Key Points:
Are you optimizing your web presence (not just your main web site) for transactions, or relationships? Given the immediacy of the web, especially in how easy it is to do stuff, it’s easy to think short term. For instance, you may do something that increases the percentage of visits that people buy your main product (optimizing the single transaction checkout funnel). This clearly is important, but I would encourage you to think longer term, not just concentrating on the single transaction, but what you are attempting to accomplish with site visitors over the long term.
If you consider a car rental company, they want you to rent cars with them. But it’s clearly not enough to just make it easy to rent from you, since other factors (like price) may mean that people don’t even consider your company for a particular transaction (when a competitor has a cheaper price). So rental car companies have loyalty programs that make it more likely to consider them and use them. The point is that this process isn’t just about optimizing single transactions, but creating an affinity and predisposition to your offerings.
In addition to services companies (like the car rental company), this table gives a flavor of how other types of organizations, for example research and membership organizations, might think about their engagement funnel:
| Engagement | Research | Services | Membership |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1 | Aware | Aware | Aware |
| Level 2 | Share | Purchase | Join |
| Level 3 | Collaborate | Loyalty program | Participate |
| Level 4 | Affect change | Strong preference | Lead |
Each organization will have a different engagement funnel (for example research organizations have very different audiences and goals). The above table is an oversimplification, but hopefully it shows the type of variety between even types of sites.
Amplification
Note that one of the main things you are looking for here is amplification. Let’s take the example research institution funnel of aware → share → collaborate → affect change. Someone may first hear about your organization through a blog post that one of their college mentions (they become aware). If they feel motivated, they will then share that post. If they collaborate with you, then they will be even more likely to spread your organization’s message. Talk is cheap. What you really might want is to affect change, for instance perhaps changing people’s day-to-day behaviors. At each subsequent stage, the impact of the engagement is stronger.
Audiences
Really, you will almost certainly have multiple engagement funnels: one per primary audience. You may want different audiences to take different actions, all anchored by your overall website vision. A professional association may have separate interactions for students, professionals, and potential customers of the professionals. A product company may target consumers and businesses differently. Each particular organization is unique, and there is no plug and play audience list (and associated long term engagement funnels per industry). For example, some think tanks target the general public and others do not, which means that the goals and engagement funnels are very different.
Drive website decisions using your long term engagement funnel
As discussed in my last blog post, business goals should drive all the decisions on your site. Looking at the engagement funnels is a concrete way of defining those goals. Decisions about your website should consider your engagement funnels:
- Are there some stages of your funnels (remember you will probably have one per audience) underrepresented on your web presence?
- Does every interaction either encourage either 1) deeper engagement or 2) further engagement at the level the visitor is already at (and not bouncing out to some lower level of engagement)? Does every web page do this?
- Are there ways of measuring how your engagement level?
- Are some levels overrepresented?
What engagement funnel would work for your type of organization?
