How To Build An Effective Sales Funnel From Scratch and Increase Conversions
Boniface Kisina???
SaaS & Tech Content Writer | Crafting Engaging, High-Impact Content that Drives Visibility & Growth | 5+ Years in Elevating Brands through Strategic, SEO-Optimized Content That Engages & Converts
Have you tried everything possible to increase conversions in your online business but nothing seems to work?
If so then your sales funnel could be the culprit.
Just a quick question:
Do you even have a sales funnel in place?
With an effective sales funnel, you can:
? Attract new leads
? Build trust and relationships with leads
? Increase sales and profit margins
? Minimize missed opportunities in the sales process
? Increase revenue from multiple related products
But how do you achieve all these benefits?
This in-depth guide will teach you how to build a full-proof sales funnel from scratch.
Let’s get started.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Image via Visual Paradigm
A sales funnel, otherwise known as a sales pipeline, is a marketing term used to describe the journey prospects take before they end up making a purchase.?
It outlines all the stages/checkpoints at which your prospects will interact with your brand before they make their final decision.
In other words, a marketing funnel is the overall marketing strategy for how you’re going to attract leads to your business, whereas a sales funnel is the actual process for turning cold prospects into paying customers. Thus a sales funnel begins at the end of the marketing funnel.
So basically, the marketing funnel builds the interest of the prospects in your brand and guides them from the time they interact (discover your brand) to the point to develop some interest in discovering your product or service
The marketing funnel can also help to generate and nurture leads. Once the prospects have discovered what you offer, they leave the marketing funnel and enter the sales funnel and into the hands of your sales team.
The sales funnel can have one stage or a couple of stages depending on the type of product or service you offer.
Image via DUE
The primary goal of the funnel is to drive people down the various sales funnel stages until they are ready to buy.
We hope you get the difference between marketing and sales funnel here because the two terms are used interchangeably but have different objectives.
Benefits of Building A Sales Funnel?
Having a streamlined sales process can be beneficial for your online business in many ways. Nevertheless, creating a highly-converting sales funnel can be a daunting task.?
So why learn how to create one?
Here are concrete reasons to have a sales funnel process in place:
Sales Funnels Can Help to Increase Conversion Rates
A well-thought-out sales funnel employs practical marketing strategies that can help to attract people who aren’t familiar with your business but are interested to buy from you.?
Once they become aware of your business (product or service), you can continue educating them (nurturing leads) until they are ready to buy.
You will notice that as you walk the prospects down through the sales funnel stages, a number of them will drop off but only the targeted will remain till the end of the sales process.
To put it in simple terms, a sales funnel helps to filter out non-buyers so that you can only remain with the most qualified prospects. This helps you to gain focus on your sales and marketing efforts.
Increase Sales
A well-defined sales funnel outlines marketing strategies and maps interactions across the customer journey. It provides deeper insights into activities that result in prospects buying your products as well as those that put them off. This helps you to focus on marketing strategies that generate sales.?
A better sales funnel can also help you identify and fix friction in the buying process thus improving conversions.
A Sales Funnel Can Increase Revenue From Multiple Related Products
With a proper sales funnel in place, you can attract website visitors and nurture them to become leads then convert them into paying customers.
Once they purchase your product or services, it means they trust you thus you can easily immediately offer them another related product. In a nutshell, a sales funnel can help you turn new customers into repeat customers.
Helps to Attract New Leads
Generating traffic and leads is one of the biggest challenges for 61% of marketers.
Fortunately, a great sales funnel can help you identify the type of content that can attract new leads to your business.
Of course, your content should be valuable and highly targeted to your audience to achieve this.
A Sales Funnel Helps to Streamline Your Marketing Process
Once you gain deeper insights into your target customers- including what attracts and what drives them away, you can easily focus on what you should do to attract leads and convert them into sales.
In the process, your marketing becomes easier, more effective, and with fewer missed opportunities.
Can Help You To Focus on The Right Leads
Not understanding your target audience can make you waste a lot of time and money.
Fortunately, creating a sales funnel helps you identify leads that you can turn into customers.
