Sales Funnels Personal Use Ebook

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INTRODUCTION

A sales funnel is a system set up on your website that builds rapport and trust with new and returning visitors, qualifies leads and encourages them to make a purchase.

By the time you finish this guide you'll understand what a sales funnel is, why it's so important and how to set it up.

At the heart of your sales funnel is the idea of conversion - turning casual visitors into buyers.

What is a Sales Funnel?

The sales funnel is an often used metaphor that describes the process of attracting potential customers to, and moving them through, your sales process to sort those who would be your ideal customer from those who would not.

Surely all customers are ideal customers?

That is not so. Your ideal customer is one who not only benefits from your product or service greatly but understands why they do so and are happy to act as brand ambassadors. A less than ideal customer might be one who buys your product because they like the packaging, advertising or heard about it by word of mouth - yet they might not fully understand how it works or its benefits to them. Such customers often ask for refunds or spread false information by word of mouth.

There are other reasons your potential customers or clients may not be a good match for you: their budget may not reach your product, they may already have a supplier that offers them a product they are happy with, and others may have requirements from the product that yours cannot provide.

In the offline world of sales, a sales funnel is the equivalent process of qualifying your leads.

Understanding this concept explains why you should vet your prospective customers to find a perfect match between your product or service and your customer. That's why sales funnels exist - and that's why it's vital you take the time to build and understand your funnel.

Like many systems and processes in digital marketing, your sales funnel will require consistent monitoring and tweaking to make it as effective as possible. Sales funnels may also change seasonally which demonstrates how important it is to understand your funnel and how it converts.

The sales funnel isn't just a system that moves your potential customers through a qualifying process. It's also a tool that allows you to predict how many customers you can expect to convert. Without understanding how many customers you convert it's impossible to properly budget for your advertising.

For example, if you understand that as part of your sales funnel, 12% of those potential customers who are exposed to your PPC advertising campaign become customers with a dollar value, then you can gauge appropriately how much money to spend on advertising and still realize a profit.

Sales funnels also show problems in your sales process, such as not having enough sales people to follow up on leads, a lack of knowledge about the product on the part of your sales people, a financial leak in advertising expenses, and more.

All sales funnels should involve a flowchart where the sequence can easily be visualized. It might be cliché, but what gets monitored gets managed. The sales funnel will include several steps and each can be evaluated separately.

It's important to spend some time monitoring your sales funnel. Analyzing how changes affect the conversion rates of each part of your workflow helps you fix what's losing you revenue.

It takes several months to build up a picture of your sales funnel, so be patient. You can't expect to learn anything by skipping the process and it's a huge mistake to do so. That means changing one thing at a time and giving it enough time to make a difference or not.

Making more than one alteration to the process doesn't allow you see which one is making the difference to your funnel, or what that difference is. You'll only end up confused about what's working.

Why Build a Sales Funnel?

After that overview, you may recognize how you’ve become part of other people’s sales funnels when you have visited their websites, read content, taken advantage of free offers or discounts, downloaded free information products or tools, or booked a free consultation.

That experience should hint at why you need to build a sales funnel. Simply put, a sales funnel is a highly effective tool to maximize your profits, with minimal human intervention.

Sales funnels take cold leads – those whose prior knowledge of you or your product was non-existent – and warm them up.

Creating warm leads is a process that depends on content marketing to a large degree and that’s what the outermost layer of your funnel will consist of: web content.

Web content comes in many formats, each appealing to a different kind of customer.

Many businesses offer discount fliers to the public, offers like buy one get one free, and free samples. They are all examples of businesses turning cold leads into warm. They want to build a rapport with you without pressuring you into a sale.

The idea is that if you like the sample or freebie, you're going to trust the business enough to buy from them.

That's how cold leads are turned warm in the offline, real world. Online, it's not so different. Even in today's highly connected society, we tend to distrust a website where the landing page asks for our credit card number in return for a product. We need to be wooed a little. We need to learn more about who's behind the website and why they are a good choice to buy from. We need to trust that they are an authority in the niche and not some shyster who set up a website to dupe us out of our money. That's why businesses who sell through a website face the greatest opposition to the sale and it's also why you need to establish and maintain an effective sales funnel if you hope to make your site profitable. Doing anything else only strengthens the perception that your site is untrustworthy.

Imagine if you found a website when searching for a wedding photographer but there were no photos of previous weddings, no blog posts that shared information about the site owner, and no pricing breakdown. Instead, there was just a button asking for you to click the buy button on an expensive photography package.

Your first reaction would be to leave the site and go look elsewhere, right?

Now imagine the same search, but instead of the last website, you found a site where you could browse through lots of photos from previous weddings, see the social shares of other pictures, read customer testimonials, see the pricing structure and a breakdown of services offered, and download a free guide to getting the most from your wedding photographer.

I'm guessing that given the choice, you'd go with the latter. Take this analogy a step further. You're not fully committed to the second photographer but continue to look for your ideal guy or gal. In the meantime, you receive emails from the second photographer who shares valuable tips and insights with you about making the most of your wedding photography with fun ideas like leaving disposable cameras on the dinner tables for your guests to use. He even sends you a discount voucher for his own services and offers free framing for a photo of your choice.

• License: Personal Use
• Category:Ebooks
• Tags:2017 Ebooks Personal Use