Why Your Business Needs A Sales Funnel

How do customers go from hearing about a product or service to ultimately purchasing it? Chances are, they have entered a business’s sales funnel and came out the other side as a paying customer.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is an automated journey a prospect goes through to become a customer. It usually consists of three to four steps that convince interested prospects to take a certain action. As customers continue to be interested, they work their way down the funnel.

Elias St. Elmo Lewis devised the sales funnel process back in 1989. He outlined four steps:

• Attention: When a customer is first made aware of your business or the products or services you sell.
• Interest: The customer is curious about your business, how it solves a problem or gives them something they want.
• Desire: The customer begins to like the product and develops a fondness for it.
• Action: The customer does more research, samples the product, and eventually purchases it.

It’s called a funnel because of the way it looks on paper. The top is wide as awareness reaches a lot of people and eventually narrows as the pool of interested individuals becomes smaller and more targeted.

Why Your Business Need A Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is the backbone of every online business. Here’s why your business needs one:

It builds a relationship

Most customers don’t make major purchases right away. They do their homework, study their options, and buy from brands they trust. A sales funnel allows that relationship to blossom.

You focus on the right leads

Uninterested customers will leave your funnel on their own, leaving you to devote your time and resources to those who are most interested.

It sets the stage for ongoing sales

When customers enter your sales funnel, they are at varying stages of the buying process. Those that are further along will become paying customers. The others are on a journey that will result in an eventual sale. Keeping interested customers engaged in sales funnel means a steady stream of customers in the future.

Accountability for your sales

Every activity in your sales funnel is tracked, so you will know your most effective content, your best selling products, the social media platform that has the most responses, and the geography of your most paying customers. Having a sales funnel helps you understand the sales process and adjust to what is working the best.

You can monitor your metrics

Sales funnel software can give you more information than the page views your website typically gives. It measures traffic, returns traffic, sales qualified leads, conversion rates, cost per lead, sales velocity, and much more.

If you’d like to learn more about sales funnels and how they can help your business, contact Web Strategy Plus. We create engaging sales copy that expands the number of visitors who enter your funnel and enticing landing pages that persuade visitors to take action. We can build a sales funnel for your business that is both effective and affordable. Contact us today for a free consultation. For more tips to grow your business, check us out on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and SlideShare.

10 Reasons That Prove Email Marketing Should Be Your Top Priority

People tend to think email marketing does not get the same attention as social media. However, what people don’t realize is it proves to be one of the most effective direct means of growing your business. Learn 10 Reasons That Prove Email Marketing Should Be Your Top Priority:

1. Email Use

With over 3.2 billion email accounts in the world today, 95% of the world’s population have direct access and 91% check their emails at least once a day. Email is an integral part of our daily lives and no one can really quit emailing.

2. Reach

The idea of reach for email is completely different than Social Media. For social networking, reach refers to the number of followers and likes who have seen your message. With email reach is determined by whether the person has opened it or not. Research shows 18% of emails are blocked and 4% are delivered to the junk or spam folder. However, on Facebook 74% of the messages are missed. Therefore email proves to be more reliable.

3. Life Span

75% of Facebook posts last around 2 hours while the life of a tweet is just 5 minutes. However, an email stays in your inbox and even if you want to delete it – it requires an additional action.

4. Return on Investment

As per the Email Marketing Benchmark Report of 2013, 60% of marketers stated that email marketing produces ROI. For every $1, the standard return on email marketing is $44.24.

5. Analytics

Email has set up solid metrics that have served as the standard for many years. Open Rates, Unsubscribes and Growth can be easily tracked with sales and profits. With a simple formula, you can determine the value of your email subscribers.

6. Engagement

People don’t usually talk about email and engagement in the same sentence. However, emails are excellent engagement vehicles and can serve as a two-way street. Best practice is not to send emails with a no-reply address. Be sure you make it easy for your customers to communicate with you.

7. Integration

The best part is that social media and email are friends. Many services allow you to post your email messages out to various social networks. This connection is great for business growth and helps in establishing cross-platform initiatives.

