Looking to increase your online sales, but not sure where to start? For a successful online business, you need a well-thought-out marketing sales funnel. This can help you increase traffic, leads, and conversions.
If you have an online business, you already have a sales funnel – whether or not you are aware of it. This is the basic buying process that businesses lead their customers through towards making that final purchase of a product or service. Effective sales funnels are key to marketing and growing your business, but can be difficult to master.
The good news is that when you do take control of your sales funnel, you have a lot more influence over it, and are more likely to see growth in traffic and sales. This guide outlines the key steps you need to go through to build a successful sales funnel.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is, in the simplest terms, the path that your website visitors go along before they purchase from your site. This can be either a product or a service. It is named a funnel because when your website’s buying pathway is set out in diagram form, this marketing strategy resembles a funnel.
It is down to you to consider the stages of the funnel and optimize the process for visitors, to guide them towards a buying decision.
These are the basic steps that a potential customer will go through before buying from your website:
- Awareness: This is your first engagement with a potential customer. You capture their attention, and they become aware of your product or service, and what it is you offer. While occasionally, a consumer might buy immediately (in a right-time, right-place scenario), it’s more common for this stage to be where you excite the customer and make them want to further engage with your business.
- Interest: At the interest stage, potential customers are thinking about their options and doing research. This is your chance to try and convert them into making a decision by offering them great content. You don’t want to use pushy selling techniques, rather establish yourself as an expert or maker leader. Help them make an informed decision, and gain their trust.
- Decision: The consumer is prepared to buy at this stage, so now is the time to make a great offer that will convince them to choose your business.
- Action: The customer is ready to act. They purchase from your business, becoming a part of your client base. Now you need to focus on retaining their business, by showing thanks for their purchase, asking for feedback, and offering further support.
We’ll be looking at this in more detail below, breaking potential customers down into their position in the funnel. Those at the top will be in the awareness stage, the middle will be at the interest stage, and those at the bottom of the funnel will be ready to make a decision/action.
Why Do You Need a Sales Funnel?
Sales funnels are an incredibly important marketing strategy and are key to growth. An effective funnel is crucial to getting sales, but can also do much more for your business or brand.
Marketing sales funnels can help you achieve many things, including:
- Building awareness of your product, service, or brand
- Developing interest in what you’re offering
- Making visitors want to purchase through offers and education
- Guiding your leads through the sales funnel to making the final purchase
Most importantly, if you understand your funnel, you can find out at what stage you’re losing leads. If you can locate the place where potential customers turn away from the buying process, you can work out a strategy to prevent this in the future. Essentially, if you don’t have a clear understanding of your sales funnel, you won’t be able to optimize it.
Understanding the Consumers in Your Funnel
Here we take a look at the customers in your sales funnel, breaking them down into those at the top, middle, and bottom. This roughly corresponds to the awareness – action model outlined above, but the focus here is on understanding different customer groups in your sales funnel.
Top of the Funnel
This is the largest group of potential customers. Potential customers at the top of the funnel are coming into contact with your business for the first time. It’s the simple process of them realizing that you exist, and exploring your business and products/services.
Your aim at this stage is to raise awareness of your brand. Rather than a hard sell, you should be aiming for exposure and engagement with a new potential client base. Those at the top of the funnel may never have heard of you or may have seen your business in passing but never visited your website.
The main goal when thinking about the top of the funnel is to make this large pool of potential customers aware that your business offers something that could be of benefit to them. Later, we’ll be looking at particular marketing techniques to gain exposure to – and the interest of – the top of the funnel.
Middle of the Funnel
In the middle of the funnel, those potential customers are weighing up whether or not your service or product could be of value to them. At this point, you are looking to turn visitors into prospects or leads.
This is a crucial stage, and you’ll probably spend a lot of time working it out. This is because all of those people whose attention you’ve attracted are deciding whether to continue engaging with you, or whether to walk away from your business without a purchase or further engagement.
At the same time, the middle of the funnel is where you’ll be able to collect a lot of customer information. Your funnel will benefit immensely from building your email list, so do what you can to capture this key piece of information. Successful ways of securing email addresses include free trials, e-books, and email courses.
You should be using targeted campaigns in the middle of the funnel. Your main focus should be on offering high-quality content, tailored offers to convince visitors to stay on-side, and developing follow-up campaigns based on what happens at this stage in the funnel.
