The 3 steps process to improve Awareness to Activation funnel conversion

User Journey Mapping, Bottlenecks & Growth levers

👋 Hi there, it’s Pierre-Jean. Welcome to this new edition of The Growth Mind!

Every 2 weeks, I share Growth strategies inspired by the world’s leading scale-ups. To help you build outstanding Growth knowledge.

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Today, we deep dive into the 3 steps process to improve your funnel conversion, from Awareness to Activation:

1. 👀 Map your User Journey: Map the steps your users should go through from discovering your product (Awareness) to experiencing its value (Activation). This process starts by listing your main acquisition channels and ends with the activation moment. The purpose is to help you visualize your journey to optimize it.

2. 📊 Analyze conversion and identify bottlenecks: Once your mapping is done, analyze the conversion between each step to identify the main drop-offs. User research will help you understand why your users drop at these steps. Drop-offs can be due to poor UX, complexity in using the product, or an unclear value prop.

3. 📈 Identify growth levers to increase funnel conversion: Focus on improving the conversion of the main bottlenecks. That’s where you’ll have the most area to grow. CRO (conversion rate optimization) tactics like Educational content, CRM communications, Social proof, or personalization can help you to drastically improve conversion.

Bonus at the end of the article → Miro template to map your User Journey.

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1#  Map your User Journey, from Awareness to Activation

When users discover your product, your goal is to make them experience its value. But before that, they need to go through several steps. Our objective here is to map this path.

In Growth, many people stop optimizing once acquisition has been reached, thinking their job is finished. But having a full-funnel vision is what will drive powerful and sustainable growth. Users’ life is just about to start when they reach acquisition.

Having a great vision of the journey your users should go through to discover your product and experience its value is a must. Stopping at the acquisition step is not enough.

Without a clear visualization of the steps your users must complete to experience your product, you’re totally blind and unable to improve conversion over your funnel.

But, with a clear view of your user journey, you’ll have the keys to improve conversion.

→ That’s why having a mapping of your user journey, from Awareness to Activation, is key. It’s the foundation to identify bottlenecks and then Growth opportunities.

To start our User Journey Mapping, we can decompose the User Journey into 3 main phases:

• Awareness: How do users discover your brand? What are your acquisition channels?

• Acquisition: Where do your users land (website, landing page, app store)? What do they need to do to use your product (sign-up, book a demo)?

• Activation: How do they onboard with your product and experience its value?

Answering those questions is the foundation to build your journey.

To answer those questions, a mapping of the User Journey with all the steps, by phase, your users should go through, will perfectly do the job.

I recommend using a funnel view for User Journey: it’s the best visualization for mapping a process to go from one step to the other.

Even if in reality, most users will probably not complete all the steps directly, your goal is to move them from point A to B. So the funnel viz makes total sense here.

Let’s look at a concrete User Journey Mapping example for the Spotify Mobile App below:

Click on the image to have a better visualization

Awareness - People discover your product

Through different channels (App Store search/ads, Organic, SEO, Paid Ads, Billboards…), people discover Spotify. This stage of awareness is key, as it’s when people first heard about your product.

Acquisition - Turn visitors into users

As Spotify’s goal is to make users sign-up for their app, acquisition channels redirect users to the Spotify app store page. Users should go through some sub-steps to be fully acquired:

• Install the app

• Start sign-up

• Add birth date

• Add gender

• Add name and finish sign-up

For a service, the acquisition stage will be different: people will likely land on a website and fill a form or book a call to be considered as acquired.

Activation - Make users experience the value of your product

On Spotify, users need to listen to their first song to discover the value of the product. The process is pretty simple:

• Pick 3 artists you like.

• Start listening to your first song.

• Enjoy the product features (playlists, smart recommendations…).

Spotify has reduced the steps to the very minimum to make the user experience as simple as possible. And having done the mapping of the User Journey make us able to see it.

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2# Analyze conversion and identify bottlenecks

Now that we’ve mapped our funnel, it’s time to analyze the conversion between each step and identify bottlenecks. But also to understand why drop-offs happen.

This analysis will help find levers to improve growth: the 3rd step of our process.

A. Analyze conversion between each step of the funnel to identify the bottlenecks

• What are the steps where you lose a large percentage of users? The goal here is to identify the 2 or 3 steps where there is a big room for improvement.

• Does it seem “normal” to lose many users at these steps? For example, losing 50% of users during the onboarding is probably too much. There is an opportunity to gain some conversion points.

• It’s important to look at industry/competitors’ benchmarks to understand how you’re doing.

Identifying the steps where you could lose fewer users will help to prioritize levers and experimentations to better convert.

Consider looking closely at those conversion rates:

• Website main conversion rate: % of visitors who sign-up/book a demo

• Onboarding completion rate: % of users completing the onboarding

• Activation rate: % of users reaching the activation moment

They potentially bundle a few steps, but give great indications on how some main phases of your journey converts.

In our Spotify User Journey mapping, we now added conversion rates between each step of the funnel:

*Figures are fake here, added for the sake of the example

We clearly see 3 big bottlenecks:

• App install to Sign-up (29%)

• Account created to Artists’ picks (72%)

• Artists picks to First listen (57%)

That’s probably where we have the most chances to gain conversion percentages. The other conversion rates are already really high so I would focus on these 3 first steps.

