What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel, is a process sales and marketing teams use to strategise and monitor the movement of leads through the customer journey.
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A sales funnel, is a process sales and marketing teams use to strategise and monitor the movement of leads through the customer journey.
Each stage in the sales funnel requires a different message to be effective. You can’t expect someone who knows nothing about your solution to buy your product or service.
Sales funnels are divided into four steps that make it easier for companies to monitor the buying process.
You may find different terminologies online — but, they all mean the same thing.
Let’s take a closer look at each step.
At the awareness stage, your goal isn’t to convert anyone. You’re trying to establish yourself as an authority and gain the trust of your new visitors.
The visitor is just getting introduced to the idea that there is a solution to their problem. They may see your ad on Facebook or land on your website via Google, and they end up finding value in your content.
You may capture their email address or get them to follow you on social media.
Some of your prospects from the awareness stage will show more interest in your solution.
For example, they may begin conducting product research and comparing different offers.
What you can do here is offer more helpful content in a genuine way that helps them choose a proper option. But, you shouldn’t push any of your offers here.
If you think about it, that goes against the whole idea of leading potential customers through a sales funnel.
This is the stage where a prospect has decided to buy, but he or she is still stuck trying to pick an option.
There are a lot of ways to make your offer stand out more.
For instance, customer reviews and testimonials are a huge plus to your business.
You can also offer something your competitor isn’t delivering, such as free shipping, limited discounts, or special offers.
"Action" is the final stage in your sales funnel. It takes an enormous amount of work and energy to arrive at the bottom of the funnel.
The prospect has decided to go with your product or service. You've successfully guided them through your sales path.
Yet, your work here isn't complete.
Your next mission is to keep your customers loyal to you and your business. Getting them to buy from you again is your new aim.
Online customers lost trust in the ads they see online. It takes more effort now to convince people of your offer than it did a decade ago.
That often results in visitors dropping out from your sales funnel — which means many lost sales for you.
To prevent that from happening to you, and to improve the effectiveness of your systems, you need a sales funnel. It has to be specifically optimised for your target audience.
Without a sales funnel, it’s hard to tell where the problem is if you don’t track the data. Having one in place allows you to optimise the buying process and improve it.
A sales funnel also helps you communicate the right message at the right time.
By understanding your potential clients, you’ll know when to follow up with them. That allows you to send special offers, such as discounts, to get them to reconsider their decisions.
Here are some tools that cover the various aspects of the sales funnel and will help you manage the process.
GetResponse is an email marketing tool that helps businesses reach a wider audience and communicate directly with their customers.
This tool features over 180 professional templates placed in various categories, e.g. signup, sales, download, promotion templates, etc.
Instead of creating a design from scratch, users can use the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor to make suitable changes to the template they choose. Users can also create a template or landing page from scratch if they want to.
With GetResponse, users can create an email list, send emails to their contacts, automate the emails via autoresponders, and view and analyze email campaign statistics like open rates, clickthrough rates, etc.
Leadpages is a software tool that allows you to build attractive landing pages that can help you boost the conversion rates of your business.
This tool allows you to either create landing pages from scratch or use the premade templates available. You are provided with customization options that give you control over the design of your landing page.
The drag-and-drop operations enable you to add text, images, widgets, etc. to create the landing page you want.
With Leadpages, you don’t need any coding or technical experience to create SEO-friendly designs.
You can also conduct A/B testing to see how your pages perform. This will help you eradicate design mistakes before you officially launch a page.
This software provides several small apps such as WordPress plugins, countdown timers and popup notifications that can make your content more interactive and engaging.
OptinMonster is a software that allows you to add forms to your website for the purpose of lead generation. This tool has a user-friendly interface and a wide collection of sleek and attractive form templates: slide-in forms, lightboxes, footer bars, etc.
You can tweak these templates and even add custom HTML and CSS to forms.
In addition to giving you the ability to create unlimited forms for different web pages, OptinMonster also has a special feature called Exit Intent. When this feature is enabled, popup forms are triggered when a web visitor is about to leave the site.
This tool integrates seamlessly with major email marketing services and e-commerce apps like Mailerlite, Shopify, Thrivecart and SamCart.
Omnisend is an ecommerce marketing automation tool that provides businesses with suitable omnichannel marketing strategies.
It combines emails, social media, SMS and other marketing channels into one platform so that marketers can increase conversions and promote growth.
This software comes with pre-made templates to help you create customized emails, as well as features to automate and send these emails. The Facebook Messenger and SMS marketing functionalities make it easier for marketers to connect with their target audience.
Omnisend also helps you create engaging forms to capture leads. It provides different form options for collecting user data, including Popups, Signup Boxes, and even Wheels of Fortune.
As with SMS messages and emails, you can integrate your forms and landing pages seamlessly into your marketing campaigns.
This software offers smart reporting features to help you see how your campaigns are performing.
These reporting features include clickmaps and real-time dashboards to help you get all the important data you need to analyze and optimize your campaigns.
Wishpond is a digital marketing platform that helps you to attract your target audience and convert them to leads by creating and publishing aesthetically-pleasing landing pages.
This tool lets you build and customize pages from scratch. With the drag-and-drop builder, you can insert page elements into your pages and forms in real-time.
There are also customizable templates that make it easier for you to create your pages, especially when you don’t have prior experience with web design.
Wishpond provides marketers with ways to increase conversions and track user activity on their websites. The measured analytics helps them to understand their customers and identify areas that need optimization and improvement.
Wishpond integrates seamlessly with third-party programs like GetResponse, MailChimp, AWeber, Salesforce, and many other apps.
To use this software to its full capacity, you can take advantage of the training materials and/or contact customer service for support.
Instapage is a landing page builder that helps you create beautiful, conversion-focused landing pages easily. This tool comes with an easy-to-use live editor and a drag-and-drop function that helps you modify the content blocks accordingly.
There is also a code editor that lets you add custom HTML and CSS scripts.
The A/B testing feature allows you to conduct experiments to optimize the performance of your pages.
You can create different versions of your page by isolating certain elements/blocks and putting them to the test. In doing so, you will see if the changes on the landing page would increase conversions or not.
You can test several page elements at once. These elements include buttons, pop-ups, signup forms, and more. That way, you can delete low-performing landing pages and keep the best ones.
Instapage offers an analytics tool that uses metrics such as visitors, clicks and conversion rates to show you how each page is performing.
It also offers a countdown timer feature and a chat plugin to increase urgency and engage with potential clients in real-time.
Lucky Orange is a platform that lets you analyze user behavior and make changes to your website accordingly.
This tool shows you the interactions of your visitors with your website in real-time. It helps you understand the problems your visitors are having and why they are leaving your site without converting.
Lucky Orange provides you with four major reports into the behavior of your site visitors.
With this tool, you can monitor visitor participation, conversion rates and dropouts, track mouse movements, and get more information about click-through-rates through heat map visualization. You can even do a live chat with the team to assist your customers.
Are you struggling to get your prospective customers through the sales funnel? You might be going wrong somewhere and we can help!
Get in touch and we’ll organise a free strategy session for you and your team.
If you don’t have a team we can pair you with one at our recommendation to implement your personalised plan of action!
In the meantime, keep an eye on our blog for the latest updates in the marketing world that could be affecting your business without you even knowing it.