Perfecting Your Sales Funnel – Part 1 of 2

Many people have been interested in a recent post that I made with regards to the importance of building a Sales Funnel in your website. I have received comments from people telling me that the idea is compelling and the thought of increasing website conversion rates without increasing internet marketing ad is something that is very interesting.

I also receive regular feedback from people that want to know how to build an effective marketing campaign. I have touched on this in the past. What I decided to do, however, is create a series of articles which take the TechWyse 3 Step Concept and compare it to real world examples.

For those of you that do not know the ‘3 Step Concept’ is featured prominently on www.techwyse.com and it works very simply, like this.

Planning & Development – planning and building a ‘conversion friendly’ website property.
Marketing & Promotion – deciding which internet marketing components will bring you targeted traffic that converts.
Measurement & Tracking – understanding the results of the development and marketing campaigns and improving.

As part of this series we will discuss each element.

In getting started, the first part of this series, and this article will be discussing the importance of sales funnel development, how it works and how the behavioral concepts are defined.

I have decided that the best way that I can explain how a sales funnel should work is by looking at a recent sales funnel development project that we have been working on.

The Sales Funnel Case Study

The Problem

Like many website owners RENOCanada, a fledgling renovations company came to us in late 2008 asking us why they were not receiving the phone calls and email leads that they thought they should from their website. The answer was simple; when visitors came to the website they were not engaged immediately because the main focus of the site was not clear

To illustrate, this is what visitors saw when they first came to the website;

As you can see, the top of the page was very busy. While the company’s specialty was doing home renovations, the eyes were not drawn to any one specific area. There were many pictures at the top, links along the left column and what most eyes were being drawn to was text smack dab in the middle that said “Play welcome message”. We felt that not many people had reason to “Play welcome message” because they did not even know what the purpose of the site was when they first go there. There is one important thing to remember when architecting a new website.

Website visitors are a ‘click happy’ bunch. A visitor decides within 5 seconds whether or not the website meets their criteria and will either choose to stay or leave in that short a timeframe. As a result of the failure to place the ‘core site message’ in the top banner, the bounce rate on the site was 57% over the previous 6 months. With that in mind our goal was simple; engage the visitor by determining the precise goal the visitor had in coming to the site and then build around that. We call that the ‘core site message’!

Deciding the ‘Core Website Message’

After bringing the client through our sales funnel process, and reviewing the web site ourselves we saw a glimpse of what the core site message was by scrolling down the homepage a bit more.

clip_image004

RENOCanada did home renovations! In fact, we could see the evidence that they were trying to build a sales funnel but were just a bit off in terms of the execution.

We determined that their ‘core site message’ was that they did home renovations. We further determined that they did three types of renovations; Kitchens, Basements and Bathrooms.

So based upon our sales funnel process we decided to build them a ‘three part banner’ and ‘one step sales funnel’.

Let me explain further.

The Sales Funnel Process

Every sales funnel begins by building a top banner which clearly demonstrates the ‘core site message’. In most cases, we demonstrate that in the top banner and then provoke the visitor to learn more by clicking on an ‘actionable button’ which goes to a more detailed page. In this case, we determined that we would build them a top banner that was cut into three sections. (we call that a three part sales funnel) This was because visitors would be interested in one of the three areas more so than if we lumped all three areas into one page. If we placed all 3 service areas onto one page this would deflate the power of the ‘core site message’.

After carefully following our sales funnel process we were able to accomplish the following:

we now understood what the ‘core site message’ was
we were able to develop an offer which would persuade the user to click into the sales funnel and onto the goal sheet
we wrote persuasive content

In tomorrows blog, I will show you the results including the design concept, the final goal page, and the thought process that helps you understand how to convert your website traffic.

Visit "Perfecting Your Sales Funnel Part 2" Now!