Without an effective sales funnel, you may not be able to generate any sales despite owning a website. Years of both failure and success have proven to many marketers that there is no one best way to go about the selling process. Like all things worthwhile it requires a continuous cycle of learning, executing and repetition.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Sales funnel is an ideal journey potential customers experiences on their way to becoming your customer. However, you can advertise your products or services to thousands of people. In the end – only a small portion of the leads generated will eventually become buying customers.
Sales Funnel key terms you need to be conversant with…
Sales pipeline is the number of deals you have. Moreover, A pipeline shows what deals salesperson has & at what stage they are at in the sales process, while the sales funnel shows the conversion rates of that process.
Sales process is a systematic approach, consisting of a series of nonlinear, single actions that are not always performed in a certain order, or perhaps not performed at all. The process your leads go through before becoming customers.
Building an Effective Sales Funnel
To build an effective sales funnel there are major things you need to put into consideration. There are;
#1. Know Your Target Audience
Before you can create your funnel, you need to understand your target audience. What are the problems they’re looking to solve? And what impact is that problem having?
Solving their problem will help get you to the impact & the impact is where urgency, value & need to live. You have to know the problem your buyers & prospects are struggling with & the impact it’s having on them. Then it’s a matter of guiding them toward that understanding so that they can see the value or impact your product or service can have.
Also important to consider which social media channels do they favor or what are the things that interest them the most? This will help you narrow your search.
#2. Build Buyers Personas
You can build different buyer personas targeting your marketing campaigns for the various segments of your customers. Your buyer personas need to be based on real-world info, not just gut instinct or guesswork. Start by defining the people who want to buy from you, not the people you wish would buy from you. Begin with;
- Do detailed audience research; who are already buying from you (age, location, language, income, buying behavior, interests and activities, life stage (such as new parenthood or retirement), etc.). Dig into your website and social analytics for patterns & see what the competition is up to.
- Identify existing customer pain points; what problems are your prospects trying to solve? What impact is that problem having?
- Understand customers’ goals; if the problem above has been identified & addressed accordingly, what is the desired outcome of solving that problem?
- Understand how your brand can help target customers; how does your product or service align with solving that problem and how close does it get your prospect to their goal? try not to think about your offering in terms of features, but instead dig deep to analyze the benefits you offer to customers. A feature is what your product is or does. A benefit is how your product or service makes your customer’s life easier or better.
- Turn your research into buyer personas; gather all of your research and look for patterns or common characteristics, i.e. industry, demographic or region. As you begin to group those patterns, you’ll have the basis of your unique customer personas.
#3. Traffic Generation
No awareness of your product – no sale. If people haven’t heard of you or your services, you’ll need to adopt different lead generation strategies to drive users to your website. Things like;
- PPC campaigns
- SEO optimization
- Landing page optimization
- Influencer marketing
- Guest posting
- Social media marketing
#4. Audience Engagement
Lead generation alone likely won’t be enough if you fail to engage your audience. You want them to learn about your product or services. Again, this comes back to content and what value you provide to the prospect or consumer.
Things like high-quality, engaging blogs. Interesting videos or tutorials. This can then be promoted or shared on your chosen social media channels. And of course, email marketing campaigns or newsletters.
#5. Convert Your Leads
The process of converting the visitors, followers, etc. into paying customers. Each of these areas, of course, requires a much deeper dive into the specifics, but hopefully, this will give you a template on which to build.
How to Build a Sales Funnel
Follow the below five processes to build sales funnels that convert:
#1: Give attracting Offer
The first thing you need to do with your funnel is to recoup the costs of your advertising. This is the “breakeven” portion of your funnel, and the first step your new customers are going to see after visiting your site from an advertisement.
There are a few steps you need to take to determine the best type of offer to use as your attractive/compelling offer.
#2: Introduce your core offer
After you’ve converted your visitor into a paying customer, it’s time to start introducing them to the rest of your business. By now, you should have one offer, product, or service that is already generating a profit for you. This is going to be your “core offer” and what you need to start working on getting in front of your new lower-paying customers.
#3: Utilize a higher ticket “upsell”
Now it’s time to make some money. While your attracting and core offers are lower in price and accessible to the masses, you’re going to have customers who want even more from your business. They’re also willing to pay a higher price for the product, service, or experience.
#4: Implement a “profit maximizer”
The final step of most sales funnels is called the “profit maximizer”, and as the name implies, it’s designed to increase the number of profits you see on backend sales from your earlier products or services.
#5: Follow up relentlessly
The key to moving customers through your sales funnel is to make sure you’re delivering the right message, at the right time, and that you’re consistently following up with them.
The last thing you want to do is send your tripwire promotional emails to customers who have already purchased your tripwire offer. Likewise, you also don’t want to be sending your profit maximizer email series to customers who haven’t even purchased your core offer yet.