Introduction:
A solid Sales Conversion Funnel is the most crucial aspect of building an online business. Without a sales conversion funnel, you won’t have any consistent way of bringing in sales over the long term and remember as a digital marketer that knows what he/she is doing, thinking long term is a priority.
You could be following all the best practices and have the best product. You could have the most informative blog in your space. You could have a high-converting opt-in form.
But if you can’t drive prospects to a sale, none of that matters.
If you have a website and a business, you can create a sales conversion funnel that converts even if you’re starting from scratch.
Here’s how to do it.
The basics of a successful sales conversion funnel
it’s important to define the key components of a funnel and how they should work
together to make sales.
A sales funnel is simply a series of steps that you design to guide visitors toward a buying decision.
A very basic sales funnel might looks like this
Sales Conversion Funnels can help you do several things:
- Create awareness for your brand, product, or service.
- Pique interest in what you have to offer.
- Evoke a desire for purchase through education.
- Help leads perform a desirable action.
- Move leads through the funnel to the final purchase.
In a profitable funnel, this process is repeatable and leads to the highest number of conversions possible.
Each stage of the funnel involves different strategies for this, however. Here’s a breakdown of what that looks like.
- Top of the funnel
The top of the funnel is the point where customers (or potential customers) are figuring out that you exist. It’s an exploratory stage.
The goal of this stage is to raise brand awareness, not to make a sale. This isn’t where you make a hard sell.
Exposure, influence, and engagement are the keywords.
- Middle of the funnel
Once there is awareness about your brand, there has to be interest.
“Visitors” need to turn into “leads,” which is the step before “customer.” At this point, visitors are considering whether or not you have something of value to offer.
They’re considering whether they should engage with you or walk away.
But this isn’t a one-way street. This is also the stage where you’re gathering information about them.
Lead magnets, email courses, e-books, case studies, free trials — anything that captures an email address will be a benefit to your funnel.
When leads get to the middle of the funnel, targeting and segmenting become very important, too.
You need to focus your effort on content creation, targeted offers, and follow-up campaigns for specific customer avatar.
You might do most of your work on this step. But if you do it right, it will be the most rewarding.
The goal here is to strengthen the relationship so that they move on to the final stage.
- Bottom of the funnel
This is the final decision-making stage in your sales funnel.
It’s also a mix of hard and soft selling, depending on the strategies you’ve used at the top and the middle of the funnel as well as the consumer’s buying behaviour.
This is where they will be researching about the benefits of your product, whether or not it will meet their needs, and how easy it is to buy from you.
It can be an emotional stage for the buyer, so it’s important that your messages and sales strategies are equally emotional and targeted to specific needs.
Reminders, re-targeting, and motivational offers work the best here. But again, we’ll get to that in a bit.
A healthy sales funnel will move someone from the top to the bottom relatively easily. But to do that, you need a strategy.
Here are the five basic steps to crafting a healthy and profitable sales conversion funnel
Step 1: Create lead-capturing landing pages
The first place you want to start is the top of your funnel, especially if you’re creating a funnel from scratch.
Remember: the top of the funnel is all about traffic. But to turn that traffic into something useful later on, you need a lead-generating landing page.
Note: A landing page could be your homepage if it looks like this
Even though this is a homepage, it has a lead-generating element on it that they’ve designed to gather emails.
Ideally, it should be higher converting than a purely informational page.
The key to a profitable sales conversion funnel is a landing page that converts, so it’s the first thing you should think about building. You will most likely need several landing pages that appeal to buyers from all stages of the cycle.
But once you finish setting up your landing page(s), it’s time to move on to the next step.
Step 2: Drive traffic to your landing pages
You’ve probably heard the age-old adage about a tree falling in the woods, right? Well, the same is true of the landing page as well.
A great landing page without any traffic won’t spike sales.
But traffic growth is one of the top challenges to inbound marketing.
This means you will need specific, proven strategies to drive traffic to your landing pages in order to move a potential customer on to the next stage of the funnel.
So what’s the best model for getting traffic? That depends on your goals, audience, and budget. Here are a few methods to consider:
- Pay per click (PCC) ads
PPC advertising is an increasingly popular choice among marketers as a way of generating traffic.
They’ve become popular for many reasons. For one, PPC ads can reach people on a variety of channels and networks.
You can create ads for Facebook or Twitter, for example, or focus on search engine PPC ads to drive organic search traffic.
But PPC ads can also be expensive. For those creating PPC ads on a budget, you have to consider the cost vs. ROI.
You have to ensure that the amount of effort and money you put into the ads will generate enough traffic to move a large number of leads through to the middle of your funnel.
- Social media
Social media outreach is another great way to drive traffic at the beginning and middle of your sales funnel.
It’s a great tool because there is a lot of traffic on those channels already. All you have to do is tap into it.
