What is a Sales Funnels?
A sales funnel is a pathway that potential customer goes through the whole process to purchase. The are some stages in the sales funnel so-called top, middle and bottom of the funnel. These stages may vary depending on the sales model. The details of these stages as follow:
- Top of the Funnel ( ToFu) - Awareness: At this stage, the buyers are aware of what are their problems and issues. They are seeking for some useful solutions, find and discover the proper products or services to solve their problems
- Middle of the Funnel (MiFu) - Considerations: The buyers starting to analyse and evaluate the different products and services also trying to engage with the sellers.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) - Decision: The buyers decide on the solution for their needs.
Most of the internet marketer experience the pain of just missing a sale. After a few weeks of pitches and demos, chatter and the charm, the prospect drops out of the sales funnel without buying anything.
Sometimes it happens, but it happens less often if you're choosing the right sales to funnel management help. Many small markets sales funnels are more like sieves, with holes left by patched together spreadsheets, missed appointments, sticky notes and forgotten follow-ups.
Sales Funnel Stages
A sales funnel started with a group of potential customers who have the knowledge or heard about your products and services. Then a part of that group of customers may have the interest and want to learn more, and some of them may contact you. As the process going on, you're trying to filter to find out who are more interested, until you end up with the people become your customers.
The sales funnel can be started with the sales page, which eventually leads to an order page whereby the potential customer's email address is captured. Alternatively, it also can start with an opt-in page or so-called "squeeze page." where a visitor has to fill in their email address to see what's behind the page. Opt-in pages are usually used to give away a free gift such as free eBook, report, article, a webinar, etc.
Let us look at how sales teams approach the leads in each stage of sales funnel and why the conversion rates matter at each stage.
Top of The Sales Funnel: Awareness
In this stage, your audiences are facing some problems, and they are starting to do some research and learning more about it. They seek solutions and discovering the goods products and services that can solve their problems.
They may discover your solution via some marketing stuff such as advertisements, forum, social media, blog post, etc. and trying to contact with your sales reps. Alternatively, you can get in touch with the prospects via cold outreach channels such as personalized cold email.
In this stage, you should only try to provide education and solutions to the audiences about their problems and are not pushing for any sale. Educational marketing materials such as, articles, videos, infographics and blog posts can help them be more informed of the topics that matter to them.
The primary purpose of the stage is to turn your untouched prospects into contact made prospects, and they are now your leads. Asking your audiences relevant questions and qualify your lead, which is what brings us to the next stage of the sales funnel.
Middle of The Sales Funnel: Considerations
In this stage, you're not required to deal with nameless contact anymore. This is because they have now named and their problems are being defined. Now they are looking for some available solutions such as products and services.
When you arrive at the middle of the sales funnel, your lead is diving deeper into more specific problems and issues. Your potential customers know what's bothering them in great detail and want to know more information about the possible solutions.
At this point, they might not start evaluating the solution providers such as some specific products or services. Instead, they're searching for types of solutions available to them.
For instance, they have yet to decide if they will buy a MacBook Pro laptop, which is for heavy user or MacBook Air laptop for a light user. The best way to serves your leads in this stage is to provide them in-depth guide, comparison-style table, pros vs cons list, and the insightful pieces.
At this stage, your leads will become qualified as you get to engage with them and asking them questions so that you will able to decide which offer is right and fit for their problem.
Bottom of The Funnel: Decision
Finally, the bottom part of your sales funnel is when your leads now know everything regarding their problem, the suitable type of solution for them, and are ready to choose the provider to purchase the right product and service to solve their problem.
At this point, the potential customer's concern now becomes vendor driven. They usually will think about some questions, and it might look something like this:
- " Does provider A provide better support than provider B? "
- "Does product A's features more than product B?"
- "Who offers the most complete features and services to me? moreover, does it worth of money?"
As mentioned above, that's what you need to helps your lead make a decision that suits their needs, budget, problems and other resources.
The best content to provide to your leads are frequently asked question (FAQ) pages, videos showing the product features, live demos and detail feature analysis. These contents reinforce their confidence in your offer as they can keep seeing how does it fit their specific problem.
Lastly, this is the time when your qualified leads go through the proposal and negotiation stage after you ideally win their business.
Importance of Sales Funnel
If you're an online entrepreneur who is selling your product online, and you're not using a sales funnel, you are loosing out on the sales. If you run a new online business and don't have any online presence, perhaps using the sales funnel is the best way to attract potential customer and increase the sales conversion rate.
Most of the people don't buy anything when they first saw it. They only take action once they have a few times of exposures to that product. So if you're relying on the traffic that drove from somewhere to your sales page, and hopes it'll convert, that's a mistake.
You have to remind your audience always about your product, and how does your product can help to solve their problem and change their lives become better. Gives it a solution to a problem they have. A sales funnel allows you to control your marketing effort.
How To Create a Sales Funnel?
To create a sales funnel, you would need to get a Landing Page Builder for WordPress plugin such as ProfitBuilder to create your own sales pages, opt-in pages and thank you pages and connected them all.
Alternatively, you can also choose Kyvio to create an opt-in page. Kyvio is a cloud-based software (All-In-One Marketing Platform) that you no need to have WordPress to use it. Kyvio included these core features such as Funnel Builder, Membership Builder, Email Automation and Smart Academy. This is also one of the cheapest marketing tools in the market for those who are started in marketing and looking for more affordable marketing tools.
If you have some budget on hand, I would suggest you try CLICKFUNNEL. This is so far the best funnel creator tool that I have used it for so many years.
What is Clickfunnels
Clickfunnels created by a guy called Russell Brunson which he has success and turning sales funnels become much easier than traditional sales funnels
Clickfunnels not only used for creating sales funnels, but it can be used for building webinars, blogs, opt-in pages and membership sites.
With the cool features in Clickfunnels, it is pretty easy to build a funnel by clicking and dragging different types of elements such as images, videos, buttons, titles, etc. With these features, you now can build any site that you desired
There are many sales funnel creator tools out there. So what sets Clickfunnels apart from others? The answer is SIMPLICITY!
Clickfunnels is for everyone who wishes to create a sales funnel within a shorter period without any experience needed. You don't have to hire any web designer to create it for you because you can do it yourself (D.I.Y ). AS such it will help you save a substantial unnecessary cost.
In Clickfunnels platform, there is a ton of pre-made templates to choose from. The user interface is user-friendly, and their support is top-notch. You can tweak and edit again and again each time you want. The best part is that you can even import the funnels created by other Clickfunnels members.
I still have more to share with you all about Clickfunnels, but maybe in my next blog, I'll share more details about it. So please stay tuned and check out on our website if you don't want to miss any of them.
If you've read my article here, I would like to say thank you for your time reading my article. 🙂 As you're my audience, I've two gifts for you, click the link below to get INSTANT ACCESS
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