stmWhat is a sales funnel? Why does it matter and how do you create them? Let’s discuss on these. Shall we?
Before diving into the main deal, if you are just coming across our post for the first time, this is Infowarehouse. The only information warehouse on the internet dedicated to bring you latest updates on the world of digital marketing.
Let’s proceed with our discussion on the importance of sales funnels in digital marketing.
What Is A Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a term used in the marketing business for the journey a potential customer goes through before purchasing a product.
A sales funnel is normally segmented into three parts:
- Top of the sales funnel (ToFu): This segment include your targeted audience
- Middle of the sales funnel (MoFu): This segment include your potential customers
- Bottom of the sales funnel (BoFu): This segment include your New and existing customers.
No matter how simple or difficult you may think the sales funnel is, the fact is that the sales funnels are effective when they’re built according to certain universal principles.
Research shows that:
- 87% of consumers choose to do business with merchant who provide contents of value at all stages of the buying process
- 63% of consumers need to hear about a company’s value proposition(s) over and over again, about 4-7 times before they trust these claims.
- Nurtured leads make 47% higher purchases than non-nurtured leads.
In addition to this, the segments of sales funnels have traditionally been structured around four sales funnel stages known by the acronym AIDA, the stages of sales funnel will be explained below, keep reading.
Most business owner know the pain of missing a sale. After several weeks trying to convince and demonstrate to prospects, the prospect drops out of the sales funnel without buying your product, all that effort will be in vain.
However, this happens less often when you have the right skill of sale management. Most small-scale business sales funnels are more like baskets, with lots of holes left by missed appointments and forgotten follow-ups.
With the help of modern technology, Application developers have developed Sales and marketing automation software to stimulate your sales funnel lapses and turn near-misses into sales.
If you’re just starting out in business, you’re bound to have some brilliant ideas and schemes that inspire you to get a head start on your plans. Unfortunately, having amazing ideas and motivation alone will not guarantee your success.
To avoid a business failure in the near future, a smart entrepreneur should have a thorough awareness of the techniques involved in trade.
The sales funnel is a crucial idea in the business sector. This sales funnel is used by salespeople as a guide for generating leads and closing transactions.
Importance Of Creating A Sales Funnel
Most businesses need to have a sales funnel because it helps in lead generation and the conversion of prospects into paying customers.
The main aim of the funnel is to introduce your product or service to targeted audience, convince them to raise their interest, and make the appropriate offer to them at the right time.
Some of the importance of sales funnel are as follows:
- Sales funnel helps you pick the right marketing strategy.
The sales funnel can assist you in determining the best marketing company strategy or tools to help you flourish as an entrepreneur.
Some entrepreneurs prefer to concentrate their efforts on potential consumers who have already reached the decision stage of the sales funnel. This makes it easier for them to persuade the prospect to proceed to the sales funnel’s Action section.
- Sales funnel helps you attract new leads
Sales funnel increase your chance in lead acquisition, however, for a sales funnel to work, you need to practically “feed” it with leads. This involves some serious processes to collect the leads in the first palace. This process might involve a combination of:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Advertising
- Social media marketing
- Lead generation through your website or landing page
- The sales funnel helps you know how to relate with your customers.
The way we describe our products, create content, and communicate with our consumers can have an impact on our ability to persuade them to move to the bottom of the sales funnel.
Once you’ve identified a potential client’s sales funnel segment, you can quickly adjust the tone of your writing and offer appealing offers or discounts to help you relate to their needs better.
- Sales funnel can help you segment leads for greater effect
Sales funnel will help better your understanding about email segmentation, which is a process of sending emails to a group of recipients with personalized content based on various parameters.
This method enables business people to target their campaigns more efficiently, leading them to better results. Email segmentation is a new marketing strategy that enables marketers to target the receivers of their messages better.
Most advanced funnel software usually has this feature built-in, allowing you to make the most of every email you collect.
- Sales funnel helps you generate more sales.
You will know how to relate to your clients better, and you will considerably push more prospects into the Action area, if you use a sales funnel to help you choose a solid marketing method.
Indeed, if you’ve mastered the sales funnel, you’ll be able to generate more revenue in the long run.
The sales funnel’s tenet is understanding how to guide people in a systematic manner toward your desired goal. The sales funnel puts you ahead of other aspiring entrepreneurs.
The lack of direction is a prevalent concern among young entrepreneurs, as well as some veterans of the system. They may have fantastic ideas, but they have no idea how to put them into action, and there is no software with proven and true sales systems.
You can obtain a competitive advantage over other businesses in your niche by understanding how the sales funnel works.
