E-Commerce: How to Get Your First Sale Online? Understand Sales Funnel Concept

You are very excited to start your e-commerce business. You have prepared everything needed to start the business, now what?

After everything is done, it is time to make your first sale online. As saying, usually first sale is the toughest to make, once you make it, you would find that it is very easy to make second sale, and eventually scale-up to e-commerce empire.

In order to get our first sale, we first need to understand a marketing concept, sales funnel. It sounds like a word pops out from marketing books right?

Yes, it is, but this article going to explain it in a more practical way and you will no longer afraid to pitch your sales.

What is Sales Funnel?

Simple question: Where our sales come from?

The answer: People.

As business owner, we do hope we can capture as many sales as possible, however in reality, do keep in mind, not everyone is your target customer. Every business, every product has its own specific target customers. All we need to do is, try to portrait your customer profile, who are they, where are they, when are they showing up? Understand who your customer is, then proceed with sales funnel technique.

Since you already know who your customer is, now it is time to “aware” them of your business or product. And this stage, is academically called as “Awareness” on the top of inverted sales funnel triangle.

Once your potential customers know your business, some might not so “interested” in what you are offering, it is always ok to let go some customers. Whoever “interested”, will stay to next stage. That’s why this stage is called “Interest”.

Those who are interested in your business, at this stage, they will “consider” and compare your business against your competitors. So this stage is “Consideration”.

 Once your customers finish considering, they will have the “intention” to buy from you. You make your sales, customers get whatever they want happily, remember they buy from you, it is because they like you, they like your business.

This is how sales funnel works, it acts like a filter. It helps business filtering out unwanted customers, deal with customers who like your business, and your business solve their problems. With this technique, usually business will end up with happy customers.

Once You Understand Sales Funnel, You Will Never Hate Selling

Why with sales funnel technique, your customers usually will be very happy with your business?

During sales funneling, you leave out uninterested customers, hence it reduces the chance of having angry customers. I can give you a pretty good example.

Back to old days that internet not so common, people still buying from traditional salespersons. Most of the time, what would have happened to those sales processes?

Some people actually not really liked what they had been offering, but due to aggressiveness of salesperson, some people ended up buying things they didn’t really want. The reason could be shy, could be introvert to tell your feeling, or that salesperson is your relatives, you afraid to reject, so you end up buying their products, usually at very expensive price. I bet you have such experience as I had.

With such experience, people tends to avoid salesperson, whenever they see, or heard of anything regarding “marketing”, most people are scared like seeing a ghost.

All this experience happened is due to unspecific targeting. These people might be interested in your business, but not so intend to buy now, with sales funnel technique, we can let go this kind of customers first, and then retarget them later on.

That’s why with sales funnel method, you usually deal with happy customers, not forcing anyone to buy from you.

Once you understand the concept of sales funnel, you will no longer hate to sell, because you know you always sell your solution to your customers, solve their problems, and they are happy with you.

How Sales Funnel Help You to Get E-Commerce Sale?

Now we understand the process, how customers will behave from the beginning and end up buying from our business. Time to earn some real money!

We portrait our customer profile. Let say, our customers like to use Facebook, we must then using Facebook Ads to “aware” our potential customers. Let them know our business first.

You link your Ads to your website, landing page or a place where you can convert the sales. Once potential customers see your Ads, click it, they will be prompted to your website or a place to convert them, at this phrase, those who clicked the Ads into your website are “Lead”, they are interested in your offer, they are still considering buying the deal. Eventually some of them will end up buying from your store; we call the orders made as “Conversion”.

As we mentioned in previous paragraph, it is an inverted triangle process. The number of potential customers is lesser and lesser during the process, before the lead converted.

So how to increase our sales?

It is pretty easy, just increase the numbers of people who are aware of your business, then eventually you have larger number of conversions.

Now you probably come to understand that why online influencers, KOL always like to seek your attention, because what they are doing is actually increasing the “Awareness”, and eventually more “Conversion”.

So the key to sell online is always exposure, Exposure and EXPOSURE!!!

Sales Funnel Help You Identify Marketing Issue

You can think sales funnel is some kind of marketing system. If you found that your Ads/Exposure is not effective, then it actually alerts you something is wrong. All you need to do is checking the process one by one.

If your leads never convert, probably is your website not easy to navigate? Complicated checkout process? Less checkout options?

You can easily list out these potential issue, then eliminate it one by one. If the conversions increasing successfully, then you have the problems solved. Once this process is consistently, achieve significant success, the last step to do is duplicate your success! Increase more sales!!

Conclusion

If you think selling something to a person is evil, because you have to push selling something to your customers, then probably indicates that you have not learned the concept of sales funnel yet.

Once you understand the concept how the sales funnel works, you will realize selling is not hard selling to someone, is a digital game that deal with numbers, all you need to do is crack the code and win the game.

Sounds fun right?