The 5 Elements Of A Sales Funnel: A Guide For New Marketers

Sales are the only part of the whole business operations which brings in money for your organization. Thus, optimizing your sales strategy is the best option that you have. This situation calls for getting an optimized sales funnel for your business.

So, what exactly is a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is crucial to a company’s marketing & sales strategy. It shows the sales process starting from lead generation to the closing of the sales. Effective sales funnel design improves marketing efficiency and effectiveness. A sales funnel illustrates a customer’s buying process. Leads travel through the sales process from initial exposure through regular purchases. The sales funnel optimizes client and supplier procedures that result in product or service sales.

This funnel technique is displayed as an inverted pyramid or funnel that shows the number of prospects in each sales cycle stage at any one time. The funnel’s broad top shows how many people have been exposed to the company. Interest in and engagement with your marketing narrows the funnel. This signals increased interest and a drive toward the clientele. People that want your product or service go down the funnel while uninterested leads leave. Finally, sales funnel marketing leads to a prospect buying and becoming a customer. Marketing prioritizes funnel performance at each stage to increase sales revenue. Let us discuss the different stages of a sales funnel.

Awareness Stage

A sales funnel starts when someone discovers your company, product, or service. The stage is the funnel’s widest point. They may have never seen your website, seen your social media updates, or heard about you through a customer or follower. The person may not realize they have a problem. However, youngsters learn about the problem and its solutions throughout this time. You focus on telling prospects you have products or services to solve their issues.

You want the prospect to sign up for a valuable free gift in exchange for their contact information, such as a phone or email address. Data and client knowledge can help you identify your target audience & buyer profiles.

·       Content Marketing

Well, to be honest, content is your marketing and sales team’s best resource nowadays. Well-crafted content may help you achieve several sales and marketing objectives at various stages. Relevant content will remain fresh and interesting in the eyes of prospective prospects and customers, offering up new opportunities for your organization weeks, months, and even years after it was developed and distributed.

However, content creation is challenging. Content creation is difficult and may not provide instant results. The marketing and sales teams may confuse lead volume for quality and disregard it. Remember that top marketers emphasize high-quality leads. They know that enormous amounts of low-quality leads are costly, hard to handle, and provide little ROI. Modern marketing and sales are not numbers. It’s much more sophisticated.

So, what is the importance of content?

Content solves problems for current and potential customers. Consumers who read your content before contacting your firm self-identifying as possible customers. This screening method removes tire kickers & lukewarm leads from your sales pipeline. This helps your sales team focus on high-converting prospects and deepens the sales-marketing relationship. This simple strategy may be utilized across your marketing and sales funnels to route and send leads to the sales staff at the best moment for conversion.

·       Social Media Advertising 

Social media marketing goes beyond the typical postings that invite people to check out your stuff. You must interact with your audience by answering their questions, commenting on their comments, and offering educational information to help them learn more.

At this point, new visitors learn about your goods. This occurs when your current followers share your content with new individuals, who then like your page. You may learn more about your target audience by generating surveys, contacting them, or cold phoning them. This information will assist you in developing unique funnels for different categories of customers.

·       SEO (Search Engine Optimization) 

The main purpose of SEO is to boost online presence. Increased exposure boosts brand recognition. Keyword research at the start of the sales funnel helps you target marketing (including SEO) and attract the right audience. Long-tail and brand phrases will become more relevant in later sections, but general keywords are crucial today. However, you cannot “shortlist” anyone.

Complete SEO teams also focus on improving SERP rankings. It makes it easier to draw consumers’ attention to your priorities. Structured data and search engine visibility (direct answers, emoticons, star ratings under posts/products, or CTR effectively integrated into the title and meta description) may also attract users.

Your brand image benefits from high internet search rankings. Your local business should invest in local SEO, including a well-optimized Google My Company page. Linking not only boosts SEO but also increases referral traffic and visibility.