B. Understand why users drops-offs - 3 main reasons:

• Lack of clarity on the value proposition: your user does not understand what is the value of your product. This can happen on your website or in your product, and can then impact website conversion as well as onboarding and activation. If your users don’t understand your value proposition, they’ll lack the necessary motivation to sign-up and complete onboarding.

• Confusing UX: your user doesn’t know what he needs to do to experience your product. As for the value proposition, a confusing UX can happen on your website or during the onboarding.

• Complex onboarding processes: your user loses motivation to complete the onboarding, as the process is too long or complicated.

Doing user research, paired with business/product analysis, will bring you the necessary insights to understand if one (or more) of the 3 reasons above impact your funnel conversion.

→ This step of understanding why users drop is crucial, as it will strongly impact the growth levers you should choose to improve conversion.

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3# Identify Growth levers to increase funnel conversion

Here comes the last step of our process. You should now have:

• A clear view of the steps of your funnel.

• Identified bottlenecks that can be turned into Growth opportunities.

To improve conversion, you have 2 main options:

1. Improve existing conversion levers.

2. Create from scratch new levers.

Those levers can be either outside or in-product.

At this step, I recommend adding to your mapping the existing communications you already send to your users → The conversational bumpers.

The purpose of doing this is to see what you already do to increase conversion.

In our Spotify User Journey mapping, we can imagine that Spotify added the following conversational levers (yellow boxes) to improve conversion:

The whole picture is now painted. It’s time to determine the levers we want to activate.

Many levers exist, but I found 10 technics that are proven to be particularly efficient. Depending on the results of your user research about why users drop off at certain steps of the funnel, you should now have insights to understand which lever you can activate.

10 CRO (conversion rate optimization) technics to increase conversion:

📣 Value proposition iterations

Iterating on value proposition and more largely wording all over your funnel is easy from a technical point of view, but can lead to great conversion uplifts. You need to make sure that users understand what is the benefit of using your product. It’s also very important to have a coherent value proposition all over your funnel: that’s where having a strong collaboration between marketing (in charge of awareness and acquisition) and product (in charge of activation) is critical.

⌛️ Urgency

Playing on urgency, with limited-time offers or FOMO effects, can be powerful. It’s proven that a sense of urgency incites users to convert more, as they don’t want to miss an offer. This tactic is very used in the e-commerce industry.

But urgency should be smartly used: if you provide limited offers during a certain period, stick to it. It’s disgraceful to see an “Offer expires in 3 days”, and when coming back 1 week later on the landing page, the same message and promotion are still here.

So authenticity is key to building sustainable growth when playing with urgency.

⭐️ Social Proof

Social proof can be materialized through testimonials, ratings, PR mentions, or even case studies of your biggest customers.

The main objective of social proof is to reassure users that they are currently dealing with a serious company with a proven track record.

I strongly recommend adding social proof both on your main landing pages and during your onboarding, by using different formats (testimonials/ratings/PR mentions). It will constantly remind your user why he should trust your product.

💻 Interactive demo

With the rise of PLG (product-led growth), adding interactive demos of a product on a landing page is a tactic that is starting to emerge.

If you have a great product that speaks for itself and demonstrates value quickly, give to your users the opportunity to see a demo can drastically improve conversion.

🔁 Retargeting

Retargeting users who visited your website is an old but gold technic. People who already discovered your product are more likely to convert that new visitors, that’s why retargeting them can be very effective.

Consider also retargeting users who did not finish your onboarding: remind them you’re still here.

🧑‍🏫 Educationnal content

Educating your users on your product can be particularly useful to increase activation. We sometimes forget that our users don’t have the same knowledge of our products as us. Some things that look basic for you can be difficult to understand for your users. That’s where educational content comes in: design content that helps your users master your product.

Educational content can be:

• Product tours

• Video tutorials

• Blog/help center articles

• Chatbots

🫵 Personalization

Personalizing a landing page and/or onboarding is a great way to make your users feel special. And being more likely to convert.

To personalize your landing page/onboarding, you should rely on your own data.

With the data gathered, you can personalize, depending on the persona:

• Activation moment

• Value proposition

• Onboarding

🎮 Gamification

Gamification technics, like rewards, progress bars, or challenges are great to improve acquisition and activation conversion.

As humans, we all like to play. Make your product enjoyable to use, like a game.

💬 CRM communications

A classic to move users from one step to the other.

Leveraging CRM communications like In-app messages, Push notifications, or emails is a powerful way to make users convert.

Consider building automated sequences of communications based on user behavior, to nurture them and make them engaged.

📞 Calling Campaigns

Calling campaigns are underrated. The phone is now an old channel, but can still be very efficient.

To increase activation, you could consider calling your new users to explain to them how to use your product and give them tips to become successful.

I recommend focusing on a specific segment that is already familiar with your product, as a calling campaign is a costly channel.

All those technics should be A/B tested by using treatment and control groups, to measure their efficiency.

🎁 Bonus: Want to map your User Journey? Steal my Miro template here

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That’s all for today! Congrats on reading this article, you did it!

See you in 2 weeks for the next edition of The Growth Mind. 👋