Conversion Architecture -- The Art of Visually Identifying Your Company's Primary Sales Funnels

Conversion architecture is the art of visually identifying your company's primary sales funnels and leading your visitors to take action.

The action could be setting an appointment, sending an email, booking a reservation or picking up the phone to call for more information. It may also include a low level action such as signing up for a newsletter or mailing list for new offerings, updates and specials. Regardless of the action, it is a form of customer conversion and you should have a plan for all the types of actions that will help a new visitor become a paying customer.

To properly develop a conversion architecture, ideally you would start with a mind-map (or other graphical flow chart) that represents the sales conversion strategy that you want to integrate into your site design.

If you’re in the midst of a site redesign and it is ongoing without a conversion architecture as part of your overall marketing strategy, it’s likely that your graphic design efforts probably don’t factor into your site’s ecommerce architecture or prospect funneling requirements. When you describe the online product marketing and selling process in broad strokes such as “easy to see, easy to navigate, and without confusion”, it’s ambiguous. I may understand what you mean, but I don’t really get a sense of what your sales conversion requirements are for all manner of actions. Typically, graphic designers are not concerned with this element of online marketing and are simply relying on your directional queues to create a “look and feel” as opposed to “a look, a feel, and a sales funnel process”.

In my view it’s not wise to build your site with one selling action in mind (i.e., a product purchase or nothing at all). Online marketing is typically a progression of steps –

1. Capture awareness.
2. Capture sustained interest with a minimal email subscription.
3. Multiple brand impressions through subscription marketing, newsletters, direct-to-inbox blog posts, offers, etc.
4. Begin a relationship; the visitor joins your social network, shares your content, fills out an information request form, etc.
5. Sales transaction.

If your conversion architecture hops over steps 1 through 4, your success will be constrained significantly, and especially if your competitors create multiple touch-points that lead prospects down multiple progressive buying funnels.

Online marketing is no different than face-to-face marketing – people want to establish a relationship and often times, they need time to do that.

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