All Posts by John Paull

The B2B customer travel from visitor, to direct,to customer, to promoter, is often broken down into four steps: attract, convert, close, and delight.

These measures are the foundation of inbound marketing, a term first coined by Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan. And each one of these steps is meant to guide visitors to your site through your sales funnel, with the end goal being to not only close that first one-time sale but convert your customers into repeat buyers and advocates for your business.

Here are four tools your business can put to work today to maximize your B2B sales funnel and boost your earnings.

Attract: Cloudlead

Usually, the top of the sales funnel for internet business focuses on creating relevant organic traffic. Traffic generation can be accomplished with a good content-marketing strategy covering the creation and marketing of quality content that engages your target audience through blog posts, social networking, guest posting and link-building.

While content promotion is the best way to increase your organic search traffic, its results are far from instantaneous. If you’re in the B2B space, for instance, you could find your strategy to reach the decision-makers you require, to close a sale through content promotion, isn’t producing results fast enough. That’s where tools such as Cloudlead come in.

Cloudlead harnesses the power of machine-learning coupled with human research, to find qualified leads for your business. Once you provide this tool with a detailed description of your product and buyer persona, Cloudlead’s proprietary research tools provide you and your sales staff with detailed contact information for decision-makers pertinent to your product.

This in turn enables you to target potential clients with pinpoint precision and transfer them to the surface of your sales funnel without needing to wait for your content promotion efforts to pay off.

Convert: GrooveJar

As soon as you have attracted a visitor to your website, the most crucial step step you can take to edge him or her toward a purchase is to catch the visitor’s email address. According to a 2017 poll by Episerver,”92 percent of customers visit a brand’s site for the first time for reasons aside from making a purchase.”

Therefore, when targeting first-time visitors, capturing an email address is a far more realistic conversion goal to aim for than an outright sale.

Email capture enables you to follow up with targeted marketing emails, such as special offers and discounts or engaging content applicable to your lead’s interests. This process is often known as”lead nurturing,” and it helps move potential customers farther down your sales funnel, closer to the ultimate goal of achieving a sale. But, how can you convince a visitor to your website to part with their email address?

GrooveJar is a suite of eight smart pop-up apps that have been shown to triple the industry-standard email catch rate of 3 percent. The most popular app, GrooveUrgent, utilizes the psychological principle of urgency to convince visitors to supply their email address by developing a pop-up window with a countdown timer; this provides visitors a limited time to heed a call-to-action that you define.

The latter provide can be a discount, a free trial offer, the chance to download an ebook — whatever you think might entice a visitor to leave anemail address. As soon as you have captured that  speech, GrooveJar’s Collect and Convert function utilizes the power of email automation to retarget your leads and turn them into buyers.

Close: Stripe Checkout

As soon as you’ve nurtured your guide satisfactorily to the point where this man is ready to generate a purchase, how can you close the deal? Although this may seem simple, 67.4 percent of checkouts are abandoned before the purchase is completed, according to CoxBlue.

Abandoned cart email apps, such as MageMail for Magento, can be highly effective in helping regain those sales, but it is essential to maximize the checkout procedure itself. Payment chip giant Stripe is popular for a reason: It’s been making it easy for companies to accept payments from major credit cards since 2011.

More recently, Stripe Checkout was developed to permit online companies to embed highly optimized checkout forms anywhere on their website. Stripe uses information gathered from its users to continually refine and optimize the checkout process, helping ensure that you do not lose sales due to poor checkout form design and functionality.

Stripe Checkout leaves effortlessly on desktops, tablets and mobile. As an added advantage, consumers have the option of having Stripe Checkout”recall” their payment details, enabling faster checkouts on repeat purchases and on other sites that use Stripe. Stripe Checkout can help ensure you do not stumble at the finish line once your customer is ready to generate a purchase.

Delight: Drip

Many small business owners assume that the ultimate goal of any sales funnel is to make a sale. While that is inherently accurate, Halligan’s hierarchy of inbound marketing states that the sales process does not end there. The crucial final step is to delight your customers, turning them into repeat clients and advocates for your business.

Many businesses devote most of their marketing efforts to acquiring new clients, but a BIAKelsey study showed that 61 percent of SMBs surveyed reported that more than half of the revenue came from repeat clients, instead of new business. That’s just one reason why it’s essential to stay in contact with your customers after they make a purchase, rather than just with an order confirmation email.

You should deliver personalized, engaging content and incentives to encourage a repeat buy or upsell to more services. You may even incentivize your customers to send other prospective customers your way by providing a reward for referrals. Drip enables you to do all these things at scale through email marketing automation.

While automated marketing campaigns that send out emails based on specified intervals or customer actions — usually known as”drip campaigns” — are often employed at a previous stage in the sales funnel, they may be just as effective in delighting your existing customers. Repeat clients are often one of a business’s most valuable assets. Intelligent use of marketing automation using Drip will help turn customers into advocates.

Final thoughts

Optimizing your B2B sales funnel means maximizing your chances for success at every stage of the customer journey, from visitor to brand advocate. Cloudlead, GrooveJar, Stripe Checkout and Drip will help your business do that.

Cloudlead, GrooveJar, Stripe Checkout and Drip will help you personalize your first-time visitor’s travel, to’customer.’