No matter what you sell, convincing potential clients to make a purchase takes time. Instead, the sales process (also known as the sales funnel) happens in stages: preparing cold prospects for future purchases by introducing them to the concept of spending their hard-earned money on your products.
Unfortunately, that’s not a simple undertaking in the current context of little trust and intense competition.
In fact, if you’ve ever created a genuinely valuable offer just to see it disappear into the wasteland of failure, you already understand how frustrating and painful it can be.
In this article, I cover every aspect of the sales funnel, including what it is, how to build one, and the types of content you require for each step.
You need the ideal platform to carry out your strategies for a sales funnel to be successful. You have all the tools you need to gather leads, nurture them, and turn them into paying customers with Systeme.io’s complete lead generation and email marketing suite.
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What is a sales funnel?
The path that potential consumers take to make a purchase is referred to in marketing as a sales funnel. The top, middle, and bottom of a sales funnel are three processes that are typically included, though the exact steps can change depending on the sales model used by a company.
Just missing a transaction may be painful for any business owner. The prospect exits the sales funnel without making a purchase after several weeks of demonstrations and presentations, conversation, and charm.
It occurs. However, it happens less frequently if you receive the proper sales funnel management assistance. Many small business sales funnels resemble sieves rather than funnels because of the holes that incomplete spreadsheets, sticky notes, missed appointments, and neglected follow-ups have left.
There is a better approach. Software for sales and marketing automation helps close such gaps in the sales funnel and convert close calls into sales.
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What are the sales funnel stages?
Customers move through several stages of your sales funnel from the time they first know about your good or service to the time they buy it (or don’t). Each prospect’s path through your funnel may be different, but ultimately, they’ll judge it based on their level of interest. They’ll consider the issue they’re attempting to resolve and carry out market study to confirm that your service is the ideal solution.
There are four primary stages in general:
Stage 1: Awareness
The “awareness” level, which is the initial step of the sales funnel, refers to the point at which customers first know about your good or service. They could know about you from word of mouth, social media, or even your advertising.
Naturally, how and why those customers proceed through the sales funnel depends on your own sales and marketing skills. You should focus your attention on leads who are in the middle and lower stages of the sales funnel because they have turned from awareness to interest.
A customer knowing about your business for the first time is an illustration of the awareness stage. Perhaps they read your blog, clicked on one of your adverts, typed your website’s address into Google, or heard a coworker mention your products or services.
Stage 2: Interest
Prospects will assess your brand depending on their level of interest once they have known about it. They’ll consider the issue they’re attempting to resolve and carry out market study to confirm that your service is the ideal remedy.
Stage 3: Decision
Prospects will investigate your pricing and packaging alternatives further after learning more about your business. Sales pages, webinars, and phone calls are useful at this point to persuade potential customers to buy.
Stage 4: Action
The outcome of all your efforts will depend on whether the prospect buys something or not at this point. The deal wouldn’t be completely lost if they hadn’t. To ensure that you remain top-of-mind, you can design nurturing campaigns.
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Examples of a Sales Funnel
Consider the sales funnel for an online bookstore you run as an example. You are aware that most of your target audience is on Facebook and that they are primarily males and females in their 20s to 50s.
You create a landing page with a form asking potential customers for their emails in return for a lead magnet. The lead magnet in this instance is the first ten pages of a recently released novel.
You place a Facebook advertisement that directs people to your landing page. Prospects download the lead magnet and provide their email addresses. Instead of prospects right now, you have leads. Through the funnel they are going.
You’ll now take care of nurturing the leads. You can share new books that will soon be available in your bookstore, instructional information relating to books, or DIY instructions for building a bookshelf. The goal of each of these email drips is to inform your customers.
You provide your entire list a 10% off voucher for the first order at the conclusion of this drip campaign. You are currently selling books like crazy, and prospects are becoming customers.
You keep delivering educational emails to your email list. Give them suggestions for bookshelves, advice on how to care for their books, or book recommendations for gifts. You are asking them to return by providing them with this content.
Here it is: the ideal sales funnel that guides leads through the funnel and turns them into paying clients.
To sum up, this sales funnel has the following four stages:
- Awareness: To direct people to your landing page, you produced a Facebook advertisement.
- Interest: You provide something of value in exchange for lead generation (email addresses).
- Desire: Your content informs and primes your audience for purchase.
