Marketers tend to talk about sales funnels a lot. You’ve probably either heard about one or tried to create it.
If you’d spent 5 minutes on the internet you’ve already had a chance to see an illustration of a sales funnel.
It looks like this.
But what that exactly means and how can you use the sales funnel to optimize your marketing and sales efforts.
We’ll dive deeper into this topic in this article, so keep reading.
What is a sales funnel and how can you improve your business with it?
In a nutshell, the sales funnel is each step that a person has to take to become your customer.
Even if you own a brick-and-mortar store, and it doesn’t seem to you that customers have to take any other steps besides entering your store, you are wrong.
Let’s say a customer passes by your store, and they decide to enter.
They are browsing your store, and then they pick an item they’ll purchase.
We can say they had a 3 step journey:
You might say right now ‘Ok, this is nice…But what can I do about it?’
And you’re completely right. As we mentioned in the previous article[1] , data is useless if it’s not used.
Let’s take a look at the following situation:
Hundreds of customers pass by your store daily, and most of them get intrigued by it and decide to enter. After a few minutes of browsing, they leave the store without purchasing anything. Your conversion rate is below 1%, which means that only 1 out of 100 people decided to buy something from your store.
Should you move your store to another location? Probably not.
You are not having problems attracting customers, you have issues with conversions.
In this case, your effort should go towards improving your offer and trying to convert people that are already coming to your store.
If, however, you have only a few visitors per day, and most of them decide to purchase something, but there’s just not enough customers passing by, or visiting your store, you don’t have a problem with the conversion rate yet. You have to make sure that people know that your store exists.
Sales funnels for online shopping are much more complex.
It was easy to craft a funnel where customers have to take only one of two steps, but what happens when you own an online store, or you are selling a digital product, and customers have many other steps in between?
Let’s say you are selling an e-book, and your customer journey goes like this:
In this case, we are talking about 5 steps for a single purchase, and it can be harder to track which step you need to optimize.
We’ve already talked about the importance of measuring the success of your campaign, and the steps people take, so if you want to read more about it, check out this article[2] .
How does your sales funnel look like?
Even though there’s a whole science behind sales funnels, it’s not hard to conclude what your current customer journey looks like. Just like we’ve created the steps for the previous 2 examples, you can create your customer journey and see which stage of the funnel you need to optimize.
There’s more than one way of optimizing your sales funnel.
Even though we talked about optimizing stages from your funnel, that’s not the only thing you can do.
What’s more, you can have a variety of different funnels that you can test.
For example, one of your funnels can look like the previous example we shared:
Blog > newsletter > sales page > conversion.
But you can also decide to pay for PPC advertising, and your funnel may look like this:
They see a Facebook page > They click and visit the landing page > they make a purchase.
The key to marketing success is testing, seeing what works and what doesn’t work, and improving things.
If you feel like your sales funnel can be improved, or you’d like to expand your sales funnel to different channels, feel free to contact us!
