Thinking Sales Funnels and Not Just Pages of Your Website

As an entrepreneur and business owner, you probably invest a lot of time in the value your marketing strategy offers to your business. More so, you also realize that the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy is to produce leads and sales. Without an effect marketing campaign, your efforts will only yield little to no fruit in the long run – and an online sales channel is an ideal marketing platform that boosts the productivity and lead generation of your business.  Using sales funnel is not the only marketing plan an entrepreneur can utilize, it has a few significant advantages over traditional marketing channels. Here’s how?

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a process or roadmap that directs visitors to a page on your Website with the ultimate goal of ensuring they purchase your products and services. The goal here is to ensure leads are converted into prospects, and in turn, into customers, who may go on to become repeat customers, purchasing your products and services again and again.

The idea behind having a sales funnel is to ensure your sales leads produce the best possible results. It works like a filter with different layers, ‘sieving’ out your niche or target audience from the large population. This correlation perfectly describes the major layers and points customers pass through during a sales process and the ensuing ‘sieving’ or ‘filtering’ process according to the potential of each customer. The process is broken down into four phases:

• This is a big stage where you can find the largest number of people, and you need to capture traffic from your advertising and marketing efforts. At this stage, you would find leads – composed of people who are actually in need of your service and those who may have visited by chance. Since every lead is important, first impression here is crucial to customer retention.
• Relevance/Interest. The interest of the potential customer is discovered / realized at this stage. Since the potential customer has visited your page, they may take actions if the content they find therein feels relevant to them – with the capacity to provide a solution to their interests. The actions here could include following you on social media, subscribing to your email list, or calling for a consultation. If your content is engaging enough, you might just win over a returning customer.
• This is the stage where the prospect decides whether your solution is perfect fit for their problem. They will closely pay attention to your message, the service you offer, your plans, and your pricing system, after which a comparative analysis is carried out against what is on offer from your competitors. Following their decision, the customer may decide to work with you.

So, Why Sales Funnels for Your Website?

An online sales funnel can help you understand and define the buying habits of your customers. This involves knowing how your customers find you (understanding the three types of online traffic is a complete other blog post), why they do, and why they decide to stay or leave. This knowledge is crucial to the growth of your business and convert browsers into customers in the shortest timeframe possible. Here are a few other reasons why you need to start thinking in terms of online sales channel now.

• Focusing on the right Leads. A sales funnel generally allows you focus on the leads to pursue, ensuring you only invest your time and resources into working on promising sales leads rather than devoting time into chasing unproductive leads. Each stage of the interaction process allows you learn about the habits of your prospects and filter the serious leads from those who are not ready to purchase your product/service.
• An online sales funnel allows you to categorize, sort, evaluate, and rank your leads. This will help you determine which sales leads require immediate attention and those that need nurturing in the long term. If they need nurturing, you can set up drip campaigns with content marketing to nurture them along.  When a sales funnel is well organized with the number of prospective customers analyzed, predicting sales volume becomes a lot easier.
• Attract Productive Leads. A well enriched online sales channel attracts productive leads to your business. With the ever-advancing business atmosphere and the opportunities that abound therein, costumers have lots and lots of options. As such, fending off competition can be a difficult task. Instead of devoting your time and resources into attracting every sales lead, having a well-structured online sales funnel can let you engage the right audience.

Understanding the value of an online sales funnel at this time is crucial to the level of success your business can achieve. It does not only give you insights into the buying habits of your customers, but you are able to build lasting relationships that lead to improved sales and returns.

If you’re interested in learning how to convert visitors to your website into stronger leads, and eventually loyal customers more effectively, speak to one of our professional Sr. Digital Marketing Consultants, call us at 888.980.8170, or email us at [email protected].

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