Creating the right sales funnel for your business can help you automate your marketing processes, increase revenue, and grow your business. This guide will introduce you to the concept of a sales funnel and help you implement it in your business.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a step-by-step process that turns you into a customer. It's called a funnel because the process starts at the top with a large number of potential customers who know about your business and its products or services. Some of these leads are lost to your marketing efforts, and some of these leads become customers when they reach the bottom of the funnel.
For example, here's how a sales funnel might work for a retail store in a mall:
- Passersby walking through the mall pass a retail store advertising 25% off summer clothing. This is the top of the funnel.
- A certain percentage of those who pass by the store come to see the sale of summer dresses. This is the next stage of the funnel.
- The customer brings two dresses to the checkout. This is the last stage in the funnel when a customer completes a purchase or leaves the store without an item of clothing.
The importance of the sales funnel
A sales funnel is a visual representation of your sales process. Show how leads enter your sales process and how they move through to the final sale. Understanding your sales funnel reveals how your sales process works, as well as its pitfalls and where customers leave the funnel and don't convert. Finding the holes in your sales funnel will allow you to fix the problems and attract more customers.
Stages of the sales funnel
The sales funnel consists of four stages: Awareness, Interest, Decision and Action.
Each stage represents the mindset of your customer, as well as the marketing approach you should take during that stage.
1. Awareness
During this stage, the prospect gets to know your business and its products or services. Awareness can come in many ways, such as an advertisement, a Facebook post, a Google search, a tweet, an email sent, a postcard or a website visit.
In some cases, he will realize that he needs a solution or that he has a problem. Then they can understand that you offer a solution. They can learn about your business and its solution at the right time and make a buying decision the moment they find it. However, this is likely to be the beginning of a relationship and it takes time to build trust and move it to the next stage of the sales funnel.
2. Interest
At this stage, the prospect is quite interested in gathering more information about your business and its offerings. They can explore and compare different options.
At this stage, the ideal would be to attract a potential customer with the right content. Rather than selling, the goal is to inform and educate. This allows you to showcase your knowledge and experience in your field of interest. For example, it could be a case study of how a company solved a similar problem with your product or a white paper on different ways to solve a similar situation. Now is not the time to sell or promote your product, if you are too focused on selling, you may alienate a potential customer.
An interested customer might subscribe to your newsletter or mailing list, or follow your social media page to follow what you're up to. If they provide an email address, you can encourage potential customers with regular emails to generate interest in your business and its offerings.
3. Solution
At this point, the customer is ready to buy. Your company's product or service may rank as the best choice, or your offering may rank in the top two or three.
That's when you'll get the best deal: a promo code on their first purchase, a bonus product when they order for a certain amount of time, or free shipping when they spend the minimum amount. The offer must be relevant and compelling to entice a potential buyer to make a purchase. A sales pitch can take many forms such as a phone call, an email, a redirect to a sales page, a webinar, or any other interaction.
4. Warehouse
This is the last part of the sales funnel when a customer becomes a customer and makes a purchase. They buy your product or service and close the deal.
Even if the customer has reached the bottom of the sales funnel, the process is not complete. The customer has acted and now you need to focus on keeping the customer to purchase additional products or services in the future, as well as referring your business proposition to others. This process involves creating the right content for your customers and delivering it at the right time. Here are some examples of actions you can take:
- Thank you for your purchase
- Be available for training, education and support
- Invite testimonials or testimonials with surveys and contacts
- Special offers and discounts by email or mail
- Share product guides and technical support
Creating a sales funnel
There are several ways to create a sales funnel, and which one is right for you depends on your business and goals. An effective strategy is to follow these steps:
1. Collect and analyze data about your audience.
Before you can create an effective sales funnel, you need to understand your ideal target customers. You need to know their specific goals and needs, what they did to meet their needs and achieve their goals, and how your products or services meet these needs and goals. The results of this analysis will allow you to create content that speaks to your target audience, such as improving or adding to existing products or services and improving your sales funnel to focus on key selling points.
You should also analyze the behavior of your target customers when they visit your website or interact with email and other marketing information. You want to know where they click, where they spend the most time, how long they read, and how long they spend on a particular page.