 

·       PPC (Pay Per Click) 

The development of PPC methods to target relevant persons unfamiliar with your brand is the awareness stage. This phase requires introducing yourself and sending them to your website. This could be done with the help of the following:

• Display advertising: Display ads may target relevant audiences on websites, blogs, mobile apps, and social media. Blogs, manuals, and white papers are useful advertisements at this point. Currently, most searches use non-branded phrases. Generic keyword-focused paid search advertising may attract high-quality website visits from search engines to leverage their purpose. A user considering shelving may look for ‘shelving ideas’ or ‘shelving reviews’ at this stage.
• Digital out-of-house (DOOH): Combining the internet and offline worlds, DOOH may reach your target audience with personalized ads to improve brand recognition. Google Shopping is only for eCommerce companies and may be used at any funnel stage. The Shopping page helps users learn about what is available and from whom while they are in the awareness stage and starting to shop, bringing them closer to the conversion of sales.
• Social media ads: Target your audience by topic or interest on social media. These channels are ideal for getting prospects’ attention during awareness.

·       Public Relations & Media Exposure

It is the responsibility of the brands to ensure that the customers remember their names. Public relations and the right marketing strategy are the foundation. PR is frequently overlooked in marketing. PR may boost sales in the sales funnel, a common business concept. Public relations and the sales funnel boost sales. PR campaigns have their benefits, but in a sales funnel, they may quadruple the impact of connecting with the target audience, increasing brand recognition, and building customer trust.

At the top of the sales funnel, the target audience is broader and easier to contact. PR may boost brand awareness on social media, owned media, earned media, & paid media. Press, speaking, editorials, blogging, and social media may convince new customers to follow your business and perhaps buy your product or service. People react to tales. One of the best ways to promote your company and help in memory is to sell a narrative or tell its story via public relations.

Interest Stage

After learning about your brand, consumers get interested in your business and products. Your product’s flaws in online content may pique their curiosity. With its brand, the company gains power and repute. Therefore, it becomes essential for the brand to excite customers towards their brand.

They become prospective customers by following you on social media, subscribing to your email list, asking questions, or sending direct messages. They then actively examine how your solution solves the problem mentioned in the first stage.

·       Lead Magnets 

Any excellent item you can provide a prospect for free in exchange for their contact information is a lead magnet.

Most buyers don’t buy right away. Business interactions are like any other human interaction. It’s difficult to ask for a person’s sensitive details when you first meet them, particularly if you have nothing to offer. To sustain a prospect’s interest, your organization must first provide a low-commitment resource. A lead magnet on your website will inspire visitors to share their contact information and engage with your business.

What are lead magnet benefits? An effective inbound marketing effort needs lead magnets. This tool generates qualified leads, builds contact databases, and boosts sales. Lead magnets on your website let you:

• Make your firm an industry leader
• Create reciprocity
• Lead by example
• Generate qualified leads
• Maintain customer interactions

After the prospect receives the lead magnet, keep in touch and keep their attention. A computerized email advertising technique lets you attract fresh prospects 24/7, even while you sleep! Your company’s productivity and conversion rates will improve with this technique.

·       Email Marketing

Email Marketing is really an important and powerful tool that helps to understand and nurture your potential leads. It helps to build a strong relationship with your audience and, in the end, convert them into customers. At this stage, your buyer compares you to the competition and their own concerns (such as budget or trust). To persuade people to buy your products or services, you must address complaints and extol its benefits in your emails.

So, how to tailor emails to the consideration stage? The discussion stage is a good time to start employing social proof. Case studies that show how you solved problems for existing customers and the advantages you provided are great. Testimonials may demonstrate how your product benefitted others. Responding to common email concerns may help reduce friction. Share your annual plan discount or student price with cost-conscious customers.

·       Remarketing Ads 

Remarketing reaches out to a website and mobile app visitors. It lets you strategically display your ads in front of these audiences on Google or a collaborator website to boost brand awareness or encourage purchases. Remarketing may be employed on display or search platforms. You may target audiences based on their site activity, such as adding something to their basket and leaving or keeping loyal customers aware of your brand. Remarketing increases ROI because you target people who have shown interest in your offering and may customize your ads to the sites where they showed interest.