Your ultimate focus in the middle of the funnel is to build a strong relationship with potential customers, nudging them towards that final stage where they decide to make a purchase and become part of your client base.
Bottom of the Funnel
This corresponds to the decision/action parts of the process mentioned earlier. This is the last stage in the sales funnel and is where consumers decide whether to make a purchase.
You’ll need to use both hard and soft selling, and your main approach will be based on the kinds of strategies and offers you’ve used in the previous two stages of the funnel. Potential customers at this stage will be weighing up the benefits of shopping with your business and deciding whether it’s convenient to buy from you.
Continue with targeted messaging, using reminders, re-targeting previous visitors, and irresistible offers. These are designed to convince the consumer to go ahead with the purchase.
Building an Effective Sales Funnel
When you develop an effective sales funnel, consumers will move along from the top to the bottom with ease.
To achieve this, however, you need to work out how to stop potential customers from dropping out of the funnel, and maximize the likelihood that they’ll want to buy at the end of it.
Here we outline a strong basic strategy for building a successful sales funnel.
Step 1: Build Quality Landing Pages that Generate Leads
If you are creating a sales funnel from scratch, you must start with your business’s landing pages. These represent the very first step in your funnel – which is all about generating traffic that you hope to convert to customers.
Your landing pages form the first impression that this group of people will have of your business. That’s why you should take the time and effort to make sure that it is well-designed, looks appealing, and is easy to understand and navigate. Don’t turn off potential customers with a poorly thought-out landing page.
To turn traffic into a potential business, your landing pages should be optimized specifically to generate leads. You can do this by encouraging visitors to sign up or subscribe to your mailing list or social media pages. This will provide you with valuable contact information that you can use later for email campaigns and communication.
It’s important to remember that you can have multiple landing pages, designed for people in different stages of the funnel. For example, a simple home page that offers basic information and an email sign-up would be well suited to visitors at the top of the funnel, whereas a page that offers further product/service specifications and Calls to Action (CTAs) would be better for those in the middle of the funnel.
Overall, you want your landing pages to offer more than just information, with some form of conversion taking place. Indeed, the success of a sales funnel can depend on how successful your landing pages are in converting. It’s more likely than not that you’ll need to develop several landing pages, aimed at buyers at different levels in the funnel.
Step 2: Traffic Growth through Offers and Advertising
So, you’ve developed brilliant landing pages. Great!
The bad news is that they’re effectively useless unless you can increase your traffic.
So how do you get visitors?
Growing traffic is one of the most difficult parts of marketing, but the good news is that with a little careful planning and choosing the right strategy, you should start to see results.
Depending on the type of your business, your goals, and your audience, there are several methods of driving traffic that you can try.
Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to blogs, e-mail marketing, case studies, and guides produced and promoted by your business. This is a great way to share easy-to-read, useful content with your audiences.
Content marketing is helpful for all stages of the funnel. It:
- Increases brand awareness
- Evokes interest from your target audiences
- Can ultimately increase your sales
This is particularly important for the middle of the funnel because it offers information and education, which are key to converting potential customers through to the purchasing stage.
You can combine content marketing with social media, which we’ll come to next. Social media is a great way to share and disseminate blogs and case studies, reaching a wider audience.
Social Media
Outreach on social media is a great way to broaden your audience at the beginning of the funnel. You should think about the forms of social media that your ideal target audience is most likely using (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and tap into that.
Social media is supposed to be social – so use it to interact with your potential customers. Responding to questions and comments can help build trust and confidence in your business.
Don’t forget to share your other content on your profiles. Combining your content marketing with social media is a great way to get consumers involved with your brand, and offers those in the middle of the funnel all of the information and guidance they need to continue through the funnel.
Advertising – Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads
Pay-per-click advertising is a quick and easy way to get your brand out there through several different channels. You could create search engine PPC ads or could consider placing them on social media such as Facebook. Where you advertise will likely depend on the consumers you’re targeting.
PPC Ads can be quite expensive, so you must work out whether the potential returns outweigh the cost.
How effective PPC ads are depends on your budget, and where you place them. Consumer research and target audience demographics can help you make an informed decision about where your adverts will be most effective.
Step 3: Create Methods of Collecting Email Addresses
Now that you’ve created targeted landing pages, decided on your advertising strategy, and set up your social media accounts, you need to create lead magnets to obtain email addresses.
