Whether you work in retail, advertising or e-commerce, you’ve likely come across the concept of a marketing funnel. This funnel helps visualize the stages consumers pass through when making a purchase. It can be broken up into three parts: the upper, middle, and lower funnel. In the third and final part of this article series, we will dig deeper, explaining what lower-funnel marketing is, comparing lower-funnel vs. upper-funnel marketing and detailing best practices.
What is Lower-Funnel Marketing?
So, what is bottom-of-the-funnel marketing? And what’s the more useful marketing strategy: top-funnel or bottom-funnel tactics? Before we can answer these questions, we must first clarify a few terms.
As we’ve stated, the marketing funnel comprises three steps, which we have outlined in detail.
- Top-of-the-funnel marketing: Customers realize they have a need that is not being met and develop an Awareness of a product to address this problem, thus stimulating their interest.
- Middle-of-the-funnel marketing: During this step, after comparing various products to see which better suits their needs, a customer’s interest transforms into a focused Desire to buy.
- Bottom-of-the-funnel marketing: At the bottom of the funnel, a consumer makes their final decision and takes Action — i.e., a purchase. If their experience is positive, they’ll be Loyal to the brand and might Advocate for it with others. This is the ultimate end goal of any company during lower-funnel marketing.
In lower-funnel marketing, you can often observe a few typical customer behaviors. Many will compare prices between different companies or search for final assurance policies, for example. To clinch sales, there are several lower-funnel marketing strategies you can employ, some of which we will examine.
Upper-Funnel vs. Lower-Funnel Marketing
Which is more important in the marketing funnel, upper-funnel vs. lower-funnel? The truth is that both are crucial. During the upper funnel stage, customers realize they have a particular need that isn’t being met and set out to find a product to solve this issue. This stage is very research heavy, with consumers looking into various companies, products and services, so marketing efforts should be focused on attracting new clients.
When a consumer is readying to make their final decision regarding a purchase, they are at the bottom of the funnel, meaning the lower-funnel marketing strategies you employ have a direct impact on conversion rates. More than that, the way you handle your lower-funnel marketing efforts may determine whether your customer turns into a regular. For these reasons, lower-funnel marketing strategies are more tailored, designed to directly reach customers and give them the necessary information to make a purchase.
In summary, thinking about these strategies in terms of top-of-funnel vs bottom-of-funnel marketing is unhelpful; it’s in bringing both together that you’ll get real results.
Understanding Prospects Ready to Convert
People at the top of the marketing funnel are called leads. These are potential buyers who are aware of your company but may not convert to paying customers. After making it to the bottom of the funnel, potential buyers are known as prospects. You can use behavioral data to identify prospects who are ready to convert, which can help drive lower-funnel marketing efforts. Some clear signs include:
- Repeated page visits: If the prospect keeps returning to the same product or pricing pages, it’s a clear sign that they are working up to making a decision.
- Cart activity: When a prospect adds an item to their cart or revisits a previously abandoned basket, this is often a strong indicator of intent to purchase.
- Requesting trials/demos: If a prospect requests a free trial or demo of a particular product or service, this is another good sign.
- Following social proof cues: Prospects who check out case studies and reviews or engage via social media are usually seeking final validation.
Once you’ve identified prospects ready to convert, you can nurture them to make a purchase using lower-funnel marketing strategies. This involves providing them with information-rich, high-value bottom-of-funnel content designed to provide invaluable insights that address key customer pain points. To ensure your lower-funnel marketing efforts are as effective as possible, you can segment your audience into specific demographics and create hyper-targeted campaigns for each.
When creating bottom of the funnel content and other lower-funnel marketing materials, maintain an awareness of each demographic and the specific concerns they may have. For example, Zoomers prioritize things like tech-savviness and social responsibility, while Millennials often place a greater emphasis on convenience and personalization.
Bottom-of-Funnel Marketing Strategies
As we’ve shown, when asking which is more important, upper vs lower-funnel marketing, the answer is — both! But in this article, we’ll focus on lower-funnel marketing strategies.
The lower-funnel marketing tactics you employ help determine whether you’ll clinch sales or not. During lower-funnel marketing, you have to do your utmost to convince prospects to commit to making a purchase, giving them a good reason to choose you over your competitors.
In this section, we’ll go over a few bottom of the funnel marketing tactics that can help you maximize conversion rates. Depending on your particular demographic and market niche, some of these strategies may be more effective than others. Monitoring and analyzing lower-funnel metrics can help you determine the efficacy of your current lower-funnel marketing strategy, allowing you to find the best methods for you.
