Design your sales Funnel BEFORE your theme

One of the great advantages of WordPress is that you can take your website data and apply a new theme design to it in less than a minute.  Unlike many other systems, the new website layout works immediately. By using the Customizer, you can even see how a new theme looks before you commit to going live!

It is for that reason that I suggest there is less pressure on nailing a theme design first time- and indeed there is much more flexibility on improving the design as you go.

Let’s go back a step and ask the question about your strategy

What is the main reason for your web site – What is it trying to sell?

Most websites that I look at will miss the whole point of a top performing web-site. – That is to gain leads or close business. They tend to oversimplify the process and ignore all the great tools that are now available.

1. The Brochure Site

   So many sites are just a few pages of content about the business and what it does. There may be a mailing list to join. This often is just more content about. This is a great start in informing the prospect of what you do. But does your site ask for an order?

2. Order Pages.

   The other extreme is a web-site that just lists product and prices. Here we can only assume that the visitor knows exactly what they want and can just choose the items and checkout.

Now, please understand I know that the majority of websites will fall into these two groups. Most brochure sites will never expect to take much business. There are also many sites with either layout that are doing good business for their owners.

Both there stategies are leaving money on the table

The Sales Funnel

The average visitor to a site is interested, but not ready to make a purchase. So we need to create a sales process which we can then incorporate into a sales funnel and then apply that to the processes and pages on the website. We need to satisfy the needs of the customer and gradually move them from interested to purchase. This will not happen at one visit, which is why we need to build a funnel to gradually encourage their purchase.

In able to make a purchase, the average prospect will need to have the following issues satisfied. These are the website equivalent of meet-know-trust.

1. They need to know you have the knowledge
2. They need to see you can provide the service
3. They have to see the products you will deliver
4. They want to see how you have already helped others
5. They may not see all the advantages of having your product or service
6. They want to know they will be looked after post sale with support and backup available.
7. If you can show them the process of purchasing they can imagine them doing the same.
8. The product or service may also help others so any on-going benefits should be understood.
9. There may be alternative solutions. You may want to suggest why some may not work as expected.

My Methodology

I had the dubious pleasure to do some marketing for a wall coating company. They had a 3-hour presentation to give to homeowners. This was even slicker than ‘traditional’ Double Glazing sales pitch. It was crafted over ten years to fulfil every stage in the process on one visit and before the internet really took over.

• I have taken apart their presentation and used it to refine a complete sales process.
• We have added the power of a 9 step process from corporate selling is difficult markets.
• We can then use this blueprint as the backbone of a complete sales funnel.
• Next, we can use web technologies like opt-oms, Email marketing, Facebook advertising, Google Ads, Twitter etc to allow us to stretch the whole says process over more than one website visit.
• Now we can build this process back into a website design
• Lastly, we add the analytics and key indicators, so that we can track the whole sales process and ber able to evolve the design based on the numbers.

So how does this site work?

This site is about picking up on the issues that matter to people. We can then craft more content to suit and build up that relationship. Such information helps us inform our private consulting clients and to launch our mini-courses for others. As you have read to the bottom of this, we think you might like to know more? – One of our courses is the 2-day funnel seminar. If you are interested, then fill in the form below.