To understand their prospects and determine who is more serious, Attrock offers a free marketing plan on their website that requires visitors to provide the details of their businesses so that the digital marketing company can know exactly what visitors want and how to help them.
Image via Attrock
Can Help in Sorting and Ranking Leads
An effective sales funnel can help you know what leads require immediate attention and who needs long-term nurturing. This means that even though some leads won’t convert right away, you can still, continue nurturing them until they become customers.
Helps to Build Trust and Relationships With Leads
It’s worth noting that not everyone who visits your website will decide to purchase right away or immediately- no matter how great your content marketing is. Besides, 7 in 10 customers will make their decision to purchase from brands they trust.
With a proper sales funnel, you will be able to contact your prospects over a while sharing content that educates and build relationships with them. This way, they will see your business as trustworthy thus buying from you.
Improve the Sales Process By Analyzing Each Stage
Keeping track of all the sales funnel stages and analyzing the results enables you to identify any friction in your customer journey. This helps you to make adjustments to each stage of the sales process or determine where you need to focus more of your marketing efforts to improve your results.
How the Sales Funnel Works
In this section, we’re going to take a look at the sales funnel stages to help you understand how it works. The funnel can be longer or shorter depending on your type of business and the product or service you offer.
In summary, this is how the sales funnel might work:
Image via Glew
People visit your website after clicking a Facebook ad or through a Google search and other sources. They become your prospects. They might read a few blog content to understand more about your products or explore your product listings.
At some point, you ask them to give you their contact addresses in exchange for a lead magnet (could be an eBook). Those who sign up for your email list become your leads.
In the next coming days or weeks, you send them email sequences with content educating them about your products and how they can use them or benefit from them.
Since they have now become familiar with your brand, you can now promote your products to them via email, text, phone call, or all of these channels. To encourage leads to come back to your website, you can offer them special offers, a coupon code, information about new content on your blog, etc.
Prospects drop off as they move down the sales funnel stages thus the funnel narrows until you’re left with those who are interested to buy your products or services.
Different industries have have different sales funnel stages in your funnel. In this section, we’re going to focus on the three broader categories of the sales pipeline:
Image via Visual Paradigm
It’s worth mentioning that each stage requires a different approach to push the most qualified leads to the next and avoid those who aren’t fit for your offer.
Also, you need to understand the sales funnel content to create for each stage to avoid sending the wrong message to your prospects.
Read on to understand each stage of a sales funnel in more detail.
Generating Leads(ToFu)
At the top of the sales funnel is the lead generation stage where visitors discover they have a need, problem, or challenge. Once they land on your website, your goal is to educate them using compelling content like eBooks, posts, social media posts, infographics, and many others that they can access upon providing their contact information. This is where you use gated content to attract leads.
In this step, a few of the visitors might further express interest in your business and will move down the funnel thus they become a Lead.
Often, marketers drive new leads into the sales pipeline by grabbing their attention. If you give them a compelling offer, they will want to learn more about your business.
To engage your target audience at this stage, use the following types of content:
Here are a few tips to generate top-of-funnel leads:
Generating Prospects(MoFu)?
Turning new visitors into qualified leads occurs in the middle of the sales funnel. Here, your leads are looking to address their needs or solve their problems- and most likely, they aren’t sure how to do it.
At this sales funnel stage, you should refrain from selling a solution to them right away. Instead, work nurturing and qualifying leads. To make them ready to make another step in the funnel, help them with practical tips and useful techniques.
You should also focus on helping people get familiar with your product or service while demonstrating expertise in your industry with highly educational content:
Here are a few tips to nurture leads with middle-of-funnel marketing:
Generating Sales(BoFu)- Purchase Stage
At the bottom of the sales funnel is where you close opportunities.
At this stage, you’re dealing with leads that have gone through the entire sales funnel and are ready to be contacted by a salesperson. Here, the prospects know they have a problem they can’t solve and have realized that you have the solution.
Remember that prospects can also drop off at this stage because they probably have a list of other optional businesses- who are your competitors.
Here, you need to give them more reasons to choose you instead of your competitors.
You can use:
Here are a few bottom-of-funnel marketing tactics to increase conversions:
After the purchase stage, you can also add the post-sale or retention stage because the overall goal of a sales funnel is to target new customers and retain them for as long as you’re in business.
