Why your business needs a sales funnel

Why your business needs a sales funnel

by | Blog | 0 comments

If you’re selling something online, then you probably should be using a sales funnel. That’s because these funnels offer you, your business, and the product or service you’re trying to sell too many advantages to ignore.

Regardless of if you’ve had success in the past without a deliberate sales funnel, or if you haven’t considered making changes to your current marketing setup, you should look at how a sales funnel would benefit your business and improve your sales before brushing off the idea. While you might have a quality product and service, more often than not, prospect customers need a bit of guidance before they’ll convert into actual customers.

Why Your Business Needs a Sales Funnel

Keep in mind that it’s completely impossible to define the exact process of activities that every customer needs to follow through before making a purchase since every business is different. Finding a process that converts prospects into customers is going to be unique for each unique business. There’s no exact pattern or template you can follow since your business and your target market are unique.

This is precisely why you need to put effort into determining an appropriate sales funnel for you and your business. 

As prospects move through your sales page, website, or newsletter, they should follow a unique buying process designed specifically for them. They should be guided by branded, skillful persuasions that represent your business appropriately. Think of your sales funnel as your opportunity to create a personalized, unique sales experience for your prospect customers. 

How to Create an Effective Sales Funnel


In order to develop a sales funnel that’s functions well and converts, you need to fully understand your own business, product, service, and audience. Without understanding these things clearly, you won’t be able to develop a strategy that works for converting prospects into customers. 

Take a moment to get an outside perspective and view your business as it can be seen from the outside. Not everyone understands your passion and vision like you do from the inside. Do your best to translate these things to potential customers in order to create a connection.

Just like it can be hard for someone else to see your passion, it can be difficult for people to understand why they need your product or service… unless you show them. Reveal the value of your products and services by showing what problems they solve and how they’ll make your prospect’s problems go away. 

In order to communicate any of these things well, however, you need to understand who your customer is. Define your target market. Who are they? What do they need? What interests them most? What kind of sales funnel process will keep them most interested?

Once you’re able to answer all of these questions, you’ll be that much closer to being able to develop a functional, effective sales funnel that gets more conversions than you’ve ever seen before!

Conclusion

We no longer live in a world where you can launch a product and automatically get sales. There are too many opportunities and options out there to choose from. The great thing about sales funnels is that they are applicable to a wide variety of businesses. Whether you’re a business coach, author, start up, or a well-established company, a sales funnel is the ideal way to boost your sales potential. 

If you’re looking for help in building a sales funnel that’s perfect for your business and your target audience, click here and schedule a call with me.

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3 Reasons You Need to Create a Sales Funnel for Your Business

3 Reasons You Need to Create a Sales Funnel for Your Business

by | Blog, Sales Funnel | 0 comments

So you have all your snazzy products and services prepared. You’ve been working on a new launch or marketing campaign and it comes time to see how it works. You hope it’ll generate a huge impact and you begin optimistically… but when it comes time to track your progress and view your results, they disappoint.

You find that your website isn’t getting the attention you hoped for. People might be viewing, but despite the traffic, you’re not making the conversions you want. Despite the number of people that view your content and read about your offers, they’re not buying. But why?

In order to clarify this dilemma, you have to determine what your sales funnel looks like, if you have a sales funnel at all, and where it’s going wrong.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

When people purchase a product or service, whether online or in person, there’s a process they go through before they make the final purchase. This process looks slightly different depending on the brand, but all of them carry a customer from the initial introduction to the product or service, all the way through to the final purchase. This process helps a customer get to know the product or service, as well as the company, until they are prepared and informed enough to purchase.

Having a website with impressive products or services isn’t enough to make a sale. People need to be aware of what you’re offering, understand the purchasing process, and trust you and your brand before you can generate revenue. This is what a marketing funnel works to accomplish. A marketing funnel is the few steps your audience must follow before they finally click your call-to-action and make a purchase on your site.

 When you talk about your business and share what you do, a lot of people show up to look. This massive amount of people represents the top of the funnel. Gradually, however, as they work through the process you’ve set up (viewing your website, reading about your products or services, learning about what problems they’ll solve, etc.) some of them drop out as they lose interest.

 This marketing funnel is the journey that all of your prospects go through before they convert into a customer. Making sure you have a well working sales funnel that carries prospects as fluidly as possible through will help you get the most conversions.

What Are the Specific Advantages of a Sales Funnel?

If you don’t think your business can be compatible with a sales funnel, then you might want to rethink your marketing strategies. Using a sales funnel has a lot of advantages, regardless of what kind of business you run. Their primary benefits of sales funnel are as follows:

  • Increase sales by organizing and nurturing leads in a personalized and understanding manner
  • Provide detailed insights of the behavior of these leads in order to make closing sales an easier ordeal
  • Save time and effort by making the nurturing of these leads an automated process
  • Create trust amongst your leads by creating brand value and helping them understand what they’re investing in and why
  • Streamline your sales process in order to make it easier for prospects to follow and so you encounter fewer errors

Conclusion

Understanding the fundamentals of a marketing funnel is not difficult. Putting an effective sales funnel into action for your own business can be more difficult. Pinpointing sections of your sales funnel that are poorly planned or clogging up prospects can be challenging if you don’t understand funnels well. If you need help setting up a sales funnel that will help you get conversions, click here to schedule a call with me and let’s discuss how I can help you set up a sales funnel designed uniquely for you and your business!

Have an easy week!

