Owning a business means understanding how to present your product or service effectively to potential customers, encouraging them to make a purchase or engage with your services. If you’re versed in marketing analytics, you’re likely familiar with the term “funnel.”
Curious about what a funnel is and how it can benefit your business? Keep reading to find out.
What is a Funnel?
Consider your website’s main goal: you want visitors to take some kind of action, whether it’s to purchase, sign up, fill out a form, or enroll in a class.
This desired action is known as a “conversion.” Essentially, it’s when a visitor transitions from just browsing to taking definitive action. A funnel is the journey a visitor undergoes to reach this conversion point.
A classic example is the Amazon purchase funnel. A customer must visit the website, view a product, add it to their cart, and complete the purchase. Other actions, like visiting the ‘about’ page or viewing other items, exist but aren’t considered primary steps in the funnel. The funnel focuses on the necessary steps leading to a conversion, starting broad and becoming narrower as the potential customer moves closer to the commitment stage.
The Purpose of a Funnel
The concept of “widening the funnel” means expanding your reach to engage a broader audience. A funnel isn’t just for direct sales; it’s also applicable to actions like newsletter sign-ups and other forms of conversions. The key is to align your funnel with the actions you want your website visitors to take.
Real-Life Funnel Examples
Funnels exist both in digital and physical retail environments. For example:
Retail Store Funnel: Customers see ads, visit the store, browse products, add them to their cart, and complete the purchase.
eCommerce Store Funnel: Visitors land on your website, view products, add them to their cart, and finalize their purchase online.
Social Media Funnel: Users click on an ad, read your landing page, provide their email, and eventually make a purchase or subscribe.
Streamlining Your Website for Better Conversion
It’s crucial to make your website as user-friendly as possible. This means clearly defining the desired actions for visitors and simplifying these processes to boost conversion rates. The easier it is for visitors to navigate and complete actions on your site, the higher your conversion rate will be.
I hope you find this information useful. If you’re looking to delve deeper or have specific challenges in your business, I’m here to help. Click here to schedule a call with me, and let’s work together towards the success of your business!
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.
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!
