What is your customers’ journey? What exactly do they think before making the final purchases? Well, there are many things that attract users. 

Wondering, how you will analyze that? Sales Funnel is the answer! The journey mapped by the sales funnel helps to outline all the checkpoints through which the customers go through before making the final purchase. But, to create a solid sales strategy, you need to think out-of-the-box. Understand, that the main goal of the sales funnel is to persuade them to make the purchases.

In this post, we have tried to cover everything that you need to know about the sales funnel. Excited to know the details? Let’s begin the read!

What is a Sales Funnel?

Let’s start with the basics! What exactly are a sales funnel? Well, the main concept of the sales funnel is to map the customers' journey of what exactly they go before making the final decision. There are several companies that follow the sales funnel or sales model to understand consumer behavior. When the prospect goes through the different stages of the sales funnel, they signify more commitment towards buying the goal. Whether it is a conventional business or an online one, sales funnel can help in boosting your marketing efforts at each stage.

What Is The Need for a Sales Funnel?

As a business owner, you can surely understand the pain of losing a prospective customer. And, why not? What if after putting lead magnets, content, webinars, and even more, the customer drops out without even making the purchase. Yes, it's sad! But it happens! Well, it can really happen if your sales funnel is not built properly. By creating the right sales funnel, you can easily understand your customers and analyze what they are doing, thinking, or looking for at each stage of the sales process. Having this valuable information can give you detailed insight and further help you in investing in the right marketing activities or channels that can turn the prospects into conversions.

Understanding the Sales Funnel Stages

To make the most of the sales funnel, it is really important to understand the sales funnel stages. Just from the time your prospect hears about your brand to the time they actually make the purchasing decision, there is a number of things that the user goes through. This journey might differ from one person to another depending on the products and services, buying personas, and even niche.

The first thing you need to be clear of before making the final sales funnel is to have a clear business vision. For this, you need to define your target audience and work towards business growth. No matter what type of business you have, you can add as many stages that you want in your sales funnel. Generally, there are four stages in a sales funnel. Let’s understand them in detail.

Stages of a Sales Funnel 

As discussed above, the four main stages of a sales funnel are: 

• Awareness

• Interest

• Decision

• Action

Awareness

The first stage of the sales funnel is the awareness stage. In this stage, the person becomes aware of the service, solution, or product. During this stage, they might also get aware of the problems and possible ways to deal with them.  The awareness can generate from a simple Google search, ad, word of mouth, a post on social media, or any other traffic source.

Interest

The next stage is the Interest stage. Now, once the customer knows about your brand, they will try to evaluate it based on the solutions you provide and their level of interest. During this stage, the prospect is looking for solutions and will search all over for the best company to provide the same.

Decision

Here the prospect knows all about your companies services and solutions. When the sales funnel actually understands the pain points of the customers, they will automatically dig deeper. From finding information on the prices of the products to getting other relevant information, the prospect will now make the decision. 

Action

Last and the most important stage of the sales funnel is the Action stage. Now, whether the prospect makes the purchase or not, if they leave at this stage, then they are gone forever now. Now, you can nurture your campaigns to ensure you stay on top of the minds of your prospective buyers for future needs.

How To Build An Effective Sales Funnel?

Understand Your Customer

The fact is the better you know your customer, the better your sales funnel will be. One thing you need to understand is that you aren’t marketing every category of people. You are focusing on your target audience, whom you can persuade to make purchases. Once you know that list, you can adjust your sales funnel as per the relevance. You can use robust tools like - Heatmaps to get a detailed overview of the hot and cold regions on your site. You can then accordingly create content and focus on them.

Try To Catch The Audience Attention

The only way your sales funnel can give definitive results is when you can actually lure your customers. For this, you need to diversify your content like - use videos, infographics, and more across different platforms and reaching your target audience. If you are high on budget, then you can also invest in Paid Ad campaigns like - Google ads, Facebook ads, and even LinkedIn ads.

Create a Landing Page

Now, the content you create should lead somewhere. But, where? Well, ideally you need to create a landing page that will help them grab the offer you just talked about in the content. Here you need to focus on capturing the leads instead of pushing the sale. A powerful landing page will lead the visitor to the next step. Make sure you need to have bold call-to-action on the page so they know where exactly they are going!

Build A Solid Email Campaign

You can now build a solid email campaign to provide your users with the content through emails. But, keep in mind, don’t do it so frequently, you can go for one or two emails per week. By providing them with an amazing piece of content, make an incredible offer at the end of your drip campaign. It will definitely lead them to take an action.

Stay In Consistent Touch

Last but not least, don’t forget about your already existing customers. Thank them for the purchases they make and continue reaching out to them from time to time. You can also provide them with special offers and discounts to keep their interest in your products and services.

Wrapping Up!

If you think it’s over, it's not! In fact, it begins from here! Once you create a powerful sales funnel and start working towards it dedicatedly. You need to measure the results on a regular basis. Analyze your approach over time and then make the adjustments accordingly.

Let us know how it works for you! Good luck!