According to a survey conducted by Salesforce, an efficient sales funnel leads to rapid growth. Results from the study reveal that about 69% of companies are yet to identify and understand the power of sales funnel in increasing their sales. More so, 80% of the market leads never translate to sales. The truth is that without a practical and functional sales funnel; it would be somewhat impossible to convert leads into sales.
As an entrepreneur, it is expedient that you understand the importance of marketing as a tool for increased growth. Without an excellent marketing system, your business growth will be stunted and eventually die due to the absence of new sales and customers.
A good sales funnel can help you generate a high amount of revenue for your business. However, if you have never done it before, the process of creating one might be a little bit challenging. The good news is that you don’t need to bother yourself even if you are a beginner. In this post, you will learn simple steps to creating your first killer sales funnel even as a beginner.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is also known as a sales process or revenue funnel. It is a system that leads prospective buyers through their buying experience and journey. A good sales funnel has four major stages: awareness, decision, interest, and action. It helps businesses in converting their leads to high paying customers. One beautiful thing about sales funnel is that it helps you to identify prospective buyers early enough and gives the customers purchasing your products and services a happy experience.
Identify Your Target Audience
This is one of the significant factors you need to take into consideration before creating your sales funnel. If you do not identify and understand your target audience, all you will be doing is shadowboxing. All your efforts will be unfruitful and will lead to frustration.
- Know what they want
- Identify the social media channel they use regularly
- Understand their areas of interest
- Identify the things that infuriate them about online shopping
Create Your Buyer Personas
The next thing to do is to build your buyer persona. You can achieve this by focusing your marketing campaigns on different dimensions of your prospects. You can create an accurate and excellent buyer persona from the following research questions:
- Why will customers buy your products?
- What are the things that will influence their decision of buying your product?
- How will they use your products after purchase?
Plan on Generating Traffic
One simple principle you need to understand about marketing is that once people do not know what you sell and how to locate you online, then you will not get any sale. This is why you must create different strategies that you will use to attract and drive prospective customers to your official website.
You can leverage the following strategies to drive traffic to your site:
- Search Engine Optimization
- PPC Campaigns
- Influencer Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Guest Posting
- Landing Page Optimization
Plan to Engage Your Audience
Having a robust lead generation strategy on its own is not enough. It would be best if you backed it up with an effective way of engaging your audience. The customers need to know more about the products and services you offer. You can achieve this using the following strategies.
- Create topnotch and engaging blogs regularly
- Create interesting videos
- Hire brand influencers and get them to review your product and also offer tutorials of your products and services
- Conduct email marketing campaigns to promote your lattes contents, blog posts, and articles.
- Generate your email list and send newsletters to them regularly
- Use social media handles and channels to promote your products and services.
Convert Your Leads
The final step in converting visitors to high-paying customers is lead conversion. You must ensure that the process of completing your purchase form does not take too long. You can achieve this by:
- Using just one-click option for sign-up or login
- Using lesser steps for completing purchase forms
- Minimizing the number of form fields
How to Create a Killer Sales Funnel
1. Create an Excellent Landing Page
The landing page of your website is the first impression your prospective customers will have about the products and services you have to offer. Therefore, you must ensure that you take out time to make it look great. A good landing page will attract users to sign up for any list on your site or even subscribe to your email list.
2. Unveil Your Front-End Offer
The next thing to do after creating a good landing page is to present your prospective customers with an opportunity to buy a product or service. You must intelligently present this offer because it will serve as a pre-sell for the back-end offer. While presenting this front-end offer, you should concentrate on how it will spark a desire in the prospects for the other offers you have in stock.
3. Present an Upsell Offer at the Back End
Offer prospective buyers and those who have bought from you the opportunity to upgrade or upsize the service or product they bought. To achieve this, create a mouth-watering offer that the customer will not be able to resist. The offer should be such that it promises to deliver more benefits to the customers if they upgrade. This is called upselling.
4. Present a Downsize Option
The same way you used to encourage prospects and returning buyers to upgrade, you should also offer some customers the opportunity to downsize or downgrade. Note this is not a disadvantage on your part, as such you should not consider it as a loss. This is an intelligent strategy of keeping customers who are not able to upgrade due to financial constraints.
The financial constraints will not last forever. It might change, and they will now have the capacity to upgrade again. You must also have cheaper offers for such category of buyers to maintain long term relationship.
5. Keep the Ball Rolling
You must ensure that you keep it going. Create a feedback system where you hear from your customers about their buying experiences. One way to achieve this is to create a membership-based rewards program. This will give you the opportunity of being in close communication with your customers. You will also be able to present new offers to them through that means.
Conclusion
With the information provided in this post, you know have all you need to create your first sales funnel. Swing into action and create one now. The importance of a good sales funnel cannot be overemphasized. It will help you increase your online visibility and exponentially grow your business, thus leading to more sales.