Lead magnets are simply resources that capture the attention of your audience. Ideally, it’s a situation where you’re offering a potential customer something of use to them, in return for an email address. You can use this as a chance to provide more information about your product or service and explain how and why it is the best in the sector.
Some lead magnets you may consider developing include:
Free E-book or Checklist
The e-book or checklist you offer should be useful to your target audience. Offer it through social media and landing pages. All the customer needs to do is enter their email address and they’ll receive the download. In return, you get contact information that you can use to re-target customers and send further offers. This will help move them through the stages of the sales funnel.
Limited-Time Free Trial
Free trials are an extremely effective way of gathering email addresses and contact information. It works in the same way as the free e-book model, but the consumer signs up with their email address in return for a free trial. This works best if you are offering a service or software rather than physical products.
Landing Page Lead Magnets
Embed lead magnets on your landing pages (which should be targeted at different target audiences according to their stage in the funnel). You may consider creating a separate landing page for your magnets that customers arrive at when they hit a PPC ad.
The most important thing with all of these methods is that the process is as simple and easy as possible for the consumer.
Your sign-up offers should include a space for their name, email address, and a confirmation button: nothing more! Customers may drop out of the signing-up process if it is too long.
Step 4: Develop an Email Marketing Campaign
If you’ve used successful lead magnets, you’ll now have plenty of email addresses to populate your marketing campaign send-list! This is your key chance to build a relationship with potential customers.
Email campaigns are great for:
- Establishing a strong relationship through regular contact
- Explaining your product or service
- Giving more information about your company (thus building trust and establishing yourself as an expert)
- Re-targeting previous customers and convincing them to return
Your email campaign should be about marketing your product/services to your leads by offering them interesting and well-thought-out content.
Don’t be tempted to send emails too quickly: 1-2 per week is enough. Overall, the campaign should be made up of 5-7 emails.
You should build up to the final sale by starting with education (e.g. providing the contacts with essential information and what they want to know about your company). It will help to consider the kinds of obstacles that you need to overcome to get them to buy.
Your campaign should end with an incredible offer, inspiring your potential customers to act and make the purchase.
Note that there are many automated email services such as GetResponse or Mailchimp that you can use to help you with email marketing. Make sure you look into that option if you don’t have the time or resources to do this manually.
Step 5: Keep Going! Monitor and Adjust your Funnel
That’s it! You’ve completed all the steps in making a sales funnel.
Now, this is perhaps the most important step: monitor and track what happens.
If you’re not getting much traffic, or you’re getting traffic but these aren’t converting to leads, there’s probably a leak in your funnel. Only through monitoring and tracking will you be able to identify at what stage potential customers are dropping out of the funnel.
To improve and fine-tune your sales funnel, you must always be monitoring your analytics, metrics, and sales figures.
Specialized tools for tracking include:
- A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool
- Email tracking software (e.g. MailChimp)
- Hootsuite for social media insights
- Google Analytics
Which of these is most useful to you will depend largely on your business and the kind of marketing you’ve performed, but usually, a combination of all of them work.
Monitoring is a constant process, no matter what tools you use. The most important part of building a sales funnel is being able to identify where you can make further improvements.
The middle of the funnel is likely to be where you will lose most customers, so take another look at your advertising, for example. Which ads are seeing results, and which are resulting in fewer conversions? Is your content marketing boosting engagement? How could you improve your sales magnets?
When you identify where improvements can be made, the quality of your leads and conversions will increase.
Conclusion
If this is your first focused attempt and working on your sales funnel, it might seem like a huge task!
However, once you start to see results in terms of your outreach and sales, you’ll have confidence in the fact that it’s all been worth it. Sales funnels are key to a successful online business, so stick at it!
In summary, what you need to do to create a successful sales funnel is:
- Make sure your landing pages are high quality and offer more than just information
- Use social media, content marketing, and paid ads to boost exposure and engagement
- Find as many ways as you can to collect e-mail addresses through
- Create an effective email marketing campaign
- Track and change your process according to the results you’re seeing. If this is your first sales funnel, it might be somewhat of a learning curve. However, the great thing is that you can use this whole process to inform how you go about improving your sales funnel in the future.
Remember, mastering the sales funnel takes time.
But, through persistence and developing your practice, you’ll unlock lots of potential business and see a huge reduction in the number of customers you lose throughout the process.