This takes us to the next stage:
Retention Stage
After your prospects have become paying customers, your job doesn’t end there. It’s not enough to attract new users to your products or services. To grow your business, you need to keep these customers by creating long-term relationships and targeting them with post-purchase content.
Use the following to build a solid customer retention strategy:
That said, let’s learn exactly how to set up a profitable sales funnel.
How To Build An Effective Sales Funnel
Here are the practical tips to teach you how to create a powerful sales funnel that converts prospects into real customers.
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Heads up: To create a successful conversion funnel, you need to determine the product or service you want to sell. Once you identify what to sell, figure out your target customers plus where your target audience hangs out most of their time.
Ready to learn how to make an effective sales funnel?
Let’s get started.
1. Understand Your Target Customers
You must be aware of the mantra “marketing to everyone is marketing to no one”
What does this mean?
You should focus your marketing efforts only on people who are a good fit for what you offer.
Knowing who is interested in your offers can save you time, money, and stress.
The first step in building a winning sales funnel is to understand your audience.?
What is a Target Audience?
A target audience is a specific group of people that are defined by mutual traits like demographics, behavior, and many others as shown in the image below:
?Image via Venture Harbour
This is the group of people your brand messaging, email copy, and content should appeal to because they might be potential customers for the products you sell.
No matter how great your products or services are, your funnel won’t help you to make sales if you target the wrong customers. In fact, your marketing budget will go to waste.
Gather huge amounts of data about your customers to make your funnel more effective.
When you gather enough information about your audience, you can adjust or optimize your funnel as well as your offers to match the data.
Here are questions to ask yourself when determining your prospective customers:
The list of questions can be as long or short as you want but focus on knowing the specifics of the people you intend to sell your products or services to.
Once you have full data about your audience, you can create useful content for each stage of the funnel to move prospects to the next step of your pipeline. You can also leverage content marketing tools to determine your audiences and create content that resonates with them.
2. Research Consumer Behavior
Making decisions is part of everyday marketers’ life.?
After all, the factors that influence customers’ purchase decisions have changed greatly over the years.
No wonder businesses are investing heavily to uncover consumer behavior and use the data to maximize their sales.
Uncovering consumer behavior can help you optimize your sales funnel effectively.
But wait! What is consumer behavior?
Consumer behavior is a term used to show how consumers decide on where, when, and from whom to buy something.
Basically, there are four types of consumer buyer behavior:
Image via Geektonight
Studying consumer behavior can help to determine the complex emotional and mental processes that influence how people reach a purchase decision.
Uncovering buyer behavior helps you to determine what drives people to consider specific products over others to avail those that are important to your customers.
Still not convinced about the importance of uncovering consumer behavior?
Here are a few essential statistics that show how important studying consumer behavior can be when creating a sales funnel:
Here are practical tips to help you gather customer data and uncover consumer behavior:
This information will aid you in discovering your audience, their purchase behavior as well as their needs.
Also, these insights will help you identify the seven types of buyers below:
3. Create Buyer Personas?
Apart from using the insights you have uncovered above to define your target consumers, you can also build detailed buyer personas.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal customers. In other words, it’s the classification of a person who has all the traits to purchase your products or services.
Here is a sample buyer persona template by HubSpot .
Image via HubSpot
Creating buyer personas helps to focus your efforts and time on qualified prospects. It’s also vital to create a sales pipeline that provides customers with better experiences.
Additionally, personas can guide you when creating messages to engage and inform your prospective consumers.
4. Put Your Content In Front of Your Target Customers
There is no point in doing all these things if you can’t pull your audience’s attention to your sales funnel.
You need to create content and share it across all of your platforms to drive huge amounts of traffic to your website.?
This is where content marketing becomes useful. In case you’re wondering what is content marketing, here is HubSpot's definition:
Image via HubSpot
As a rule, you should create different types of content such as videos, blog posts, social media posts, and more to drive traffic from the following sources:
You can embed forms and popups to your website to capture leads or run launch a few social media ads on the channels your prospective customers spend most of their time.
