Do you have a lot of visitors landing on your website or sales page but they are just not converting?
They say websites only convert about 2-3% of your online traffic.

To put this into perspective, I always compare websites to physical shops.

It’s like running a retail shop with the entrance door closed whilst only being open for a few hours. It’s probably a shop that doesn’t have any signage out the front either, because all the while your door is closed, my guess is you are not getting phone inquiries.

This is pretty much the same thing when it comes to generating leads online. Despite many gurus online telling you what works for them, and ‘selling’ you their strategies, there is no magic bullet for any business.

 

Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

I believe to have a great sales funnel, many businesses have to align their marketing strategy with their sales strategy to ensure strangers who visit your website actually convert to customers.

If you’re a medium to large business, you will be familiar with terms such as MQL (marketing qualified leads) and SQL (sales qualified leads).

And if you are a smaller business, your are probably more familiar with these 5 terms:

 

Source of Traffic – where do your leads come from?

Lead to Customer Conversions – what offers do you have in place to convert these leads?

Nurture – how are you managing the leads who have visited you? Do you phone them? Do you email them?

Opportunity – What is the size of the deal with this lead?

Customers – What is the lifetime value once they are converted to a customer?

For larger businesses, it’s not that simple to work out SQLs and MQLs. The structure of the organisation can determine if both sales and marketing departments will have resources to work together, to identify what their ideal qualified lead looks like.

For example, to agree on what a “hot lead” is, both sales and marketing departments have to agree on their criteria of leads that match the marketing avatar versus the leads that are sales ready.

This criteria can also be referred to as “scoring” and many marketing automation tools such as the one we use here, Active Campaign, enables this scoring system to occur automatically behind the scenes. If a score is met, the system will trigger an action such as email sent to the sales rep to follow up with the lead.

Once everyone in the organisation has agreed on what their MQL and SQL target looks like, they are then able to think about ways to optimize each stages in that sales funnel with the following metrics such as:

 

Visitor to Lead
Lead to MQL
MQL to SQL
SQL to Opportunity
Opportunity to Customer
Lead to Customer
Sales Life Cycle
Customer Acquisition Cost (also known as CAC)

If your sales funnel is working, then you know that the sales cycle is much shorter, which is good as this means you’re closing deals faster. You are probably selling more since you are focusing on qualifying leads better, thus acquiring them with less effort and time.

Even smaller businesses can work out their sales funnels by combining their sales strategy with their marketing strategy.

Building a marketing system that combines the two strategies, ultimately means you are using technology to save on extra overheads thus enabling you to run a business that is easily scalable and predictable.

If you’re curious about marketing automation and how it can positively impact your business, you can always apply for a free strategy session by clicking on the link here.