The Marketing Funnel
No matter what you have to offer at some point it needs to be sold. I think the key thing I have learned about selling over the past 15 years or so is that selling is really a numbers game. NOT EVERYONE WANTS OR NEEDS YOUR PRODUCT. But there is a guaranteed percentage that do.
This percentage might only be small, but regardless if you have an idea of where you want to be and what percentage will buy then you have a plan for success.
“While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty”
The concept of the marketing funnel is really simple, but holds great value. You see I believe many people concentrate on getting the sale, and don’t get me wrong it’s important. However in most cases the sale will happen with a degree of predictability, what you need to concentrate on is the conversion.
The funnel concept is this: If you tell enough people about your product then mathematics can tell you how many products you will sell.
For the sake of simplicity, lets say you have an ebook you want to sell, so you really only have one product. And to make things even more simple lets say that right now on average you sell one a day on your website, and finally you might get about 1,000 hits per day on your site.
So the way the funnel works in this case is that for every 1,000 hits on your website you make 1 sale, or 1/1000. This gives you a conversion rate of 0.1%. To be honest this is a little low, most website owners expect a conversion rate of between 1% and 3%. A conversation rate of 0.1% might be ok however if the product you are selling makes you a lot of money, hundreds or thousands of dollars.
So, whats the result? Well you need to look at the conversion rate as a key to your success, then look at how you can improve the conversion rate, or improve the funnel, more on that another time.