During my time leading the digital team at The Royal Mint, I found myself at a fascinating crossroads: the point where user experience, conversion optimisation, and sales performance meet.
Overseeing the customer journey across a period of incredible national and cultural significance – from the memorial of Queen Elizabeth II and the Coronation of King Charles III, to Brexit commemorations and celebrated licensed series like Beatrix Potter, The Gruffalo, Paddington, Star Wars and James Bond – gave me a rare opportunity to rethink how we plan digital experiences.
Amidst the scale of these projects, a simple truth became clear: conversion isn’t one-dimensional. Sales are the ultimate goal, of course, but the path to a sale is complex and often indirect – a reality made even more vivid when you factor in what Google termed “The Messy Middle.” It was from this realisation that my idea of a Conversion Hierarchy was born.
Understanding the Conversion Hierarchy
The Conversion Hierarchy we developed acted as a strategic framework to plan journeys with clear priorities. It also gave the team a shared language to structure journeys more intentionally, always remembering that customer behaviour isn’t linear.
Here’s how the hierarchy breaks down:
1. Primary Goal – Conversion to Sale
At the heart of the journey sits the purchase. Every decision we made – be it page structure, content hierarchy, or call-to-action – had to reinforce our primary mission, to guide the customer confidently towards completing a purchase.
But crucially, our conversion hierarchy recognised that if a sale wasn’t achieved immediately, the journey shouldn’t be seen as a failure.
2. Secondary Goal – Conversion to Data Capture
If we couldn’t secure a sale, the next best outcome was capturing valuable customer data. This could be as simple as an email address, particularly from new visitors. But we went further:
- Wishlists and Likes, encouraging users to bookmark or engage with products, gave us signals of intent.
- Social Share Hyperlinks, if a visitor shared a coin release or collection with friends, it told us something powerful about affinity.
- Self-Personalisation is our most powerful tool in the second stage of our hierarchy, allowing users to interact with their profile, select preferences, or engage with tailored content, giving us richer customer records without feeling invasive.
This layer of the hierarchy helped shift our mindset – a user not buying today could still be investing in tomorrow’s sale.
3. Foundational Goal – Cookie Consent and Retargeting Enablement
Beneath all of this sat an operational layer of cookie consent. Without appropriate consent, our ability to continue conversations through retargeting (paid social, display, PPC) would be severely limited. Optimising cookie consent journeys isn’t a glamorous task, and one that’s extremely difficult to dedicate time to, but it was fundamental to maintaining an efficient marketing funnel.
Ensuring we captured consent effectively, while still respecting privacy and offering a great UX, became a foundational requirement for us. Without it, our teams are working blind.
Back to the Future – Planning Branching Journeys
Internally, I had a little fun with how we described journey planning, and I often found myself describing an alternative reality to our marketing teams. Drawing inspiration from “Back to the Future,” we used the metaphor of “branching timelines” to represent decision points in the user journey.
Just like Marty McFly’s choices created alternative futures, every interaction a customer made could trigger a different pathway:
- If they added to the cart but abandoned it, they entered a recovery journey.
- If they joined a mailing list but didn’t browse products, they moved into a nurture sequence.
- If they accepted cookies but bounced quickly, they became eligible for smarter retargeting.
Thinking in branching timelines helped us break free from rigid, funnel-based thinking. It made us more adaptable, more experimental, and ultimately more successful.
Why This Still Matters Today
Even years later, I find myself referencing the term Conversion Hierarchy when helping businesses structure their customer journeys. It’s a reminder that while the sale remains the North Star, every interaction matters, and every fallback objective strengthens your ability to win the sale in the future.
As our knowledge of CRO and UX continues to evolve, embracing layered, branching journeys will only become more important. Because real customer journeys aren’t linear. They’re loops, side quests and yes, sometimes, messy middles.
And if you plan for that complexity instead of resisting it, you give your brand the best possible chance to thrive.
Image by Thanasis Papazacharias from Pixabay