8. Promotional

Around 77% of people prefer to get promotional content via email while only 4% prefer it via Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook is viewed as a platform for establishing connections and to interact with family and friends. Emails are perceived differently, mainly due to its privacy and simplicity. In a recent survey, 70% of recipients stated that they have used discounts and promotional coupons received in promotional emails.

9. Mobility

Litmus stated that 66% of Gmail inboxes are accessed via mobile phones. A major number of transactions will be done online, and mobile email amounts to 13% of it. Smart marketers have learned how to embrace email and carve out a whole new channel to promote their products.

10. Personalization

Email has the power to send promotional content to hundreds of people at one time while still maintaining the same standards of personalization.

In conclusion, Email marketing has proven to be a networking channel that can truly help you establish a valued relationship between you and your subscriber.

5 Reasons a Company Website Isn’t Optional: It’s a Necessity to Survive and Thrive

While starting a small business can be a very rewarding experience, that doesn’t mean that it’s without challenges. Because there’s no shortage of obstacles that can stand in the way of small business success, it’s important to give yourself every advantage possible. One of those very important advantages is to have a website. Since people spend so much time searching online, not having a website means that you’re missing out on the opportunity to connect with a lot of potential customers.

To understand exactly why having a website is a necessity for any small business that wants to succeed, let’s go over four different specific benefits:

Protect Your Reputation

Good online reviews of your business can really help it flourish. Unfortunately, it only takes one negative review to undermine all the other good things that have been said about you. The good news is if you have a website, you can publish content on it that is specifically designed to help make any online negativity about your business less visible.

Increase Customer Loyalty

When you have a website, it’s easy to add a sign-up form so people can give you their email address. Depending on your specific type of business, you can then send the people who sign up anything from a bi-weekly newsletter to coupons. The key takeaway is regardless of what you decide is best to send, as long as it provides value, it will help to increase customer loyalty.

Attract Highly Targeted Traffic from Google

Although we touched on this in the opening paragraph, it’s such an important topic that it’s worth discussing in detail. When people use Google to search for a specific keyword phrase, they’re basically saying exactly what they need at that time. So if your website appears in the list of results that show up and the searcher clicks your link, there’s a very good chance that they’re going to want to do business with you.

Serves as a Hub for Social Media Promotion

There’s a lot of value in using social media to promote your business. The one caveat is in order to maximize results, you need a central hub where you can drive traffic from all the different social sites you use. By having a website, accomplishing that goal will be quite easy to do.

Your Website Needs to Be Visible in Google

As you can see from several of the benefits above, small businesses will only gain those things if they not only have a website but have a website that shows up in Google. While making your website visible in Google for relevant searches may seem like some kind of magic, the reality is it simply requires an effective marketing strategy. So whether you already have a website but need to increase visibility, or you want to have a website built that is fully search engine optimized, your best option is to work with an experienced design, development and marketing agency.

Local SEO Tips: How To Increase The Local Influence of Your Website

Local SEO Tips

Because more people than ever are now searching for local businesses using both standard and mobile devices, local SEO has become essential for any business that serves a specific geographic region. While it’s something that simply can’t be overlooked, it has actually become more complicated in recent years.

The main reason is that Google wants to ensure that they provide the best experience to searchers who are expecting local results. This goal has caused them to put measures in place that discourage businesses without an actual local presence from gaming the system.

Although executing the right local SEO strategy can be a challenge, the good news is Google does want to display real businesses in its local results. So if you have any kind of retail presence in your area, you should be able to get the visibility you want by following a handful of straightforward steps, as well as knowing certain pitfalls to avoid:

How to Get Started with Local SEO

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a Google Business page. When it comes to filling out this page, the more information you can provide, the better. That includes adding plenty of pictures to your page so people can see what your business looks like and exactly what it has to offer.

Once you have a Google Business page, you can begin focusing on other tactics to augment your efforts. One of those tactics is to ensure all mentions of your business name, address and phone number (NAP) are up to date. Having plenty of these up-to-date citations from credible sources sends a strong message to Google that your business does indeed have an actual local presence.

