals want to strengthen their core with an at-home routine.
You publish a blog post titled, “10 Best At-Home, Zero Equipment Exercises to Alleviate Back Pain.” You run a short video ad on Instagram, referring to their struggle, and redirect them to the article for a solution. It’s the first time they’ve ever visited your site — or heard about you.
On the blog, a pop-up appears offering a free “7-Day At-Home Workout Plan” in exchange for the visitor’s email address. After signing up, the person receives a series of emails, one per day, with valuable content such as daily workout tips and nutrition advice. The lead becomes convinced that you’re trustworthy.
On the 8th day, the potential customer gets an offer to join a free webinar with a Q&A session, titled “How to stay motivated in your workouts.” To secure more participants, you run retargeting ads on social media. This way, you remind those who clicked on the webinar page but didn’t sign up for the free, no-strings-attached event.
During the webinar, the fitness coach answers all questions and explains how their premium fitness program works.
At the end, attendees get a limited-time 20% discount for a 12-week personalized fitness coaching program, along with a link. This creates a sense of urgency.
Leads are taken to a simple checkout process. It’s free of any distractions like banners or competing CTAs that could stop them from converting.
New clients receive an onboarding email with a video from their coach, introducing them to a private Slack community and a personalized workout dashboard. They also get a link to a calendar where they can schedule their first 1:1 session with the coach.
After completing the first month of the training, they get a 50% discount for a meal plan and a discount code for supplements from partner brands, which complements their fitness journey.
They are also encouraged to join a referral program where they earn $50 for every friend they refer who signs up for the program.
And there it is — just one of the routes leads could take to become happy customers.
If you want to ideate your potential acquisition journeys, HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates will be a great starting point.
Your work on the funnel doesn’t end with the stages I’ve mentioned above. As customers’ needs change and new competitors appear on the market, what works today might not work in a few months. That’s why you need to constantly refine your funnel.
How? Here is a list of some great tactics from customer acquisition experts and my own experiences.
I’ll start off with one of my personal favorites, which some customer acquisition specialists refer to as “hinting at the promised land.” It’s about figuring out how you can give a taste of your product, whether digital or physical, to someone who is still far from putting it in their basket.
I believe that Ahrefs can be a perfect source of inspiration. A few years ago, the SaaS company decided to make some of its features free to use on their website, without any opt-in.
The company lets you check three things: How many backlinks your website has, its authority score, and if you have any broken links. All you have to do is enter your website’s URL. Ahrefs shows you the information and tells you that there’s much more on a paid plan, encouraging you to give it a try.
This lets them build leads’ confidence in their product’s value, increasing the likelihood that visitors will eventually become customers.
Pro tip: If you offer a physical product, I recommend taking a look at Sephora’s virtual try-on feature. Like Ahrefs, it lets you see a real-life product applied to you.
Getting testimonials from real (unpaid) users is a tip I recommend to all businesses. Yet, I believe there are three groups that can benefit in particular, i.e., those who offer a product that:
Leads searching for such solutions don’t want to take any chances that what they buy won’t work for their goals.
Greta Maiocchi, head of marketing and admissions at Open Institute of Technology (OPIT), says that their organization knew this and decided to take endorsements to a higher level. They not only display testimonials on their site but also let potential clients get in touch with alumni.
But how did they get there? Maiocchi says that OPIT first reorganized its customer engagement strategy. “We discovered that our rich learning environment, with benefits like weekly professor meetings and access to tutors, was our rewarding differentiator,” she says.
OPIT started accentuating these perks right from the first interaction with leads, effectively addressing the online learning apprehensions of their target group. “Additionally, we gave a personalized touch by connecting potential students with alumni to give them a real-life glimpse into OPIT.”
This resulted in a 30% rise in conversion rate for the institute, and this happened during the initial inquiry stage itself, Maiocchi adds.
Based on her experiences, Maiocchi sums up: “It’s not about overhauling the entire funnel structure; sometimes, nuanced changes can provide exceptional results.”