Online shoppers abandon their carts 72% of the time, with just 8% checking out later. Remarketing ads boost this to 26% by reminding consumers of their planned purchases. You may create audience databases for remarketing advertising in AdWords and link them to Google Analytics for further targeting based on page views and conversions. Given so many more comprehensive targeting options, you can regulate your spending and eliminate unwanted clicks.

Decision Stage

Well, congratulations, you have made up so far in the sales funnel as people are now talking about your brand and products. You are almost at the stage of closing the sales. Just a little bit of push, and you are done. Follow the below-mentioned tools, and you are good to go.

·       Product/Service Demonstration 

Demos are important in sales because they help you close business. Many salespeople, however, make the mistake of believing that all demonstrations are created equal. In truth, providing a successful demo requires a lot of subtlety. The sales demo is the essential phase in your sales funnel, and it can make or break your transactions since it enables you to demonstrate how your product or service will address issues for consumers. Product demonstrations are also a chance for you as the salesman to build trust with the prospective customer.

It is not your customer’s responsibility to remember you. It is your task and responsibility to ensure that they do not forget you. The conclusion is that if you want to complete more business, you must provide excellent software demonstrations. You can ensure that the demonstration is relevant to your consumer and personalized to their requirements by following the suggestions we’ve discussed above. As a consequence, you’ll be able to build trust and get closer to closing the purchase!

If you follow these guidelines, you’ll be well on your way to providing a fantastic demo that will help you close the sale with prospective customers!

·       Customer Testimonials & Case Studies 

Customer testimonials and case studies help potential customers evaluate your product or service. They can help you build trust, credibility, and social proof and overcome obstacles. In conclusion, customer reviews affect consumer purchases. Businesses may increase sales by sharing positive customer experiences. If you want to boost sales and marketing, include client testimonials in your strategy. You have the buyer’s attention, and they want more information. You may also create many case studies for different buyer journey stages.

A case study lets a former customer sell you by becoming your brand ambassador. Salespeople may often bring out what worked and didn’t for customers to prove the service works.

·       Offers & Promotions 

Sales promotions are temporary campaigns that increase demand, interest, or product use. Sales promotions vary in design and function. You may use them to attract new customers, boost retention, dump inventory, or build customer relationships.The best approaches encompass the whole sales funnel and target exact targets based on the customer journey. Here are a few examples:

• Engage new clients

Offer discounts, free trials, or freebies to attract new customers. In a perfect scenario, they’ll adore your solution and become loyal customers.

• Introduce new goods or services.

Offering discounted product testing to customers can help you get positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations to expand your audience.

• Remove your goods immediately.

Many organizations utilize discounts to get rid of aging inventory owing to seasonality, poor performance, or last-minute quarterly sales goals.

• Increase loyalty over time.

Sales promotions help you keep loyal customers happy, engaged, and informed about new releases and updates.

There’s much more. Sales promotions may assist the bottom line and actual buyers.

·       Trust Signals 

Trust signals are components on your website that aid in the development of trust among your visitors. Customer feedback, security badges, & testimonials may be included. People who trust you are more inclined to conduct business with you. People who visit your website want to know whether they can entrust you with their private data, money, and time. By incorporating trust signals on your site, you are assisting in the development of trust and increasing the possibility that visitors will do the action you want.

For example, if you’re offering a product online, you’ll want to ensure that prospective buyers trust you with their payment details. By putting customer evaluations and a security emblem on your website, you are informing visitors that others have successfully bought from you and that their personal data is safe. This may assist in raising conversions and revenues.

Action Stage

At this stage, you are expected to be in contact with your customers, and the chance of closing the sale is very high. Now is the time you must perform some “actions” to ensure that the leads are converted. It is post this stage that purchase takes place.

