How To Create An Effective Sales Funnel
Every business needs to create an effective sales funnel if they want to succeed in their marketing efforts. So many businesses don’t create a plan when it comes to marketing. Instead they do what everyone else is doing or what they feel is easiest or cheapest, without knowing whether or not it actually works.
Sales funnels help business owners know how many potential customers they have, where they come from, and how they’re going to be brought into the product cycle.
6 Key Stages To Create An Effective Sales Funnel
A well-crafted marketing sales funnel system helps you move qualified leads through the sales process to make a conversion. It’s a good way to visualize what you’re going to do, have done, and what the measured results are when it’s all said and done. Sales funnels help a business determine how they will grab their audience’s attention, overcome objections, improve engagement and make more sales.
1. Awareness
This is the widest part of your sales funnel. It’s where you want to make your audience awareness about your business’s existence. These members of your audience probably don’t know about you at all. For this stage you want to create marketing messages that educate your audience about your products and your niche.
Examples of how this can be done include placing advertisements where your target market will see them, issuing press releases, writing keyword-rich blog posts or holding free webinars. This is the stage where you want to create calls to action within the content that encourage your audience to sign up for your email list or follow you on social media to stay in touch.
2. Interest
Once your audience is introduced, they now know about you and see that you may be able to add value to their lives or solve their problems. You know they’re interested because they have signed up to receive your email list. To keep their interest you still have to provide them value. The objective is to teach them more about your products and services, and how you know their problems and can solve them.
While the content you send them might still be in the same form (blog posts, eBooks, video and so forth) as the awareness stage, the information you send them in this phase should be more specific and relevant. For example, it may be an eBook or checklist that they can download and keep. Or a short 7 day eCourse series sent to them via email, using sales funnel software like an autoresponder to deliver the messages that you pre-schedule. Keeping the interest of audience members who have given you permission to market to them is a very important part of the sales funnel. If you plan your content and information correctly you can move them faster to the purchase phase.
3. Consideration
The prospect knows they need the product by now. But they need more information to determine that it’s the right product to solve their problem. First, you need to convince them that your product is better because of you. You can demonstrate this via the content you put out on social media, on your blog, and in other channels. That involves a lot more information (like the interest phase), but information that’s more in-depth, focused and personalized.
Focus more on identifying the pain points of your customers and showing them how your products specifically will solve them. Getting personal with your audience at this point will help pull them toward trusting you more and buying from you. This can be done with with consultation calls, webinars and teleseminars, product demonstrations and testimonials from other customers who can tell about what your product or service did for them.
4. Intent
The prospect has now essentially made the choice to buy the product. They now need to determine exactly which product they need when comparing one over the other. This is a good time to include content and the right branding that actually compares one thing against another and show why your brand is superior.
These include using blog posts to build confidence in your audience about your superior products and services or an email newsletter that makes you stand out as an expert. If you know your audience well enough, you can now use emotional trigger words that will move them toward the evaluation process to choose who to buy from. These prospects want to buy. Using the right content and words you can move them to the next stage and toward choosing your product or service over someone else.
5. Evaluation
At this stage the prospect is already convinced they need a product like yours. They now need to know for sure that yours is the right one for them. You’ll still need to deliver content to them in the forms mentioned above and below, but the information needs to assume that the audience already answered several calls to action given in the above stages of your sales funnel.
At this stage you’re convincing them that you’re the person for the job and no one else. You can do that through various forms of content. This includes specific product focused reports, webinars, free or low cost consultations or limited time offers or coupons to encourage buying right now.
6. Purchase
This is the where your prospect makes an actual purchase. The purchase phase can actually involve several other stages of the product funnel in terms of your audience purchasing entry level products to try you out. But your job is not over just because someone makes a purchase. The sales funnel starts again. You need to move them onto your other products. Because they have purchased from you once, they are much more likely to purchase from you again because they believe in you and trust you to provide what they need to solve their problems.
Even if they buy your most expensive product or service, there is more to do. Follow up with them and turn them into fans that promote your products and services. No one is more qualified or better at promoting your products than someone who loves them and buys them.
Free Checklist: Create An Effective Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a valuable tool to help you get deeper into not only how to market, but why and when to do certain things when implementing your overall marketing strategy. It’s especially helpful when creating content and products that educate and serve your audience.
When you create an effective sales funnel it puts your business on autopilot and consistently turns prospects into paying customers if you structure it the right way. To learn more, you can download my free Sales Funnel Checklist which outlines the best practices for making your internet marketing sales funnel produce the intended result, lots of traffic, lots of prospects and lots of sales.