Building Sales Through Engagement

If you have spent time working in sales or marketing-related fields, then the likelihood is that you have heard of the classic Sales or Marketing funnels. The concept breaks down a person's engagement with your business into stages and defines the touchpoints that help you build a relationship and influence buying behaviour. If you are looking to build awareness and start converting leads into sales, then you're reading the right blog!

Awareness

The first and broadest segment of the funnel focuses on making as many people as possible aware of your business. This starts with driving traffic, or people, to your website through SEO, social media, content and adverts. Ensuring that the information you share is valuable is half the battle, the other half is getting it in the right place to reach your target audience. There is little point in advertising your cupcake business on websites recruiting truck drivers, which would be a waste of your time and money.

Monitoring where your website traffic comes from via source tags will help you determine where best to focus your efforts in terms of advertising and content. For example, adding 'src=LinkedInOct21' to a URL and tracking it via Google Analytics will let you know how many visitors to your site came through an advert or post on LinkedIn in October 2021; helping you track performance.

Consideration

Once someone has engaged with your business, either by following you on a social platform or providing you with an email address, you can share more information about you, your business and how you can help them with their needs. Although still high level, consider sharing tailored content through your social media stories as well as your posts. Give 'early access' to case studies, content or events. Set up a newsletter with regular content for people to get updates from your business straight to their inboxes.

Offering discount codes or free subscriptions on your site via pop-ups for those who have spent a set amount of time on your site is a good way of encouraging people to interact with you. Whilst also allowing you to showcase new products, other promotions and more information about your business in future campaigns.

Engagement

As people interact more with your business, be sure to track and make the most of these touchpoints. Using automation for these activities can make this easier, such as sending a "thank you" email to those who complete your "Contact us" form.

If you have an online shop and someone has put things in their basket but has not completed the purchase, after a set amount of time - ie. an hour or so, getting an auto-email to say "have you forgotten something" will remind them to return to your site and complete their purchase.

Get your CRM system to do the heavy lifting for you by automatically adding tags for certain activities such as signing up for an event or downloading a copy of 'Top 10 Website Checklist- The Basics'. This will help with segmentation in future campaigns as well as determining which activities have been the most effective over time.

Be sure to keep an eye on these stats; has someone signed into your website multiple times, consistently opened your newsletter for the last six months, have they forwarded the email, have they opened it more than once? These are clear indications of high interest in your business and of individuals who should move to the next stage.

Conversion

On average, it takes seven touchpoints or interactions with your business before a person reaches this stage and convert to a buyer of your products or services. Again, this is where behaviour tracking through your site, social profiles and email campaigns will come in handy. Decide which touchpoints to monitor and set thresholds as to when you will move them through to the Conversion stage of your business. Be sure to also add weighting to each of these touchpoints. For example, someone who has signed up to an event, attended and opened the follow-up email has technically only had three interactions. However, these three activities are more valuable than opening 7 out of the last 12 of your newsletters. Once people hit these targets, you can reach out to them as part of your sales process. Either with a phone call, if you have their number, or send them a direct message with final promotional offers or ask if they have any questions.

Retention

Consider how you can add value to your existing customer base. Either through additional services, tailored content or specific offers for new products and services. Keeping people engaged with your business and its propositions will also help you to turn them into advocates. Once someone has used your products or services, they can speak to others that they know and spread the word about your offering. Encouraging this 'advocate' behaviour is a simple way of getting others to talk about your business and products whilst also growing the number of people at the 'awareness stage' of the marketing and sales pipeline. One mutually beneficial way to keep customers engaged and gain new leads is to provide benefits for 'referring a friend'. Consider the number of companies or subscriptions which you may have, how you talk about those businesses, and how many of them also provide incentives for referring people.

Keeping your existing contacts happy, engaged and coming back for more is always good for business, as am I!