Understanding the Components of a Sales Funnel

Funnel

Online marketing remains a deep dark void of “the great unknown” for many people. It’s often thought that by simply posting an item for sale people will swarm in and make a purchase. That’s not an accurate understanding.

Every marketing plan will formally or informally follow a basic marketing principle known as the sales funnel or conversion funnel. Sales conversion refers to the process of being visited by a potential customer and actually closing the sale. Few people realize that a typical conversion rate on the internet is approximately 2 to 4 percent. To accomplish a sale online through your website, you must understand 25 to 50 visitors will have to visit your site for every resulting sale clickfunnels pricing chart.

What are the components, or steps, of a typical sales funnel?

At the top of a funnel is a wide opening, and as an object enters the funnel, the further down it goes, and the more the walls narrow until finally entering the spout at the bottom.

At the top of a conversion funnel, you will encounter the first component, step or stage. That first stage is the process whereby people see your URL posted or located someplace, typically a link back to your site. This group of people will be quite large, and represent the original 100 percent of those who will begin the process of the funnel.

The next stage pertains to those who not only see your URL, but actually take the time to visit your site. Remember, for every click a person has to take in any online process, it’s common to lose about half of the people involved.

Once people visit your site, they begin to fall into two categories. Sales prospects and non-sales prospects. Naturally, in this process, the number of people involved continues to be reduced.

The next stage is a refining process, where by sales prospects are reduced again to actual qualified sales leads. In this process, the “tire kickers”, and “window shoppers” are eliminated.

All of this bringing us to the final stage of the sales funnels. The place where actual buyers make a purchase. This number of people is typically a 2 to 4 percent cluster of those who originally began the process, by first seeing your URL.

With the process of the sales funnel understood, it now becomes very clear that if a person or business wishes to make sales, they must first succeed in driving huge numbers of people to their website. The only way this happens is by making a person’s or business’ URL highly visible.

Once a sales system is established. A system which can lead people through the sales funnel process, the focus of every website owner should turn to making their URL as visible as is possible. The average person must see an URL 7 times, just to remember it. By simply doing the math, it becomes apparent that if you need 1000 people to visit your website, then your URL must be visible to this group of people a maximum of 7000 individual times.

As far as URL impressions go, it’s commonly accepted that for every resulting sale 600 to 1000 URL impressions must occur.

Creating a good sales funnel is perhaps the smallest part of the total sales conversion process. Making an URL visible is where the real work happens.