7 Approaches to Recession-Proof Your Conversion Funnels

The past few years have reshaped the global business landscape in ways few could have predicted. After weathering pandemic-era volatility, supply chain disruptions, and record inflation, companies are now navigating a new normal defined by cautious growth and the accelerating impact of AI on every facet of marketing.

With economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions continuing to test resilience, this period also offers an opportunity for brands to build smarter, more sustainable conversion funnels grounded in long-term value rather than short-term gains. 

With the right mix of data-driven strategy, creativity, and adaptability, businesses can continue to capture meaningful conversions and position themselves for success in whatever comes next. 

What is a Conversion Funnel?

A conversion funnel is a marketing model that illustrates the stages a potential customer goes through before completing a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a demo. The funnel is a metaphor for the process of identifying large new prospects and gradually narrowing them down to a smaller group that takes action.

The purpose of a conversion funnel is to map and understand the customer journey, enabling businesses to identify how potential customers move from first discovering a product or service to ultimately converting. By analyzing the funnel, marketers can pinpoint where users drop off and optimize each stage to improve retention and conversion rates.

Each stage of the funnel corresponds to a distinct level of customer engagement and intent. 

Stages of the Conversion Funnel

The stages of the conversion funnel are:

1. Awareness: Capture attention + introduce your brand or service
2. Interest / Consideration: Engage your audience and spark genuine interest
3. Decision / Intent: Motivate prospects to take action
4. Conversion / Action: Turn those prospects into customers
5. Retention / Loyalty: Keep customers engaged and coming back
6. Advocacy: Turn loyal customers into brand ambassadors

With this in mind, let’s take a look at seven key approaches that you can use in order to recession-proof your conversion funnels to continue welcoming new customers to your business:

7 Approaches to Recession-Proof Your Conversion Funnels

1. Enlist the right tools to help optimize your funnel
2. Scout out untapped customers
3. Utilize trial and error analytics
4. Explore new marketing avenues
5. Turn to brand recognition
6. Establish an emotional connection
7. Prioritize lifetime value

1. Enlist the Right Tools to Help Optimize Your Funnel

Periods of recession are naturally profoundly difficult for businesses to navigate. Existing sales funnels can become ineffective as consumers lose their purchasing power, so the emphasis must shift towards utilizing the right tools to bolster your efforts. 

Platforms like Google Analytics, which offer free insights into site performance, are absolutely essential for keeping up with the changing consumer climate. Likewise, tools like Mixpanel, Heap, and Amplitude can be excellent for user-level tracking. 

If you operate a mobile app as well, tools like AppsFlyer can help highlight where mobile installs came from – whether it’s a paid ad or a social media recommendation. This can be a great money-saving measure whilst optimizing the most effective avenues of advertising. 

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Although the prospect of embracing more tools can be daunting, they can form an effective buffer to mitigate lost conversion rates through better insights and actionable advice. 

2. Scout Out Untapped Customers

Although they can be tough for businesses, economic downturns can also provide a brief respite for discovering new audiences and accelerating expansions into new markets. Due to the slowing down of consumer activity, marketers have the freedom to ask questions like ‘who are the audiences that we’ve been unable to reach until now? What demographics do analytics suggest we look to?’

“A frequent error that businesses make is prioritizing their capabilities over client outcomes and pain points,” said Tomás Gouveia, Marketer at Significa. “ Messaging excessively focused on the business's features rather than demonstrating how those capabilities contribute to client success significantly impedes conversion rates.”

Whilst recessions are difficult times for ramping up spending, evidence actually indicates that these downturns can be fruitful times to invest in marketing. Increasing operations during a recession conveys a perception of stability to customers and offers a greater opportunity to gain brand recognition while rivals are slowing down their advertising spend. 

To address this, consider pairing cash-strapped customers who are reconsidering their spending with cost-effective campaigns targeting new audiences. However, it’s important to avoid neglecting existing customers when allocating more investment towards discovering untapped new audiences. 

3. Don’t be Afraid to Utilize Trial and Error Analytics

Recessions can be a time to try new things and act on the insights offered up by analytical engines. This is because a slowdown in consumer spending means that businesses are free to allocate less time to optimizing their most successful revenue streams and instead seek out new markets to sustain growth. 

Furthermore, recessions bring with them a fundamental change in consumer behavior, which is likely to be compounded by shifting attitudes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and rise of WFH. 

In preparation for operating in a downturn, it’s worth seeking out the insights offered by Google Analytics, or your favored analytical engine, and dedicating time to acting on the platform’s recommendations in order to find new appeal online.

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Deconstruct your existing funnel stage by stage, and look for highlighted pain points for leads or recommendations for improvement. Whilst consumer spending power is impacted, this trial-and-error tactic can be analyzed through impressions and traffic flows with less risk associated with missteps. 

