This is a timely submission from a contributor as I am just in the process of updating my website with my 2020 offering. This is an interesting take on how to make your website work harder for your business.
If Your Homepage Isn’t A Sales Funnel, You’re Missing Out
For years, marketers have been beating the drum on the importance of “sales funnels.” The basic idea is to lead a customer down a path from initial interest to the point where they are willing and happy to part with their money. For the most part, it’s a pleasant process as the prospective customer learns more about the product and whether it is the right match for them. They first discover it, want to find out more about it, and then decide that they want it to be a part of their lives.
Marketers, however, usually only deploy sales funnels to a single product at a time. Rarely do they see their entire business – their whole website – as a funnel. It’s usually a matter of a customer clicking an ad, arriving at a landing page and then responding to a call to action – single customer viewing a single product and clicking a separate CTR.
But now there’s a new kid on the block, aptly called the “homepage funnel.” The idea here is to transform the homepage experience so that it too becomes a kind of funnel for users.
The Problem With Homepages Right Now
At present, there’s a problem with homepages. The majority of them are simply glorified menus, designed to allow customers to find the products and services that they want. The only issue with this approach is that people don’t always know what is right for them. What’s more, it seems strange to use landing pages for your sales funnel for individual products but NOT for situations in which you want to sell lots of different things. Surely if the process works for one of your offerings, it should work for many?
If you ask an SEO company what the most crucial aspect of digital marketing is, it will tell you that it is directing users to products. Ultimately, that’s your goal. You want to pair people with the things that will benefit them.
Homepages don’t do this; not as they stand, anyway. Instead, they expect customers to know exactly what they want immediately.
Transforming Homepages Into Funnels
The solution is to transform your homepage into a new funnel that directs people to your other sales funnels. How this works is pretty straightforward. You attempt to classify customers by their need and then create calls to action that immediately take them to the relevant single-product funnel.
So, for instance, let’s say that you’re an accounting firm, and you want to improve your home page. You could have a button for business customers that take them to your corporate sales pages, and another for individuals or sole traders which forwards them to another.
While it might seem similar to regular homepages, the psychology of a homepage funnel is very different. You’re collecting people through your SEO efforts and then directing them to the relevant sales channel, taking some of the uncertainty out of the process.
The result of this is usually a higher number of conversions and sales, and a boost to your business. Good luck.