Building the Online Funnel for the Electronics Industry

Most of today’s engineers research their product designs online.  The product information engineers reseach and trust the most is likely published on your website right now.  Transforming your website from a catalog of electronic component information into a business tool requires the site to measurably move visitors toward a sale.  In order to accomplish this, it is vital to understand three things:

• The technical product information needed during the engineering lifecycle
• The level of sales intent indicated by the use of your product information
• How to set up your site to measure its use by visitors

The Engineering Lifecycle

The classic engineering lifecycle is illustrated the right.  During most design cycle phases, engineers require extensive information to support design decisions.  Product marketing teams at component manufacturers have created special-purpose informational materials to help and lead the engineer to include the part in their design.

Today, product information spans a variety of media from technical documents to interactive tools and videos.  Most of these resources are available on every manufacturer's site.

A sample list of common informational materials that are valued by engineers are listed below.   A download or online use of any of these resources should be considered a conversion for a component marketer.  

• Product Folder View
• Datasheet Download
• Education Video View
• Selector Guide Use
• Reference Design Download
• Software Download
• Sample Order

The Level of Sales Intent Assigned to the Online Funnel

The online funnel is a key concept in understanding how value can be applied to specific conversions on your website.  An online sale is a great conversion and easily understood, but alone it fails to represent how a website is building business value in the electronics industry.  To understand value creation, it's necessary to look at the complete picture of sales intent demonstrated by visitors.  As engineers visit your site and perform various online actions, you can match these actions to the online funnel and see how value builds as various stages.  

The first step is to determine which actions indicate levels of sales intent.  The bulleted list above is a good start, but you may have other documents and tools available to visitors that are considered valuable to the sales process.  After deciding on the online actions that indicate value for both sales and marketing organizations, these actions, or conversions, should be assigned to the appropriate level of your online funnel.  The lower the level, the higher the value assigned because the engineer is demonstrating stronger commercial intent.  For example, a visitor viewing a video about configuring a component is not as compelling as purchasing a sample, but it indicates that the engineer is investing time to increase their understanding of your product.  Compared to a visit to a product folder, the video would be assigned a higher value as it shows a stronger level of interest.  Therefore, a marketing campaign that results in increased views of the video is measurably making a difference in engineers developing an understanding and consideration for the component and moves them further down the online funnel.

Measuring The Use of the Data and Conversions

The online funnel is a fluid system.  The dynamics of the funnel reveal overall impact of marketing and sales programs for the company.  The two key elements in measuring your funnel are the number of unique people within each stage in any period of time (typically in a month), and the number of unique people moving to a lower stage.  The number of people should be measured as both the number of conversions and the number of conversions per unique individual.   

The behavior of any unique person in the funnel is typically viewed across a period of time - usually 45 or 60 days.  This window of time allows marketers to attribute credit to campaigns that brought a new visitor to the site, even thought that visitor did not convert on the first visit.  In the electronics industry, often a visitor will return several days later and take an action that is a measured conversion.  Over 45 or 60 days, the visitor attracted by the original campaign may convert several times and be monitored by your web analytics system as they move down the funnel.

The funnel narrows as people drop out and fail to move down to the next stage during the attribution time window.  Simply measuring just the top and bottom of the funnel is insufficient.  Consider that 100,000 unique people may visit your website each month but only twenty of these may become a volume purchase within 45 days of the original visit.  In the electronics industry, where it may take six months or longer for a project to move from concept to volume purchase, it's important to understand the volume of people moving towards sales at any point in time and how those individuals entered the funnel initially.

Measuring the entire funnel will give you insight into the health of your sales process as well as the results of marketing campaigns.  By understanding how visitors from different sources and campaigns affect the volume of engineers at each level of your sales funnel, your website will be a critical feedback system in the sales and marketing process.

To help you configure your web analytics system to measure conversions resulting from your SupplyFrame Media marketing campaigns, please refer to our information on configuring Omniture and Google Analytics.