Does your busi­ness need a sales funnel?

No mat­ter what you sell, get­ting prospec­tive cus­tomers to buy does­n’t hap­pen instant­ly. Grow­ing your busi­ness with online mar­ket­ing can be a con­fus­ing, frus­trat­ing, and down­right fog­gy experience.

Do you still need a sales fun­nel if you already have a website?

The answer is yes!

If you don’t cur­rent­ly have a well-designed sales page, you will prob­a­bly only con­vert at 1–2%, leav­ing a lot of mon­ey on the table.

Buy­ers need to be guid­ed, incen­tivised, encour­aged, and inspired to take action. That’s what sales fun­nels are here for!

And if you’re won­der­ing if this will work for your type of busi­ness, the answer is yes. Many peo­ple think that their busi­ness is dif­fer­ent and wor­ry that fun­nels may not work for them. The real­i­ty is that fun­nels work for any type of busi­ness try­ing to gen­er­ate leads or cre­ate cus­tomers — the fun­nel just needs to be tai­lored to them.

So, what is a sales funnel?

A sales fun­nel is the cus­tomer’s path from first hear­ing about your prod­uct or ser­vice to pur­chas­ing that prod­uct or ser­vice. With­out a strong fun­nel, even the most bril­liant prod­ucts aren’t going to get to the peo­ple who need them most.

Have you come across these strange acronyms ToFu, MoFu, BoFu? These are noth­ing more than the stages of a sales funnel.
Site vis­i­tors are at the top of the fun­nel (ToFu) when they’re ini­tial­ly inter­est­ed in your prod­uct or service.

The mid­dle of the fun­nel (MoFu) is achieved when the vis­i­tor clear­ly defines their prob­lem and nar­rows down cer­tain solu­tions. Your prod­uct or ser­vice is now being considered!

At the bot­tom of the sales fun­nel, you’ll find your BoFu leads – these poten­tial cus­tomers are high­ly qual­i­fied and well on their way to mak­ing a purchase.

Mea­sur­ing your cus­tomer’s jour­ney from the Top (Tar­get Audi­ence), Mid­dle (Poten­tial Cus­tomers), and Bot­tom (New & Exist­ing Cus­tomers) of a sales fun­nel is vital!

In real­i­ty, every online busi­ness has some sort of a sales fun­nel in place because they all need to con­vert poten­tial cus­tomers into leads and then into pay­ing customers.

Sales fun­nels are cre­at­ed with one goal in mind, and there are many goals to choose from. Some sales fun­nels are for lead gen­er­a­tion, whilst oth­ers are for sales, webi­na­rs atten­dance, and high-tick­et offers.

Here are some gen­er­al tips to fol­low when cre­at­ing your sales funnels.

1. Drive high-quality traffic

The foun­da­tion for any prof­itable sales fun­nel is high-qual­i­ty traf­fic. Low-qual­i­ty traf­fic that isn’t inter­est­ed in what you’re offer­ing (or can’t afford it) — will always result in a low con­ver­sion rate and a high cost per conversion.

So, you should­n’t tar­get every­one. This is the most com­mon lead gen­er­a­tion mis­take. You need to know your ide­al cus­tomer and under­stand their pain points. What their prob­lem is, and what their fears are.

Your aim should be to find a painful prob­lem that your ide­al cus­tomers are strug­gling with, which is either the same or relat­ed to the prob­lem that your fron­tend offer solves.

Remem­ber that clients may think about their sub-prob­lems and not real­ly about the big pic­ture — their main prob­lem. It is your job to iden­ti­fy it.

A good way of defin­ing your tar­get audi­ence is by cre­at­ing buy­er per­sonas. You can’t get to know every cus­tomer or prospect indi­vid­u­al­ly, but you can cre­ate a cus­tomer per­sona to rep­re­sent your cus­tomer base.

Refer to this mod­el cus­tomer as if they were a real per­son. This will allow you to craft mar­ket­ing mes­sages tar­get­ed specif­i­cal­ly to them.

2. Create value

Your offer should be so com­pelling that your cus­tomer per­sona can­not say no to it.

