Your Online Business Is Losing A Lot Of Money If You’re Not Doing This

Running an online business gives most entrepreneurs the privilege to work from home. For organizations like large eCommerce companies whom their entire activities are based online, they run mostly from a centralized office location, and always endeavor to cover all the metrics for success, irrespective of the cost.

But while it may sound exciting to run an online business in many places around the world, it’s a whole lot harder in Africa.

Few people would risk paying their money to a company over the internet, for the fear of losing it all eventually. Another sect may choose to pay, only to end up getting a shitty service. While the last, whom may get value for their money, may or may not return to purchase from the same company again.

Most online businesses believe a successful purchase is good enough for them, and so, employ a form of “hope marketing” to ensure the person returns to buy again. Asides getting an existing customer to return, most online businesses also fail to remarket to individuals that are long gone and didn’t make a purchase, but browsed their product catalogs.

These groups of customers visit the online business, maybe make a purchase, and then leave.

The problem with this cycle is that the owners of these businesses don’t understand the essence of creating a sales funnel, and so, lose a ton of potential sales in the process.

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So What’s A Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a buying process that’s created to lead a prospect to an eventual purchase, or to get existing customers to purchase even a whole lot more.

Why’s An Online Sales Funnel Even Important Anyway

An online sales funnel is a hot buzz word in the internet marketing scene. It is not just a direct method of influencing customers to buy, but a scheme that’s designed to generate even more sales for any internet business.

For instance, it could involve using a landing page to collect the customer’s email in exchange for a free item, sending a sales deal based on the customers behaviour on your product page, sending follow-up emails in respect to those deals and offering discounts and help at the same time.

If a purchase is successful, you offer an up-sell. If that doesn’t work, then a down-sell.

If the customer upgrades their offer, you make more money, else, they only get sold what they bought. After which the customers begin to get another series of follow up emails showing how they can make the most of the products they just bought with some other items from your store.

While a sales funnel cannot be covered in-depth in this article, it’s an online marketing skit to get prospects who never made a purchase to return, and to make even more sales from existing customers.

This is done with follow-up phone conversations or email marketing, as the follow-up emails are sent with autoresponders in a bid to convince the prospect or customer to make a new or additional purchase.

See Also: 10 Steps To Start An Online Business In Nigeria

Some Autoresponders You Can Use For Your Sales Funnel Are

1). MailChimp:

This is the world’s most popular email marketing tool. It is extremely robust, works flawlessly, but comes at a higher cost. With MailChimp, you’ll get to have at least 1,000 subscribers receiving emails for free, before you can start paying monthly fees.

2). MailerLite:

This is a highly effective autoresponder. You can easily create online courses and more with it, while running your sales funnel through it. It is very cheap—one of the cheapest in the market—and lets you have up to 2,000 subscribers receiving emails for free, before you begin to pay.

3). GetResponse:

GetResponse is yet another highly effective email marketing tool. Its autoresponder feature works flawlsessly like the rest, and unlike mailchimp, it is cheaper, but not as cheap as MailerLite.

See Also: Top 10 Mistakes To Avoid When Starting An Online Business

So What Then Should You Do?

If you run an internet business and want to make the most of your revenues, you’d need to build a sales funnel around your products and services. You have to ensure that both window shoppers and existing customers have a smart remarketing sequence structured for them, and must be configured not just for the two groups in general, but for specific browsing behaviors.

By building a smart sales funnel for your online business, you can build trust through smart follow-up sequences, convert many more prospects into customers, and more than double your existing sales.

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What are your thoughts on why your online business is losing out on potentially more income without a sales funnel? Let me know by leaving a comment below.