Solve the Mid-Funnel Blindspot

The shift from in-store to online shopping has left many retailers needing help understanding their customers’ needs. The lack of face-to-face interactions has removed the ability to read body language cues. The result? A mid-funnel blindspot, where retailers lose sight of customer intent, leading to missed opportunities and lost sales.

Customer engagement suffers when there is a disconnect between what the customer needs and the messaging they receive from the business. Understanding and interpreting digital body language cues is the key to solving the mid-funnel blindspot. Capturing and analyzing these cues enables retailers to enhance customer experience, boost conversions, and foster greater customer loyalty. 

The Mid-Funnel Blindspot

Marketers are familiar with the concept of a customer progressing through the stages of a traditional marketing funnel, starting with acquisition and ending with conversion. The three stages in the middle - interest, consideration, and intent - make up the mid-funnel. 

The 95/5 rule helps illustrate the importance of engaging with prospective customers who move past the awareness stage.

• 95% of leads captured don’t engage after clicking your paid ad because they’re not currently in-market
• 5% of leads move past the acquisition stage, which can be further broken down into:
  • 2% being brand loyalists and go straight to conversion, either purchasing the advertised product or another product from you
  • 3% could be buyers if nurtured properly with personalized communication aligned with their activity on your website or other channels

This breakdown highlights the importance of identifying and focusing on the 5% of leads that show potential for conversion, especially the 3% that require nurturing.

In a traditional face-to-face setting, salespersons use body language and tone of voice as cues to identify promising leads. In a digital setting, companies use analytics to determine which leads are at which funnel stage. However, analytics are limited. They stop at tracking page level and button clicks, lacking deeper insights. Limited data has created a mid-funnel blindspot, making it challenging to identify which 5% of leads need personalized engagement and nurturing. 

The mid-funnel blindspot comes from a lack of actionable information due to various circumstances.

• The decline of third-party cookies has reduced the effectiveness of paid media, resulting in reduced media spend and lower lead volume.
• Companies collect less information about leads due to privacy regulations.
• Customers exhibit asymmetric behaviors during the varied lengths of time they’re in the mid-funnel.
• Companies can’t interpret body language from behind a screen.

While the mid-funnel blindspot challenges marketers, digital body language offers a solution. Collecting and interpreting digital body language can help companies identify behavior patterns and common events that lead to successful conversions.

Digital Body Language Indicators

HCLSoftware has identified 12 digital body language indicators that go beyond superficial insights to identify potential buyers at each mid-funnel stage. These behaviors are strong predictors of which leads will follow through to conversion.

• Interest
  • Mouse hover
  • Orientation change
  • Resize window
  • Screen/page views
• Consideration
  • Revisits
  • Swipe/scroll product content
  • Keyboard and gesture count (taps, pinch)
  • Search values
• Intent
  • Input counts (drop downs, radio buttons)
  • Multiple windows or tabs
  • Form submit or download event
  • Contact or store lookup

• Interest: These early signs show a customer is engaging with your content to assess if it’s the right fit. For example, a customer frequently resizing their browser window or enlarging a photo might be trying to get a better view of the product.
• Consideration: Customers are more invested in actively exploring your offerings. They may revisit the same page several times or scroll further down to read product details.
• Intent: Customers at this stage are in the final stage of their purchase decision. Opening multiple windows or tabs indicates that they’re comparing product prices or features.

Connect with Your 5%

Customers demand both privacy and personalization. Website behavior is the best customer intelligence to meet those polarized demands. Collecting the data is only the first step. You must identify customer patterns and conversion roadblocks to drive targeted, personalized messaging. 

Using customer behavior data to drive progress will give you a competitive advantage, but two-thirds of retailers say it doesn’t come without challenges. Retailers note data management as the greatest personalization challenge, including gathering, integrating, and synthesizing customer data. Siloed processes and organizational models prevent the efficient sharing of customer data to drive real-time promotional decisions.

HCL Customer Data Platform (CDP) directly addresses these data management challenges. It ingests below-page-level intent behaviors, known as digital body language indicators, providing the deep insights retailers need. Using first-party cookies and soft-matching, CDP attaches omnichannel behaviors to a unified customer record, breaking down data silos. This allows for real-time, hyper-personalized messaging via marketing automation platforms, turning fragmented data into actionable intelligence.

Bring Your Mid-Funnel Blindspot into Focus

Understanding and engaging with potential customers in the mid-funnel is critical for success in today’s market. The shift to online shopping has created a gap in understanding customer intent. Marketers can better understand customer behavior by identifying and analyzing 12 key indicators across the interest, consideration, and intent funnel stages.

Focus on gaining deeper insight into your mid-funnel blindspot and improving personalized messaging to realize positive business impacts. HCL CDP gathers first-party customer information and behaviors into a single source of truth. By leveraging digital body language, retailers can illuminate the mid-funnel blindspot and deliver personalized experiences that resonate with customers.

Ready to bring your mid-funnel into focus? Connect with the HCLSoftware CDP team to discover how a CDP can elevate your personalized marketing and help you engage with your valuable 5% of potential buyers better.