Every retailer would love to have more customers coming to their store, whether it’s online, or, into their shopfront.
As business owners, we spend a lot of time, and money, obsessing over the best ways to attract those customers.
If you’ve hear people talking about sales funnels and customer life cycles, and you’re feeling a little out of your depth, today I’m going to break down exactly what they are, so that you can master YOUR store’s sales funnel and attract more customers
What’s a Sales Funnel?
Instead of using this term funnel, think about it as a small set of stairs, leading to your shop’s front door (virtual or otherwise).
Each step that a potential customer has to walk up, gets them closer to purchasing from you.
In text book speak, there are 5 steps that a person has to walk up, before they become a customer.
Climbing the stairs to a sale
The first step, is Awareness. This is the hardest part, and the one you probably spend the most money on.
It’s making people aware that your store even exists. And you do this through your advertising and marketing campaigns and your store signage if you have a shopfront.
Once they’ve taken that first step up to awareness, you need to move them another step closer, and get them interested in your products.
Think about being on a bus, and all the stores you drive past. You might be aware of dozens of stores in just that one bus trip, but you aren’t interested in every single one, are you.
So, whilst you made it to step 1 (Awareness) on your bus trip, you’re not going to climb to step 2 (interest), for the vast majority of those stores.
Interest is created in many ways. It could be as easy as attractive store windows. Just a few simple ways to create awareness are using your blog to write great articles and have great images on your website.
A certain number of people will now be aware of your store, and be interested in finding out more about what you sell, so they’ll climb to step 3, Consideration
In retail speak, this is where they start looking around.
They’ll start clicking on categories in your webstore, or start browsing inside your shop.
At this stage, they still don’t know if they’ll be buying anything yet.
Once they’ve browsed, they move to step 4 – evaluation. In an online store, this is the point where they click on individual products, reading descriptions and looking at images and adding them to their cart. In store, they’ll be picking things up, perhaps asking questions, and adding items to their basket.
And then finally, at step 5, the highest step, but also the smallest part of the typical funnel, the customer will go through checkout, online or instore.
There’s also a 6th step, which people often forget, which is the returning customer, but we’ll dig into that step in another episode.
Can you see how each step you have to move up, you will lose people along the way?
Only those customers, that are truly interested in what you have for sale, will climb up all the steps for you.
Remember, online, a good conversion rate is 2%, but that still means that 98/100 people don’t buy from you.
Now that you have a better understanding of how a sales funnel works, you’ll now be able to analyse at what point potential customers are dropping off and work out how many people you need to come into the funnel to make a sale
If you’d like to get more personalized assistance on creating sales funnels that get you more sales, you might be interested in my Boutique Rockstars program, where you’ll get 1 on 1 support from me, every week, to help you build your retail store, to obtain personal and financial freedom.
Visit salensknight.com/rockstars, for more information.
Until next week
Be profitable.