To ensure the sustainability and growth of your business, you need to acquire new customers every day. A sales funnel helps you follow up on your qualified leads and accelerate sales.
A well-thought-out sales funnel is the foundation of almost every successful internet business. It’s necessary.
It’s essentially an automatic route in which you feed people into one end, generally through content marketing or advertising, and they come.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is an overview of all the steps that contribute to the sale of your product or service.
It helps answer the following questions:
- How many leads are in your funnel at each stage?
- How many conversions occur at each stage?
These answers, in turn, allow you to answer the following questions:
- Did you achieve your goals?
- Which phases need more attention?
- What do a sales funnel look like?
From the first contact with your business to purchase, a lead goes through different phases of your funnel. This journey differs for each business, depending on the target audience, the sector, and the products or services offered.
However, each sale funnel typically consists of four smaller key moments, often referred to as micro-conversions. These four moments contribute to your ultimate goal: the sale.
What is Conversion?
Conversion is when people who visit your website complete an objective. They convert from visitors to leads or, if they buy something, to customers in this fashion.
When someone converts from a passive visitor to an active, interested visitor or customer, it is called a conversion.
Conversions, as previously established, are essentially goal completions. Any action that a user makes on your website that is beneficial in some manner is referred to as a “conversion.” Conversions may be many things since there are so many different acts that might be helpful.
Conversion into a customer, which occurs when someone makes a purchase, is the ideal conversion. Other conversions, on the other hand, are valuable as well, and numerous smaller conversions can lead visitors to eventually convert into customers.
Actions, events, goal completions, and leads are all terms used to describe conversions
What is a Lead?
A lead is a client who has gone through the initial phases of the sales process and knows you well enough to contact you or has demonstrated a higher interest in your product or service.
This consumer is no longer simply a curious one; they’re someone who knows about your business and wants to get in touch with you, either for further information or to make a purchase.
Understanding the FOUR Phases of a Sales Funnel
Phase 1: Awareness
This is the initial stage, dubbed “awareness,” since it is when consumers first become aware of your solution, service, or product.
They may also become aware of the issues that need to be addressed and alternative solutions.
This is the first time people learn about you, whether through an ad, a Google search, a social media post, word of mouth, or another traffic source.
When a prospect learns about your organization for the first time, this is an example of the awareness stage
Phase 2: Interest
When a prospect learns about your brand, they will assess it based on their degree of interest and the solutions you provide.
The prospect is actively exploring solutions to their difficulties and strategies to reach their goals at the “Interest” stage. They use Google to look for solutions.
They will consider the problem they are attempting to address and undertake competitive research to ensure that your service is the best answer.
Phase 3: Decision
Now that the prospect is aware of your organization and the answers it offers to the prospect’s problems, they will delve further.
Pricing and packaging choices will be available to the prospect. Sales pages, webinars, and phone conversations may all assist prospects to choose at this time.
Phase 4: Action
The most crucial stage of the funnel is whether or not the prospect makes a purchase. If they don’t buy from you right away, that doesn’t imply the sale is over.
You may design nurturing programs to ensure that you remain top of mind for any future demands.
Case Study: Understanding Important Conversion Points
For example, you own a clothing store. A passer-by looks at your shop window and realizes that he needs new pants – the passer-by becomes a Lead
This lead will then look for a solution to his problem. He or she may be interested in your offer.
The lead walks into your store and takes a look at your items. Three pants seem to please him – becomes a potential customer
For example, this potential customer then decides to try on one of the pants. you inform him that these pants are also available in another colour, then potential customer compare prices.
Your potential customer takes action by making a purchase and becomes a customer.
Marketing Funnel vs Sales Funnel vs Customer Journey
Do high-sounding terms like “customer journey,” “sales funnel,” and “marketing funnel” confuse you? Their meaning, however, is very simple.
The customer journey brings together all the contacts a customer has had with you. He thus includes his first exchange with your company as the moment when you won his loyalty forever.
The sales funnel brings together all the actions leading up to the purchase and is often linked to the efforts of your sales team.
The marketing funnel helps you attract leads. In other words, it comes before the sales funnel. A lead becomes a Qualified Lead or Sales Qualified Lead as soon as they take action, such as calling you or requesting a quote on your website. So your marketing funnel serves to fill your sales funnel.
Why Do You Need a Sales Funnel?
1. Consumers Are Sophisticated
Consumers nowadays are more educated than ever before. They do their assignments. They take the time to think about their possibilities. They also buy from companies they have faith in.
To put it another way, selling isn’t as straightforward as directing visitors to a landing page and urging them to buy.
A sales funnel helps you to gradually convert leads into clients. Simply put, it gives you the sophisticated sales process you require to convert intelligent modern consumers.
2. The Purchase Cycle Isn’t Instant
The buying cycle might range from a few hours to a few months, depending on the product or service.
You never know where people will be in that cycle when they get on your website, so unless you’re utilizing a traffic acquisition method tailored to solely draw ready customers, there’s a statistical chance that the visitor won’t be ready to purchase.
What happens next? What if they aren’t ready to purchase right now?
Nothing. They walk away.
You most likely paid for their visit, and they just departed.
That doesn’t have to be the case with a sales funnel. You’re not attempting to persuade them to buy right away via a sales funnel. Simply put, you’re attempting to capture and maintain their attention in order to gain the right to pitch to them by obtaining their email address.
Once you have their email address, which you can get by offering them something valuable for free, you can continue to provide value and keep your brand to be the top of their priority until they are ready and willing to buy.
You are the obvious choice at that time since…
3. You Can Build Trust with A Sales Funnel
Persons are more likely to buy from people they trust.
That has always been true for non-commodities, but there hasn’t always been an adequate chance to earn potential consumers’ confidence.
Online sales funnels overcome this problem by giving you all the space you need to earn your audience’s confidence.
An email auto-responder is a standard part of most funnels. This is a series of automatic emails sent to new subscribers. It enables you to promote to them, but more crucially, it enables you to introduce yourself to them on your terms and offer them so much value that they eagerly anticipate hearing from you again.
Furthermore, there is a significant benefit to doing this via email…
4. Email Subscribers Convert Really Well.
With good reason, email is at the heart of the internet sales funnel. Email outperforms almost every other marketing channel in terms of ROI.
Email is also around 40 times more successful in acquiring new consumers than Facebook or Twitter, owing to the extremely high conversion rate of email subscribers.
It’s essentially the marketing world’s super-weapon.
You may take advantage of email’s success in generating sales to your firm by creating a sales funnel with email marketing at its center. It works for almost any sort of business, and it will work for you.
5. Increase Lifetime Value with Sales Funnels
Many traditional sales models operate on a one-and-done basis. Even if the visitor purchases immediately after arriving at your landing page, the tale is over.
The first purchase is only the beginning with sales funnels.
Despite accounting for just 15% of online consumers, returning customers spend three times more than one-time shoppers and account for 1/3 of all online shopping income.
In other words, clients who buy from you on a regular basis will hypothetically account for a third of your revenue. But, if your business concept is one-and-done, how can you generate repeat customers?
To be honest, that business strategy is ridiculous.
You’ll need a sales funnel that allows you to upsell and retain customers so you can keep selling to them for years. It’s a foregone conclusion.
Conclusion
For a reason, sales funnels are at the heart of internet marketing.
At every point of the purchasing cycle, they enable you to create a lasting connection with potential consumers.
They assist you in gaining potential consumers’ confidence and guiding them toward making a purchase.
They use email to persuade and convert customers.
They boost customer lifetime value, allowing you to market to them again and again.
Create a sales funnel if you want to enhance your sales.
