You need to approach online sales differently than you would a bricks-and-mortar shop. Because of the huge number of potential buyers, it’s impossible to maintain a personal relationship with each online customer. But, you can build customer relationships by creating an easy-to-use website along with paid social media ads, presenting clear contact information, and providing excellent customer service.

We design sales funnel. Most website visitors don’t buy the first time they visit a business’s website. Instead, they are likely looking for more general information. Potential buyers who are first visiting your website is similar to the top of the sales funnel.

Often, you have many prospects coming into the top of the funnel. As you move prospects through the funnel, they turn into leads. Pay close attention to leads to pull them even further into your sales funnel. The end goal of your funnel is to convert leads into paying customers. In other words, prospects turn into leads and leads turn into customers.

For example, my company offers something of value in exchange for a potential customer’s contact information. A visitor could get a guided demo of our software by submitting an email address.

Once we receive a prospect’s email address, they are a lead. We send our leads other valuable offerings in hopes that they’ll return to our website.

Our goal is to drive a large volume of prospects into our sales funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, we invite leads to become customers.