What exactly is a sales funnel?
Let’s start with the definition of the sales funnel.
The sales funnel serves as a tool to illustrate your contact points from potential prospects to your customers. The visual representation of a sales funnel quickly shows that there are significantly more prospects than ultimately customers. But don’t worry, this is perfectly normal.
Why is it so important to classify the different contact points?
To get more customers, you first need to define your sales funnel, then optimise it. In other words, you want to find out at which points in the journey your prospects are getting lost and find the reasons for this. The better you understand your users and their journey, the better you can react. It also creates important clues for measuring success.
Here the most important steps in a sales funnel. Of course, you can adapt or expand them as you wish for your analysis and the journey of your users.
If you want to learn more about the most important KPIs, you can find out more in our blog post.
The different Stages in the Sales Funnel
1. The unknown
Like a funnel, you start with a large opening to attract potential customers. However, it is important to define what your target audience looks like at the beginning of your sales funnel, what they (might) be looking for and what things are (potentially) important to them.
Perhaps offline measures are also a relevant way for you to generate attention.
Among this target group, however, not everyone will like your product. They may not be in the right price category, they may not make the decision to buy until later, or the unknowns were simply curious.
Even here, it is worthwhile to analyse the data on your reach: how many impressions do your ads achieve, how many followers do you have.
The better you know your target group, the more specifically you can address them and design your advertising material. And thus win over more and more suitable interested parties. As a rule, you will need several steps to do this, and it is precisely these steps that you map in the sales funnel.
Be it thanks to push or pull marketing measures, you have aroused interest and the first users land on your landing page (or in your shop). That’s what you want to achieve in this stage.
As already mentioned, significantly more visitors will land on your landing page than actually convert to customers at the end of the sales funnel. That’s why your approach in advertising material, for example, is much more generic at this point.
2. The interested people
Don’t worry, it’s normal: depending on the product or service, probably over 95% of your website visitors will not convert. (More detailed industry data can be found here).
This can be for a variety of reasons, for example the product/service is not suitable, it was the wrong time, there is not yet any serious interest in buying or the users are still at the very beginning of the information process.
Where do we go from here?
Ask yourself the question “What exactly is the goal of your landing page? You now need an explicit objective to successfully guide users through the process and also to ensure the measurability of your actions. Possible goals could be:
- Newsletter subscription
- Purchase on website
- Request for quotation or contact
What can you offer your visitors so that they close accordingly?
In order to attract your website visitors in the best possible way, there are several things you can pay attention to. A clear and visually appealing design as well as good content are part of the small 1×1. You can find out what you need to consider when designing your website for ranking optimisation in the article from t3n.
No matter what final action you want your users to take. As a rule, you will probably have included a questionnaire such as the one from SlideVision or a contact form on your website.
You can read here how to guide your users successfully through the questionnaire. Dwell time and bounce rate help you with the right evaluation. These KPIs help you to understand where and why you are losing your users in the sales funnel. At this point, you should also consider whether re-targeting measures are worthwhile for you.
3. Leads
Your sales funnel becomes narrower: depending on the service or product offered, your prospective customers complete the purchase directly on the homepage or they submit their request by sending a contact form. The step to the final purchase is still pending here. The user expects a direct offer or a callback to specify his or her wishes.
4. Customers
Not all people who have requested a quote or with whom you have had a sales conversation actually become customers. Now, at the end of your sales funnel, you can also evaluate how much a customer has cost you.
For classic e-commerce: Pay attention to the return rate and the shopping basket value, you can also find out more about this in our blog post on KPIs.
And now?
After the sale is before the sale ;). For most products and services, it is worth developing your own strategy for existing and new customers. In any case, consider which re-marketing measures could be useful.
Customer loyalty: make sure your customers are happy with your service and product and stay happy.
In addition, you can now evaluate and optimise your sales funnel. At which interfaces did you lose the most potential customers? How can you optimise this rate? Maybe you need additional contact points to convince your users. Or you can change the approach in the ads. In any case, take the time to test and build on your learnings.
