Understanding each user’s full customer journey is an essential part of today’s best digital marketing strategies. After all, if marketers can’t tell where, when, and why their customers are taking key actions, it’s almost impossible to successfully optimize their marketing programs. That makes it particularly important to focus not just on the customer journey as a whole, but on each of the steps that lead consumers from their initial interactions with your brand to their first purchase...and beyond.

One key framework that helps businesses to better understand the complete customer journey? Marketing funnels. These visual representations of each user’s touchpoints throughout a marketing campaign or customer lifecycle allow marketing, growth, and engagement teams to identify the precise moment where users fall away or stop engaging as actively, potentially allowing for targeted messaging that can boost retention and conversion rates. So let’s take a look at the Braze platform’s Funnel Reports and how it can support more effective customer engagement.

Braze Funnel Reports: Key Insights, Step by Step

To make it easier for brands to manage their users’ customer journeys, the Braze platform comes with comprehensive funnel reporting capabilities. Highly customizable and easy-to-understand, Braze Funnel Reports paint a clear, step-by-step picture of the paths that users take after receiving specific campaigns, allowing for a deeper understanding of what’s working (and what isn’t) in a given customer journey.

What does that look like in practice? Let’s take a step by step look at how to use Funnel reports to gain deeper insights into how customers are engaging with your marketing efforts.

Step 1: Select a Relevant Time Frame

Customer behaviors are an ever-changing thing—so ensuring that you’re looking at a date range that’s relevant to your current marketing program is a key first step in making the most of your funnel reporting. With Braze Funnel Reports, you can choose a custom time frame that falls within the last six months and adjust the data to focus on customers who entered that particular workflow or marketing funnel within a set window.

Step 2: Choose Your Funnel Steps

To accurately understand how users are responding to each stage of a particular funnel, you need to think through what the key steps are for that funnel and ensure that your Funnel Report includes them. These key user events can include receiving a message, making a purchase, starting a session, and a range of custom events, allowing you to match your funnel reporting to your intended customer journey.

Imagine, for instance, that your company is building out a customer journey intended to encourage your customers to buy something from your new collection of fall sweaters. You’d want to set “receives promotional campaign,” “starts session,” “views product,” “add to cart,” and “makes a purchase” as funnel steps to ensure that you’re capturing each key action and determining where you can improve your conversion rates across the entirety of that purchase funnel.

Step 3: Review Your Funnel Report

Once you’ve built and run your Funnel Report, you’ll be able to better assess what stages of your funnel are playing out the way you intended—and which ones are leading to significant drop off among your target audience. If you’ve set up multiple variants to compare, you can look at your control group next to each of the flown variants you’ve created, providing a deeper understanding of how the differences between the different funnel versions are impacting conversions across the funnel as a whole.

Final Thoughts

The first step toward exceptional customer engagement is understanding what your customers are actually doing—and where your marketing program is and isn’t performing. With Funnel Reports, brands can clearly identify the specific customer drop-off points for each and every campaign and optimize accordingly, allowing digital marketers to fine-tune campaigns in order to improve performance and boost conversions.

To learn more about how to effectively understand essential KPIs, metrics, and benchmarks to better understand the impact of your marketing programs, check out the Braze Benchmarks and Metrics guide.

Interested in seeing how Funnel Reports are supporting the engagement programs of real Braze customers? Check out our exclusive webinar, “Data-Driven Customer Engagement (Without the Headaches).”