Personalized Offers and Discounts
A recent survey shows that over 75% of customers say receiving personalized communications played a crucial role in prompting them to consider a given company. Clearly, personalization is an important tool in lower-funnel marketing. One way in which it can be employed is through offers and discounts.
In lower-funnel marketing, promotional offers can be personalized in a variety of ways. You might offer a cart abandonment discount to convince a potential customer to go through with a purchase, or you might run dynamic ads for products they viewed but didn’t buy. Or, you might decide to take a more personal approach, utilizing birthday offers and anniversary discounts. These are all great ideas for lower-funnel marketing.
Regardless of the form they take, personalized lower-funnel marketing promotions demonstrate that you care about your customers and their experience with your brand. This makes potential buyers feel valued and appreciated, making them more likely to engage with your company. As such, personalized offers are a great lower-funnel marketing tactic. Additionally, if price is a matter of concern for them, an additional discount might remove that particular barrier to purchase.
Remarketing and Abandonment Recovery
Shopping cart abandonment — when a prospect adds items to their basket but exits the site without making a purchase — is a lower-funnel marketing struggle faced by all online retailers. In fact, according to Statista, global cart abandonment rates have been rising gradually since 2014. Their research shows that in 2023, the share of abandoned online shopping carts reached 70% for the first time in ten years. According to the Baymard Institute, this high rate of abandonment causes online stores to lose around $260 billion per year.
Taking the necessary steps to reduce abandonment and recover prospects is of the utmost importance during lower-funnel marketing. This is where remarketing comes in — that is, attracting prospects back to your site using tailored ads, often featuring items they added to their basket but didn’t buy. Remarketing tactics can also be used to draw successful conversions back into the middle of the marketing funnel for repeat sales.
Tailored lower-funnel marketing ads are a key part of this process. They might take the form of:
- Standard remarketing ads tailored to previous visitors to your site;
- Dynamic remarketing ads tailored to a specific user;
- Social media remarketing ads, which appear across social media or in search engine results linked with social media platforms;
- Video remarketing ads, which appear on YouTube videos or in the margins of the site.
These lower-funnel marketing ads help remind prospects of your brand and can influence them to rethink cart abandonment, especially when combined with a discount. They can also encourage successful conversions to shop from you again.
Social Proof and Case Studies
Recent studies show that social proof is one of the most important factors in lower-funnel marketing and sales conversion, with 95% of consumers claiming to read online reviews before shopping. This is because if a product or service has received a lot of praise, it shows it is trustworthy and high quality. Similarly, case studies can build credibility while also providing prospective customers with key insights into how this purchase might solve their particular pain points.
Product reviews can usually be found at the bottom of a product page, beneath the item description. This placement is important, as it means that visitors don’t have to look far for information regarding the product they’re considering, and is essential in lower-funnel marketing. For the same reason, it’s a good idea to have a clearly labeled and easily navigable page with case studies.
To maximize the impact of user reviews, you should do your best to engage with them in a productive manner, whether on your website, on Google Reviews or elsewhere. If someone leaves a positive review, you could leave them a personalized thank you or send a couple of tips to help them make the most of their product. Lower-funnel marketing can help convince a consumer to choose you over a competitor.
Simplified Checkout Processes
One of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment is overly complicated checkout processes, with over a fifth of US online shoppers ditching their baskets for this reason. To avoid losing customers at this crucial step, try to simplify their experience. Streamlining the checkout process is a great lower-funnel marketing tactic that can help prevent prospective buyers from losing interest during the sale.
Here are a few different ways you can optimize your checkout for more effective lower-funnel marketing.
- Optimize your site for mobile: An increasing number of people choose to shop online using their mobile device, with 76% of mobile shoppers claiming they do so to save time. So, be sure to optimize your checkout for desktop and mobile.
- Include a guest checkout option: Requiring account registration is a big ask. Allowing a customer to check out as a guest provides a much smoother experience.
- Offer a number of payment options: Providing users with the option of paying with a digital wallet or a “buy now, pay later” service saves them from having to go scrambling for their credit card.
There are other ways you can implement this lower-funnel marketing strategy, but these three tips give you a good place to start.
Customer Service and Support
Good customer service is another important aspect of lower-funnel marketing. According to Salesforce Research, nearly 90% of consumers say that they would be more inclined to make a repeat purchase after having a positive experience with a brand. This shows the importance of having a high-quality support team in place that works quickly and efficiently to provide all visitors to your site with the care they need.
As the saying goes, the first impression is the most important. Whether they first encounter your brand via social media, through a user review or by stumbling across your webpage, visitors to your site should immediately be made aware of your dedication to customer service. This might be in the form of a pop-up chat box offering assistance, a swift reply to an email or a friendly voice on the other end of your company helpline. Creating a positive impression helps lower-funnel marketing and can help convince consumers to give your brand a chance.
