Creating Your Marketing Funnel: The Master Key to Monetizing Any Website
Published December 11, 2009 - RSS/XML Feed RSS
 
Promoting a website and making it profitable is the one thing which most internet business owners struggle with more than anything. In fact, this is the reason why the majority of online businesses fail within the first few months in spite of the owner having spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on web design and product creation. However, you can easily avoid being a part of this statistic as long as you have a great plan for monetizing your site and the persistence to follow through with it. The following information will show you how to build a solid and dependable marketing “funnel” which you can use to make your business prosperous and successful.

What is a Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel is an incremental process which is designed to move interested prospects through a series of steps in order to turn them into paying customers and eventually loyal patrons of your business. In order for a marketing funnel to be successful, it must effectively build your brand and help you to establish trust with your customers. This is best accomplished through a strategic process which allows your prospects to become customers at a pace that they are comfortable with. At the same time, your marketing funnel must be designed to maximize every possible opportunity to market a product or service to your customer.

Your Marketing Funnel: A Blueprint for Success

Step One: Collect a Lead

One of the biggest mistakes that internet markers make is expecting a sale on the first visit. However, the ultra successful internet marketers such as Ali Brown, Mitch Meyerson and Frank Rumbauskas all claim that building a strong relationship with your list of customers is where the gold is. This means that the first step of your marketing funnel should always be to collect customer contact information such as their name and email. This is done by offering them something of value in return for their information such as a free ebook, a membership to your site or a free report to download.

Step Two: Viral Lead Collection

Viral marketing is another one of the secret weapons of the most successful internet marketers, and one which you need to use whenever you have the opportunity. Viral marketing is the internet equivalent of word to mouth marketing and is how sites like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and Stumbleupon got started. The best time to ask a customer for a referral is when they have just become a customer, whether they are a paying customer or new list member. Therefore, your second step should be to offer your customer another free gift in exchange for sending their friends a referral email to sign up for your list.

Step Three: Your Sales Offer

Most of your customers are not going to buy right away and that’s the reason why it’s important to get their contact information so that you can continue to build value until they are ready to buy. However, you will get some customers who are ready to buy on the first visit and you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to make them an offer. So your third step in your marketing funnel is to lead them directly to your sales page where you have a strong sales letter that you are consistently testing and optimizing and a strong offer which compels them to buy right now.

Step Four: The Upsell

Marketing research continuously reveals that about one third of customers who make a purchase are going to agree to an upsell of about 30% of the original product price.Therefore, your third step should be to make a one-time upsell offer to your new customer before you take them to your checkout page. This is why it is very important to have an ecommerce application and merchant account which makes it easy for customers to make a purchase and to add to their purchase. In addition to the upsell, it is also important to have a counter offer which you can make to the customers who decide to leave your sales page without buying. This can be done in the form of a popup which comes as soon as the customer hits the back button on their browser and should offer them an “abridged” version of your product at a fraction of the original price.

Step Five: Forum Membership

Forums and social networking sites are where all of the action is on the internet and so building one for your customers can bring you a TON of exposure and customer loyalty. However, your chances of getting someone to sign up for a forum after their purchase are much slimmer than the chances of them signing up during their checkout process. Therefore, once your customer has checked out, send them immediately to a page where they can sign up for your forum and even invite their friends in exchange for a few more free items. While you might end up giving away a lot of products this way, the long term rewards will be well worth the initial sacrifice.

Step Six: Follow up and Back End Sales

Since your relationship with your customer list is where the gold is, you’ll need to make sure that you have a strategic method for building that relationship and continuing to make offers to your customers. This is why it is a good idea to have an email service like Constant Contact or A Weber which allows you split your list into segments so that you can mail your customers based on what products they have already bought from you. Otherwise you might end up with a lot of them opting out of your list because they keep getting offers which they have already said yes to and which may even be at a discounted price from what they originally paid. Of course, you should also make sure that you are periodically sending out offers for free gifts in exchange for additional customer referrals.

Conclusion

This is just a basic marketing funnel which you can use to monetize your website and which in no way exhausts the possibilities in regard to viral marketing, upselling and conversion testing. Just begin to put these steps into practice and remember to keep testing and refining your marketing process.

Additional Resources for Refining Your Marketing Strategy

http://www.warriorforum.com/forum

A community of internet marketers who discuss methods of marketing, testing and search engine optimization.

More Information About Upselling Offers
http://kansascity.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/2008/06/16/smallb2.html

http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?44a1d58b-cbff-408e-b709-3fa1f4ee44ec

http://www.directsaleswebmarketing.com/marketing-strategy-up-sell-customer-conversion/

http://ezinearticles.com/?Different-Ways-to-Offer-an-Upsell&id=2582990

Read Related Articles About Promoting Your Site

All Categories: