A business website should be designed with a specific goal in mind. There should be the final action that you want your visitor to take online. This could be to buy, to request more information or to request a quote.

The sales funnel is a metaphor. We can visualize the sales process which is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. A large number of prospects will yield a much smaller number of sales. The website sales funnel describes the process your website visitors go through from the moment they arrive at the site until they fulfill your goal.

The sales funnel is a way to focus on your sales conversion as you make changes. Start by breaking your sales process down into steps or stages that each visitor who buys from you will pass thru. Increasing the flow at any step will increase your final sales numbers.

In the example above 8% of visitors who arrive at the website will end up buying. The number of people who buy can be increased in two ways.

1. Increase the number of visitors who arrive to the website.
2. Make improvements on your website and increase the percentage of people who buy

Website statistics packages such as Google Analytics allow you to set-up a sales funnel to track this data automatically. This way you can make changes to your website and watch the impact. This allows you to change and refine your website conversion rate over time.

Related posts:

1. How to Design Your Website to Convert Visitors into Buyers
2. Some Websites Require Multiple Sales Funnels
3. Getting Your Website Visitor to Take Action
4. How to Increase Sales during Recessionary Times
5. Getting Website Visitors to Take Action