5. Create a High Converting Landing Page
Your visitors must land somewhere before you move them down the funnel. If they sign up for a webinar or eBook or if they click an ad, they should be directed to a page. That’s where a landing page becomes helpful.
Here is a landing page template from HubSpot.
Image via HubSpot
The landing page plays a significant role in your business. For instance, it should convince prospects what you offer is exactly what they are looking for. It should demonstrate who you are and your exceptional benefits.
The biggest mistake most marketers make when creating a landing page is to focus only on how amazing their offers are.?
For your information, at this stage, your prospects want to see how your products or services can help them solve their needs.
Also, remember that you only have a few seconds to impress your prospects and capture them.
Here are practical tips to keep your prospect moving down the sales funnel until they make a purchase and become loyal customers:
Give Them Something Valuable
Once visitors come to your landing page, you should focus on capturing leads(getting their email addresses) instead of selling them your products right away.
To get your prospect’s contact information, you need to give them something of value. That could be a free eBook, checklist, or whitepaper with useful and informative content.
Take a look at how Attrock, a digital marketing company collects the email addresses of their visitors by having a simple call-to-action button with the words “Let Our Experts Connect with You” on their landing page:
Image via Attrock
Use images that are relatable to your prospects and augment your emotional message. Your visuals should be real, authentic, and mobile-friendly.
Nurture The Prospect
Once the prospects have provided their contact information, it means they have started to develop an interest in your brand. Your next step is to nurture them with educational content about your product or service. Don’t sell to them right away here.
Doing so might push them away. Also, keep them updated with fresh content about your products or services regularly at least once or two times per week. Your content should show them how your products or services can solve their key needs.
Make Your Best Offer
Once you have nurtured the prospects, the last step is to close the deal. Here you make an irresistible offer that your prospect can’t ignore or turn down. Your offer could be a product demonstration, a special discount code, or a free trial.
Keep Communicating and Building Relationships
At this stage, your prospects have either become paying customers or decided not to make a purchase yet. No matter what they decide to do, continue communicating with them and focus on building a relationship with them.
If they decide to buy, continue sending them educational content about your products or services while engaging them constantly to build loyalty and offering them great service to make them loyal customers.
If the prospects decide not to purchase your best offer, reach out to them regularly via email marketing. You can use different email nurturing series to convert them into customers.
Optimize Your Sales Funnel
Even if you build a successful sales funnel, your work doesn’t end there. You have to keep improving and optimizing it and determine where prospects are dropping off.
Begin at the top of the funnel and focus on the points where prospects make their next move from one stage to another.
Evaluate the performance of each piece of content at each stage to see whether it’s capturing enough leads.
Generally, your content should get prospects to take a certain action. If they aren’t clicking the call to action, try to use other marketing efforts or marketing activities to encourage them to take action.
Test your landing page. The offer you give your prospects on the landing page as well as the CTA should reflect the content that attracted the prospects to your page. If prospects aren’t providing their email addresses it means they aren’t trusting you. Test all the elements of your landing page including the headline, images, copy, and CTA buttons to determine what’s working and what’s not.
Track your customer retention rates. Do customers return to buy from you? Or are they buying other products or services you offer? Do they refer other customers to your company?
FAQs
1. What are the stages of a sales funnel?
No matter the details required in a sale funnel- the sales process can be classified into three broader categories:
2. What is the difference between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel?
A marketing funnel focuses on promoting products or services to give leads a reason to purchase whereas a sales funnel focuses on enticing leads to buy and become repeat customers.?
3. What are the different types of sales funnels?
There are different types of funnels that include, but are not limited to:
4. How do you create a sales funnel?
?Follow these practical tips to build an effective sales funnel that converts:
5. Why do I need to build a sales funnel?
A sales funnel helps you to keep track of the buyer journey and make necessary adjustments as needed.
Ready to Create a Sales Funnel?
When learning how to build a sales funnel from scratch, focus on your target customers. This means creating a sales funnel that focuses on providing value to your prospective customers and helping them achieve their goals or solve their problems.
Remember that creating a solid funnel is an ongoing process and involves a lot of tweaking and improving before you nail it. Of importance is to offer suitable lead-capture and nurturing content that will move the prospects down the sales funnel while augmenting their experience.