Chances are that if you are selling online, you already have a sales funnel setup. So how do you optimize one?
Creating the ideal sales funnel is no easy task and it will not happen overnight. It requires analysis, tracking, and having a clear methodology to follow in order to get the most out of it.
What is a sales funnel (aka conversion funnel)?
We bring results by analyzing and optimizing your sales funnel
A sales funnel, also known as a “conversion funnel”, is a marketing tool that helps you to understand the flow on your website that a visitor takes towards the desired goal you want them to reach.
Let’s say you are running a B2B business and use your website to generate leads for your business. You run online ads and send people who click on them onto a landing page. The desired action is that these people read the information on your website, then go to the contact page and send you an inquiry or ask for more information.
Now a “funnel” might sound that you are just poring people onto your website and then hope they will contact you. But in online terms, that doesn’t work. We need to guide people carefully towards the desired goal. There are thousands of actions people can take on a website. And there are just as many ways to guide them through the site and optimize towards the conversion goal. This process is what we call sales funnel optimization.
To optimize your conversion funnel takes time and constant testing. The latter requires the right methodology to be able to gather data which in return helps us to understand the customer flow better and make optimizations.
Sales funnels can get very complex. In fact, the more granular you get, the better results you will achieve. In the end you wasn’t to constantly improve the customer’s experience and the customer journey on your website, so having a well thought out sales funnel is very important.
Mapping your sales funnel
With the rise MarTech and many new analytic tools on the market, these days we are able to map your funnel out visualize the flow of people on your website. With our advance analytics platform we can analyze accurately what is going on. Then we can visualize the flow of people in order to make decisions on what actions we should take, what changes are necessary to make to the sales funnel to improve conversions.
Let’s take a look at the 5 elements of a conversion funnel.
5 Elements of a Sales Funnel
1: Awareness
The starting phase in your conversion funnel. We are still trying to make people actually interested in going to our website. We are merely trying to make people attracted to check us out. In this stage we would look at where visitors are coming from: this could be paid ads like Google ads, Facebook ads, native ads, Tok Tok ads, etc. but this could also be direct visits, referrals from other websites or from your own inbound marketing efforts. We will use a variety of analytical tools to get this information. We need to assure that we are reaching the right audiences for our products or services.
2: Interest
Once we attracted them in phase 1, people are now visiting your website. In the interest phase, we need to make sure that once people come to our website, they are presented with the right information that will make them interested in exploring further and take a desired action. At this stage we are already progressed in our sales funnel which started with phase 1 and now people have already taken action and visited our site. We are now already trying to build a closer relationship with the leads on our site. So we might use a range of marketing tools such as popups, sticky bars, opt-in forms, newsletter signups, and marketing automation. We also will take our time to analyze website copy, headlines, attention-grabbing photos or illustrations that all might have an effect on what people do and if they follow towards our desired goals.
3: Desire
The name of this phase makes it very clear: We want to make people really desire what we are offering. We have be by making people interested in our products, now we can take it a step further and make people really want what we have. If we are selling products online, this could be by high quality product videos or viral videos, it could be in the form of customer reviews that are really loving the product and giving it social proof by describing their experiences, it could be that you provide them with really well written product page copy and all the information they are looking for. It could also be supporting content such as engaging blog content, promotion or free shipping.
4: Conversion
Finally we are at the stage of your sales funnel where people take action and all your hard work pays off! For this stage to run without any friction, we need to really dig into your product pages, service pages, call to actions, conversion metrics and other on-page details that make the desired action (such as a person adding an item to the cart or contacting you for more information) be as easy as possible to take. We also need to do everything possible and use A/B split testing to find out the best way to improve conversions.
5: Re-engage
One of the most important steps in a sales funnel…but also one of the most forgotten. A conversion happened, you have a new customer, so now what? Retention. You want to nurture your customers and make them repeat buyers. This does not happen by itself and there are many ways to achieve this. So what can you do?
First of all, we should try to make them become part of any of your communication channels so it is easier to stay in touch with them. This could be following social media channels, signing up for a newsletter, being part of a marketing automation workflow that we signed them up to, or it could also be a coupon or other promotional discount that will make them come back after they have made a purchase.
The above are the 5 main categories of a sales funnel. But they are not all. Usually, each business is different, so the sales funnel should be customized to fit each business.
You can see from the above “that getting it right” is a difficult and complex task.
We are happy to take the burden off your back and figure out the best way to optimize your customer journey.