‘Sales Funnels help you to get closer than ever to your customers. It’s so close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.’ – Steve Jobs
Let’s face it – acquiring customers is hard! There are hundreds of thousands of businesses trying to gain the attention of customers, and for businesses like yours, it could truly be very competitive.
If you’re ready to splurge on paid marketing and pay-per-click advertisement, finding potential leads will be a piece of cake for you. However, this might mean that you’re spending extravagantly on paid marketing, reducing your revenue!
A more sustainable way of marketing can be through sales funnels. In such marketing strategies, you will have to plan to convert potential prospects into leads who will come back for more! Sales funnels ensure high return-on-investment with a fraction of the cost when compared to paid marketing – this surely makes sales funnels a vital tool for marketers all over the world!
The Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a pathway that identifies the prospect’s personas to lead them through the product lifestyle, including moving them from being aware of your product to interest, desire and then ultimately to a point where they purchase the product.
The importance of sales funnel for businesses is vast. More than 73% of the leads are not even ready to purchase your product. This indicates that only 27% of people in your marketing campaigns are actually interested in your product. It is a massive loss of potential marketing budget. From the remaining 27%, only 2-3% will actually purchase the product. This is a huge blow if you have spent a fortune on marketing expenses.
Every business demands recognition, and sales funnels can help with that. The sales funnel consists of six major segments:
1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Consideration
4. Intent
5. Evaluation
6. Sale
Awareness
This is the topmost part of the funnel. During this stage, the customers do not know about your company. It’s the first touchdown for your business; you make them aware of what you’re offering. It’s simply catching the eye and grabbing the attention of your customers.
Interest
Once you’ve made the customers aware of the product or service you’re offering, your prospects will have an arise in interest. In this phase, they will just look into the advertisement, go further into what you have to offer, etc.
Consideration
Once the prospect has shown interest, they soon move to the third step of the funnel. They consider their problems and try to decide if the product or service you offer solves their problem.
Intent
If a prospect moves to the intent stage, you have a good chance of selling the product to the prospect. It is during this phase where the customers show positive intent in purchasing the product before moving on to the next step.
Evaluation
Customers are highly rational – they try to compare between products to find the best offers for them. This is why they’ll try to evaluate whether your offering is better than any other in the market.
Sale
Based on all the information the customers gather in the previous steps, they will decide whether or not to take the offer. In most cases, the prospects turn into leads; that is, they purchase the product.
The whole process within the sales funnel is a top-down methodology. Once a prospect sees the ad, he/she is aware of the product. Slowly, we aim to grow interest; at one point they’ll consider us and intend on buying the product. During this time, they’ll try to seek out an evaluation from other’s experiences. Once they’re satisfied, he/she will go for purchasing the product or service.
How We Create The Ultimate Sales Funnel
Building the ultimate sales funnel is something that you’d not want to do it yourself. This is mainly because the learning curve in learning the perfect sales funnel can be very flat; you’ll take years to get a sales funnel that fits your business!
This is why it’s always recommended that you consult with a professional digital marketing company specializing in sales funneling like BlueFlower Media. Let’s take a brief look into how we create the ultimate sales funnel for businesses!
Offering A Irresistible Lead Magnet
We start off from the top of the funnel and ensure that a large number of people are being aware of the product or service you’re offering. In this case, we target the people who’d genuinely be interested in your product and/or have used or shown interest in similar products recently.
The top of the sales funnel is all about getting traffic. You’ll want the maximum email addresses from the top of the sales funnel. For this reason, you need a professional landing page that offers a reward if they sign up (it can be into your mailing list or for a demo).
A landing page for your website might look like this:
Identifying The Customer Persona
In our previous post on ‘WhyYou Need Outbound Marketing For Your Business,’ we’ve explained the importance of identifying the business’s customer base and their persona.
Getting such insight will help us to create an irresistible lead magnet. To do this, however, we at first need to accurately identify your prospect’s problems, goals, personality, interests and what they want. Next, we think about how your product or service can solve the problem they’re facing. This enables us to track and predict the pathway they’ll take through the sales funnel.
