Marketing Funnel, 4 steps toward converting leads

By Roberta Salzano

Published: April 28, 2025

The marketing funnel is used to select the best leads and turn them into customers. Knowing how to leverage marketing automation and digital marketing, therefore, becomes a necessity to improve digital communication and maintain the relationship with customers from a business development perspective.

The 4 key funnel steps, combined with inbound marketing techniques, significantly improve the customer buying experience. Let's look together at how to optimize your conversion process.

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What is a Funnel? Definition

The translation of funnel: funnel. The term Sales Funnel or Marketing Funnel, refers to the buying process that a potential customer goes through the different stages of a conversion process. The sales funnel serves to:

interest a potential buyer
qualify his maturity in the buying process
accompany him through to the sale
build his loyalty to the product and brand

The ultimate goal is to convert leads into customers. And in the end? build loyalty!!!

The marketing funnel consists of three main parts:

TOFU (Top of the Funnel) is the initial stage where the needs of the audience are not yet explicitly expressed
MOFU (Middle of the Funnel) is the entire middle path that tries to keep leads interested to bring them closer to the moment of conversion
BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) the final stage where nothing is needed for conversion

How to develop a funnel marketing strategy?

Before we launch into the discovery of the four macro phases of a marketing funnel, let's start by looking at what the preparatory work is to make sure you have everything ready.

Personas: who do you want to talk to?

Of course, the first step always remains knowing who we are talking to. Many companies make the mistake of trying to stay on a broad audience to increase the chances of conversion. But no, in marketing today you can no longer do the quantity over quality argument , you have to know your target audience in detail. This is where personas come in; define yours precisely and you have the perfect Identikit of the person.

How do you then associate your personas with the funnel? Quite simply each audience type has a different customer journey with different touch points. If you think about it, this is the basis of inbound marketing and lead generation strategies

What are the needs we want to satisfy?

Very well we have an in-depth knowledge of our audience, but do we know what need we could satisfy? the value proposition we decide to showcase must be designed to satisfy a specific need.

Anticipate obstacles in advance

Throughout the customer journey there are different obstacles that might put our lead off. Make a careful study of these to try to minimize them. Some leads are always lost along the way but try to avoid massacres.

A funnel model as inspiration

Prospect screening and customer lifecycle management is based on the 4 steps of the sales funnel:

Step 1: Awareness and Problem identification

The first stage of the funnel approach is to capture the attention of an Internet user and arouse his or her interest. It is in the information-gathering stage. You are already attracting a qualified lead to your website, as you are responding to their inquiries.

A content-rich website

Attracting users to your website can become a powerful content marketing lever . Offer content such as: blog articles, white papers, case studies, videos, etc.

Also for e-commerce and marketplace sites the same: it's all about addressing the concerns of potential buyers.

Landing pages for frequent keywords

These landing pages are aimed at attracting Internet users to a specific topic, such as a precise and popular keyword that corresponds to customers' expectations.

The landing page of a website is no longer the page on which the user spontaneously navigates.

These pages allow you to generate traffic, collect e-mail addresses and acquire potential customers by segmenting them by area of interest

A contact form for data capture.

Lead qualification starts here: your web page must contain a contact form for the user to fill out. The user, thus, can provide their contact information.

Start by studying contact data so you can qualify the best ones

You can contact the user and get to know them better before sending them an appropriate proposal.

Link information gathering to your CRM

Generating contacts is important; maintaining them, is essential. Collecting and centralizing all your databases in one information system is essential to:

provide effective support,
avoid duplication,
have up-to-date data,
be able to share information across departments: sales, billing, inventory management, etc.

Phase 2: Interest

Second phase: the acquisition of qualified leads. To generate them, it is necessary to optimize the customer journey and the personalization of the relationship to achieve a good customer experience.

The indispensable marketing automation

An automated marketing solution, coupled with an emailing solution, allows your sales representatives to save time by giving the final nudge to users to buy.

An automated emailing scenario tailored to the buyer's profile acts on behavior very smoothly to persuade without aggression or sales pressure.

Lead nurturing, to introduce you to your new prospects...

...with your best appearance, of course. Leads are like babies in the incubator. It is recommended that you pitch them with good content that removes any possible barriers to conversion.

Seize every opportunity with lead scoring

A lead is assigned a score: the higher the score, the more ready they are to receive a call from a sales representative.

What inbound marketing KPIs to analyze?

A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a key performance indicator.

