The Link Between Sales Funnels and Digital Spend ROI

The Link Between Sales Funnels and Digital Spend ROI

Every company wants to squeeze as much ROI out of its sales funnel digital spend as possible. The problem is that uncovering ROI is more challenging than it seems. Often, the major problem is data blindness.

Data blindness happens when many different siloed sales funnels are in place. Each of the sales funnels involves a specific buyer’s journey. However, if the funnels aren’t sharing data in one centralized location, the data remains separated. This can lead to marketers making decisions and conclusions based on incomplete data.

You need your data to work together to determine your true ROI in digital marketing. However, that’s impossible if you have a tech stack that doesn’t integrate. It leaves you making guesses, which is hardly the concrete, scientific approach you need to get a baseline ROI and make wise marketing decisions from there.

Incomplete Data: More Prevalent Than Many Companies Realize

Piecemeal data locked tight in silos is commonplace. For example, if you’re using a Microsoft stack, that’s well and good, but only if it is integrated with sales funnels, landing pages, or other data sources. Rather than cobbling together data solutions, using an all-in-one marketing automation platform enables you to get better data for better business decisions.

In some cases, businesses might be facing a disconnection problem. For example, if your engagement metrics show 400,000 visitors a month and 30,000 Facebook campaign advocates but only 10 completed carts, something is wrong with the data. Fortunately, implementing a universal tracking method (UTM) to help see the truth behind those numbers and develop a better sales funnel ROI is the perfect place to start.

Optimizing Sales Funnels to Boost ROI

Once you’ve figured out how to integrate your sales funnel data into a dashboard of results, you then have to work toward uncovering how to improve ROI in digital marketing. Remember that every sales funnel needs to drive a KPI that drives revenue. An excellent way to test sales funnels is to run them through cheaper sources like Facebook. You can take what you learn from your inexpensive Facebook sales funnel test run data and then use it on another site, such as Google or your website.

As soon as your data-collecting machine is running smoothly, you can apply the following best practices to nail down your digital spending, unearth your ROI, and move the needle in your favor.

1. Think ‘Apples to Apples’

Everyone has an opinion on attribution models. At the end of the day, it’s less important if you prefer last-click attribution or first-click attribution. Just choose one for all the sales funnels you use.

Picking one attribution type allows you to look at an attribution model of revenue in an apples-to-apples way. It also makes your life easier when looking at data across multiple platforms. You can worry less about having dozens of different attribution models based on countless customer journey possibilities and steps and concentrate your efforts on one instead. It’s much less complicated and will give you an initial idea of your ROI.

2. Make Use of Your Current Customer Base

You can reverse-engineer your current customer base to inform your awareness stage marketing. Just backtrack your customers’ paths. How did they get to the action stage? What routes did they take to convert? What spurred them to move out of awareness? Find their intent, and you can begin to boost your ROI

Remember that during the awareness stage, the largest possible pool of people will show interest in what you’re offering. If you can tag them early, you can retarget them through thoughtful, cost-effective bidding. In six months, many will be in the decision and action stages, and you will have paid less to convert them.

3. Drip Valuable Content to Derive More Valuable Data

Adding value along the sales funnel through press mentions, blog posts, whitepapers, etc., doesn’t just create demand. It also allows you to glean more data about the steps in your funnel that trigger better overall ROI.

For instance, let’s say you publish a video. You can find out how long consumers viewed the video, as well as exactly how many gave their information after watching it all the way through. With those insights, you can outbid through programmatic bidding, which is more advanced than keyword bidding because it allows you to bid based on action and interest. You’re bidding on individual people based on their web history and getting them at a discount.

Crushing it with your sales funnels starts with having clean, integrated data that you can use immediately. High-quality data is the key to building a brand via sustainable omnichannel marketing models aimed at accelerating conversions and improving your ROI year after year.

Author

  • Rick Bodey

    Rick Bodey is chief marketing officer and partner at Ezzey, a digital marketing agency based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Since 2004, Rick has built and exited three startups and guided more than 100 in lean startup methodologies.

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