Marketing Sales Funnel
TweetIt seems like most new Internet marketers focus very heavily on traffic. They want to get as many visitors to their site as they can. In their minds, the more eyes on their signup box or that see their product offer, the more money they are going to make. The Internet marketers who only worry about traffic are only taking care of the first step of their sales funnel. What is a sales funnel you ask?
The sales funnel is the process that begins when you capture the attention of prospects. This would be the visitor to your site. As you move down the funnel the visitor interacts with your site in some way, whether it's filling out a form, following you on Twitter, liking your Facebook page, whatever. As you continue to interact with the potential customer you need to demonstrate to them that you can solve some kind of problem or need for them. As you continue to move down the funnel, customers fall off who are not all that interested in what you have to say, so the ones that are left are very targeted. This targeted list is a gold mine as you can offer highly tailored products and services to them at higher prices. This is where the profits are made.
You need to optimize your funnel each step of the way. Are you using PPC ads? Then make sure you are targeting the right traffic. Are some keywords performing better for you than others? These are the ones to focus your SEO efforts on. How well does your hover ad convert visitors to leads? Have you tested it against different wording, a different special bonus, or just a different design? Continue testing until you have achieved the highest conversion rate of visitor signups. Once the visitor has signed up, how well are they reacting to your offers? Do you need to tweak your autoresponder system to get better results? How about your email blasts? Are you trying to upsell former customers? The different ways to optimize your funnel goes on and on.
Now you can see why the marketers who focus on the sales funnel and optimizing it to perfection make the most money. Even if they do not get as much traffic as someone else, they refine their funnel so that they get more money out of each one of those leads. In the end that is all that matters. Traffic stats are nice, but how much money you make is really the only thing you should care about.