The benefit of online marketing is the ability to automate and track your marketing and sales process. A sale or lead funnel is one of the ways of doing this.

So what exactly is a Sales funnel when it comes to digital marketing. It is the process of leading a website visitor through the steps of the sales cycle.

All sales funnels will differ depending on the product or service being sold but there are a few fundamental steps that we can cover in this article, traffic, Landing page, Lead magnet, follow up and close.

Traffic

This can come from a variety of sources, the common ways to get traffic are:

• Facebook Advertising
• Google Adwords
• Social media
• SEO

The aim of the game is to send the traffic to a landing page that converts.

 

Landing Page

Your landing page can be a page on your website that is optimized for conversions. In most cases, it will be set up to collect your potential customer’s details.

Ways to optimize your landing page:

• Use clear headlines and copy
• Minimize options on the page
• Have a strong call to action

Lead magnet

Once you get people to your landing page you will give them something of value for their contact details. This is called a lead magnet and it could be a number of things. Here are some examples of lead magnets.

• Free report
• Cheat Sheet
• Video
• Email course
• Webinar

Follow up

Once you receive their contact details you can now follow up with them. This can be done by calling your prospect if you collected their phone number on your landing page or follow them up with an email series giving them more information about your business. This depends on your type of business and what you are selling.

 

Close/Sale

Once you get a number of people through this sales cycle you will be able to determine how many people actually buy your product or service. This will allow you to adjust your funnel to get maximum results.

The internet has made it possible for us to automate the sales process and creating a sales funnel is the way that we do it. There are many different sales funnels and every business will have a different process but the key is to keep testing and adjusting the process for the best results.

That brings us to maybe the most important part which is tracking or monitoring the process and results of the sales funnel. Checking each step of the funnel is very important, this way you can see which traffic sources are getting you the best results and where you are losing people in the funnel.

Using Google analytics is a great free way of keeping track of what’s happening in your sales funnel and there are many other paid analytics tools you can use.

So what do you do if you find that you are losing the majority of people moving down your sales funnel?

There are many different strategies but here are a few of the most common:

Email Autoresponder series

Once someone enters their details to get your lead magnet and they do not take the next steps that you need them to take you can nudge them along with emails, giving more information and adding value.

Remarketing

Use Google Adwords and Facebook remarketing for people that do not go through the whole process. You could create ads reminding your customer to take the next step.

Phone calls

Good old fashion phone calls still work well, depending on the business model.

I hope you can see that figuring out your sales funnel is an important step for every business even if you are not an e-commerce business.