Website Ideas & Internet Marketing Solutions Blog

A sales funnel is a tool that tracks the progression and measures the quality of your visitors and leads. The purpose of the sales funnel is to tell you what percentage of your visitors and leads have gone on to become customers as well as what content offers you should be providing your audience based upon where they are in the funnel.

An infographic is an image that is used to represent information. The main purpose of an infographic is to simplify complex subject matter by turning dense data into a visually engaging experience. Infographics can help you showcase expert understanding of a topic and are an ideal format to present survey data, explain how something works or create a comparison. Infographics were made for the age of social media. In addition to hosting on a website, blog or landing page, share infographics across your social media channels.

Inbound Lifecycle Stages are properties that identify where your contacts are in the marketing funnel. The purpose of Inbound Lifecycle Stages is to benchmark your contacts progression through the marketing funnel and segment your audience in order to provide stage appropriate content offers.

The inbound sales funnel is comprised of lifecycle stages that represent a prospect’s progression from visitor to customer. The purpose of the inbound sales funnel is to prescribe appropriate content offers relevant to where a lead is in the sales funnel.

A lead to customer conversion rate is the percentage of leads who have gone on to becomes customers. Your lead to customer conversion rate shows how effective you are at converting leads into purchasing customers. You can determine your lead to customer conversion rate by dividing numbers of customers by number of total leads.

Smarketing is the process of aligning marketing and sales teams within an organization around common goals with a main objective of increasing revenue. Smarketing is important because it is the point at which marketing can most effectively hand off qualified leads to sales. Without collaboration at this critical stage, a significant amount of leads can be lost.

A qualified lead is a lead who has expressed interest in your products or services and meets buying criteria as established by sales and marketing teams within your organization. Understanding the necessary criteria for a lead to be qualified is important as it helps direct the sales and marketing teams to invest time in leads who are most likely to convert into customers.

Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers into leads. The primary objective of lead generation is to bring visitors in with content offers and guide them through the buyer’s journey until they are ready to become a customer. Lead generation takes place within the second stage of inbound marketing the conversion stage.

Lead nurturing, also known as drip marketing or marketing automation, is the process of building relationships by providing relevant content offers to leads and customers that align with where they are in the buyer’s journey and sales funnel. The purpose of lead nurturing is to provide information and answers to prospects at the appropriate time in order to guide them towards becoming customers.

The term lead refers to a contact who has submitted a form on a website or landing page in return for a content offer. At this stage, at least some information about the individual is known. Ways in which an individual can become a lead include downloading an eBook, submitting a survey response or signing up for a newsletter among other options.