Tag: sales funnel

  • A Quick Guide To The Sales Funnel – For Affiliate Marketers

    sales-funnelA sales funnel is a process which can represent your entire sales process in one image. As a funnel is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, so your sales funnel is meant to call the attention of a wide swath of potential clients in the beginning, and continue to whittle that group down until you reach those who will become paying clients. There are a lot of individual theories related to the sales funnel concept, and there are even tools to help you track your funnel. Here we will take a look at some basics of the sales funnel for an affiliate marketer.

    1. The first step in the sales funnel is broadcasting your marketing message to as many prospects as possible. This does not mean broadcasting to as many people as possible, as all people are not potential customers. For example, if you are advertising to seniors who may want a new walk-in bathtub, you would broadcast your message on seniors’ webpages, in AARP magazine, etc. For affiliate marketers, people usually enter the sales funnel when they enter their information on a landing page, or call in for more information about a product or service.
    2. The second step in the sales funnel will generally differ from business to business, and product to product, but usually includes some kind of customer contact. Here is it important to note that all the steps in the sales funnel are call and response. Now that the customer has given you their information or called your company (step 1), you may respond by replying with an auto responder series, sending them a newsletter, or giving them a free trial. In other words, step 2 is all about responding to the customer’s request for more information.
    3. The third step involves handling the customer’s response to step 2. Depending on the length of the sales funnel this may be the point where the actual sale is made. Other sales funnels will be longer, and may include the customer watching a video, then taking a webinar, then talking to a coach to ask any questions they have, and then finally making the purchase. So, step three and those after really just represent a series of steps the customer will take up to the point of making a purchase. Sometimes the sales funnel will even have a small purchase in earlier steps, leading to a larger purchase in later steps.

    As can be seen, the sales funnel can be as short as 2 steps, or as many steps as the affiliate feels is necessary to convince the prospect that the offer is worth purchasing. In 2013 there were some marketers who disputed the practicality of the sales funnel altogether, saying that prospects are not so readily predictable as to follow the well laid out steps. Considering that a sales funnel is meant to do 2 things: generate sales, and accurately track conversion rates of each step in the process, it is true that any disruption in either of these two metrics could cause the sales funnel concept to falter, but not necessarily fall apart. These would simply be signs that additional tracking metrics are needed, or that some steps of the process need to be improved or eliminated.

  • Affiliates: Insulate Your Sales Funnel Against This Hidden Foe

    Affiliates: Insulate Your Sales Funnel Against This Hidden Foe

    In the world of affiliate marketing the name of the game is sales. If an affiliate brings sales to the company that likely would not have happened without their involvement, then on a whole this is seen to be a net positive for the company. Of course there are other considerations, such as marketing and promotion techniques and conversion rates – but overall more sales are better. But determining which sales your company would have otherwise made, without the affiliate, is very important and can lead to some interesting conclusions.

    As can be read in this article, sometimes affiliate marketers simply send customers to purchase a product that they were going to purchase anyways, collecting a commission in the process. In extreme cases, customers actually stop the buying process, and then go through an affiliate link to continue it. Here is how it happens:

    1. Customer arrives to your website through your blog, PPC, or some other non-affiliate manner.
    2. Customer finds a product or service on your site, adds it to their cart, and proceeds to the check out.
    3. On the checkout page the customer sees the “Add Discount Code” field and instead of continuing the purchase without a discount code, decides to open another browser and search for one.
    4. When the customer searches “[Your company name] discount code” the top results take them to your affiliate’s websites, where the customer is presented a discount code, which may or may not be valid.
    5. The affiliate site puts a cookie in your customer’s computer, and redirects them back to your site, where they finish the purchase.
    6. Affiliate collects commission for the sale.

    This whole process may happen by accident or on purpose. The big take away here is that retailers should take note and make necessary changes to prevent this from happening.

    To read more from VentureBeat.com, click here.