6 Benefits of Creating a Marketing Sales Funnel
Most businesses, especially the small ones, want a quick and straight forward way of getting customers. Even though this may be possible, you might not be able to retain customers with this method without the use of a marketing sales funnel.
You will also not tell which customers are buying and which ones are just browsing through the website.
There is a difference between leads and actual conversation of a lead to a buying customer.
That’s why you need a marketing sales funnel.
So, what is a marketing sales funnel?
We can simply define a marketing sales funnel as a process your customers need to go through before they finally convert fully and take any purchasing action.
It is called a funnel because of the shape it assumes as the volumes of people that pass through it reduce as you progress. It is a visual representation of a journey of your website visitors before they are finally converted into customers.
For instance, when you start marketing your business, you get a large group of people who will be interested in hearing about it. These people, however, reduce towards the business process and their numbers continue dropping with every step.
By the time you reach the actual buying stage, you’ll only have a few people left. It is, therefore, a journey that every visitor to your website goes through before they fully become customers.
You need to grow your business bigger and collect more revenue by working towards widening the top of the funnel and creating engaging content that will lead to conversation.
The primary concern of a sales funnel is to give your customers room to make decisions on whether to buy or not.
This decision will depend on how your content is able to convince them.
Every business, whether small or big, needs marketing sales funnel. Here are some of the benefits your business will get from a sales funnel.
1. Improved conversation rates
It’s easy to get people into your website. You can attract as many people as you can and get them to subscribe to your site. However, this doesn’t guarantee that they will make a purchase in the long run.
That’s how a sales funnel works.
You will start out with a wide audience, but as the process goes on, you find that most of them drop along the way. You need those who’ll stay to buy the products in the long run.
Those that stay are the ones who will boost your conversation rates.
Building an effective marketing sales funnel is similar to dating. Before you ask that special someone to marry you, you have to go through a courting process to build that relationship.
You first have to introduce yourself to your ideal person based on your attraction to them. This would be the same as finding your targeted audience.
Then over time, you start to date the person in order to get to know them, what makes them tick, and what things they like and dislike to build trust.
In a funnel, this would be the process of building interest with the potential customer. There has to be some interest demonstrated by the customer to consider going out on a second date with you.
The more time you take establishing a relationship with your targeted customer through the use of the sales funnel, then you can build on that relationship/trust using email marketing.
Eventually, that person that you spend time courting and getting to know will eventually feel comfortable with you and will consider marrying you, or at least buying something your offering.
These marketing sales funnels are your introduction and relationship builder to get to ‘YES’!
Another reason why sales funnels increase your conversation rates is by giving you a 360-degree view of the way every lead passes through the funnel.
You get to understand what it takes to convert a customer so that you take the necessary steps.
2. Sales volume prediction and accountability
A sales funnel is helpful in showing you how many people have moved down to the final stage which is the purchase. This way, you can easily tell who made a purchase and who did not.
By predicting your sales, you are able to improvise new and existing strategies towards improving your marketing efforts.
With a sales funnel, you also say goodbye to confusions and reaching out to leads blindly. You can know your best sources of leads, the best-selling products, and the location of most of your customers among many things.
This way, you know where to focus most of your marketing efforts and if applicable, know which salesperson to reward more for exceeding expectations.
3. Consistent sales
As a business person, you need to have consistent revenue flow to be able to run your business effectively.
Ups and downs in revenue stream can mess up your business and prevent you from planning ahead because you don’t know what the future holds.
A sales funnel allows you to bring in new clients and filter them towards the end of the funnel. You can market your business without putting in too many efforts and at the end come up with some customers.
The customers who go through the sales funnel process are likely to stick around and keep purchasing from you. This way, you get the revenue security as you continue sourcing for more.
4. Identify problems
In the business world, there are so many errors that you can do without realizing it. Most of these mistakes affect your customers. Through your customers, you can identify any problem and tackle it before it goes out of hand.
A marketing sales funnel will help you identify these problems better.
For instance, when a potential customer exits the sales funnel at any given stage, you can trace the root cause of the exit.
This way, you can take necessary measures to correct it and also create a better marketing strategy.
5. Easier marketing
The most challenging part of running a business is the marketing aspect.
A sales funnel makes it easier by giving you an accurate view of the number of leads that enter your funnel and not those who are converted at the final stage.
You can use these to calculate the amount of extra efforts you need to put so that you get more leads to enter your funnel.
Once you know this, you can wisely invest your money in the appropriate lead sources and platforms and get the returns for your investments.
Marketing funnels, much like any other form of lead generation requires testing. You want to focus and pay close attention to what landing pages get the most engagement and conversions.
Determining the best offer or lead magnet used to generate leads to introduce new visitors into customers.
You really want to focus on these various aspects of your funnel for optimization to ensure higher lead and sales conversions.
Once perfected, your marketing sales funnel can become one of your greatest assets within your online business and can drastically help you in sustaining a profitable online business.
6. Minimum errors
Sales funnels are mostly automated; hence you won’t need human interventions most of the time.
Lack of human intervention also means fewer errors.
A business with the least errors is likely to minimize losses or unnecessary expenditure. So, if your sales team is prone to making mistakes, it’s high time you work with a sales funnel and save your business from falling.
What makes a sales funnel so powerful is the use of a back end email autoresponder. Once you’ve acquired a new email through the use of a squeeze/landing page, you can then send your email prospect through what is known as an email funnel.
Sending the customer multiple follow up emails helps in the “dating” process and helps your reader get to know you and what you’re about.
Not all visitors who enter their email through your landing page will purchase from you initially. This is why having an email autoresponder, such as GetResponse or Aweber can be extremely powerful when it comes to email marketing and getting your visitors to convert at a later date.
Conclusion
Businesses have used sales funnels for years and are continuing to benefit from them.
If you’ve not embraced it yet, then you’re missing out on a lot.
It is difficult to get those customers who will approach your business and buy directly without passing through a process.
This is even made more difficult with the digitization that has made competition more intense. Your business can only survive and thrive through a sales funnel.
Creating a marketing sales funnel can be overwhelming, but there are a number of exceptional sales funnel training courses out there that can show you the proper way to setup an effective funnel to get you more leads and sales without any experience required.