Finally, identify ways to keep the momentum going. Whether that’s including a link to your Google Business page at the bottom of emails, or creating a strategy for how many times a week you want to share content through your page, keeping your efforts active will help drive the best results.

What To Avoid

Once you get your local business SEO on the right track, the last thing you want to do is make a mistake that’s going to derail your progress. The two biggest things you want to avoid are creating any type of fake reviews or doing anything online that could tarnish your reputation. In terms of fake reviews, Google is quite good at identifying patterns that seem unnatural, so avoid the temptation to write reviews of yourself or pay others to leave positive remarks.

And when it comes to protecting your reputation, even if you receive a negative review, don’t respond in anger. There are countless examples of businesses making things way worse for themselves by getting mad at negative reviews instead of finding a better way to deal with them or simply ignoring the review.

By putting the steps we covered to work, as well as keeping in mind the things that you should avoid, you’ll be able to develop a local SEO presence in Google’s results that will help generate phone calls and visits from highly targeted potential customers.

Having a Mobile Friendly Website is No Longer Optional – It’s a MUST

The original iPhone was released on June 29th, 2007. Although the iPhone was far from being the first mobile device, it did change the mobile landscape forever. Prior to the iPhone, using the Internet away from a desktop or laptop was limited to watered-down webpages that rendered as text. But because the iPhone included a full online browsing experience through Safari, it kicked off an explosion in the mobile web.

Mobile’s Evolution Over the Last 9 Years

While the mobile web as we know it today is less than a decade old, it’s already gone through several evolutions. The first was the app gold rush. In addition to the Safari browser, Apple also launched the idea of apps with their device. This led to developers and businesses rushing to create apps. However, it became clear that most people don’t want to use a dedicated app for every business they’re interested in. This is supported by recent research which shows that most people use less than a half dozen apps on a regular basis.

Since it doesn’t make sense for most small to medium businesses to have a dedicated app, there was also a time during the last nine years when the focus was on having a separate mobile website. The reason that the trend has come and gone is there were several major problems. Not only did it create an often frustrating experience for website visitors, but it also required businesses to manage two different websites.

Why Responsive Design is The Best Solution for Mobile

Multiple studies have confirmed that mobile is now the most common way that people of all ages search online and visit websites. So even though it doesn’t make sense for most businesses to have an app or separate mobile version of their website, having an optimized mobile presence is a MUST!

The option that has emerged as the best mobile solution for businesses is responsive website design. With this approach, a website will automatically resize to a screen of any size. That means a site will load quickly, look great and offer full functionality on any mobile device, tablet or standard computer. And unlike the previous approach of having two versions of a website, responsive design is done through one set of code, which makes it very easy to manage.

How do you know if your current website has an optimized responsive design and is fully mobile friendly? The best way is to use Google’s free mobile-friendly test tool.

What If You Don’t Pass the Mobile-Friendly Test?

If you don’t pass Google’s test, it almost guarantees that your site isn’t ranking as well as it should for mobile searches. It also means that visitors who do come to your site via a mobile device are more likely to abandon it due to a less than optimal experience.

Since those issues mean your business is missing out on potential revenue every day, you need to fix them as soon as possible. That’s where Web Strategy Plus can help. With our responsive web design services, we can fully update your site to ensure it’s completely mobile friendly.

To get your site’s mobile problem solved as soon as possible, contact us now for a free consultation and quote!

10 Things Every Small Business Website Needs

If you want a website that not only looks great but is also capable of generating new leads for your business, make sure your site has all of the following ten traits:

An Easy to Remember URL

You don’t want multiple dashes or numbers in your website URL. Instead, it’s important to have a simple address. Since you will say it over the phone and may put it on marketing materials like posters or even billboards, you want something that can be typed in without any issues. Ensuring your address is easy to remember is also why it’s best to stick with .com, .net, or in some cases, .org.

Clear Navigation

When it comes to navigation, simplicity is always best. You want to be sure that regardless of where someone is on your site, they’re only a single click away from your main pages.

A Clear Explanation of You and Your Business

People should know exactly what you and your business are about within a few seconds of finding their way to your site. Failing to include this information can cause visitors to lose trust and hit the back button.