Performing A Competitor Analysis
The next step to designing the perfect sales funnel is competitor research. This is a fundamental step; we must do it to know exactly what the competitors are doing. This helps us identify what areas we can improve upon to make ours better than the competitors.
To do this, we study more than 10 top competitors in the industry and have a look at their lead magnets. Occasionally we’ll have our team members sign up for the newsletters to see what they’re providing their clients. With such information, we can find the value proposition, gaps in the market and opportunities we can leverage.
Designing A Better Lead Magnet
With the enormous amount of data of the customers and competitors, we can then start designing the irresistible lead magnet. To do this, we try to identify the value proposition your customers would love to get, what they’ll be ready to give their email addresses for and what you can provide for free without disrupting your business.
Finding a suitable lead magnet can be very hard, so we test a few lead magnets and collect the data to get which lead magnet performed the best!
Exposure For The Lead Magnet
Up until now, we have designed your lead magnet using your customer personas and competitor analysis. But, what’s the use of creating such an irresistible lead magnet if people don’t know that it exists?
In this case, we start promoting the lead magnet. This can be in various ways:
1. Placing the lead magnet where most visitors will see
2. Pop-ups showing the lead magnets
3. Re-designing the homepage to ensure proper exposure of lead magnet
We also recommend that you promote the lead magnet through social media, pay-per-click marketing or influencer marketing. This increases the number of people who’d come into contact with the lead magnet.
BloggingWizard has put up 3 ways in which you can further promote your sales magnet.
Automated Email Drip Campaign
Your sales funnel doesn’t end after creating the lead magnet; you need to email the prospects regularly to ensure that they consider your solution to solve their problems. You’ll have to continually communicate and interact with your leads on a regular basis. This makes sure that your brand seems familiar, trustworthy and top-of-the-mind to your prospects.
We can help you create an automated email drip campaign so that you can constantly be in touch with your prospects.
Creating A Full-Proof Content Plan
After the creation of an automated emailing system, you should be sure of what content to send your prospects. This is a critical step – you must provide your prospects with things that they’re interested in not what you want them to see. Emailing prospects with irrelevant content will mean that you’re getting unsubscribed by them; you must be very careful!
Don’t know how to develop a content plan? Don’t worry; we’ll help you develop a killer content plan!
Sending Emails
After you’re done making a solid content plan, you should then start sending emails at regular intervals, say 7 days. This ensures that you’re always keeping in touch with your prospects without spamming them with emails.
You should also maintain a sequence of drip emailing; slowly come to what you’re offering. Focus primarily on building a relationship with your clients.
Also, be sure that you’re replying to your client’s emails. This is very important if you’re to build a relationship with the client.
Testing And Iterating The Sales Funnel
Think you’re done? Unfortunately, you’re not done yet!
After placing the sales funnel, you must continuously check the analytics to measure how the funnel is performing. It’s recommended that you A/B test every sales funnel to find out the best one possible. To do this, change your landing page layout, email’s subject line and even experiment with the color and styling of the call to action (CTA) button.
Try to measure and iterate the sales funnel frequently to ensure high performance of the tool!
What’s Next?
Sales funnel can be a fundamental tool to ensure that prospects are turned into leads. It’s a very powerful one too; it creates a personal relationship between the brand and its customers.
In a study by SalesForce, it was reported that a staggering 79% of the marketing leads are never converted to sales. Sales funneling and lead nurturing enables companies to use the untapped resources to get more sales. Also, the sales funnel ensures a better overall experience for the leads; they’ll definitely consider doing business with you if they get a warm experience when visiting your website.
Tracking a customer’s journey from awareness stage to sales can be quite tricky for businesses; the stakes are just too high while chances of a learning curve too steep. For this reason, you need someone else to create the killer sales funnel for you.
In this case, BlueFlower Media can help you craft your very own sales funnel that goes along with your business. We’ve already worked with a number of companies in various industries, including law firms, accounting firms and a lot more!
Worried about how much it’ll cost you? Don’t worry; we’re one of the few companies in Canada which deliver outstanding service with the fastest delivery and within the cheapest rates, guaranteed! Contact with our project manager to get customer pricing regarding your business solutions!
