Clients usually pull away if you are trying too hard to make a sale. That is why marketing has moved from distributing pamphlets to white papers and websites. Even websites use entertaining and attractive content to pull potential customers in. For many, though, this is where digital marketing stops. However, as you will see in this post, there is more to digital marketing than just setting up a website and hoping for the best. In this post, we’ll answer: what is a sales funnel? How can it help your business? How does Clickfunnels, Dotcom Secrets and other ‘tools’ help? Let’s find out the answers to these questions.
Digital Marketing and Funnels
Your prospects are not pleased when you are pushing them to make a purchase. Even people that want to buy your product or service might run away if you try too hard. Many people do not understand this fact about marketing which leads to problems.
This is why every business must have a sales funnel. Sales funnels offer plenty of benefits – including vastly improving your sales. A properly made sales funnel can positively affect the decision of your visitors. Instead of you pushing them to make a sale directly, you use prompts and optimized pages to nudge visitors to make a purchase.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is the process that a company or individual uses to lead customers through when making a purchase. It is a broad term that includes finding and qualifying customers and selling products or services to these customers.
It is also known as a purchase funnel. It is the process that a visitor (prospect) goes through from the landing page to the checkout page.
The sales funnel is wider at the top, just like a literal funnel, and pushes the qualified leads from one point to another while eliminating anyone who isn’t right for your business or isn’t currently interested in purchasing your product or service.
It comes in different stages, which we will discuss in this article. You can think of the sales funnel as the interaction or flow between visitors and buyers. The visitors come in from the top, and a percentage of these visitors leave the bottom of the funnel as conversions or buying customers.
An optimized sales funnel can make a massive difference to your business.
What is a sales funnel and how is it different from a marketing funnel?
What is a sales funnel and how is it different from a marketing funnel? Many folks interchange a sales funnel and a marketing funnel. However, they are not technically the same. They differ in terms of the context.
However, business has evolved and sales and marketing teams now mean the same thing in most cases. Nevertheless, a marketing funnel is different from a sales funnel.
The marketing funnel is designed to increase awareness of your brand or product. It nurtures the visitor to where they might start thinking of buying your product.
The sales funnel is the point where the marketing funnel takes the visitor or lead. It takes them from thinking about making a purchase to actually making a purchase.
Thus, the sales funnel continues where the marketing funnel stops.
Why Sales funnels are an important part of your business
Regardless of how you decide to raise awareness and bring people to your online store or website, the truth is that half of your incoming traffic will not be willing to purchase at that moment. Thus, you have to optimize your funnel to convert as many as possible.
A failure to optimize will result in lost prospects who could have made a purchase.
You can influence your leads to become conversions with some tweaks – chief of which is deploying a sales funnel. If you can optimize each stage of the sales funnel, you can make more people that visit your site paying leads.
Benefits of Optimized Sales Funnel
- It helps you to make more sales since a higher number of visitors are guided through the funnel to become conversions.
- A sales funnel assists you by making sure that you target the right audience at every stage of their journey through your website.
- The sales funnel helps you to understand why your product or service isn’t meant for everyone. This assists you to look for ways to appeal to them.
- Having a sales funnel makes you better than competitors that fail to implement a sales funnel into their strategy.
Overall, a lack of a sales funnel is a failure to plan and will ultimately result in crashing your business as you won’t make enough sales.
Stages of the Sales Funnel
How do sales funnel work? Well, to know that, you must consider the stages of the sales funnel. These stages are important and help to guide a prospect to become a customer.
- Awareness
- Interest
- Decision
- Action
These are the four stages of your typical sales funnel. Let’s consider each of these stages.
Awareness
This is the first stage of any sales funnel. It is where your prospects first meet you. It is similar to parts of the marketing funnel as it is where they first know you as a business and learn about the things that you sell and the services you provide. It is also where they are first aware of how you are different from your competitors.
Some ways that prospects reach this part of the funnel could be:
- Referrals from friends on social media
- Offline action
- Google search and ranking
Since this is the first time a prospect meets you, it is important to make a good impression. Thus, put your best foot forward by engaging with the prospect and displaying your strength.
Interest
After passing through the Awareness stage of the funnel, prospects are channeled through to the interest stage. The prospect, after being aware of your brand, will now decide whether your product or service is a good fit for them.
This is a critical stage as it is where you can start molding the mindset of the prospect. You already have their attention and it is an opportunity for you to tell them what the solution to their needs should look like and how your service fits into that.
You have to build trust and a relationship with the prospects here.
One way to take advantage of this stage is by having a Unique Selling Point. You must learn how to communicate with your prospects well. There are several tools that you can use that can help to highlight your strengths to the prospect.
Clickfunnels doe a great job of showing a prospect how your service or product can help them.
Decision
In this stage of the sales funnel, the prospect already knows that they are going to buy what you are offering – but are now comparing you with other brands that offer the same services.
In this stage, the prospect starts to think about things like the cost and quality of the products. They are looking to make a value buy.
There are different tactics you can use here, but what you would decide to use often depends on the type of business you are running.
Action
This is the end of the sales funnel. In this stage, the prospect has made the decision to buy from you. Here is your chance to delight your customer and encourage them to come back for more. They already have a hand on their wallet – you just need to give them a nudge to hand the money over to you.
This is a tricky stage that can make or break the work you have done in all prior stages. You must thus help your prospects to overcome any reservations they might have about your product.
How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel?
So far, we have answered the question ‘what is a sales funnel? You have seen how important the sales funnel is to your business.
However, there is no perfect sales funnel. The best you can do is optimize it as best you can. In this section, we will see some of the best ways to optimize a sales funnel:
-
Know Your Audience
If you do not know who you are selling to, how would you know how to optimize the sales funnel?
You must know as much as you can about your prospects. This will greatly increase the chances of saying the right things that would appeal to them.
If you do not have the measure of your audience, you’d just be working fruitlessly.
-
Capture the Prospects’ Email Address
Getting your prospects’ email address is like having one foot through the door. With this address, you can still maintain a relationship with the prospect even after they have left your website.
You can get the email address using different tactics. Tools like Clickfunnels come with features that when implemented, can result in getting the address. You could implement a sign-up form as the visitor is engaged with your content.
-
Include Engaging Media
There is conclusive evidence that pictures, videos, and similar media can improve your visitor’s interactions with your page. It is one way to stand out from your competitors.
Therefore, when building a landing page or other pages on the website, incorporate as much media as possible. Clickfunnels comes with a Drag and Drop editor that helps you to achieve this without plenty of stress.
How Clickfunnels and DotCom Secrets can help you
Clickfunnels is a software designed to help you to build sales funnels. It is the creation of one of the most popular and successful internet marketers, Russell Brunson.
It comes with plenty of features that help you to build conversion-optimized sales funnels. You get plenty of sales funnel templates ready to be implemented depending on your type of business. All the sales funnel stages are also considered and optimized for the best results.
Dotcom Secrets is a book written by Russell Brunson too. In the book, you get a deeper look into what sales funnels are and how to optimize them for your business.
Conclusion
We are sure you now know the answer to the question: what is a sales funnel? This process is very helpful for anyone looking to drastically improve conversion and help sales. It might seem complicated to optimize, but there are tools full of resources to help you. Clickfunnels, for example, is primarily designed to help you create the best sales funnels for your business. We hope that this post has given more insight into ‘what is a sales funnel?’
