Well done!
The lead generation process has worked for you. You have attracted potential buyers, captured their information, nurtured them for a while, and now you have warm leads who are ready to take action!
Here at the bottom of the funnel, is a golden opportunity for you to position your eCommerce brand as superior to its competitors, flatter your products and offers with data and big numbers, accelerate the deal cycle, and instill confidence in their decision to purchase.
As soon as you have captured the attention of the potential consumers in your top of funnel and middle of funnel marketing, you’ll have to close the deal through the bottom of funnel marketing by ensuring you convince them your offer is the best there is.
You want your leads at the bottom of the funnel, and you have spent quite an amount of time, effort, and money to get them there. This is when your leads are ready to decide whether to buy from your eCommerce store or from a competitor.
In this article, we will discuss in detail several aspects of the bottom funnel marketing including;
- What is bottom of funnel marketing?
- Why does a good bottom funnel matter?
- Top 10 Bottom Funnel Marketing Tactics for eCommerce
- How to measure bottom of funnel marketing success
- What is post-purchase interaction and why does it matter?
What is Bottom of the Funnel Marketing?
In a nutshell, the bottom of the funnel is where you convert your Sales Qualified Leads into paying customers; that is the spot where conversions occur.
The conversions at the bottom of the funnel are a two-part process. Leads are stagnant here, perhaps still comparing alternatives and weighing their options. This is when you have to be very intentional with your messaging to give them that final push that would cause the conversion to happen.
At this stage, B2B leads would typically need to speak directly with a sales representative, while B2C leads may never require any support to complete a purchase.
The bottom of the funnel is where you;
- Foster the decision-making process
- Convince leads your product or offer is their best choice.
The number of leads you have at this marketing funnel stage is much smaller than at the top and middle, but these leads are much more Marketing Qualified Leads eligible and equally fit to become paying customers.
As you’ve taken your leads through the earlier stages of Awareness at the top of the marketing funnel and Interest and Desire in the middle of the funnel, you’ve cultivated their zeal and earned their trust. During the next stage, these potential buyers will evaluate, intend, and ideally take the Action every business owner craves – purchase.
Let’s now examine what a good bottom funnel marketing looks like, and then we’ll explore why a good bottom funnel matters to any business.
Why Does a Good Bottom Funnel Matter?
Before we look at why a good bottom funnel matters for eCommerce brands, it is essential to know what to look out for to recognize a good bottom funnel.
At the bottom of the funnel, the main deal is convincing indecisive leads and converting them to paying customers. To achieve this objective, marketers must explain why their product is the best in a pool of similar products. Marketers do this by using campaigns or incentives to encourage the leads to convert to customers.
At this point, you should have noticed our four magic words to give you a grasp of what a good bottom funnel marketing should do.
- Convince
- Encourage
- Convert
- Increase sales
Convince
The leads at the bottom of your marketing funnel are warm leads, ready to make a purchase. However, there is a small problem here – your competitors.
These warm leads are on the fence. They know they have a problem and have many solutions to solve it. But, they’re not sure which solutions would solve it. So, they’re waiting for that nudge to make the right choice.
They don’t want to look like a fool and regret the decision of buying from a particular eCommerce store. Instead, they’re looking for the assurance that they’ll get the right product from the right company at the right price.
Customers are indecisive by the time they enter the bottom funnel. Therefore, you must find a way to convince them before one of your competitors do.
Encourage
A proven way to encourage your warm leads to buy from you, as seen previously, is to enable them to trust your product. There are a few proven ways to do this;
- Offer discounts and coupons codes
- Free trials (if you are one of the SaaS guys)
- Product comparisons
- Free shipping for first-time customers
- Reviews and testimonials
You’d agree that over 90% of customers you have encountered were interested in getting extra value for their money. Unfortunately, there are no proven tactics to sell products other than advertising mouth-watering offers.
Convert
According to Marketing Sherpa, a conversion is “the point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action.” In other words, a conversion occurs when a lead responds to your Call-To-Action. This could be signing up for a newsletter, submitting an email address, or requesting a demo, amongst other things.
But if you run an eCommerce business, my guess is you want leads to make some purchases and get your business a few dollars richer.
Conversions are the essence of having a funne, so if a bottom funnel doesn’t cause some of those to happen, what is the point?
Increase Sales
A good bottom funnel should take two steps to be successful.
The first step is to convert leads to paying customers, and the second step is to encourage the customer to come back and shop again through post-purchase interactions. We will discuss this topic in detail later in this article.
Once this goal is reached, the business has earned more sales. This is an important goal because companies rely on customers to buy their products, and this is a cycle that never ends.
I have never heard of such a thing as too many sales, have you?