Prominent Contact Information

When it comes to perfect website design for a business, your contact information needs to be readily displayed. Even if you’re hesitant to include a phone number, doing so will help inspire trust among visitors. That’s true even if they never call you.

Real Testimonials

Continuing the theme of ensuring that visitors to your site trust your business, you should have real testimonials that customers have sent you. If possible, include people’s pictures next to their testimonials. Another option is to link to their social media profiles.

Use Quality Pictures and Subheadings

Since online readers like to scan, be sure to break up any big chunks of text on your site by utilizing relevant images and informative subheadings.

Tell Visitors What You Want Them to Do

In order to convert visitors into actual leads, you need to tell them what they should do. So whether that’s submitting a contact form or giving you a call, be sure your site makes that desired action crystal clear.

Regularly Add Content

Whether it’s news updates about your business or informative blog posts, regularly adding new content will help you engage visitors and bring in more search engine traffic.

Take Advantage of Google Webmaster Tools for SEO

The best way to ensure your site is accessible and doesn’t have any SEO issues is to sign up for a free Google Webmaster Tools account. This will provide you with reports, as well as alert you to any issues that need to be addressed.

A Reliable Host

If your site is down, it’s not going to help your business. That’s why it’s vital to carefully research your options before committing to a specific host.

A Professional Web Design Company Can Provide the Perfect Small Business Website

If you want to ensure your website has all ten traits, your best option is to let a professional team create or redesign your website. By working with experienced professionals, you will get a website that’s fully optimized to generate as many targeted leads as possible for your business!

Do you need a better website for your business? Web Strategy Plus offers a free quote or consultation to help you identify the areas of your marketing plan that need improvement. Learn More

7 SEO Facts Business Owners Must Keep In Mind

If you want your website to rank well in Google, it’s important to understand the basic realities of search engine optimization. Although SEO is a very broad subject, its most important components can be distilled into seven key facts:

1. Change is Inevitable

Not only has Google developed a reputation for regularly rolling out major changes to their algorithm, but many other aspects of online marketing also change on a regular basis. Because this type of change is going to happen, it’s important to account for it in any strategies you develop.

2. SEO Isn’t Something to Set and Forget

While there are certain optimization tactics you can do one time and then be done with for the foreseeable future, SEO is an ongoing effort. When businesses fail to commit to SEO, it’s nearly impossible for them to get the results they want.

3. Mobile SEO Matters

Using a responsive design for your website is a good starting point for mobile SEO. However, because local website optimization also plays a role in these rankings, it’s important to address additional issues as well. Geo-targeting, user navigation, and customized experiences are all factors that can play a role in how well a website ranks in mobile search results.

4. Your CMS Can Make or Break Your Rankings

Choosing a new CMS isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly. One of the many ways it can affect your site is through rankings. While an optimized CMS can provide a lot of help in terms of rankings, the wrong one can hold you back. And even if a quality CMS is selected, it’s important to transition properly in order to protect any existing rankings.

5. Small Changes Can Have a Big Impact

This reality of SEO is a double-edged sword. Since there are times when trying to rank can be very frustrating, it’s reassuring to know that the rankings your site deserves may just be a small change away. On the other hand, if you’ve managed to establish very good rankings, it can be a little scary to realize that even if it’s something small, making the wrong change to your site can have very serious consequences.

6. SEO Shouldn’t Exist in a Bubble

A big part of getting the most out of search engine optimization for business is understanding that this practice doesn’t exist in a bubble. While it is important to ensure that all of your SEO efforts are in the hands of capable professionals, you also need to take into account how search engine optimization interacts with everything else you’re doing online and offline. By finding the best ways to integrate all of your efforts, you’ll be able to generate the best possible results.

7. Google Doesn’t Owe You Anything

While this last point may sound harsh, the sooner you take it to heart, the sooner you’ll be able to develop a truly effective SEO strategy for your website.

If you want to work with an SEO company that can help you stay on top of this ever-changing landscape, contact us today to schedule a consultation.