What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a type of marketing tool used by businesses to attract customers. There are three main parts to the sales funnel – the top, middle, and bottom. Each of those parts require a certain action to make it work. You can learn a lot about sales funnels if you do some research. There are even blogs written about them: https://www.clickfunnels.com/blog/sales-funnels/. These blogs are very informative and can help you to learn more about them. This article will attempt to let you learn more about sales funnels and how they work. Again, you can do more research and discover even more about them. It is an interesting way of getting sales for your business.
Stages
- Awareness
Awareness is the first stage, and this is the stage where people first notice you. They might have just been doing a Google search and came across your name. They could have been told about you by a friend or family member. However, they came across your name, it is now your job to keep them interested in you. You need to have an informative and dynamic home page for potential customers to land on. You do not want it to be so boring that they click away immediately.
- Interest
Once people have landed on your page, you want to keep their interest. As was said above, you want your landing page to be interesting and dynamic. You want to have something that will tug at their interest and keep them looking at your page. They will not stay if your page is not interesting. Sometimes flashy gifs, popups, and the architecture of the page will keep the interest. You can look here to see how others do it. Other times it is the information itself that grabs their attention. Whatever it is, you want them to stay on your page so that you can eventually make your sale.
- Decision
Once you have their attention and they are staying on your page, you want them to make a decision on your products or services. You want them to see what you have to offer in an easy-to-read format. You want to put your products or services upfront in a way that they can spot it easily. You might also want to put your prices upfront, as well. In this way you will keep their attention and might be able to turn their interest into a sale.
- Action
Once the customer has made a decision, you want them to take action. You will need a call-to-action button to keep their attention. You need to make it easy for the customer to purchase your products or services. You can have a cart on your page with buttons on your items that say “add to cart” so that it is easy for your customers to navigate and is, therefore, more user friendly. This can help to seal the deal and make your sale.
Next Steps
To build your sales funnel you will need to take the following steps.
- Create a Landing Page
You want to create a landing page that is informative and interesting. You want people to stay and learn more about your company. You want popup that gives the potential customers a place to enroll for email updates so that you can keep in contact with them. This page should also communicate clearly who you are as a company and what you do. You want them to know all about you from your landing page.
- Offer Something of Value
Once you have them on your landing page, you will want to have them sign up for your email. You can do this by offering them something of value. This could be a percentage off your products or a one-time only deal. It can also be an e-book or something similar to that to get their attention. Once you have their email, you can continue to encourage them to buy from you with special email only deals.
- Start Nurturing
Once you have their email, you have moved from the awareness stage into the interest stage. You can nurture that interest by sending them informative emails about your business and why they should buy from you instead of the other company that sells things similar to yours. You want them to continue to have interest in your company and eventually buy from you.
- Upsell
Once you have their interest, you want them to buy something from you. You can try to upsell them at this point. If they are wanting the basic service or product, show them that the next step up is a better value for them even if they must spend a little more to get it. You want them to think they are getting a much better deal than they would have with the basic product.
- Keep It Going
Once you have made the sell, you want the customer to return to do more business with you. You will also want to convince the customers who chose not to buy from you to do business with you in the future. You will want to keep the nurturing emails coming to both sets of people. You want to prove that you are the best company to do business with and have them return.
Conclusion
A sales funnel is a marketing tool to get people to buy from your company. There are several steps to make a successful sales funnel and those steps are outlined here. You can still get more information if you choose to do some more research, but these steps will get you started in the right direction. The basic idea of a sales funnel is to get people interested enough in your product or service that they will buy from you and encourage friends and family to also buy from you.
If you can grab their attention at the beginning and keep it until you make the sell you will have a more successful business. You want to do this with all your potential customers, and you want to encourage those people who chose not to buy from you to give you another chance.
