Sales funnels have gained tremendous exposure.
Think about a past experience of buying a product or service. Did you purchase from the brand the first time you heard their name?
Did an advert immediately spark a desire to part with your cash? Of course not! Our purchasing decisions take time.
Whether you’re involved in B2B or B2C sales, it’s critical to understand that buyers are going on a journey. Today, we discuss what is a sales funnel.
This buyer’s journey (or sales funnel) involves every checkpoint or interaction a customer has with your brand before they make a purchase. But it also helps identify where you are losing customers – a part of the sales funnel that bottlenecks your potential revenue.
Your ultimate goal is to streamline your sales funnel, driving more and more customers towards the final sale (and to keep them coming back).
This article addresses these challenges, answering some fundamental sales funnel questions:
- What is a sales funnel?
- Why are sales funnels important?
- How to build your sales funnel?
- Optimizing your sales funnel?
So what exactly is a sales funnel?
Originally developed as a marketing concept (as far back as the 1980s), the sales funnel is a way to visualize the customer’s journey. It starts broadly, encompassing all the potential customers who first become aware of your brand.
As we move through the stages, we filter for the consumers most interested in purchasing your product. We educate and spark desire through content and advertising until a customer finally chooses to purchase your product or service over a competitor’s.
Let’s go through the different stages:
- Awareness: A potential customer first hears about your brand, product, or service
- Interest: The potential customer is interested in your product or service and learns general information.
- Desire: The customer wants to buy your product or service and investigates the specifics of your brand.
- Action: The customer purchases your product or service.
That’s not the only way to conceptualize the sales funnel. You may hear people talk about “top-of-funnel marketing” or another similar term. They’re referring to this model of the sales funnel:
- Top of the funnel. Lead generation is driven by marketing
- Middle of the funnel. Leads consider more about a product or service.
- Bottom of the funnel. Leads are convinced to buy your product or service.
The core characteristic of both models is increasing familiarity with your brand. The more familiar with your brand they become, the more likely they are to purchase a product or service in the future.
Why are sales funnels important?
Consider this shocking statistic: only 2% of consumers are converted to buy your product or service during their first site visit. In fact, 97% of website users never return to the same website.
That has to change!
Through ingenious landing page design, impeccable website design & development, and a bespoke sales funnel strategy, you can experience a significant uptick in sales. You increase your retention rate by creating a website experience designed to push customers through the sales funnel.
But the sales funnel concept doesn’t just work for your landing page. The same concept can be employed for webinars, product launches, and more.
When creating a sales funnel, we aim to introduce your product or service, alleviate their concerns, emphasize the benefits, and make it simple to convert. Sometimes that’s as simple as putting the call-to-action (CTA) buttons in a strategic location.
How to build your sales funnel
Building a sales funnel means translating the steps listed above into a seamless website design. Sculpting a stellar first impression relies on a slick, informative, and engaging site. To achieve this goal, we follow three key steps:
- Create a landing page. The landing page comes first. In a single page, you need to explain who you are, demonstrate trust, and make a promise about what your product or service can deliver. Using CTA buttons, client reviews, and clear benefits can transform a site’s conversion rate – sometimes going from single to high double digits.
- Build the site. Next, we map out the site, creating pages that further drive your prospects into customers. That could be a review page, a guarantee, FAQs, or how it works. We also add an opt-in or purchasing page that minimizes the steps a customer needs to take to make a purchase – all with our signature blend of style and creativity.
- Generate an email list. Following up on interested leads is much easier if they sign-up for their email address. Sending updates, product info, and even offers via an email marketing campaign can result in skyrocketing sales. It has one of the best ROIs of any marketing tactic.
Optimizing your sales funnel
No two pages are alike. Indeed, the best sales funnels avoid cookie-cutter designs and techniques. Nevertheless, there are a few simple tips that’ll help optimize your sales funnel:
- Strategically placing call-to-action buttons in prominent places using vibrant colors significantly increases your chance of a conversion. Altering the button’s size, color, or location has led to huge benefits for many businesses.
- Keep designs clean, simple, and functional. Good design should inform the customer about your brand, focusing solely on the message you want to convey.
- Research what your customers want. Yes, you’ve got a product or service to sell. But working out your angle means getting inside your customer’s head: what benefits or aspects of your brand are you going to emphasize on the landing page and beyond?
Build your sales funnel with us
First impressions matter. Most customers will judge your authority, credibility, and expertise with a few glances at your site. If they’re not impressed, you’ll never hear from them again. Or… you could hire an industry-leading expert team of designers, coders, writers, and marketers to build a bespoke website tailored to your business’s needs. That’s us. This article shows what is a sales funnel.
Speak to our team about creating a game-changing sales funnel.