- Sales funnel makes email upselling easier
Email upselling is a process whereby a company offers its existing customers products and services in an email after they have made a purchase. This strategy can be used to sell different things, including higher priced products, more products of same funnel or even products that lead into another funnel.
Upselling can immensely boost your profits when done correctly, and as long as the upsell is important and valuable for your clients, you will further increase your brand loyalty.
- Sales funnel helps you improve on the ways you can grow your business.
Many overnight achievements do not occur in a single night. Knowing how to use a sales funnel can provide you more insight into what tactics will help you raise your sales.
Perhaps you’ve discovered that clients at the Decision section opt for a different product due to your pricing. You can quickly improve these by identifying the roadblocks that prevent clients from achieving their intended outcomes.
The sales funnel is, without a doubt, an essential idea in business development. You will become an expert in lead generation as you learn to identify each prospect’s level in the funnel, resulting in more sales for your company.
Sales Funnel Stages
Sales funnel generally involves four main stages, these stages are sometimes referees to as sections. They are:
The Awareness Stage: This area includes people who are aware of your company but have no interest in learning more about it.
Interest Stage: This section includes potential clients who are aware of your company and want to learn more about it. These prospects, however, are not convinced enough to try out your product.
Decision Making: Customers who know what they want but aren’t sure which brand to support (you?). Alternatively, your competitors). This is a crucial portion because it is here that you must convince people to patronize you.
Action stage: Every marketer’s goal is to get customers to the sales funnel’s action phase. The consumer has already made a decision based on your marketing strategy in this part.
How To Create A Sales Funnel
Below is a very simple techniques to create a fast sales tunnel:
Step 1: Analyze the Behavior of Your Targeted Audience
Whether you like it or not, not everyone is interested in your products. Therefore, you are not marketing to everybody, you’re only marketing to people who are a good fit for your products.
One effective tool online to monitor your customer’s behavior is “crazy egg”. You can Sign up for a Crazy Egg account and start creating Snapshots. The website will give you a breakdown of where different visitors have clicked and on what part of the screen. Hence, monitoring your customers’ behavior.
Step 2: Capture the Attention of Your Audience
Sales funnel is only effective when you can draw people’s attention to it.
You can do this by posting valuable contents on your website at a regular interval, if you’re willing to spend more cash, you can run a few ads through some social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google.
The platform you want to use depend on what you’re selling, if you’re selling B2B products, LinkedIn is recommended.
Step 3: Build a Landing Page
The ads you’re running on a desired platform needs to take your potential customers somewhere, this is where a landing page comes in. You would want to direct them to a landing page with crazy discounts and can’t-miss offers.
It is important to note that, since these prospects are still at the beginning of the sales funnel, you should focus more on capturing leads instead of pushing the sale.
A good landing page with valuable content should steer the potential customer toward the next step.
On your landing page, you will need a bold call to action that tells prospects exactly what to do, whether it’s watching an instructional video or downloading a free e-book.
Step 4: Create an Email Drip Campaign
Email drip campaign is quite important, you should market to your leads through email by providing amazing content with can’t miss offer. Do so regularly, but not too frequently because people get easily disturbed. One or two emails per week will do.
Step 5: Keep in Touch
The mistake most entrepreneurs do is forgetting their existing customers while chasing new ones, don’t forget about your existing customers. Instead, continue staying in touch with them. Thank them for their purchases, offer additional coupon codes and existing customers discounts. Also try and involve them in your social media sphere.
Free Sales Funnel Templates To Build Yours
- Your Brands Personal pricing plan sales funnel template
This funnel template is compatible with a Software-as-a-service companies which provide assistance to small-scale brands that cannot afford large-scale solutions.
You can begin your sales funnel on a landing page concerning your products, where clients can choose between two Call-to-actions: whether they start making use of your product by inputting their contact information (such as email address) which will automatically add them to your potential customers list, or redirect them.
On your pricing plan page, you can indicate different pricing plans to offer and compare prospects personalized pricing plan based on the number of their contacts.
This way, you’ll give them a chance to save cost, thus boosting your chances of converting them into clients.
- Lead magnet sales funnel template
Lead generation can be quite difficult, if your business use an inbound approach, a lead magnet sales funnel template will be of great help. Below is a step by step method of creating a lead magnet.
First things first, you have to create something valuable you can offer the visitors of your site for free, for example; a white-paper, a case-study, a detailed industry report or an electronic book in exchange for their contact information.