Another quality of a good bottom of funnel marketing is its ability to boost the confidence of leads so they feel comfortable making a purchase. It is essential for marketers to educate leads about their items and establish credibility for their brands. If your brand has won a few industry awards, do not hesitate to flaunt them. This would make your brand look more impressive than your competitors.
If leads are confident about a product or brand, a purchase is just around the corner.
Ultimately, the goal of any business is to grow through repeat sales, which is why a good bottom of the funnel marketing is vital.
Next, we will discuss some proven tactics that make bottom funnel marketing successful.
Top 10 Bottom Funnel Marketing Tactics for eCommerce
You don’t want to lose any leads once they have reached the bottom of the sales funnel, especially if you could have converted them through strategic messaging and special incentives like the ones above.
Here are some of the most acceptable tactics to make the most of your bottom funnel marketing.
- Free Trials or Basic Plans
If you are a SaaS dude like me, I’m sure you’ve already heard about the milk and honey we use to attract bottom of the funnel leads to take action on our landing pages.
Free trials and basic plans are among the most effective tactics to convince warm leads that your brand and product are credible and aren’t just after their precious money, especially when you do not require them to input their card details during the initial sign-up.
Providing hands-on experience on what they will achieve from your product is a great way to start. The free trial should explicitly describe the value propositions in detail and include access to all the features you have.
In addition, you should run your free trial for a minimum of 14 days to allow leads to gain the whole experience and a maximum of 30 days so they don’t question your intentions.
- Live Demos
Another way to ensure your bottom of the funnel leads experience your product and feel comfortable with the user interface is by walking them through a live demonstration via teleconferencing. The demonstration should cover all possible solution points, product features, and beyond.
The lead’s present and future requirements are met during live demos, and cost savings are achieved. Consider scheduling three to four sessions if everyone is available since one session may not be enough.
- Social Media
Ever heard of #buildingInPublic?
Building in public is a social media movement for founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs. These folks share stories of wins, losses, and lessons on Twitter.
By building in public, they appear authentic yet vulnerable and build a community of other founders who eventually become customers. Although many founders use it as a gimmick to go viral and a ploy to get users, that isn’t the idea for authentic founders. They just have a story to tell and are hungry to learn from other founders.
Building in public is writing your own autobiography as a founder, CEO, or entrepreneur one tweet at a time.
If you’re hearing about this for the first time, get your Twitter account and be ready to join the community.
Benefits of building in public on Twitter include;
- Win social proof
- Grow an audience of niche followers
- Earn free marketing
Building in public can generate viral word of mouth if done well and with your zeal coupled with the enthusiasm of a community. And as we know, positive word of mouth is one of the best ways to market a new brand or product.
Share relevant presentations, video links, diagrams, or other web references through social channels that indirectly establish your value propositions and their benefits.
- Blog Posts
In bottom funnel marketing, blog posts are a great way to communicate key features about a product and answer implementation queries. It is possible to create posts for specific buyer personas so that your content is more relevant and customized. Once this content is developed, you can distribute it through email, social media, user communities, or your CRM.
Unlike the top of the funnel blog posts, bottom funnel blog posts shouldn’t be SEO friendly. These contents are intended for very warm leads who have been nurtured and made to experience your product through the top and middle funnels. Giving cold leads access to one of these content might throw them off balance and cause a leak in your marketing funnel.
- Newsletters and Warm Emails
The essence of newsletters and warm emails is often overlooked at the bottom of the funnel. Marketers think of newsletters and warm emails as a cliche, basic method of seeking cheap attention from leads, possibly because of a low click-through or open rate. Despite this, other marketers who play the game right continue to see many conversions happen at the bottom of their marketing funnels.
As a marketer, you think of ways to engage your customers and boost sales. You have your answer if you can play it right in your newsletters and warm emails.
Newsletters have stood the test of time as an effective marketing tactic. You get to promote your brand, and leads get exclusive and personalized content at the bottom of the funnel.
According to McKinsey researchers, you’re 40 times more likely to get bottom funnel conversions from email marketing than social media.
Be clear, concise, confident, and value-driven in your newsletter and warm emails. Strive to leave a lasting impression even if you don’t win the business. Maintaining good relationships can help win back lost business and increase repeat business.
- Promo and Discount Codes
As soon as you have warm leads hanging around in the bottom of the funnel, you should be able to convince a fair share of them to take action by offering promo and discount codes. This is particularly great for eCommerce.
You have seen a potential customer visit your website and add an item to the cart without purchasing. You could get the sale by emailing them with a discount code.
- Customer Support
Unlike the experience in a supermarket, where consumers can feel and gauge a product to see if it’s right for them or call for the assistance of a physical salesperson, online shopping is filled with uncertainty and doubt.
