No matter what product or service you are offering, it will not be an instant process to get potential purchasers to commit.
Instead of having the sales process happen at once, it happens in progressive stages (the sales funnel): Gradually introducing cold prospects to the concept of purchasing your products and getting them ready to buy in the future.
Sadly, in today’s atmosphere of lacking confidence and extreme rivalry … this is not a quick job.
It can be quite disheartening and difficult to create a worthwhile option to sell a product or service, only to find it ending in defeat.
The remedy for this suffering and the key to achieving success lies in constructing a sales channel incorporating five levels. Basically, using a template that has been tried and tested and is not just easier and quicker … it creates extraordinary results.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Explaining the concept of a sales funnel is tricky, which is why we took the time to compose a full article about the topic. By way of offering a simplified definition …
A sales funnel is a marketing technique created to bring in people who are not yet customers and change them into repeat clients by guiding them along five different stages. The “funnel” comparison implies that you will commence with a sizable group of potential customers that will reduce to a more specific, invaluable client base.
The ultimate objective is not to secure only one transaction. The objective is to have repeat customers that have lasting value.
Breaking down the buyer’s journey into discrete stages creates the capability to accurately decide when and how to present offerings.
As a proprietor of a small business, it is possible for you to begin with just one or two items. For a corporation that specializes in marketing to other companies, you may have many approaches to generate leads and guide them through the stages of the sales process and help out the sales personnel.
Suddenly, everything can feel complex. For the sake of simplicity …
Think about ordering at a McDonald’s. If you purchase a hamburger, are you asked if you would like to have cheese on it? Would you like fries to accompany your chicken nuggets? If you purchase a combo meal, you have the option of upgrading the size to something bigger or “supersizing” it. This is an example of a sales strategy.
Every proposal consists of multiple offers intended to boost the amount of the purchase and motivate further purchases.
At the biggest of the big picture, a sales funnel is usually divided into three parts:
- Top of the sales funnel (ToFu): Target audience
- Middle of the sales funnel (MoFu): Potential customers
- Bottom of the sales funnel (BoFu): New and existing customers
To some extent, this process of guiding someone through the sales process happens even if you do not have specified stages deliberately set up. Using a pre-made template when you’re building an online company can help to get more customers.
The key to driving sales is to capture and maintain the interest of potential customers by offering them an increasing amount of value at each stage of the purchase process.
It does not matter if they are basic or complicated, sales funnels function as long as they keep up with universal standards. Case in point:
- 87% of consumers choose to do business with vendors who provide valuable content at all stages of the buying process
- 63% of consumers need to hear a company’s value proposition(s) 3-5 times before they trust these claims
- Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured prospects
In addition to top, middle, and bottom, sales funnels have traditionally been organized according to the four phases referenced by the acronym …
Sales Funnel AIDA: Awareness. Interest. Desire. Action
Elias St. Elmo Lewis, an advertising and sales pioneer, formulated the AIDA model in the late 1800s. This has become a critical part of nearly every successful advertisement and promotion effort since.
Why is it so successful?
AIDA helps customers throughout the process of making a purchase, providing support as they go from being drawn in to actually completing the acquisition.
Awareness
At times referred to as “attention,” the initiation of the sales funnel is when a company catches the attention of potential customers with marketing material and/or a usual free offer.
Interest
At this point, the brand will start to form a stronger bond with its potential customers, taking a more proactive role in discovering their ambitions and difficulties. By doing this, you can start to think of potential solutions, allowing them to make quick progress – and become more interested.
Desire
People at this point in the buying process are convinced they have an issue that needs to be addressed. Additionally, they are beginning to consider buying something to address this issue. At this moment, the company illustrates how its top-notch product can be of help.
Action
The last step in the sales funnel is when possible customers choose whether to buy the company’s high-quality product or service. It is essential to demonstrate the benefit of your offer as well as the consequences of not buying it.
This passage is explaining the journey that people commonly undergo, as well as the steps necessary to move them further along the sales channel. It is important to implement certain actions to ensure that potential customers are advancing in the funnel.
Depending on the product you are trying to sell and the people you are targeting, make sure each part of the sales process is customized.
You definitely can have multiple funnels in operation at once. This will become clearer soon.
5 Steps to Creating a Profitable Marketing Funnel for Your Online Store
1) Don’t assume anyone knows your business yet.
No matter how much enthusiasm you have for your company and how much it could help a large number of people, those people are not aware it exists. They don’t know you. They don’t trust you. They fail to understand the potential assistance you could give them.
If you put all of your money into advertisements and get a lot of traffic to your online platform, it is likely that 70% of these people will not sign up for your service or become customers. Worse, this number could be even higher. The Baymard Institute gave its estimate based on the conversion rates for some of the major firms like IBM. The significance of trust cannot be neglected when it comes to persuading people to take action, unfortunately, lesser-known companies lack the trustworthiness that more established ones have.