Some performance indicators allow you to qualify prospects who are more likely to buy .

Here are the main ones:

Traffic on your website: the number of pages viewed, time spent, topics viewed.
Your Google ranking: check the performance of your natural referencing, this allows you to optimize your content to attract more visitors.
Email marketing: the type of email opened by your lead (newsletter), what they read, the type of links clicked.
Landing page: in addition to the conversion rate, it is advisable to test your page, as well as the call to actions to keep only the most efficient version.
Social networks: the number of shares, the traffic sent to your site from social networks.

Stage 3: Consideration

At this stage we end up with Leads who are concretely interested in our product or that of our competitors. It is therefore important to be able to stand out from the competition and give that missing push.

The sales representative finally enters the picture during this third phase. The exchange can take place by phone or e-mail-it is up to you to determine the type of marketing campaigns appropriate for closing the deal.

The sales contact

The sales representative is well equipped to present his proposal as he has the prospect's data, profile, interests, etc.

Step 4: Conversion

If all goes well, the prospect is ready to buy.

From email marketing to purchase

The sales representative has the prospect's email address and consent. The path to purchase can then be made via email.

Online payment

The sales process raises the issue of payment. A direct debit (SEPA direct debit) solution is useful to reduce the loss of customers or subscribers.

This point should not be underestimated. A smooth shopping experience is also made by a fast payment system. Conversely, any diffilc that leads to your customer not abandoning the cart once so close to the goal.

What about after conversion?

Retention

The final stage is perhaps the most important in the sales cycle.

Your e-mail scenarios must be tailored to succeed in this long-term marketing strategy: segment, personalize and tailor your messages.

Loyalty is good for your business.

Customer loyalty is indeed an unparalleled vector of growth and revenue:

A negative customer comment can do a lot of harm (bad online reputation)
Turning a potential customer costs seven times more than keeping an existing customer (Reichheld F.F., The loyalty effect)
80% of your revenue is generated by 20% of your customers (Pareto's Law)

Take care of after-sales service

Your personas (customer profiles) are now represented by real people with varying human behaviors and consumer expectations.

Adapt to each customer in your marketing support: think premium, think business, think customer satisfaction!

Expansion

Once the customer is loyal and somewhat appreciative of you, you can be daring and offer to take it one more small step further. For example, think of a Cross Selling strategy in which you can recommend products complementary to the one originally purchased. Or even by upselling you can take it to the higher-end products thereby increasing the spend.

Advocacy

Improve the customer journey by questioning your customers, learn what works, what level of quality is perceived, areas for improvement.

Satisfaction questionnaire, user community, every helpful comment is valuable!

The ability to leave a comment supports the right for your customer to express themselves: give them full freedom

Encourage them to become your ambassadors! Your satisfied customers are your best advertisement!

Tips: Excellent customer service also means being able to seize every opportunity to close an additional sale.

Measure the performance of your conversion funnel with Google Analytics

Having a Google Analytics account is extremely useful for analyzing your conversion funnel and measuring its efficiency when you do not have the appropriate CRM tool.

A webmarketing expert takes a functional view of processes:

to configure google analytics
To define custom goals in analytics analysis
to leverage the web analytics dataset
To correct and optimize the funnel at each step

Google Analytics settings allow you to measure the performance of your website conversion funnel accurately. You will be able to, for example:

analyze the Internet user's progress through your funnel
determine the origin of visitors accessing your contact form
see which landing pages generate the most contacts
measure the inbound conversion rate

You can cross-reference these figures with the number of shopping carts and orders to check the profitability of your actions.

What are the best software to choose?

The tools available for generating prospects in multi-channel mode are quite numerous.

Website creation software

Having a website is the basis for implementing digital marketing and funnel.
CMS or dedicated developer? Study your needs, that's the best advice we can give you!

Emailing software

As the mastery of datamining progresses, some email marketing tools offer good features for both deliverability and data exploitation. However, make sure you have an excellent interconnection with your CRM and marketing automation software. A solution like Newsletter2go can send the right email to the right person. It also collects all the useful information for your CRM.

A marketing automation solution

Again, marketing automation tools bring their share of functionality and performance.

Same observation as above: do you need your solution to communicate intelligently and intelligibly with your CRM software and emailing functions? try software like Zoho Campaign! offers innovative and high-performance features to automate marketing across the board.

All-in-one software

In the world of customer relationship management tools, Microsoft Dynamics 365 stands out. This software, in fact, is so broad in terms of functionality that it is an ERP.