With all this information, you can create buyer personas for any type of customer. Different people have different reasons for buying your product or service and different ways of using it. By developing customer personas (imaginary representations of different types of target customers), you can create sales funnels and targeted content for each group to improve the shopping experience.
2. Grab the audience's attention.
To get people to buy, you need to engage them in your sales funnel. And to engage them, you need to show the right content to the right people at the right time.
There are several ways to grab your audience's attention:
- Organic (free) traffic comes from posting content (eg blog posts, infographics, videos) on your social media platforms.
- Paid traffic comes from buying ads on various platforms (eg Google, Facebook, LinkedIn).
- Cold calling and emailing are designed to connect with businesses and people who may need your product or service.
3. Create a landing page.
Once potential customers see your content, they should be somewhere behind the call to action. One option is to send the prospect to a landing page.
A landing page is a website or page with an attractive offer. Most of your landing page visitors will be in the interest stage, so the purpose of a landing page is to generate leads, not to sell. The page explains the next stage of the sales process and contains a strong call to action (eg download the white paper, watch the video, sign up for the newsletter for an informative guide).
4. Develop an email marketing campaign.
Once you've captured your customers' email addresses, it's time to sell them through your email marketing campaign. Provide great content that generates interest in your products or services and the solutions you offer. Don't sell it right away; educate your prospects first and deliver valuable and useful content through your emails.
One thing to consider is how often you choose to send emails. You want to provide regular content to keep you in touch, but not have that touch so often that you overwhelm them and force them to unsubscribe. One or two emails a week is regular enough to keep you connected and motivated without boring you with a greeting.
What you've already learned about your contacts will help you create the right content for your email marketing campaign. Understand what your customers want to know, what problems they need to solve or what goals they want to achieve. Also consider any barriers or reasons why they might not want to buy from you.
Once your email marketing campaign is complete, formulate your offer. Make it a good prospect, and preferably unbearable. This key content should encourage them to make a purchase.
5. Keep in touch with existing customers.
The sales funnel does its job when a customer makes a purchase. However, your interaction doesn't have to stop there. It's important to stay in touch with your customers after they've made a purchase so they'll continue to buy from you and recommend your business to others.
There are many ways to stay in touch with buyers after the sale:
- Thank you for your purchase.
- Connect with them on social media.
- Provide coupons and discounts for future purchases.
- Publish special offers and customer-only information on private pages.
Evaluate the effectiveness of your sales funnel
A sales funnel is not a static tool. Once you've created a sales funnel, measure and evaluate its success to identify gaps and improve performance. Sales funnels should change over time as you get to know your customers, develop new products and services, and invest in new technologies.
To determine the effectiveness of your sales funnel, monitor conversion rates. Determine how many potential customers subscribe to your mailing list after clicking on ads on various websites. Collect data on the number of actions they take on specific links, download different information products, visit different pages on your site and make purchases.
Assess what happens at each stage of the sales funnel. Ask these questions to determine where you need to improve your sales funnel:
- How many leads are you generating daily, weekly and monthly with your content?
- How many customers give you their email address or contact information?
- How many purchases did you make with your last email marketing campaign?
- How often do customers make repeat purchases?
Optimizing the sales funnel
Even if your sales funnel is doing the job, there are ways to improve it. It is important to optimize the sales funnel to make it more efficient and effective. Some parts of your sales funnel can cause you to fail faster than others.
Follow these strategies to optimize your sales funnel:
- Focus on the areas of the sales funnel where people take the next step.
- Post multiple versions of the same ad and content using different headlines and phrases.
- Target content to different types of buyers and drive prospects across multiple social media sites to get your content in front of the right people.
- A/B test your landing pages to see what converts the most customers.
- A/B test your email campaigns by adjusting the headline, language, layout, images and other factors to see what yields the highest response rates.
- Check your offer to see if it offers a higher conversion rate than another. For example, some people respond well to free shipping, while others prefer a discount.
- Monitor customer retention rates to see how often customers return to the store.
- Track your referrals to see how many customers refer you.