What is a Sales Funnel?

A funnel is more than just that plastic thing you use to help put windshield wiper fluid in your car. It’s what we use in marketing terminology to represent the path that your customers take from visiting your site, making a transaction, and tracking your revenue. Each step can be tied to various key metrics that can help you figure out which part of your funnel requires your attention. These are loosely defined at Visitors (leads), Customers (registrations, sign-ups), Orders (sales), and Revenue.

 

Visitors – this is typically called “top of the funnel” as it represents all inbound traffic to your site or bricks and mortar location. This include anybody that may happen to land on your website or random foot traffic which may or may not be your target customer. Some of the key metrics include: page views, unique visitors, and bounce rate.

Customers – this can also be signups by email, registrations or downloads and represents the pool of visitors in the first step of the funnel that have taken some sort of action on your site, but not bought anything yet. Some of the key metrics that describe this part of the funnel are: demographic information like age, gender and geographic area.

Orders – the third part of the funnel can be sales or clients, this is the pool of users who have attempted to or actually bought something from your store. Some metrics related to orders is average order size, type of order, number of orders, or cart abandonment rate.

Revenue – the most important step of the funnel is how much money was collected from the customers that completed their purchase. Some key metrics collected in this step are revenue based on time range, order type, customer, etc.

Keeping an eye on your funnel can give you a general idea of which parts need further development or attention. Let’s say you’re a retailer that sees a high unique visitor rate, but a low order rate. On further inspection, you see that your cart abandonment rate is high. This could be due to your checkout page being too lengthy or your customers may just need a friendly reminder to come back and completely their purchase. When you’re a brand new store with no customers, then your focus could be on filling your funnel with various marketing strategies like Facebook ads or Instagram posting.

Whether you’re just starting up or are a mature business, remember to keep an eye on your funnel to ensure that there are no parts that are weak or holding you back from increasing your ROI.

Tell us, which part of your sales funnel is currently your weakest point? Your strongest point?