·       Strong Call to Action (CTA) 

Calls to action (CTAs) may help your visitors through their purchasing experience & have an influence over conversion rates. A well-executed CTA will do wonders for capturing visitors’ attention, & directing them through the registration process.

The human mind is so used to how the internet works that they anticipate seeing a call-to-action in a prominent spot on your website or landing page. However, this does not imply that they are willing to follow your lead and convert. Crafting good CTAs is an art form in and of itself, but it is one that can be perfected if established approaches are followed.

Finding the appropriate mix between straightforward, unambiguous instruction and attractive, jargon-free text that uses action words like “download,” “register,” or “start” might take some repetition and imagination. Examine the websites of big brands to discover what type of actionable text they’re employing and let your inner copywriter shine.

·       Seamless Checkout Process

According to one survey, 69.99% of buyers leave their online shopping carts. The causes include, among other things, a sluggish website, no customer assistance, too many forms to fill out, and a failed payment. Even if just one part of your checkout procedure is incorrect, you might lose a considerable amount of money. Providing a flawless checkout experience, on the other hand, encourages consumers to finish transactions.

Furthermore, it has an effect on your bottom line. A well-designed checkout process may provide several benefits to your company. Reduced basket abandonment, higher funnel conversion rate, increased consumer happiness, enhanced brand loyalty, and so on. As a result, thinking along such lines becomes critical. A well-designed checkout experience contributes to an increase in average order value (AOV). In the checkout sequence, you may employ marketing methods like upselling and cross-selling to encourage users to purchase more from your site. To enhance order ticket size, for example, you may easily add a “recommendation” or “people who also bought this” option to your checkout window.

·       Guarantee

If you, as a business, are offering a guarantee to your customers about certain features or parts of the product, then it automatically makes it better in the eyes of the consumers. They think that the product would be free of the problems that are covered in the guarantee, and it makes them buy your product or services.

On the other hand, a guarantee about any product or service establishes your brand as a strong player in the market.

·       Integration

Integrated marketing may assist in moving clients from one step of the funnel to the next. This is especially noticeable throughout the finding, appraisal, and intent phases. It not only helps drive clients through the sales funnel, but it also screens out those who will never be interested in acquiring the desired product or service. Integrated marketing should be an important aspect of every company’s efforts to impact present and new customers, whether you’re an SME or a multinational corporation (MNC). It not only helps in the retention of long-term relationships with current clients, but it also aids in the progression of new consumers via the sales funnel. By maximizing the usage of integrated marketing, you may save significant time and money that would otherwise be spent setting up several marketing campaigns.

The repeating of the same message across many platforms will elicit an action from the consumer, such as the purchase of a product. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, discovered in 1885 that repeating particular patterns over time assisted people in remembering knowledge.

Retention & Advocacy  

After the sales are made, we come to ensure that the purchase made must be repeated and ensure that we must have a good customer retention strategy. Now, it is your turn to make your customers brand ambassadors. If you have done a good job, then your customers will recommend you to their friends and family.

Follow the below tools and processes to ensure that you have a good customer retention strategy.

·       Post Purchase Support 

The post-purchase lifecycle enables the brand to maintain a connection with its clients. According to Support, 40% of buyers feel that the post-purchase experience enhances their brand experience. Retailers must realize that the Customer Experience does not stop with the transaction. When clients buy from you, there is a time lag between when an order is placed and when the goods are sent to them.

Some components of the post-purchase experience that may build or break your brand’s reputation include seamless order tracking, technical assistance, and return and refund. A customer’s post-purchase experience affects their view of your organization and their choice to return or not.  A consumer who is pleased by your post-purchase service is more likely to skip the first two phases of the consumer lifecycle – awareness of the brand & purchase interest – and go directly to buy intent.