Before you can sell some­one one of your main prod­ucts or ser­vices, you’ve got to draw them in with a com­pelling offer. This offer is called bait, and it’s just the begin­ning of the sales funnel.

After some­one con­firms their order by enter­ing their ship­ping and pay­ment infor­ma­tion, they are tak­en to an upsell page. Here, they can add prod­ucts to their order with just a sin­gle click (since they’ve already entered their pay­ment and ship­ping infor­ma­tion). This is where most peo­ple aban­don their cart, and upselling pages are how you increase the aver­age cart val­ue. There’s a lot more you can do, but we’ll come back to it in the next steps!

3. Good copywriting

Writ­ing good copy is a form of art. But you need to remem­ber that when writ­ing sales copy, the only goal is the results. The best sales fun­nel copy is clear and com­pelling. Tell your poten­tial cus­tomers what they will receive and why it’s the best choice.

Explain why they need it and why they need to take action straight away.

Remem­ber that to write a good copy, you need to under­stand the offer and why it’s com­pelling, as well as under­stand the cus­tomer per­sona and why they need what’s being offered.

4. Use Social Proof

Social proof is an ele­ment of a sales page that can huge­ly impact the con­ver­sion rate.

Accord­ing to Opt­in­Mon­ster, 87% of buy­ing deci­sions begin with research con­duct­ed online before the pur­chase is made, and 92% of con­sumers are more like­ly to trust non-paid rec­om­men­da­tions than any oth­er type of advertising.

There­fore, you must think about includ­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als, suc­cess sto­ries, and busi­ness sta­tis­tics on your sales page to improve your conversions!

5. Remove navigation

This tip is sim­ple but impor­tant. If you want the high­est pos­si­ble con­ver­sion rate, remove all nav­i­ga­tion on each page of your sales fun­nel. The few­er places there are to click and dis­tract your poten­tial cus­tomers, the better.

If you’re try­ing to sell a spe­cif­ic prod­uct or ser­vice to a cer­tain group of peo­ple, focus on that goal only. It’s not a clas­sic web­site; it’s a sales funnel.

6. Use upsells and downsells

Here’s anoth­er fact of online mar­ket­ing for you to think about: when some­one buys some­thing, they are like­ly to buy more things.

And your job is to cap­i­talise on that and sell them more prod­ucts or ser­vices while they’re in the mood.

Hav­ing a sales fun­nel with order bumps, upsells, and downsells is cru­cial as it increas­es the aver­age order val­ue and gives your poten­tial cus­tomers what they might want.

An order bump is when a prod­uct or ser­vice is added to a cus­tomer’s bas­ket at the check­out page. The order bump offer is pre­sent­ed on the check­out page, and with a sin­gle click, the cus­tomer can add the prod­uct to their purchase.

Addi­tion­al­ly, we use an upsell page when some­body has already pur­chased a prod­uct or ser­vice, and we use downsell pages when some­one says “no” to the ini­tial upsell. Downsells are usu­al­ly a watered-down ver­sion of what you offer on the upsell page.

7. Follow up email sequence

Sell­ing straight away is great. And ide­al­ly, lots of peo­ple will con­vert on the first pass.

But some sales will hap­pen dur­ing the fol­low-up process… because that’s just how mar­ket­ing and sales work.

There­fore, you need to imple­ment a lead nur­tur­ing sequence that will help you to con­vert those peo­ple in lat­er stages.

What’s impor­tant here is to strike the right bal­ance between pro­vid­ing val­ue and sell­ing your prod­uct. You can put cus­tomers off by being too salesy, but equal­ly, you can’t be leav­ing mon­ey on the table by not pro­mot­ing your product.

Remem­ber, it is just the beginning!

A lead gen­er­a­tion fun­nel is a sys­tem exist­ing with­in your over­all sales fun­nel. Each stage exists in con­nec­tion with oth­er stages. So, every­thing that hap­pens at each stage of your sales fun­nel affects the suc­cess poten­tial or exist­ing cus­tomer’s behav­iour in sub­se­quent stages of that sales funnel.

Are you ready to launch your funnel?

If you need help cre­at­ing your sales fun­nels, book a fun­nel strat­e­gy call with us!