Nowadays, an affiliated marketer is soul-fully interested in looking into trends which can help them to generate more sales. Over the last couple of years ‘the sales funnel strategy’ has been used by the successful marketer.
This is because sales funnels are a good and healthy strategy for someone trying to create a selling point for one of their products or someone else’s. With this strategy, the number of interactions between brand and consumer along with the buying cycle has multiplied.
Another key aspect, to it, is that we can pro-actively use these interactions to capture the prospect at various different stages of the consumer journey.
Also, we focus and prioritize the area which requires more guidance. Here is a list of top five strategies to do that:-
The Basic Sales Funnel Strategy
Very little has changed in the basic sales funnel principle from the time it was first discovered. The model is still applied and helps in generating sales. Applying too much effort to the sales funnel can sometimes take it to the point of over complexity. Go through the following video to know more about this strategy:
The strategy invokes various interaction points- both online and offline. The stages between the brand and consumer remain essentially the same.
The key to generating more sales is including the appropriate number of stages in the overall customer journey. On a successful journey, a number of stages take place as shown below.
a. Awareness: the moment in time when a user first discovers your brand, product, offers, and other discounts etc.
b. Consideration: Customers like to compare against the competition and wait for special offers before consideration.
c. Conversion: When a customer likes your brand and makes a choice to buy from you.
d. Loyalty: Regular customers are buying from you because they know and trust you
e. Advocacy: Customers actively recommended you to potential buyers.
Nowadays, this is basic proven marketing logic. Aside from generating multiple leads to convert, it involves much less work on your part. The strategy talks about gaining the highest potential with minimal inputs.
It is also one of the most obvious approaches and focuses on high-intent users. They are the ones who are ready to buy. AdWords and Bing are the most common platforms which allow you to target the audience where people are itching to buy. AdWords is the primary channel to target high-intent customer with search queries. Bing follows closely behind.
Next strategy is to continue to target those that are searching for keywords that have the most buyer intent associated with them. This is a great way to start any affiliate marketing campaign.
The fact that these people are ready to buy also increases the likelihood of competition in the chosen niche. Here is a list of activities that you can carry out to ensure you place the right products to the right people every time. This covers both research related tasks and suggestions to implement.
1. Make sure you research products, services, company reviews in your chosen niche
2. Use keywords with buyer intent in your PPC campaigns
3. Check pages visited on your website
4. Offer a sign up list and communicate with your prospects
5. Provide ongoing value to your prospects
6. Always be testing
Everyone who has visited your offer is a potential customer. If your offer is not good enough, they may go and purchase from your competitors. To maximize the conversion using a marketing funnel and to keep a positive check on your rivals, you might want to guide the potential customer to ‘the finish line.
You can use organic search mix to capture the leads. Another way is through social advertising and AdWords. Although, at first glance, it might look like that lead has no intention of buying right now but they still hold good potential for the future.
Facebook is another particularly good company where you can go to capture these leads. This is possible due to the variety of targeting options. What is more challenging is guiding the customers along the buying process, and making them convert. It is however easy when you implement the correct process.
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To go beyond the first purchase, you want to create repeat buyers and to invoke those who forget about you. You want them to be your long-term customer, hence loyal to your brand. It is recommended that you capture the interest of other people – both offline and online.
The loyalty of the customer is very important for any business or brand. The important part is the quality of your product/service. Here is a list of some other key elements:-
1. Quality of Products/Service
2. Premium customer service
3. The offers on refund (applies to your own or affiliate products)
4. The policies of return (applies to your own or affiliate products)
5. The recommendations and rewards
6. Personalization offers for existing customers
7. Time-limited promotions
8. After-purchase content
It is important to automate as much of your sales funnel as possible. This ensures that you do not have to intervene in the prospects buying process.
If you had to manually take each lead at a time through your funnel, this will lead you nowhere. Automation is key in any business, it will maximize conversions, and the time you have to spend building your business in other areas.
The first step is generating traffic, and building upon that by stacking your traffic campaigns so you have lots of traffic entering your sales funnel. Then you must ensure your system is capable of detecting these interactions.
For example, your automation layer will be able to capture leads and offer them incentives to purchase, or even free access to information that will help them make an informed decision.
This allows you to segment those who enter your sales funnel, and those who do not. Anyone who does not decide to leave their contact details can be contacted later via a remarketing campaign.
Google analytics and good tracking will help you understand the profile of traffic entering your sales funnel, and with a good follow up strategy with your prospects….overtime you will increase your conversions.
The Sales Funnel is a simplified version which has been used by many successful brands for a number of years now. It is now crucial to put more focus on leading, nurturing and optimizing each stage of the consumer experience, and following up with the prospect is key to them getting to know who you are.
A sales funnel strategy, therefore, is one of the best strategies for the consumer journey. It helps in preventing leads slipping away and buying somewhere else.