What Is A Marketing Funnel Or Website Funnel?

Have you ever heard of a marketing funnel or website funnel?  Most people who aren’t in online marketing haven’t, and they don’t know the importance of it either.
The website funnel is simply a model or concept that your website has X amount of visitors, ideally about 5-10% will show interest in what you offer, about 3-8% will become qualified leads, and about 1-3% will become new customers.  As you move down the funnel, you drop off more and more people and only a select few pass through the funnel.
Many websites do a terrible job in managing at least one aspect of the funnel.  It all starts with getting website visitors, obviously our preferred choice is through search engine optimization.  Traffic from search engines is fairly inexpensive to get compared to other marketing means, and in my personal experiences and with our clients search engine traffic is higher quality than traffic from other online sources.
So once we have visitors on our website, the funnel begins. We start out at point 1 where we aim to get 5-10% of our total visitors showing an interest in our products or services.  That can be through a phone call, contact us form, registration, email list signup, or any other mean of someone showing interest in what you offer.  Most websites aren’t properly optimized to have the highest conversion rate possible.  Whenever we build a new website, we always keep conversions in mind and build the site in a way that will maximize the conversion percentage.  We also are able to come in and make changes to the structure, colors, and layout of your site to help it convert better.
While many websites struggle with conversions, I think most businesses and websites struggle the most with making those conversions qualified leads.  A qualified lead is someone who is interest in your product or service, but they also have the budget and expectations to be a good match for a client of yours.  That means educating them on what you offer, having enough information on your website to help them make the right decision, having a good follow up process for your prospects, and having a CRM system to manage all your website leads.  So many businesses receive contact requests, send a response, and that’s the end of it.  A business that is good at converting leads to customers will follow up on a consistent basis and educate their lead about their product or service and why they’re the best.
And the last stage of the funnel — the customer stage.  Only about 1-3% of your total website visitors will ever become customers.  For many websites that don’t have a decent funnel in place, this number can be as low as .05-.25%, but for companies who have an excellent funnel in certain industries it can be as high as 5% or sometimes even higher.  We always aim for 1-3% — so for every 100 website visitors we strive for at least 1 new customer.  An important aspect to keep in mind is that these numbers relate primarily to service based websites; websites that offer a product often have much higher conversion rates but the same principles still apply, just with different percentages.
It’s important to understand that all these aspects need to work together to have a successful online marketing campaign.  We always offer suggestions for what we can improve on your website or with your conversion process to help you improve these numbers.