How to Create a High Converting Sales Funnel for Your Business
What is a sales funnel?
Also known as a revenue funnel or sales process, a Sales Funnel is a term used that stands for the entire journey from a customer discovering your product to them making a purchase.
Before we dive deeper into understand the sales funnel, we need to look at what conversions mean. Conversion is defined as a measurement of when a person took action that pushed them further down the purchase (sales) funnel.
Remember: You can’t sell anything to anybody; you can only help them see the value for themselves in what you offer.
Why is having a sales funnel important?
Understanding the sales funnel will help you to know how your potential customers behave and think during each stage of the purchasing journey. Having these insights will allow you to invest your energy and time strategically. It gives you a clear path on what type of marketing and relevant content you should be creating for each stage of the sales funnel.
What are the sales funnel stages?
The sales funnel is generally divided into several steps, which can vary depending on the particular sales model. These steps are frequently referred to as the AIDA model – Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action.
From the moment a potential customer comes across your product until the moment they make a purchase, they will pass through different stages of your sales funnel. That journey may vary from one customer to another but in the end it’ll come back to their interest level. Customers are thinking about the problem that they have. They are looking at your product to see if it’s the best option to solve that problem.
Awareness
This is the first stage of the sales funnel. In this stage potential customers become aware of your product or service. They may discover you from your marketing efforts, social media or even word of mouth.
Interest
At this stage of the sales funnel, a potential customer is thinking about the problem they are trying to solve and are trying to make a decision if your business is the best option to help them solve it.
Decision
During this stage of the sales funnel, a potential customer has already become interested in your product or service and they want to find out more information. They will want to find out about things like your pricing or service packaging options. This is where sales pages with strong CTA’s or discovery calls if you’re a service based business are helpful to help sway your potential customers to make a purchase.
Action
This is the final stage and all of your efforts comes down to this stage. Will your potential customer or prospect make the sale? This of course is what every business owner wants to achieve. If the purchase doesn’t happen, you can refer back to each stage of the sales funnel to understand what in the customer purchasing sales journey can be improved.
Some things to keep in mind about the sales funnel
50% Drop Off
It’s normal, and you can expect around 50% of the initial leads gained in the Awareness phase to drop off and continue to drop by 50% per stage of the funnel. This is a crucial point to keep in mind so you don’t get disheartened and continue your efforts.
Remember: Not all leads are buyers.
Conversion has always been a numbers game, whether through traditional OR digital marketing methods.
While the quality of the leads you have is a significant factor, converting higher numbers involves having more leads.
Developing a clear strategy for each part of the AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action) is absolutely vital.
How to create a high converting sales funnel for your business
Here is an example of a sales funnel you could create for your business:
Lead Generation
Firstly you need to understand where you can find potential customers. Where you generate your lead flow from, be it social media, PPC, content marketing, organic results, or otherwise, will depend entirely on your audience, where they spend their time, and what industry you are in. Who are you targeting and how can yo reach them so they become aware of your product? This is why a target audience analysis is extremely important when starting any business venture.
2. Create a landing page or a website
Now-days especially If you’re a digital business, you simply won’t be able to do business without a landing page. No matter what type of business model you have, you will need high-converting landing page to drive conversions.
Essentially a landing page is where potential customers will arrive after clicking an ad or a link. A purpose of landing page to lead visitors to take action like make a purchase, download a document or submit their information so you can follow up with them.
During the first visit to the landing page this is where potential customers learn about your company. It needs to communicate very clearly what it is that you do and the value you are providing to them.
The sales funnel cannot be discussed without considering the user’s experience or the user journey.
Why is UX important?
This is the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.
Suppose the user does not have a good, smooth and intuitive experience when they arrive at your website. In that case, it doesn’t matter how much work you’ve done on the various levels of your funnel, nor on how valuable or useful your product or service is – they will most likely not convert.
Two important points to consider are the speed of your website and whether the site is mobile responsive. If the page takes too long to load, the customer will most likely opt-out.
Secondly, majority of people now days search and shop on mobile devices, so it’s vital for your website to be mobile responsive.
Tools
Here are a couple of tools you can use to keep on top of the page speed and how mobile-friendly your website is.
Mobile-friendly test:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly
Page speed test:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
3. Offer something of value by creating a Lead Magnet
You should be trying to capture as many email addresses as possible in exchange for something of value.
But why concentrate on gathering email addresses?
You own your email list. You don’t own Twitter or Instagram.
Social media campaigns and SEO efforts can go waste when these platforms change their policies. On the other hand, if you own your email list, it is not influenced by the decisions of other businesses.
According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average sees a 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the USA.
Email subscribers who join an email list from a website and verify their identity by clicking on a link (double-opt-in), which means they are already interested in what you have to offer. Email allows you to land into a user’s inbox.
There is no ranking system limiting your reach. It is very direct and personal. Email can be targeted - you know what your target audience likes to consume, and you can deliver highly relevant offers through segmentation to get the best results.
So how do you obtain email addressees on your landing page?
Long gone are the days when simply having "a subscribe to our email list" on your website is going to work. People want to avoid getting their inboxes spammed and will try to avoid giving out their email addresses as much as possible.
This is why having an incentivised email opt-in with a lead magnet is important. If you’re new to digital marketing, this essentially means giving a valuable piece of content for free in exchange for someone’s email address.
Examples of a lead magnet:
PDF Download
E-book
Free intro to a course
A checklist or cheatsheet
Free product
Enter a giveaway
4. Nurturing the Lead Flow
At this point, your prospects will move from the ‘Awareness’ stage into the ‘Interest’ stage.
Always remember that relationship building is a massive part of dealing with customers, both in terms of keeping existing customers happy and onboarding new customers. People do business with people they like and that they can trust.
When nurturing your lead flow, your focus needs to be placed on adding continues value to the customer's life.
Now that you have gathered your potential customers email addresses, you can create an email series and provide useful educational content about your offerings.
5. Now for the Sales Part - It’s time to up-sell
Basically, value is the name of the game here. As we know - we need to offer value to our leads throughout the whole process, including the final sales step. Your product needs to be of value to them; otherwise, why would they buy it?
As your potential customers move into the ‘Decision’ stage, you want to offer them something that will nudge them into the direction of a purchasing decision. This could include a free trial or a a special discount.
The key is to communicate your products’ USP (Unique Selling Point) clearly. If offering a discount, it needs to be a limited offering. Be sure to display the full and discounted prices alongside one another.
Another tip? A sense of urgency is a great asset. If you are offering a discount, ensure that limited availability is communicated. You could incorporate something like a count down timer or a call to action:
“Less than 24 hours left”
“Only 5 spots left”
“Last chance!”