Robyn

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Understanding Marketing Funnels & How They Improve Your Business

Understanding Marketing Funnels & How They Improve Your Business

by | Blog, Marketing | 0 comments

Part of owning a business is understanding ways to get your product or service in front of your desired customer so that you can make a sale (or so they’ll sign up, join, etc.). If you’ve spent much time at all learning about marketing analytics, then you’ve probably heard the term “funnel” a great number of times.

If you’re curious to know what exactly this mysterious thing is and how it can help you grow your business, then keep reading!

What is a Funnel?

Remember this: You want the visitors on your website to take some kind of action. This is the entire purpose of your site. Maybe you want them to buy from you, sign up, fill out a form, enroll in your class, etc. 

Regardless of your particular desired action, when someone does something that you want them to do on your website, it’s called a “conversion.” When someone buys from you, it’s a conversion. When they sign up for your class, it’s a conversion. The visitor “converts” from browsing to taking action, and a funnel is the steps a visitor needs to go through in order to accomplish this conversion.

This is easy to understand if you look at an example, such as the Amazon purchase funnel. There are a few simple steps that a visitor has to take before purchasing a product (or, making a conversion). They must:

  1. Visit Amazon’s website
  2. View the product
  3. Add the product to the cart
  4. And complete the purchase.

While there are other possible steps that can be taken in between each of these steps (visiting the “about” page, viewing other items, clicking away from the site altogether to name just a few possible steps), they don’t need to be counted as steps in the funnel since they aren’t necessary steps. The essential process a customer must go through to reach a conversion is referred to as a “funnel” since at it’s beginning (step one) there are a lot of potential customers who will enter but not necessarily convert. As people get through steps two, three, and so on, the size of the crowd thins (or narrows), until they get to the “commitment” portion, which is the sale (the end of the funnel) and it is quite narrow compared to step one.

Only the most interested of customers will make it all the way down to the last step of the conversion process (the bottom of the funnel).

What’s the Point of a Funnel?

When you hear someone say “widen the funnel,” they mean you should cast a larger net for your first step of the conversion process. This entails marketing got larger or new audiences, increasing your brand awareness, and just getting more visits to your site. The more people who are in your funnel to start with, the more likely it is to find someone who goes all the way down to the commitment stage. 

It’s important to know that funnels are useful for more than just selling products or services! You can track your newsletter sign up, page conversions, and more by using a funnel! The key is in figuring out your goal, what you want your visitors to do on your site, and then creating a funnel to help your page visitors do what you want them to do.

Real Life Funnel Examples

Marketing funnels are actually everywhere, not just online. Think about it. There is a funnel process for retail as well as eCommerce stores. The process for each is remarkably similar if you look at it:

  • Retail Store Funnel
    • Customer sees advertisements for store
    • Customer enters store
    • Customer views products
    • Customer adds desired product to cart
    • Customer completes purchase with store clerk
  • eCommerce Store Funnel
    • Customer visits website
    • Customer views products
    • Customer adds desired product to cart
    • Customer completes purchase at site checkout
  • Social Media Funnel
    • Customer clicks an Instagram ad
    • Customer reads landing page copy
    • Customer gives you their email
    • Customer buys a product/subscription

Making sure your website is easy to use for your page visitors includes making conversions an easy process. Decide what you want a person to do when they visit your website and then bring as much clarity and simplicity to these actions as possible. This will help ensure that you receive the most conversions possible.

I hope this information has been helpful! I want to hear more from you. What do you wish you understood better? What areas are you struggling with in your business? Hit “reply” and let me know! I love hearing from you and want to help however I can. 

Have a great week!
Robyn Bennett 

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Is Your Website As Secure as It Could Be?

Is Your Website As Secure as It Could Be?

by | Blog, Contributed Post | 0 comments

***Contributed Post***

If you are running a digital business, it is important that you keep your content, your sales funnels, and your clients safe. Unfortunately, hackers are usually a few steps ahead of software developers, and it is important that you pay attention not only the price of your site and hosting, but also the safety features that will keep your virtual shop window generate a steady income. Below you will find a few tips on what to check.

Software

If you are trying to get visitors for free, chances are that you have one or more SEO software installed. The good news is that these tools can be useful when you are trying to determine what your potential clients are looking for and what the most popular content is, but some of them will collect information about your users and your site, and you might not even know about this. Make sure that you read the user guide and documentation before you install any software.

Security Upgrades

In case you are blogging remotely through an app or even Google Docs, you might not log in to the site and update your software on time. Some of the updates are there for improving your site’s security, while others will just improve the user experience. However, before every major upgrade, you should create a backup of your files, or you might face disruption when your site crashes.

Encryption

Image via Pixabay

In case you are selling physical products or services online, you will need to ensure that all the information sent through your site is secure and encrypted. You will need to have an SSL certificate for eCommerce sites, and ensure that your subscription is renewed automatically. Your clients will look for the “https” before they hit the buy button/

Server

Next, you will have to check how safe the server where your site is hosted is. You might need to add further security software and create a scan for your site content to avoid having a problem in the future. If you are not confident that you will find the issue yourself, you can get in touch with Matrium Technologies network security services and get a professional assessment and identify your main risks.

Member Accounts

If you have implemented membership options in your digital marketing sales funnels, you will need to encrypt your clients’ details and personal information. Do you remember the scandals large companies had to face when their user data got compromised by hackers? Avoid having the same problems and always use a safe membership program that will help you maintain your reputation. Membership sites can be profitable, but if your users are not feeling safe or are facing technical issues, your retention rate will suffer.

Making your website work smoothly and keeping your customers and visitors safe is your responsibility as a business owner. Pay attention to the above areas, and you will keep your business assets safe from malicious attacks and prevent your site from crashing.

Featured image via PxHere

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