Funneling Customers to Increase Sales
In light of current events, using your online presence to sell your goods and services is paramount.
But it’s not quite as simple as throwing up a pretty website enabling customers to buy online. After all, everyone seems to be doing that.
To differentiate your business from all the others, you must dive deeper into the psyche of the customer so that you not only have an online presence, but stand out among the masses who have all switched to digital marketing.
What you need is a marketing funnel.
What the heck is that? In basic terms, a marketing funnel describes the process you create to:
Entice a potential customer to visit your website
Keep a potential customer on your website long enough to make an impression
Guide the customer to take a specific action
These actions could include encouraging visitors to sign-up for your email list, email you for more information or buy your products and services. Ultimately, your funnel turns visitors into customers, a process also known as conversion.
Conversion! New customers, repeat customers… now we’re talking. Implementing an effective marketing funnel increases your sales.
There are four basic steps of a marketing funnel:
Create awareness
Build interest in your offerings
Increase the desire for your products and services
Entice customers to take action
Create Awareness
Step one is to create awareness for your products or services. You may have a beautiful website but if no one knows it exists, there aren’t many people visiting your site.
Social media, search engines, SEO, printed materials, signage… there are a myriad of ways to direct customers to your website. SEO is a must. The effectiveness of other tactics will depend on your target audience and your offerings.
Let’s use a carpet cleaning service as an example. You’re running a sale offering to clean one room for free. You use direct mail and social media to announce this sale. Both announcements contain very little information except “Visit yourcarpetcleaning.com to have a room professionally cleaned for FREE!”. You’re using the announcement as a teaser to drive traffic directly to your site.
Build Interest
Once you have visitors on your website, the next step is to build interest in your offerings. Ultimately, you want to keep visitors on your website long enough that they want to learn more. To achieve this, your website must have captivating content and encourage visitors to dive deeper into your site.
Back to the carpet cleaning service example… your site may provide visitors the options of different types of services. Perhaps you offer simply clean, deep clean, pet clean, etc. Your suite of services creates interest among visitors and they’re encouraged to learn more about the different options.
Increase Desire
Encourage visitors to want your product or services. Why do they want or need you? How are you helping them or solving a problem they have? This is your opportunity to educate your customer.
Perhaps this education is in the form of a blog providing advice for carpet owners on how to keep their carpets clean. Or, you provide facts about carpet filth. Just how much dirt does one pet add to your carpet? How much dirt accumulates over 6 months?
Take Action
The entire marketing funnel is designed to do one thing… get a customer to take action. The “action” piece should be front and center. You want to make it easy for customers to do business with you.
Perhaps the customer was referred to you and had already decided before visiting your website that they were going to buy your products or services. You want to capture them immediately with a “Buy Now” type of button. Perhaps the visitor is a repeat customer. You don’t want to send them through your whole website searching for a “Buy Now” button.
The carpet cleaning company would have a button right at the top of the website that says “Claim your FREE room cleaning now” or “Set-up a FREE carpet assessment today”. Click and done!
If you’re building your website from scratch, it’s imperative to incorporate a marketing funnel. If your site is already up and running, it’s fairly simple to revamp the site to incorporate this process.
If you have questions or need help setting up your funnel, email us at info@stamarketplace.com.