4. Explore New Marketing Avenues like Video

The economic downturn can also present a strong opportunity to explore new avenues for your marketing. One of the key approaches for generating greater levels of audience engagement is through video content. 

“Offer simplified user flows, tutorials, videos, and robust customer service,” said Nick Vasylyna, Founder & CEO of Busy Rebel Labs. 

By producing videos, you can establish trust with your leads in a clear and digestible manner. Furthermore, video content has become more accessible and impactful in recent years, with easier options for embedding clips on social media and the rise of specialist social platforms like TikTok and Instagram. 

Videos also appeal to a wider range of learning styles among target audiences, allowing businesses to demonstrate value and position themselves as thought leaders in their industries in a far more effective manner. 

According to Optinmonster data, 89% of video marketers claim that the approach has given them a good ROI, whilst 83% believe that video has helped to improve lead generation. 

Be sure to utilize periods of recession to broaden your reach through video content, and seek to create videos that can help to build consumer trust and rapport. Even if spending power is weakened in the cost of living crisis, nothing is stopping you from building your brand in the meantime.

5. Turn to Brand Recognition

As we touched on in the previous point, a downturn can empower marketers to dedicate more time to building brand recognition for their target audience.

Even if they can’t act on their desire to make a purchase with your company, customers certainly can keep you in mind throughout a cost-of-living squeeze and retain their intent by retaining a positive impression of your brand. 

But how can marketers seek to remain relevant for leads over time? The best solution is to remain as active as possible on the platforms that your consumers use and continue to demonstrate value to them. It’s also worth incorporating the more humanistic side of your brand to resonate over longer periods of time – this can be achieved through highlighting charitable causes or launching a non-profit campaign. 

It’s also worth spending time to enhance the user experience on your website, which helps maintain a sense of rapport and community among your users. When it comes to hosting a WordPress site, many providers can offer greater volumes of data centers and acceleration options to ensure that your brand is globally accessible for anyone who wants to explore your business further. 

6. Establish an Emotional Connection

When COVID-19 wreaked havoc on companies worldwide, it also fundamentally altered how customers viewed businesses. Such a large-scale catastrophe led to more individuals seeking out sustainability-focused and inclusive brands, as opposed to those with more problematic ESG considerations. 

When financial downturns make it more difficult to win over consumer loyalty, building an emotional connection emerges as a leading approach for marketing efforts. 

Here, it’s essential to remember key personalization approaches, such as addressing customers by name in email campaigns and tailoring the range of products showcased based on their browsing history. 

It’s also important to consider running campaigns that have a charitable cause, and local businesses launching a product or service that financially supports a nearby charity can be an excellent way to win customers that are deeply considering their spending options. 

By delivering a more emotional element to your brand and promoting it throughout your sales funnel, it can make the acquisition of new customers far more effective–particularly when a recession causes individuals to become more receptive to the humanistic side of organizations. 

7. Prioritize Lifetime Value

Although some marketers can mistakenly believe that their conversion funnel ends with, well, a conversion, it’s essential to prioritize lifetime value–particularly in the midst of a recession. 

If someone has a favorable experience buying and using your products, they become instantly more likely to act as advocates and continue using your product for life. This leverages an element of organic support that can help businesses sustain their operations despite the downturn. 

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One of the best ways of achieving lifetime value to customers is through optimizing your sales funnel and the touchpoints in between registering interest and actioning a sale. Each touchpoint should be streamlined but impactful in a way that entices prospective buyers. 

User experience should be at the core of your funnel, but more targeted campaigns and audience segmentation can help make customers feel valued and more likely to convert — and continue converting long into the future. 

As always, it’s essential for businesses to ramp up their research and analytics in the midst of a market downturn. Recessions mean that a company’s pain points become massive stumbling blocks to conversions. Likewise, economic hardships can not only hurt customer spending power, but also impact their behavior and values. Continually monitor your funnel and look for signs that things have changed. 

Time to Think About Your Conversion Funnels

As various countries head towards a recession, marketers should use the strategies above to adapt and optimize their conversion funnels. 

Although we may be facing a sustained period of economic difficulty, it could actually become a productive time for businesses that plan to use the recession as an opportunity to adapt their funnels and focus on more value-added retention tactics. With this in mind, there’s nothing stopping your business from overcoming the downturn and building the potential to thrive for years to come.

About the Author

Dmytro Spilka Director and Founder at Solvid

Dmytro is a Head Wizard at Solvid, a creative inbound marketing & software development agency in London. His work has been featured and mentioned in a wide range of publications, including The Next Web, Business2Community, Huff Post, Kissmetrics, Crazy Egg, Sitepoint, SEMRush, and more.

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