After a visitor have submitted his/her contact information such as email address, ensure to send him/her an email of appreciation with a promised freebie. Now you’re provided with a lot of leads you can nurture with valued content and compelling offers.
- Product-Launch sales funnel template
For example, your sales funnel should begin with an opt-in form that guarantees your consumers will receive high-quality promotional content in exchange for their contact information, such as an email containing a sales ebook or video.
The following stage will be to deliver three to four educational ebooks or films that contain relevant, important information about your product, how it operates, and how a client can profit from it. Keep in mind that these ebooks or videos must deliver genuine value to the prospect.
This will assist you in developing a relationship of mutual trust and respect with your potential clients and growing those relationships to the point where they are willing to purchase your newly introduced product or service.
- Product promotion sales funnel template
When you want to 1) encourage current customers to buy more and 2) encourage potential consumers who haven’t indicated interest in your product yet, the product promotion sales funnel template comes in handy.
Start your sales funnel with a free trial, a free demonstration, or a low-cost monthly subscription plan, for example.
After a customer has made their first small purchase or used a product sample, you should qualify the customer and follow up with upselling. You should offer the customer a “can’t miss” proposition, such as a reasonable discount on products of interest, and explain how much they are saving and the value of the product.
- Webinar sales funnel template
This sales funnel serves as a good means to acquire high quality leads, webinars are very important for sales and marketing specialists!
To begin, visitors to your site will enter their contact information when they sign up for your webinar. After that, you send a confirmation email to these customers, thanking them for their interest.
Then you host a webinar and give a recorded version to your subscribers so they can watch it whenever they want.
Here’s where your Call-to-Action comes in: in your follow-up email, mention your items and invite webinar attendees and subscribers to check them out. They will not hesitate to buy your product or services if they like them after all of your persuasion.
- Live demo sales funnel template
This funnel template enables you sell by adding live demonstration videos of how your product works to your site. All you need to do is to create a live demonstration page with the recorded live Question & Answers section.
It’ll be very wise to link it to your subscription page where you can offer a proposition to those leads who’ve watched the Question & Answers videos until the end.
- High-ticket sales funnel template
Selling high-ticket products can be a difficult task. The prices of deals are too expensive for clients to make an impulse decision. In this case, it would help if you build a sales funnel that will comprise of several well planned steps.
First, create an online event page such as a webinar where visitors can register and leave their email addresses in exchange for an ebook or other valuable content.
After which, you send your potential customers a follow-up email with a ‘thank you’ message, attaching a link to the online event.
The online event should be well planned and highlight the real value of your product’s and benefits to encourage visitors to move to the next level.
At the end of the online event, redirect prospects to the CTA page where you won’t necessarily ask them to buy a product immediately with full payment. Instead, you can ask them to pay in installment for the product they’ve already decided to purchase.
- Social media + email sales funnel template
You can drastically enhance sales if you combine the power of your social media and email marketing techniques.
For example, you can begin with a social media post where you’ll invite your customers to an online event. You can also send an invitation email to your subscriber list in addition to your social media posts, this is done to drive more interest in your event.
At the end of the event, redirect visitors to the CTA page as usual, where you’ll offer them your main product with irresistible discounts.
- Tripwire sales funnel template
A tripwire is the opposite of the high-ticket sales funnel, because it’s a low-priced offer. The main mission here is to turn a prospect into the customer and ready them for a more expensive proposition. As a rule, this must be a valuable product you’re marketing at an irresistible price.
The good part of tripwire sales funnel is that even if it doesn’t result in selling a more expensive product, it will increase your email list with new leads as upon ordering a tripwire product, your targeted audience will have to leave their email addresses.
- Cancellation sales funnel template
This funnel template is used as a live boat when a user wants to cancel his/her subscription. To keep those customers, start with a Survey page directed at finding out the reasons they want to cancel. Then you should make an offer for them to stay. For instance, this can cause a reduction on their budget for the next month.
Conclusion
Creating a sales funnel without doubt takes time, but it’s the only way one can survive in a competitive marketplace.
Believe it or not, the little things matter when it comes to sales funnel, a small amount of your hardworking can impact conversions. However, do not press individuals to buy from you too quickly or you may lose them.
Take your time to develop a sales funnel that reflects both your desires and those of your target audience. If you’re not making sales or getting leads, nurture it over time, adjust your approach to various sales funnel stages, and figure out why your efforts aren’t working.
Have you been searching online for “What is a sales funnel?”
I hope you find the information here useful? Read similar posts recommended for you below.
References
- https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/sales-funnel/
- https://www.oberlo.com/blog/how-to-create-a-sales-funnel
Also Read