- Action: Offer an irresistible incentive to your leads, then start marketing to them again to increase retention.
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How to create a sales funnel for your business
You must first have prospects who can pass through your sales funnel in order for it to exist. Once you have those prospects, you can use lead scoring to track their activity and engagement to determine where they are in the funnel.
Here are five steps to help you create a sales funnel:
1. Build a landing page
The first time potential customers discover about your business will probably be on a landing page. They will land on a landing page if they click on an advertisement, register for a webinar, or download an ebook. That page need to summarise your company’s identity and distinguishing qualities (after all, this could be the one and only opportunity you have to wow prospects). Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, make sure the landing page has a form for visitors to fill out. You want to get their email address so you can stay in touch with them.
2. Offer something of value
Here’s where you have to offer your potential customers something in return for their email address. An ebook or whitepaper can be used as a lead magnet to effectively give something of value to your landing page.
3. Start nurturing
Your prospects will then transition from the Awareness stage into the Interest stage at this point. Additionally, you may construct an email nurturing series to give instructional content about your service since you have all of their email addresses from the landing page.
4. Upsell
You want to offer anything that can encourage prospects toward a purchasing decision as they enter the Decision stage. A product demo, prolonged free trial, or exclusive discount are a few examples of this.
5. Keep it going
You either acquire new clients during the Action phase or learn the reasons why potential customers aren’t interested in making a purchase. Keep the lines of communication open either way. Concentrate on product education, engagement, and retention for new consumers. Create a fresh nurture series for prospects who didn’t buy so you can follow up with them every few months.
How to Create Content for Each Stage of The Sales Funnel
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is failing to match the stages of their sales funnel with their content marketing efforts in order to close more transactions. They frequently don’t dig deep enough or consider profitable options like repurposing their current material to expand exposure. As a result, their prospects do not go forward in the funnel. To properly interact, they require a sales strategy at each level.
Because of this, I have chosen to discuss how you may use various types of content for the various stages of your sales funnel.
Blogging (Awareness and Interest)
You may raise awareness and interest about your business by blogging. It can serve as your primary source of website traffic and is an excellent way to interact with your list by posting relevant content.
By using the appropriate keywords in your blog posts, you can attract your target audience via an organic search and increase exposure. An effective marketing funnel plan that captivates visitors and converts them into customers depends on acquiring customers.
Another strategy for social media promotion is to encourage others to share your posts or to use promoted postings. The fact that blogging is not a “bottom of the funnel” activity must be made clear.
In other words, it won’t result in consumers choosing to purchase from you. You’ll need to either create different forms of content for that purpose or get people to join you on a sales call.
Lead Magnets (Interest)
Any kind of lead magnet can be utilized as a technique to raise awareness of your offering. Offering your audience something of value in which they are already interested, like a course or guide, will help you expand your email list.
For this stage, anything that might inform your prospects about how they can resolve their issues and accomplish their objectives is beneficial. You can include calls to action asking them to check out your products and services, get in touch with your sales team, etc. within the lead magnets themselves.
Webinars (Decision and Action)
Even though they can be utilized as lead magnets, webinars are mainly concerned with the decision-making process and persuading visitors to take action and purchase your products.
People who register for webinars typically have a strong interest in accomplishing a certain objective or resolving a particular issue. This can involve increasing their traffic, becoming in shape, or meeting their soul partner.
Along with educating them, your webinar should also capture their interest and persuade them to purchase your product.
A call-to-action to purchase your product, begin a free trial, or schedule a consultation should always be included at the conclusion of every page.
Videos (Awareness, Interest)
Videos can be a very helpful medium for the choice and action stages as well, but they are more effective for the awareness and interest stage.
Because YouTube is well known as the second-largest search engine, you may drive a ton of traffic to your website by optimizing the videos for particular keywords.
Additionally, you may educate your audience on issues that interest them by using services like Wistia to embed educational videos in your blog posts and website.
You may increase demand for your product or service by producing explanatory videos.
Last but not least, sales videos might persuade viewers to make a decisive decision. By providing customers with thorough instructions on how to utilize your products, you can also make training videos for customer retention. To make sales videos for your audience on YouTube, you can either start a new channel or leverage an existing one.
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Principles of Persuasion for Effective Sales Funnel
Dr. Robert Cialdini, a marketing and psychology professor, introduced 6 principles of persuasion in his 1984 book Influence.