It’s also a great tool for driving traffic because of its influential nature.
Even something as simple as answering a customer’s question on social media prompts 48% of consumers to make a purchase or convert in some way.
This means that it’s relatively easy for you to bring awareness to your brand while also moving someone from the awareness stage into the “tell me more” stage.
- Content marketing
Social media isn’t the only way (or even the best way) to drive traffic to your site.
Content marketing — utilising emails, blog content, case studies, etc. — is as effective, if not more effective, at driving traffic than social media alone.
fact, 66% of marketers report using blogs and other web content as their primary social media content, too.
While content marketing can hit consumers at any stage of the cycle, it’s the perfect tool for influencing the middle of the funnel particularly.
It helps meet the education and research needs that someone in the middle of the funnel would need to finally convert.
But in order to get that conversion, you have to develop content that captures information.
Step 3: Develop resources that collect email addresses
After you’ve set up your landing pages, PPC ads, and social media accounts, the next step is to create content that captures attention.
It takes a lot of concentrated effort to move someone from the top of the funnel to the middle or from the middle to the bottom.
In short, you need to continue to target them with the content they’re looking for.
If they need more information about the benefits of your product, then you should send them to landing pages, e-books, or other resources that explain why your solution is the most effective solution.
Creating resources — also called lead magnets — does two things:
- It provides something valuable for the consumer.
- It gives you an email address that you can use for further marketing.
It’s easy for someone to download a free checklist or an e-book. And if you can capture that email, you can send them more information that might persuade them to buy.
It’s a soft-sell strategy that works surprisingly well if you do it correctly.
So how do you create a lead magnet that moves someone through the funnel?
- Create a variety of lead magnets.
Lead magnets should first and foremost be something useful for your target audience. There needs to be a good reason for them to give you their email
- Make your lead magnet noticeable.
Your lead magnet should be on your lead-generating landing pages or embedded into your content in a noticeable way.
In some cases, you can create a unique landing page for your magnet and then create PPC ads that link to it.
- Make it easy for people to give their information.
Getting someone onto your email list is a matter of value exchange. You’re giving them something and getting their email in return.
You want this process to be as effortless as possible. And I mean effortless.
Unless they’re signing up for a free trial where they would need to give more information, you should only have a name box, an email box, and a button. That’s it.
Even just giving them an email address box works.
You don’t need a lot of information about the customer right away even if they’re in the middle of the funnel.
Once you have their email, you can move on to the real sales point: email campaigns.
Step 4: Set up an email marketing campaign
An email campaign is the next logical step in the sales conversion funnel because it builds a relationship with a prospect over time.
This gives them the space they need to make a purchasing decision while also keeping them actively engaged in the process.
In terms of effectiveness, 87% of B2B marketers use email marketing to generate leads, and 31% say email marketing makes the biggest impact on their revenue.
Email campaigns can fill a wide range of purposes. They can introduce a prospect to the product or service you offer:
The goal is to create a series of emails that continue to remind prospects that you still exist and that you’re ready to do business.
A typical email campaign might look like:
- Day 1– A “welcome” email that thanks the prospect for showing an interest in your product or service.
- Day 2– An email that offers another relevant lead magnet, typically a freebie like a checklist, e-book or trial.
- Day 3 – An email that includes a customer testimonial about your product or service.
- Day 4– An email that includes more stories or examples of how your product has helped people be successful and how they can use your product or service.
- Day 5 – A final email that goes for the “hard sell” or next step in the purchase chain.
Step 5: Track and tweak your sales funnel
Let’s do a quick refresher on the sales funnel steps so far:
- Create your landing pages.
- Start your traffic-driving initiatives (PPC, social media, etc.).
- Create your lead magnets.
- Set up an email marketing campaign.
By the time you’ve created an email marketing campaign, you should start seeing some sales.
But it will become critical for you to track each step to make sure there are no holes or leaks in your funnel, particularly in the middle of the funnel.
If traffic isn’t coming to your site, or that traffic isn’t turning into email addresses, or your sales numbers aren’t rising, there’s something wrong.
Watching your metrics, analytics, and sales numbers will be vital to the process.
For the most part, you should be able to track the success of your sales funnel with specific tools. Consider using things like:
A CRM — A good CRM will allow you to track all new leads, open deals, and see current customers.
Email tracking software — If you’re using an email service like Drip or MailChimp, you should be able to track leads from your desktop or integrate it with your CRM.
Social media tools — Tools like Buffer or Hootsuite can help you see your social media lead-generation progress.
Of course, something like Google Analytics works well, too.
At the end of the day, the tools don’t matter as much as the fact that you’re regularly checking your sales funnel for leaks.
This will let you see where you can make improvements that might significantly improve the quality of your leads and, eventually, your conversions.