The sales funnel is an effective way of visualizing how your marketing campaign works, and the route that a target takes from seeing your advertisements to becoming a paying customer. The sales funnel includes every part of the buying process, and it shows the ideal route, and how each activity relates to others during the campaign.

A typical sales funnel would look something like this:

• Marketing through acquisition channels
• Visitors
• Leads
• Opportunities
• Sales
• Satisfaction
• Retention
• Cross selling, up-selling and winback for repeat customers

That is a single funnel, but the real picture is rather different, and looks more like a web, with multiple acquisition channels creating leads from different avenues, and even your existing satisfied customers sometimes feeding you leads. Mapping out this process will help you find strengths and weaknesses in your marketing. [Read more…]