These are:
- Reciprocity
- Consistency
- Social Proof
- Liking
- Authority
- Scarcity
According to Dr. Kendrick, a psychologist, this is how they operate:
In essence, we are more likely to accept someone’s advice if we believe them to be a reliable source of information (authority), if we consider them to be a trusted friend (liking), if we believe we owe them one (reciprocity), or if doing so will be consistent with our beliefs or previous commitments (consistency). We have a tendency to choose things that will give us limited resources because we believe they are in trend (consensus [social proof]) (scarcity).
The methods and techniques described in this article can help you move leads through your sales funnel more quickly. For example:
- By dispersing freebies (guides, checklists, and PDFs), you can raise awareness by applying the reciprocity and consistency principles. Regularly blogging or posting on social media develops your presence and demonstrates consistency (awareness).
- Making use of the ideas of desire and scarcity, you can pique attention. If people like you or think you are providing a scarce resource, they will be more interested in what you have to say.
- If potential customers perceive you as an authority in your field and so more likely to pay attention to you, you can help them make decisions. Case studies, webinars, and tutorials can all be used to increase your authority.
- If you apply the social proof principle during the action stage, your chances of closing a sale are better. Showing off positive luxury PR as well as reviews, suggestions, and testimonials can provide social evidence.
Benefits of Creating a Sales Funnel
Your business will definitely profit from a well-designed sales funnel because it will successfully guide prospects through the funnel. Let’s explore a few advantages of a sales funnel.
The right message at the right time
You can always offer the right information and an aligned message to your prospects when you have a comprehensive sales funnel in place, which includes a map of their queries and the details they require. This will reduce any frustration on the part of your potential customer.
Alignment between marketing and sales
At any stage of the customer journey, from early research to late decision-making, your prospect can reach you. Therefore, it’s crucial to coordinate your marketing and sales activities so that they get the information they require even if you are unable to provide it directly as a salesperson. You can make the right offer to your prospects outside of sales interactions if you have a great sales funnel in place.
Saves time and efforts
With a strong funnel in place, you can quickly weed out problematic leads and focus more of your efforts on highly qualified ones, which will ultimately lead to more sales and better customers.
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Sales Funnel Tracking With Systeme.io
Want to experiment with different funnel variations and track their performance? Give Systeme.io a free try. You can open a free account forever.
Systeme.io is a multifunctional software that integrates a variety of functionality into a simple user interface.
You won’t find any unnecessary fluff on the platform, and each of these elements is important to the process of operating a successful online business.
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Build Sales Funnels Free Forever
Any marketer will be able to tell to how challenging it can be to create a successful sales funnel. Let’s explore in more detail how Systeme.io can make it simple to build high-quality funnels in this evaluation.
There are pre-built pages that have been expertly created to increase conversions, help you sell more products with less effort, and make it simple to create sales funnels for your own company.
Here is an illustration of how to make a sales funnel using the Systeme.io marketing software:
Whether you’re selling physical or digital goods, you’ll be able to manage your own company’s marketing platform using pages like these.
Without having to make any guesses, you may use the templates to create appealing, expert sales pages.
For instance, with a few clicks, you can quickly construct thank you pages, sales pages, and landing pages.
Alternately, you may even walk your visitors through a longer process by including additional phases in your funnel with the platform’s funnel builder, all without the need for additional software.
All of this may be finished in a matter of minutes because of the user-friendly and drag-and-drop interface.
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Summary
When you construct your sales funnel, your effort is not finished. In fact, this is where everything starts.
Once everything is in place, it’s critical to measure your progress. Create a measurement program first, then decide on your KPIs. Spend some time creating a sales funnel that reflects both your goals and those of your target audience.
Find out why your efforts aren’t producing the desired results and optimize it over time while modifying your strategy for various sales funnel stages.
If you want to optimize your funnel and achieve better outcomes, gather data, analyze it, and make changes. Determine your areas of strength and weakness. These inquiries will enable you to identify the areas of your sales funnel that want improvement. and then concentrate your efforts there.
You can be sure that your business is healthy if there is a smooth movement of people from the top down to the execution level.
Your sales funnel can’t be perfect until you have the right tool to execute your marketing strategy. With Systeme.io, you get an all-in-one lead generation and email marketing tool — helping you capture leads, nurture them, and convert them into paying customers.
So, what are you waiting for?
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