An online sales process (also known as a funnel) is, on the face of it, a simple series of steps. You put leads in at the top, and you get customers out of the bottom. You gain leads via advertising and organic search traffic, and the standard wisdom is that if you want more customers, you simply need to get more leads.

However, getting leads can be very expensive. Whether you are advertising on Google or one or all of the social media platforms (usually Facebook or Instagram), there is a significant cost. The results of this can be quite quick, unlike an SEO campaign to bring in more organic traffic, which is a much longer game.

Making changes to Your Sales Funnel

Once you have your funnel in place, though there are plenty of things you can do to decrease the number of people falling through the cracks. The number of people who finally purchase after an initial enquiry can be as low as one percent, so it is easy to see that there can be room for improvement without needing to find more leads and in doing so, spend more money.

The first step is to make sure you are fishing in the right pond. If your product is a video game, then you need to advertise to the correct demographic. Otherwise, if your advertising is charged per impression, you are paying to put your advert in front of people who aren’t interested. If you are paying per click, you may well get clicks, but from people who are merely curious, and will rarely buy.

Fine-tuning Your Lead Capture

Once you have that box ticked, you need to look at your lead capture page or process; you can get a lot of fall out here if the wrong message is given. A ‘good’ result in this part of the process from cold leads is around 33%. 

Even so, if your lead capture rate is only 10% at this point, and you could increase this to 20 or even 30 percent, it means you’ve got two or three times the amount of people going through to the next stage. 

It should be mentioned, that these are very broad brush solutions and ballpark figures. If your business needs more bespoke advice then getting in contact with an agency that offers conversion optimisation services would be a positive move.

Optimising Final Conversions

How you contact these leads now, and how you build a relationship with them to the point at which you make then an offer will vary massively from industry to industry. Testing both the length and content of this campaign can also make or break how many of those leads you ‘convert’ into sales.

To put it in a nutshell, if your conversion rate is 1%, but you double the number of people who give you their details, and then you tweak your email or social media campaign to double the number of that number who then buy, your overall conversion rate has gone up from 1% to 4%, all without parting with a single extra penny.

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