How does marketing funnel work? Also, tell the working of online sales.

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I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking, but I’ll try to cover the bases. Online sales have become more powerful thanks to marketing funnels, aka online sales funnels.  Both of these topics are broad, so let’s just dive in.

There’s not much to say about how online selling works in the literal sense. You have something to sell, you offer it on a webpage, and you drive traffic (visitors) to that webpage. If someone chooses to buy, they pay through a checkout system and the order is completed.

That’s really all there is to it. It’s the steps in between and around that concept that determine success or failure in eCommerce (another word for online sales). Obviously, just spamming people with the link to a sales page isn’t going to work, because the traffic is completely cold. The people who click, if any even would, have no prior introduction to you or to what you’re selling. So with online selling, just like any business, pre-selling and targeting the right potential customer is mandatory.

To get into what I mean, let’s move on to funnels.

A marketing funnel is a process of turning leads into customers and making as much money as possible through that process. Marketers capture leads and then gradually those leads are converted into customers, and through upsells and repeat sales, the efforts to capture leads become more profitable. Funnels are usually broken into stages, with fewer and fewer leads passing into the next stage. Hence, the term funnel, because a funnel starts wide and narrows down.

Perhaps the most important part of any funnel is the beginning or the front-end. In other words, the initial advertising and promotion that turns cold traffic who has never heard of you into potential buyers. From there, if you create a more natural and welcoming journey for prospects to become customers, you consequently get far better numbers, both in sales frequency and revenue earned per customer (especially the latter).

If you want a really simple way of understanding it, think of a sales funnel as a strict path through which you turn strangers into loyal customers. Because loyalty is extremely important on the internet, where everyone is constantly getting distracted. You cannot just let good potential customers drift away after one sale. You need a way to make them buy more, learn more, and feel a more emotional investment in what you have to offer. That’s how you create a community of fans who buy everything you sell.

In general, there are four stages in a marketing funnel:

1) Awareness: When the customer comes to know about an e-commerce website and the products it sells. Or at least gets a vague awareness about something the business has to offer. Usually, you lead with the content here. Traffic backlinking through content marketing, PPC ads, etc.

2) Interest: This is when the customer shows an interest in the business as potentially understanding their problems and needs. You generally do this by drawing the customer from the awareness content to a landing page that gets their email address. A free gift teaching something important to them is just one example. Get their interest in something you have to offer, that isn’t necessarily a product that earns you money. You’ll make more later on the back-end.

3) Desire: Here, usually via email marketing, you introduce the product you sell, smoothly transitioning from information about you and your free gift, and why this non-free product is perfect for the customer.

4) Action: The final push to get a sale, and then more. Never settle for just one purchase. Offer upsells, transition buyers into a new email list designed to market more exclusively to them, etc. Basically, shift people from one funnel to another.

The above is a general, simplified concept for the sake of learning. This shouldn’t be considered the ultimate set of instructions for constructing a funnel.

Hopefully, that clears things up. As I have mentioned earlier regarding competition, the need of the hour is to stand out. In such a competitive scenario, Russel Brunson’s tips are proving to be very helpful for online entrepreneurs around the world. His book, DotCom Secrets, speaks volumes about creating incredibly profitable online businesses through the use of sales funnels. People call it the playbook for multiplying your online business empire, and they’re right.

If anyone asks about marketing funnels, my first instinct is to just tell them to read that. The principles of the book are easy to understand and implement. Check it out, it’s worth it. If you are interested, you can read my review through this link. That review covers more points in the context of your question. You can also explore the Knowledge Base section on my website for answers to questions similar to yours.

Please feel free to reply if you need any clarification.

Good Luck!

Thanks,

Cleo



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