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The Website Sales Funnel.

It consists of 3 things.

• 1. Your website's visitors. Your website's visitors are the people that are finding and browsing your website. There are vast and various ways to increase the amount of people that visit your site. The quality of these visitors (i.e. are these people searching for exactly what you offer and where they are at in the purchase decision) will play a large role in your "Website Sales Funnel".
• 2. Your website's visitor to enquiry rate. Your website's visitors to enquiry rate is the percentage of your visitors that contact you for more information or because they are ready to buy. For example let's say your site received 400 visitors in one week and you received 20 enquiries. This would give you a visitor to enquiry rate of 5%. This rate can dramatically increase or decrease the amount of sales your website helps you make!
• 3. Your sales close rate. Your sales close rate is your website enquiry to closed sales rate. For example, if you received 20 enquiries and you close at 30%, you will have made 6 sales.

Example 1 (below to the left)

This example shows a business that provides a services at an average of $250 for it's clients. The first example on the left shows that their website has a visitor to enquiry rate of only 1%.

So they're paying $100/week with pay-per-click advertising to get 100 visitors to the site and getting 300 visitors/week from natural search engine listings (the free ones). This gives them a total of 400 visitors/week and they're really not making any sales from.

Generally, website owner's first response would be "get more traffic to the website to make more sales". When in fact, so much more can be done utilising the same amount of visitors!

Example 2 (below to the right)

This same business fixes their website and their new visitor/enquiry rate is 8%.

This goes to show how valuable having a website with a well tuned sales funnel can be!

Increasing your visitor/enquiry rate.

Make sure your visitors are finding your website because they are specifically searching for the product/service you provide!

It's one thing to have a ton of visitors every week, but if they're not the right type of potential customers, your website will be much less effective in turning these visitors into enquiries.

Make sure your contact details are prominent and clearly displayed on every page!

If people have already made the purchase decision, the last thing you want is to loose an easy sale because they can't be bothered to search through and find your contact details.

People are lazy and follow the path of least resistance - Make their life easy!

Research proves people visiting websites take the easiest route to find what they're looking for. For example, let's say I'm looking at the website of a company that sells motorcycles. I'm interested in taking one for a test drive, but I can't be bothered picking up the phone and arranging anything right now. I then see a form says "For more information about our range please enter your details below". So I do...

From the motorcycle companies perspective, this enquiry is a potential buyer.

Don't think you know - use the facts!

Tracking and analytics are absolutely essential to quantify and make adjustments to your site that will have a positive impact!

Regardless of what you know about your customers, your industry or the marketplace, you could spend forever trying new wording, new forms, new layouts when the data is available to show you exactly what your visitors want.

Once you've identified their exact need/search, persuade them to give you their contact information with a strong specific call to action. You're not hassling them and creating a lesser quality lead. You're simply appealing to their lazy web browsing nature!