The success of any new business depends upon its sales funnel strategies, whether it is a brick-and-mortar establishment or an online business. Creating a top-notch sales funnel is an indispensable aspect of attracting and converting business leads into customers.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Sales funnel is a visual representation that maps out the process a potential buyer goes through from when they hear about your business until they are ready to purchase your products or services. As the journey may be different from one prospect to another, it is a useful tool to help you identify if prospects are converting and at which stage they may be dropping out. The sales funnel comprises of four main stages:
Awareness
This is when you catch a consumer’s attention, and the prospect learns about your brand and what products and services you have on offer. They might discover your brand through advertising, social media, or word of mouth from friends or family.
Interest
This is the point where a potential customer has become aware of your business and is researching, doing comparison shopping, and evaluating their options. At this stage, you must swoop in with some great content that informs them that you have the perfect solution to their needs, but without being overtly selling or being too pushy.
Decision
After developing an interest in your offerings, the prospect is now actively contemplating buying from you. They might be considering a couple of other options and comparing pricing or packages to make the best decision for themself.
Here, you must put your best foot forward by compelling them to buy from you by giving them incentives like free shipping, a discount code, or perhaps a bonus product.
Action
As the last and most crucial stage of the sales funnels, where the customer finally decides to buy from you.
Building an Effective Sales Funnel
Your goal is to keep moving prospects through your sales funnel until they reach the last stage and make a purchase. It is only a carefully planned and properly executed sales funnel that will encourage your leads into taking the desired action.
To simplify the process, you may choose to use a sales funnel builder software that provides you with the tools and strategies to market and sell your products and follow up with customers. Perhaps a free trial can help give you a better sense of the software and determine whether it suits your business needs or not. It is one of the simplest solutions that can save you a ton of money in the long run.
Identify Your Target Market
Before beginning to create a sales funnel, it is imperative to understand your target audience. Remember, your goal is not to market your business to everybody but to only those who are a good fit for what you have on offer. Creating content or spending money on advertisements will be in vain if you do not have a clear-cut idea about who and where your target customers are.
By researching what they want solutions for, what interests them the most, and the social media platform they use most, you can effectively market your business to ideal prospects at each stage of the sales funnel and move them down your pipeline.
Generate Traffic
Getting sales would be a distant dream if people are not aware of what you are selling. To lure people into developing an interest in your business, you must capture their attention and drive them to your website using various lead generation strategies.
There are several methods to drive meaningful traffic to your website. These could include organic strategies like SEO, referrals from other websites linking to you, and posting tons of catchy infographics and video content across social media platforms. If you don’t mind spending some cash, then PPC advertising can also be a viable way to attract traffic to your business.
Create an Impressive Landing Page
A landing offers the first direct impression to prospects about your company and introduces them to the brand. When a lead clicks on your ad or a link on social media, it should direct them to a stellar landing page that clearly describes and promotes your business and the unique benefits your products and services can provide them. It is the first and perhaps the only opportunity you have to capture their attention and drive them to take the next desired step. Therefore, you must get it right.
The landing page must include a way for the prospects to enter their contact information, ideally their email, so you can continue to communicate your business’s value to them.
Engage Your Audience
No matter how effective your lead generation efforts are, they will not be enough if you can not engage your audience with your content. There are several ways to keep prospects interested, such as creating appealing blog posts or industry-related videos.
But one of the most viable ways to communicate with your leads and market to them is through an email marketing campaign. This involves sending them regular updates about your business while ensuring that you do not overdo it. A couple of newsletters per week should suffice. You can start by sending some educational content, followed by promotional content.
Convert Your Leads
As prospects enter the final decision stage, include an irresistible offer that is hard to turn down and steers them into the direction of making a purchase. That could include providing a product demonstration, a special discount, or an extended free trial.
The main goal of a sales funnel is to move prospects through the various stages of the sales cycle until they complete a purchase. After landing a new customer, it is vital to keep the communication going and continue the relationship-building process. Reach out to them with educational content and regular updates regarding promotions or sales to build brand trust and loyalty and retain them as your valued customers.
For those who dropped out at the last stage and did not turn into paying customers, nurture them with a different email nurturing series every few months.