Middle of the Funnel

A CEO mentioned something on the phone earlier today about "middle of the funnel" activity, and I thought he made a really bright insight.

More on that in a moment.

Back in the stone ages (2005 - Nordstrom) our brilliant IT support team (who reported to the Credit Division) built us a process to identify every visitor on our website. We recorded information about every single visit, and if the customer purchased, the email address was linked to every single visit, allowing us to tailor/target/personalize any offline marketing activities because we linked purchases to visits.

We also learned what we called the "3-2-1" rule ... the customer generally visited three times a month, carted merchandise twice a month, and purchased once a month (with 3/4th of those purchases happening ... in a store ... which our crack IT staff linked back to the website visits via integration of our point-of-sale system and our e-commerce system).

Show of hands ... how many of you are doing all of that today? In other words, if a customer who hasn't purchased in twenty-seven months all of a sudden ends up on your website, how many of you have programs in place to immediately communicate with that customer?

The simple act of recognizing a customer ... that's a middle-of-the-funnel activity.

Since 2005, we've become GREAT at bottom-of-the-funnel activity.

Since 2005, we've become mediocre at middle-of-the-funnel activity.

And since 2005, we've become horrible at top-of-the-funnel activity. It's all been eliminated from the marketing mix, viewed as "waste". Turns out it isn't "waste", is it? It's the activity that trickles down to the rest of the business.

I recall an author telling me pre-COVID that it was all of the waste from top-of-the-funnel activity that led to good middle-of-the-funnel activity which ultimately led to high ROAS bottom-of-the-funnel activity. I've never forgotten his thesis.

As we head toward 2025, we're going to give top/middle-of-the-funnel activities more scrutiny. We "have" to do this, don't you think?