Your sales funnel forms the link between marketing and sales, working alongside your lead nurturing efforts to turn potential leads into purchasing customers. Despite the importance of this funnel, it is often treated as an afterthought rather than the main event. In fact, your lead funnel can only work when you have everything in place with your digital marketing strategy.
Whether you have designed an email marketing mailer series that takes new leads through the funnel, or you are planning a few opt-in downloads to sweeten the deal, your sales funnel will not perform without a few basic elements.
Getting the Most From Your Sales Funnel
How can you be sure that your sales funnel is working as it should? For starters, make sure that the following are in place:
- Market segmentation. Segmenting your lists is the first step required to fine-tune your funnel. There are a few different ways that you can segment. You could focus entirely on behaviours, such as visits to contact page, number of times your website has been opened, amount of time spent on key product pages and abandoned carts, for example. You could also segment demographically, using factors such as age, gender, location and LSM. Segmentation enables you to use target marketing far more effectively.
- Lead scoring. Next up, you can move onto lead scoring. This will separate the lukewarm and cold leads from the warmer leads that have a better chance of converting. If you are not scoring your leads, you will end up wasting valuable time and effort on leads that have little to no hope of converting. If you have a system in place for high priority and high value leads meanwhile, you will get far more from your efforts without wasting time or resources.
- Marketing and sales alignment. That brings us to the next step. You may already find that your funnel is looking a bit more manageable. But, what happens when your shiny new leads are taken to your sales team? Do you have aligned goals? Is there a plan in place that deals with how leads are nurtured? In order to truly see value from your funnel, it is essential to align your marketing and sales efforts. This can be done with the help of CRM tools, which will greatly simplify the process.
Now that you have a better idea of what you will need to have in place for your funnel, you can focus on creating an enticing offer that works perfectly with your lead nurturing efforts. This is where email marketing works to help you perfect your sales funnel.