To use lower-funnel marketing tactics to encourage a customer to buy from you again or even to recommend you to others, you might consider sending them a personalized thank you email. You might even include an exclusive promo code to entice them to return. Either way, even just reaching out with a simple thank you is helpful with lower-funnel marketing, as it ensures the shopping experience ends on a positive note.
Technology and Tools for Lower-Funnel Marketing
There is a range of lower-funnel marketing technologies and tools available to help you make the most of your bottom of the funnel strategies and optimize conversion rates. For example, you can use heatmaps to see how visitors interact with your site, revealing where they click, how far they scroll and which pages they visit the most. Alternatively, you can use A/B testing tools to compare how two different versions of the same page perform, thereby determining which is the most effective. These lower-funnel marketing technologies can help you track key metrics and figure out what works and what doesn’t so that you can make data-informed design decisions for lower-funnel conversion optimization.
CRM (customer relationship management) systems are another useful tool for boosting conversion rates and increasing the efficacy of lower-funnel marketing strategies. This is because they can be used to track and nurture high-intent leads, helping turn them into prospects ready for conversion and then, finally, into sales. With these systems, you can automate follow-ups for potential customers still in the decision-making phase, which is essential in lower-funnel marketing.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Lower-Funnel Marketing
We’ve explained some of the key bottom-funnel tactics — but what should you avoid? In our experience, brands that struggle to make conversions during this final stage of the sales funnel often make one of these three lower-funnel marketing mistakes. Considering these are just as important as examining successful bottom of the funnel marketing examples.
- Overlooking the importance of trust-building elements: From confirming site safety protocols with secure badges to offering a clear and effective return policy to posting high-quality bottom-funnel content, there are lots of ways you can build customer trust. Whichever way you go about it, establishing your brand as trustworthy is absolutely essential in lower-funnel marketing and should not be overlooked.
- Neglecting to follow up on leads that show high purchase intent: In lower-funnel marketing, if a prospect shows high purchase intent but then doesn’t go ahead with their order, it’s crucial that you follow up as quickly as possible. Telling them that you’re still around — therefore reminding them of all the reasons you and your product stood out to them — might be all the encouragement they need to make a purchase.
- Relying solely on discounts without addressing other concerns: Discounts are great in lower-funnel marketing, but if they’re all your company has to offer, you’re unlikely to make many conversions. While high price points are a concern across many demographics, studies show that consumers often value trust, quality and good customer service. Certain demographics — namely Gen Z — place a great emphasis on things like authenticity and social responsibility, too.
By keeping these common pitfalls in mind, you’re more likely to get the results you’re looking for out of lower-funnel advertising.
Measuring Success in Lower-Funnel Marketing
To determine whether or not your bottom-funnel marketing efforts are bearing fruit, there are several important metrics you should monitor. Examples include cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value and, of course, conversion rate. By setting benchmarks for these lower funnel marketing metrics and regularly holding your current performance up against them, you can accurately assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. You can also track your progress more easily, enabling you to set useful short- and long-term lower-funnel marketing goals and make actionable plans for them.
By continuously measuring yourself against these lower-funnel marketing benchmarks, as well as utilizing essential data from heatmaps, A/B testing and CRM systems, you will be able to find out which marketing tactics work for you. This will allow you to refine your lower-funnel marketing campaigns, thereby producing better results and helping you meet conversion and revenue goals.
Finally, don’t forget that customer feedback is another indispensable tool you have at your disposal in lower-funnel marketing. By paying attention to the needs and wants of your users, you will have a better understanding of what they’re looking for from your brand. And with this understanding, you can guarantee they will find it.
Conclusion
Remember that it’s not a question of the top of the funnel vs. bottom of the funnel; both are crucial. With that being said, lower-funnel marketing is an essential part of driving conversions and making more sales. Through a combination of personalized discounts, remarketing campaigns, efficient website design and excellent customer service, you can help convert prospects in this part of the funnel. These lower-funnel marketing strategies are all grounded on a bedrock of trust, thereby providing prospective buyers with the reassurance required to clinch a sale.
As we’ve highlighted, such lower-funnel marketing tactics are at their most effective when you are armed with the necessary analytical technologies — and that is where we come in. When you register on the MGID platform, you’ll be given access to advanced tools to help you analyze both site performance and user behavior. In addition, you’ll also benefit from the advice of a personal manager and a team of creative marketing specialists, all dedicated to helping you establish a dynamic brand with your unique voice.
Reach out today to find out more about how MGID can help you implement lower-funnel marketing tactics, drive conversions, grow your business and meet with success.
