Bryan Eisenberg's article, Conversion versus Persuasion: What's Your Challenge?, offers more support and, perhaps, better illustration for the conversion funnel I described in my previous post, Funnel vs. Hub-and-Spoke Conversion Visualization, which itself was a counter point to Shane Atchison's Conversion Funnel 2.0.
As I stated in my previous post, a valuable conversion funnel
recognizes that there is a flow to the decision making process that consumers go through, and that your site needs to push people through that flow, whether it's literally a linear flow or not. If you think of the funnel as visitor based, not visit based, and you think of the funnel steps not as pages on the site, but qualification levels of the visitor (or how close they are to making a decision), you see that it is an extremely valuable visualization.
Have a look at Eisenberg's illustration of the funnel he describes. It offers a nice view of how non-linear the buying decision process (and hence, the conversion process) really is.
Perhaps my conversion funnel is better called a "Persuasion Funnel"?
