A sales funnel is a V shaped diagram that represents the journey potential customers go through to becoming customers. There are a series of steps they go through before they are turned from a prospect into a client. Moving from noticing your business at the wide part, to interacting directly with one of your representatives, to becoming a customer. It is important to have a consistent and affective process while moving prospects through this process. The experience they have with your business is key to generating referrals and adding to the lifetime value that new customers generate.
In this two-part series, we will talk first about how leads enter your sales funnel and then how you will convert those leads into customers.
Step 1: Entering the Sales Funnel
The top of the funnel is often defined as the awareness stage, where as they are just now becoming familiar with your company, products and/or services. At this point they are typically interacting with your sales and marketing efforts. With these efforts it is important to maintain a consistent message across all levels of their interaction.
Step 2: Customers Take Action and Progress Through the Funnel
During some point in these efforts potential customers will “take action” and reach out in one form or another. Making this easy and seamless is of utmost importance to generating qualified leads that turn into clients. Some customers may want to call directly and talk to a professional. Others may want to fill out a contact form and wait for a call from you. Other times customers will want to walk into your place of business and talk face to face. Advertising these different ways to interact, while advertising the same consistent message is key to the consistent growth of your business.
The lower stages of your funnel are all about the actual sales process they experience. Leads at the middle and lower stages of your funnel are the ones most likely to turn into closed paying clients. These are the potential clients you want your sales representatives interacting directly with as to get the most out of their time.
Keep Your Funnel From Leaking
Minimizing the breaks in the funnel is key to generating consistent revenue for your business. During any point when the sale moves through your funnel, the potential customer can be lost in the cracks for a myriad of reasons. Making sure that you are addressing all of their concerns, explaining the advantages, and moving through the process with consistent messaging will minimize the cracks in your sales funnel. The more granular you focus your stages, the easier it will be to identify where the leaks are happening.
Retargeting To Maintain Interest
One tool that has proven to be a great to recapture and reengage your potential clients is the use of retargeting across multiples mediums. Taking your website as an example. Only 2% of traffic converts for most websites on the first visit. Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, and targeted display are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion. The design of your Website along with use of retargeting can help get the most of your visits. Displaying your message and branding across multiple mediums will keep reminding potential customers of what they can gain from your business. By recapturing their interest it creates another opportunity to reengage you companies sales funnel. There are lots of different tools to retarget and increase your conversions. Building your database of clients that have interacted with your website or ad, it makes it possible to continue to interact with them.
There are two types of retargeting pixel based and list based. Pixel based is a way to redisplay your information across any anonymous visitor. List based is redisplaying to potential clients that you have gotten their contact information in your database. Moving potential clients along the funnel it is necessary to have good retargeting practices.
Join Us Next Week For Part 2
In next week’s article, we will be talking about the sales process and turning the leads in your sales funnel into paying customers.
To learn how Iceberg Web Design can help with your sales funnel and retargeting, contact Shane Bader 763-350-8762 or email shane@icebergwebdesign.com.