Every business model relies on converting leads into sales. Whether you’re selling a service, a product or a philosophy, you direct clients through a sales funnel to convert them into paying customers. By understanding your sales funnel, you can maximize your conversion rates and overall return on investment. Let’s take a closer look at what a sales funnel is and how it directly impacts your success.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel covers all the steps a customer takes from learning about your business to making a purchase. For an ecommerce business, the sales funnel may include clicking on a paid ad, browsing through products on the home page, adding a product to a virtual cart, and completing the checkout process. The funnel varies from one business to the next, but it typically includes these components:
- Awareness: A potential customer becomes aware of the business.
- Interest: The prospect sees something that entices him or her to explore the business further (enter the website or the store).
- Decision: The prospect has found something he or she likes and decides to make a purchase.
- Action: The prospect follows through with the decision and completes the purchase, thereby becoming a customer.
If you can move your clients from awareness to action, you have a successful sales funnel. If you have a lot of interest without matching sales, there is an issue along the way that needs to be resolved.
How Your Sales Funnel Impacts Conversion Rates
As much as 3/4ths of ecommerce businesses lose clients through cart abandonment. This occurs when a shopper adds an item to their virtual shopping cart but does not complete the checkout process. From the perspective of the sales funnel, the customer completes the decision phase but fails to follow-through with the action phase.
Businesses can lose prospects at any part of the sales funnel. If you do not have the right ads, window displays, business cards, or other marketing strategies, you may never capture the interest of potential customers. If your products and services don’t match the ads, you’ll lose interest and thereby lose clients. That is why it is important to understand your sales funnel, step-by-step. Then you can identify points of weakness and find solutions to address them.
Using Data-Driven Digital Marketing to Jump-Start Your Sales Funnel Online
At Detroit Internet Marketing, we use artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics in every element of our digital marketing strategies. This allows us to create ads and content that are specifically tailored to your audience. We can pinpoint the exact time of day your audience is most receptive to paid ads. This reduces the cost of lead generation by captivating a high-converting audience at the best-performing time. We further optimize the ads based on high-converting keywords and placement to give your sales funnel a solid, reliable foundation.
Website repair is another key element of online sales conversions. Flawed website navigation, broken links and slow loading times can turn an otherwise functioning sales funnel into a disaster. Clients get frustrated by a faulty website and give up on their purchase altogether. They may be one step away from making a call, only to click out and go to your competitor. We offer personalized website repair solutions that eliminate those errors and ensure your customers have a pleasant experience.
If you feel like your sales funnel is in need of a facelift, contact the online marketing experts at Detroit Internet Marketing. We can evaluate your audience, budget and goals to come up with a custom marketing plan to improve your sales funnel. Contact us at (248) 234-4830 to schedule your one-on-one evaluation.