What to do about it
Therefore, your sales cycle needs to start with perfecting an effective landing page that you routinely measure results from in order to refine it.
Use video
Create a 50-second video explaining in clear terms the issue you are aiming to help customers with as well as the proposal you have to alleviate it.
Ask for reviews
Be sure to obtain feedback/comments on your work from your initial customers. By using automation, emails can be sent out to aid the process, or customers may be individually contacted by hand.
Grow, Educate, Offer
At this point, it is likely observable that the purpose of this landing page is two-fold, including introducing the product and creating confidence in the brand. Conversion is the primary objective, though it can take several forms.
According to research from the Baymard Institute, most customers who visit a website will depart without having purchased anything. That’s OK for right now. Look for a reasonable conversion option that works with the purpose of your product. The most popular activity to take post-transaction is to acquire the customer’s email address and add it to one’s email list. This is a top-of-funnel initiative.
How It’s Done
An excellent case study of this practice is provided by Booking.com. To capture users’ contacts and build an audience even when they are not yet prepared to book a room, the company offers the perk of special coupons and discounts if you enroll in their “secret” alert program. This provision enables the email team to remain in steady contact with fresh users, prepping them to buy something when the moment is apt or a deal arises.
2) Educate now in order to sell later.
Now that you have the person’s email address, you can start to guide them further along the sales process. One major blunder companies often make at this point is trying to forcefully push for a sale. Do not do this. Instead, create value for your potential customers.
If, for example, you provide a service or product intended to help small and medium-sized businesses to purchase ergonomic chairs for employees, it could be worthwhile to email your customers weekly with facts and figures showing how productivity can be increased by using those chairs, or how insurance fees could potentially be reduced due to a decrease in chiropractic needs.
Leading Not Pushing
The purpose of this available sales process is to walk the prospective buyer through the stages until they attain sufficient details to decide to purchase. Initially, this entails providing knowledge and afterward, showing them the extra value.
Not everyone who accesses your website will be equally familiar with your product or knowledgeable about the potential benefits it can provide.
3) Never underestimate the potential impact of a personal meeting.
If you are short on resources or have the capacity, take the initiative and connect with your consumer base. Open temporary stores, write out personal cards, arrange an individual get-together or suggest merchandise sessions. This helped us enormously when it came to being able to grow our start-up for 2 reasons:
- It gives you the possibility to become more familiar with your users, their needs, their worries, their insecurities, and the objections which inhibit them from buying your product.
- It will allow you to plan and automate exactly the emails you will need to send in the future in order to provide follow-up and educate your next clients all the way up until the sale is made.
This final phase requires a lot of effort, determination, and vitality, but unquestionably it is the most critical one in this article. If you develop a more profound understanding of your customers than your competitors, you will succeed.
4) Design your onboarding process from day one.
Giving new customers the right introduction to a product through onboarding lets them start using it successfully right away.
Today, the company doing this the best is Canva. Try out their software to get a glimpse of how someone who has no idea about your platform can become proficient in it within just 23 seconds.
Retailers should try to replicate the educational process for products that are meant to be used (such as car parts, sports gear, etc.). Redshift Sports is a seller of bicycle components, creating distinct products on the market. This entails that buyers have to be knowledgeable not only before they buy, but also afterward — they must know precisely how to swap out their pieces. The team made several instructional videos and included them in emails sent to shoppers to explain the situation.
5) Remarketing: use it intelligently.
You’ve already seen this. It happens to you every day. The company’s brand or advertisement will start appearing all over – on Facebook, on your preferred news site, etc. You have already visited their site at some point, but you didn’t take any action and now they seem to be following you around the web.
You can thank remarketing for this.
Instead of pestering a potential client again, utilize this procedure rather go on reinforcing the bond that you are creating with them.
In the future, when customer eventually needs your services, they will remember your brand first. In the end, your contribution will be critical in introducing these products to the public, teaching them how to utilize them, and offering them added worth on the internet.
Remember Exit Intent Offers In Your Sales Funnel
A majority of the visitors who end up on your landing page will leave without any further action taken.
Do not simply accept the circumstance without attempting to challenge it.
Instead, you should do something to keep visitors to your website and, if possible, make them consider your offer once more.
Include a special offer that triggers when someone is about to leave your landing pages. This involves showing popups, overlays, and other similar features to website visitors when it appears they are about to leave.
Within these layers, you have the option of including one-time suggestions of gratis products, items with reduced prices, or other cost-effective suggestions that your prospects unsure of buying may be interested in getting.
By doing this, you can make a final attempt to hold onto these people’s attention before they permanently leave your website.
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