It is your responsibility to stimulate that experience by providing them support. There are many ways you can do this online depending on what industry you’re in – SaaS or eCommerce;
- 3D videos
- Webinars
- Facebook or YouTube lives answering FAQs
Educating bottom of funnel leads and customers about the product achieves two objectives. First, it assigns a human face to the company in the customer’s mind, which increases trust, which is highly valuable at this stage of the funnel. Secondly, it reduces buyer anxiety and doubt and boosts confidence in your brand.
- Affiliates and Influencers
A good partnership with influencers and affiliates can skyrocket the bottom of funnel conversions and provide risk-free marketing. You won’t have to spam someone’s inbox or push ads onto faces, because you rely on someone reputable to promote your brand to an audience that already trusts them.
Affiliate and influencer marketing are both priceless. An Adweek study says 74% of people rely on word-of-mouth recommendations. And more than 80% of American consumers will look for recommendations from trusted entities and websites before deciding to purchase anything.
That makes affiliate marketing as valuable as paid ads or even more. Consider creating an affiliate program. It is also a great way to engage current customers if you incentivize them to promote your products and brand on your behalf.
We’ll examine more ways to promote post-purchase interaction later in this article.
- Video Training Courses
Another remarkable tactic to boost conversions in the bottom funnel is to create video training courses.
When your leads can see your team interacting with them via a video, it fosters a closer relationship with your brand. This interactive format is excellent for answering questions and addressing user pain points right before the conversion. And videos are the easiest way to show different use cases for your product.
- Success Stories and Case Studies
Success stories and case studies are other types of content that can be used anywhere but are most effective at the bottom of the sales funnel. Sharing success stories and case studies is a powerful tool in your arsenal when someone is deciding whether or not to purchase from you.
Customers’ success stories and user case studies combine the persuasive power of statistics and proof with the engaging elements of storytelling. Their combined efforts help on-the-fence buyers visualize themselves as customers and demonstrate what they will be able to accomplish.
Zapier never fails at this. They frequently highlight customer stories and interesting user case studies by focusing on the time saved and money made by customers through using Zapier, tapping into their value proposition.
How to Measure Bottom of Funnel Marketing Success
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost Per Acquisition gives you an insight into how much you spend to generate each sale or customer.
To calculate the cost per acquisition, marketers divide the entire cost of marketing campaigns by the number of conversions they get. The idea is if the investment outweighs the ROI, you might want to consider other alternatives so you do not run at a loss.
Customer Acquisition Cost = Cost of Sales and Marketing divided by the Number of New Customers Acquired
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
LTV measures the amount of value a customer brings into the business. Customer Lifetime Value helps you weigh how effectively your business model is performing throughout the speculated period.
To get your LTV, divide the customer value (money spent) over the average lifespan of the customer.
LTV = Customer Value X Average Customer Lifespan
- Conversion rates
Conversion rate measures how often conversions take place.
The bottom funnel conversion rate could be obtained by finding how many people in the bottom funnel converted to customers and made a purchase.
Conversion rates are calculated by simply taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion during the same period.
Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions / Total number of leads X 100
Each bottom funnel marketing channel has different goals, so it’s important to analyze the success of each one. These channels might include;
- Webinars = Number of attendees
- Newsletters = Number of sign ups / Open rates
- Targeted blog posts = Click through rates
- Warm emails = Click through rates
What is Post-Purchase Interaction and Why Does it Matter?
Customers know a brand is authentic when it stays in touch with them even after they have made the purchase. Post-purchase interactions are basically a brand’s effort to stay in touch with a customer after making a purchase.
If you run an eCommerce business, interacting with your customers when they are most anxiously waiting for their deliveries, you are going a step further to instill trust and exceed their expectations. This indeed interests them and inspires customer loyalty.
Some top post-purchase strategies include;
- Incentivizing your customers to promote the product they have just purchased
You can do this by launching an affiliate program with Metricks. They have a unique post-purchase widget that automatically pops up and convinces your shiny new customer to sign up to promote the item they have just purchased. No matter what it is.
- Create an Online Community for your Customers
Nothing beats providing a virtual space for all your customers to meet, network, and share personal experiences of your products. An example of a brand utilizing this tactic is Binance, with over three hundred thousand customers active in their telegram group.
- Loyalty programs
This is an avenue to incentivize customers to call again. This is not to be confused with affiliate programs that incentivize your customers to spread the word about your product. You could encourage customers to shop again by offering them discounts on their next purchase or going the route of a “buy one, get one free.”
The Takeaway
You now have everything you need to make the most of your bottom funnel marketing.
As you have seen, it is an integral part of the marketing funnel because there is where all the conversions take place. Customers are on the fence. On one side of the wall is you and on the other side is one or more of your competitors. It’s a sensitive stage of the funnel. Leads have already narrowed their options to you and perhaps a few of your competitors. And it’s now up to you to do a better job than your competitors at convincing them.
You do better, you get the customer, and you don’t. You lose them. Simple as that.