subject: Monitoring The Success Of Your Sales Funnel [print this page] What is a sales funnel? A sales funnel is a string of effective strategies that leads a prospect through a selection of sales opportunities, creating loyalty and the possibility of an upsell. To create a sales funnel, you will need to come up with a marketing campaign that will drive customers to your site.
Some of the ways to build a sales funnel include free coaching by email, exclusive membership sites and free newsletter subscriptions. As you can see, you have a variety of options, so you need to test which ones work.
Test and track various advertising options to evaluate not only which methods drive the most traffic to your site but which methods result in the most opt-ins and conversions. For example PPC marketing isn't working for you because of the low opt-in count despite the high volume of clickthroughs. Or, you might have noticed that advertising on social networks has raised the number of sales from first time visitors. If you have the numbers to prove that one marketing strategy can build your sales funnel more effectively, then you can tinker with the other aspects of your marketing campaign to become more lucrative.
Don't be afraid of experimenting with various alternatives as far as marketing is concerned. Give one strategy a deadline and cut your losses when it's not performing well. In the past, marketers who are strapped for cash have no choice but rely on banner ad or link exchanges to promote their businesses. But now that the best advertising alternatives are within our reach budget-wise, it's easier to test out several options.
Is Your Bait Effective?
Your front-end offer can also make or break your marketing campaign. You cannot begin to build a well-oiled sales funnel if your front end offer is lame. Maybe your target customers cannot afford your price? Maybe your customers know too little about your offer and they will not simply hand in their cash to someone who doesn't bother to address their need for more information?
Get to know your target market more. Testing the success of a marketing campaign can save you a lot of time and effort (not to mention money) in the long run.
Even if you see some customers buying your products, your job isn't done yet. Buying customers can be used to track your back-end sales. Consider testing and tracking various offers and different levels in your sales funnel. You need to find out which other products will appeal to the customers that already bought something from you. You can offer a bonus in exchange for a short survey. At the very least, you can offer your previous customers a chance to share in the profits by becoming your affiliates.
