What Is a Sales Funnel?

Sales funnel is a marketing system. It’s the “ideal” process you intend your customers to experience as they go from Prospect to Lead to Customer to Repeat Buyer. Sales funnels have been around much longer than web marketing, but the online world is the best thing to ever happen to sales funnels because websites and email marketing make use of them so often.

The purpose of a funnel is to make things easier and cleaner. You use a funnel to increase the likelihood that all or most of the liquid will go straight to its destination.
Sales funnels work the same way– they help you avoid “spilling” (or losing) potential customers.
The idea of using a funnel as a metaphor for Sales & Marketing processes in business really stems from the classic Marketing concept, AIDA. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

A simple contact form or phone number listed on my travel website might help me get a few new leads here and there. Instead of just waiting for people to pick up the phone and call my car repair shop. I offer a free report all about a topic of great interest to my target customers.

The Power of Content.

As my example illustrates, the most critical ingredient in virtually every sales funnel is content.

You need content if you want to attract more prospects to your website in the first place.

Blogging, for example, allows you to leverage “public content” to attract more site visitors.

You need content if you want to turn more prospects into leads.

Offering a free report or e-course allows you to capture more email addresses with “exclusive content.

If you want to turn more leads into customers, you need quality content.

Such as sending out periodic newsletters is a great way to build a stronger relationship with your customers

The Ultimate Sales Funnel.

So far, we’ve looked at the essential elements for creating the most basic sales funnels. You definitely need to work at putting these key ingredients into place before moving forward– great content, a lead magnet, and email marketing.

The real power of the sales funnel is in growing your Lifetime Customer Value.

The ultimate goal of that process is to create Lifetime Customers. As you can imagine, those lifetime customers will be major contributors to the long-term growth of your business.

Let’s say your goal is $1,000,000 in annual revenue. You only need to do $1,000 in sales every year to 1,000 customers if your Lifetime Customer annual value is $1,000 per year. Your only job every year is to keep those 1,000 spots filled with nurtured prospects if you can keep those 1,000 customers around for 3 to 5 years.

On the other hand, if you only focus on generating one sale with each of your customers and that sale is only worth $100 in revenue, you’re going to need 10,000 customers to reach your $1M revenue goal. And every year, you’ll have to find 10,000 more customers.

This failure is why most small businesses fail within 5 years or less.

Strong sales funnel will make it far easier to increase Lifetime Customer Value and help you reach your annual sales goals. This means nurturing those customers, yes, but it also means working on developing new backend products and services you can sell to add more value to your lead products.

The term “Sales Funnel” refers to this exact process. For every 10,000 prospects you put into the top of the funnel, only 2,000 will become leads.

These numbers are always different for every business. You can be sure about one thing– the more time you invest into building and fine-tuning your sales funnel, the more successful you’ll be.

Marketing your website is a complex process. As SEO becomes increasingly difficult and Social Media becomes increasingly time-consuming, nothing could be more important than spending time mapping out your very own online sales funnel. However, if you need assistance with creating your sales funnel, please contact us, here at Rank Secure. We can help you develop a great SEO and marketing strategy. We can work with you to create a specific plan for your needs. We know that every business has their own particular needs. We want to provide adequate solutions to the things you need. Not only can we help with all things marketing we can also help your website’s SEO. Having search engines rank highly on search engines like google does nothing but help your business. Give Rank Secure a call to start working on your custom plan. Let’s get together and do something great today,