I recommend using user analytics and usability testing tools because they will shorten the time it takes to understand what’s behind your conversion numbers. You’ll see which parts of your website, emails, or other assets get the most clicks and reads and where they drop out.
This is something I’ve experienced first-hand.
Several years ago, I worked as a content marketer at a SaaS company that decided to include free assets to encourage signups to a freemium plan.
There was a library of 25 free templates, traffic looked great, and the average user session duration was quite long, which hinted that they interacted with the page content. But, for some reason, conversions weren’t impressive.
To figure out the reason, we set up a session recording tool and saw that the reason was rather prosaic.
There was a pop-up that was set up cross-site by sales, which activated halfway through the page. This drew the leads’ attention away from the templates. After excluding these pages from the ongoing campaign, leads began clicking on relevant CTAs and signing up for the freemium plan.
Did you know that, while 81% of brands believe that they have a “good” or “excellent” customer engagement strategy, only 62% of consumers agree?
I think this number is a wake-up call, and companies should make it a habit of asking clients for their opinions.
Sergey Taver, marketing manager of Precision Watches, agrees with me. As a company offering premium products, the brand is very proactive in gathering feedback that would help them maintain the highest customer experience standards.
“One unique strategy we’ve implemented is utilizing customer feedback effectively to enhance our service offerings,” Taver says. “We actively seek feedback and recommendations through email follow-ups after purchases. This procedure demonstrates our dedication to client satisfaction and points out areas in which we may improve.”
Taver told me that Precision Watches implemented quite a few changes based on their customer feedback, including virtual one-on-one consultations with their watch specialists.
“This change in our practices has resulted in a 25% rise in client engagement and a 15% increase in repeat business. Clients value the customized experience because it builds confidence and loyalty,” he concludes.
The more diverse your conversion strategies and user acquisition channels, the more likely your clients are to have different expectations of what onboarding should look like.
Simon Lee, CEO at Glance, told me that they’ve created personalized onboarding sequences using behavioral segmentation as a response to this expectation.
“Instead of sending all new leads through the same general funnel, we first divided users by their engagement with our platform.
For instance, people who enrolled through a product demo got a highly visual, feature-centric onboarding sequence,” Lee says. “In contrast, users enrolled through an educational piece got a benefits-oriented onboarding sequence.”
Lee told me that the approach led to a 27% activation rate uplift and an 18% churn reduction in the first three months of the intervention.
“The lesson here is that onboarding has a material impact on user learning and retention. When customized, users learn and engage more quickly and stick around longer,” he explains.
With so many options to try out, it can be tempting to keep adding new strategies or tactics into your funnel. That’s fine, as long as they don’t accidentally introduce user confusion or contradict one another. Sometimes, you can find more value in cutting steps.
Rain Yang, founder and CEO at WoodenAve, told me how they’ve been able to boost conversions by simplifying their user acquisition process.
He says that the brand turned to a “frictionless onboarding and value-first follow-up strategy to fix lead drop-offs happening right before they completed signup.”
Instead of adding new steps to improve the funnel, WoddenAve focused on removing unnecessary friction by simplifying the application process. Yang told me that, following this change, the brand saw a 20% increase in completed sign-ups within 30 days.
But it didn’t end there. Yang says that the company also worked to improve the post-onboarding experience to prevent customers from falling into the “post-sign-up abyss.”
“We employed a value-first follow-up strategy, sending personalized insights, like projected credit score improvements, based on their data. We built trust early on by focusing on their current needs instead of trying to sell them things. This led to a 15% rise in first-time loan applications,” Yang says.
Yang concluded with a piece of advice that stuck with me: “Don’t just invite customers into the door; show them why they should stay.”
Building an effective customer acquisition funnel can feel complex at first. The good news is once you and the entire organization understand its purpose and learn to put the customer’s perspective in the front seat, you might see a great return.
My advice is to stay inquisitive about your clients needs and about the purpose of each and every action your business takes to win customers. Review each stage of the funnel regularly, organize brainstorming sessions, and track data through the entire process.
Here’s to seeing more conversions and long-lasting relationships with clients.
