It’s the middle of summer for those of us in the northern hemisphere and the roads, rails and airways are probably at their busiest in terms of holiday traffic.
Think about the last time you planned a holiday trip. Then think about the last time you thought about how your customers will move through your sales funnel. We all spend some time planning how we will reach our holiday destination, but how much thought is given to a prospect’s journey?
Perhaps your prospect arrives at your site travelling along a link from a search engine or social media platform. Or perhaps they are responding to an email you or an affiliate has sent them. However they travel you need to give some thought to where they will arrive.
It might be a sales page, a squeeze page, or a home page. Give some thought to the information they will find. Will you provide information on a page or in a downloadable document? Once they’ve consumed the information where do you want them to go next?
It will help if you know your objective to having them arrive at your site in the first place. How can you encourage them to stay on your site and how can you move them through the steps that end in a conversion, whether that be to submit their contact details or to make a purchase.
Whether they just submit their details or make a purchase they should end up on an email list. Now they are in your database what will happen to them next? You have to consider your email sequence, the offers you will make them, and whether you will segment your list.
At each possible purchase point you should consider what will happen to the prospect who wants more information and is willing to pay for it, what will happen to the prospect who is uninterested in making an extra purchase, and what will happen to the prospect who is not tempted by your initial offer.
Whatever happens to your prospect once they reach your funnel, it all has to be planned out in advance. One way to approach this is to consider your customer’s journey and try to make it as easy, engaging and fluid as possible.