·       Loyalty Programs 

Loyalty program efforts such as special discounts and incentive programs foster stronger consumer ties. These relationships are critical for establishing trust, encouraging repeat purchases and other desirable conversions, and increasing KPIs like AOV and ROI. Brands that do not have these sorts of ties with their consumers may lack credibility. People routinely search for reviews and suggestions before making a purchase choice. Thus, loyal consumers are vital for building social proof. In fact, 95% of customers read reviews while they purchase, and 8 out of 10 look at online evaluations while in a physical store. When reviews contain photographs or videos of the product in use, they are more successful at generating confidence and driving sales.

Finally, dedicated consumers contribute to the creation of a feeling of community by communicating and sharing their passion for the business through social media and word-of-mouth. Whether consumers recommend their family and friends, submit user-generated content, or just tell others about their favorite items, brand advocates create new revenue with no further investment from the company.

·       Referral Programs 

• It is vital to build enthusiasm to get people to discuss your goods.
• You may convert your current users into client acquisition channels with the correct referral program.
• Effective referral program often includes a focused promotion, as well as rewards that benefit your consumers and turn them into powerful advocates.
• Moreover, half of the organizations with formalized referral programs rated their sales efforts as extremely successful, compared to 35% of those without.
• Referrals have the potential to favorably affect your bottom line. As a result, you should concentrate on your referral techniques and create an action plan for acquiring new clients via your present users.
• Maintain your commitment to your current consumers and provide them with more reasons to suggest your product. Once you have gotten some strong referrals, you should focus on boosting your income.
• For more information, see our fifth phase – Revenue of the Sales funnel series, where you’ll get useful hints on how to boost your revenue.

·       Feedback Mechanisms 

You are intimately familiar with your product or items. Before implementing any product feature or application, you and your team thoroughly studied and discussed it hundreds of times. At the same time, this may explain why you don’t see the flaws. It is critical to uncover what your consumers prefer – what they like about your items, what they detest, and why. Showing that you actually listen to and value client feedback can help you thrive in the company (more than anything else!).

After all, your product is designed for consumers. Thus, it should be as near to their specifications as feasible. Nothing shows your consumers how important they are than asking questions and acting on them. When asked for in-app feedback on a product, a website experience, or any other contact, your consumers feel appreciated and treated nearly as if they were a member of your creative team. By soliciting consumer feedback, you make them feel as though their ideas are actually appreciated.

When consumers feel heard, they begin to associate your company with positive connotations and convey their positive experience back to you, perhaps leading to additional purchases in the future.

Measurement & Optimization 

Done with the sales? Well, you must have committed some mistakes, or the process could have been optimized in a better way. Therefore, measurement and optimization of your sales funnel are important. You can measure and optimize your sales funnel with the below tools and tests.

• Analytics Tools 

Analytical tools will help you optimize and measure your sales funnel in a better way by giving you quantifiable data. With this data, you would be able to pinpoint the pain points of your customers and ensure that you will get the best results. Moreover, these tools give you a clear picture of where you need to work upon.

• A/B Testing 
• A/B testing is the technique of comparing the performance of two versions of a digital element. It’s also known as split testing.
• A/B testing is now used to examine anything from emails and landing pages to websites and applications. While the goals of A/B testing have changed, the underlying concepts have not.
• It compares two versions of a website, app, or landing page. This experiment demonstrates the variations in user replies. It aids in gauging consumer reactions. To identify which version works best, statistical data is gathered and analyzed.
• A/B testing compares two different versions of a website. Variation A denotes the control variant. The modification that has been tested is in Variation B.
• A/B testing is also known as random controlled testing (RCT) since it ensures that sample groups are selected at random. This contributes to improved performance.

Some of the benefits of using A/B testing are:

• Better ROI
• Low Bounce Rate
• Low-risk modifications
• Better business growth

KPI Tracking

Key performance indicators (KPIs) in sales are measurements that are used to monitor how closely a sales team’s performance tracks established targets and how this performance affects the organization as a whole. This contains indicators such as the average number of leads produced each quarter and the transaction conversion rate.

These KPIs also help you to understand customer lifetime value and help you increase it.