Why should you Build a Sales Funnel?

Starting a business comes with all types of problems. One key issue you must deal with to have a profitable business is sales and marketing automation. To make your business website attractive to more visitors who become repeat buyers of your products, build sales funnels. Read on to learn what a funnel is and what each stage means. You will also understand how to position your business to meet new prospects at each stage, and convert them to buying clients.

What are sales funnels?

To understand what sales funnels are, have the picture of a funnel in your mind. A funnel represents the number of likely customers that visit your site and interact with your business. As they click to visit your website and browse different pages, some of them will leave. A few of them will continue to the checkout stage and purchase what you are selling.

In marketing, the phase that visitors, who may later become your customers, pass through before they buy your product is called a funnel. A sales funnel is there to bring your business more potential customers. Funnels ensure that only those who are ready to buy from you enter and reach the bottom. In essence, the sales funnel draw visitors and qualify them by helping those who will not purchase from your business leave freely.

However, to guarantee more of these visitors become your customers, make their visit to your website and their stay there seamless. And to discover if any part of your marketing process is not working as planned, learn about what makes up a sales funnel.

Funnel Parts

Here are the parts of a sales funnel and what they mean.

Top of the Funnel

This is the awareness stage. Here, you mainly attract many visitors to your business website.

Middle of the Funnel

At this point, you should be driving more targeted visitors to test your service.

Bottom of the funnel

This is the final stage, where the few that stay on your funnel, buy from you.

Turning Visitors into Buyers

If your sales funnel is a high-converting one, more visitors will enter the top and reach the bottom, and you will make more sales.

Your strategy from the onset is to get many visitors to enter the top, but keep going through the center and finally reach the bottom. These visitors have one motive, to find out if your business can meet their demand.

To filter those that will enter your funnel and ensure they are the ones that are ready to convert or buy your product, do the following. Create content that pulls in many visitors that need what you are uniquely positioned to offer them. To acquire more leads, produce the type of content they will consume. That is called mapping the customer journey.

Potentially, your social media pages typically pull in many leads. But without knowing how funnels work, and what each part does, you won’t be able to convert those visitors to buy your products.

Funnel Stages, Functions and Actions on Each Stage

As a Marketer, your strategy is to build traffic/a lead generation funnel. The funnel converts traffic to leads or buyers and repeats that process. Also, to effectively convert strangers to customers who will buy enthusiastically from your business, create a perfect funnel.

Do that by considering your visitors and breaking their presence on your funnel into four different levels. They include awareness, consideration, decision, and action stages.

Cold Prospects

At the top of the funnel, you have visitors who come and discover their problems after browsing through your website. At that top, you have a huge number of visitors who you can turn into your customers. The urgency to solve their problems becomes heightened after consuming the helpful content on your site.

Nevertheless, to have more conversions, provide them with useful lead magnets. Then add a call to action that guides them to your landing page. Consider offering them free trials, and brand awareness email campaigns that position your brand as the ultimate solution giver for the trouble they want to resolve.

These savvy visitors will compare your brand with others and only choose your brand depending on the quality, and usefulness of the content you used during the nurturing period.

Warm Prospects

This is the middle of the funnel, the consideration and decision stage for your visitors. These are likely customers searching for the right solution provider for their problem. They will compare which solution provider better qualifies to help them resolve their troubles.

You will assess these potential customers by providing them with your best products and services. Give them enough taste of the service your business is capable of delivering to them, to allow them to select your business.

To properly do that, investigate who they are and what they want so that you can create the type of content they need as lead nurturing sequences. While doing so, don’t forget that your present customers are also in the middle of the funnel. So, continue to prove to them that you remain the best option for meeting their demands.

You will only capture the right lead through unique content such as case studies, product comparisons, explainer videos, and inquiries. With the right positioning of your firm, wrong leads will leave.

Eager Prospects

This is the bottom of the funnel and the action stage. At this level, you have qualified audience members and leads who believe that your company can help them and want to buy from you. Even so, keep nurturing them with sequences of helpful content before asking them to buy directly.

Answer price questions and provide explainer videos. Show them the features and benefits of your products, and offer them competitive pricing.

Finally, provide helpful customer support, and simple checkout processes. Once you have gotten a sale, think of upselling your clients so they buy more products from you.

Upselling is an upgrade to a higher version of your product. So, offer them costlier products. Similarly, do cross-selling by asking them to buy additional items that will enhance the use of what they had already purchased.