Creating a Sales Funnel can be the positive change you've been looking for. A Sales Funnel increases your income and makes your business profitable . Think for a second about the number of companies or brands that offer the same thing as you, probably more than 10, being conservative, which makes it imperative that you offer a unique experience to your client that allows you to differentiate yourself from the competition.
I have no doubt that you have heard this before: “you must differentiate yourself” ; but, how do you achieve it? I am not going to lie to you, in most cases it is an arduous path of persistence, research, changes and, above all, knowing your client; that is where the importance of the sales funnel lies, this will allow you to create a personalized experience to accompany the user in each phase until they achieve the purchase of the product .
With a sales funnel, you can eliminate the things that your audience is not interested in seeing and incorporate those that they are interested in. You can organize yourself, it will allow you to send the information that your readers need and thus guide them towards your information products and services. When they reach the end of the funnel, their conclusion will be that you are the one who has the solution to their problems.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Let's start by talking about two terms that are very similar but have major differences. The Buyer's Journey is often confused with the Sales Funnel .
Buyer's Journey or Customer Journey is made up of 3 stages called:
- Discovery: the user realizes that he has a deficiency and begins to find out how to solve it
- Consideration: the user evaluates all the options that could provide a solution to his deficiency
- Decision: the user has already evaluated the advantages and disadvantages and takes the purchase action
With this tool, we are able to understand the experiences, emotions and stages that this consumer goes through as they progress in their relationship with the brand, which helps us, in a visual and simple way, to put ourselves in their shoes and then establish and design the actions ( touchpoints ) that in each phase will bring the user closer to our objectives.
Sales funnel is where we decide when and where to apply touchpoints . When to show our clients the valuable content that will help them in each stage of the Buyer's Journey until they make the decision to purchase our product as a winning option.
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Let's separate the Sales Funnel into two:
1️⃣ Marketing funnel: where all the attraction strategies are carried out until the interest in our product is raised. You accompany them from the discovery stage to the consideration stage where they are very likely to fill out a form leaving their data, turning them into a lead.
2️⃣Sales funnel: from the moment a person becomes a lead until the purchase decision is made. While in the Buyer's Journey it is unlikely that a person will abandon one of the stages (when a person has a need, sooner or later they end up covering it), in the Sales Funnel you will have losses , that is, at each stage a percentage of those interested will abandon ship and decide on another product or brand. A Sales Funnel increases your income to the extent that you get the consumer to the end of the funnel.
Your real job is to make that percentage as low as possible by generating differentiated and personalized attraction and retention strategies .
BUYER'S JOURNEY - SALES FUNNEL
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Why create and optimize a sales funnel?
From the moment you decide to sell something, regardless of whether they are products, information products, services, etc., the " sales funnel " is created by itself with the daily activity of your work, only we cannot say that from the beginning that sales funnel increases your income or is an optimized funnel, that is, let's suppose that you are a designer and you have a service to create company logos.
Someone searches Google for “ logo designers ” and finds your website in the results. They go there, look at your portfolio, read other clients’ comments, and then write to you to ask about your services. You reply, describe how you work, and what your costs are. The client reads your email , likes your proposal, and decides to hire you.
If you look closely, there was a sales funnel, the customer went through several stages until making the purchase decision. Your big challenge, as we mentioned above, is to get the largest number of people to stay within your funnel until reaching the end, and that is why you must create a segmentation strategy that will filter the people who enter our blog according to their interests and needs.
It consists of providing value to the subscriber while showing them that our products are what they need to solve their problems. All of this in a natural and automated way.
Now, steps to create an optimized sales funnel
Step #1: Let's define your customer and your value proposition
Your Buyer Persona: It all starts with knowing your Buyer Persona , your ideal buyer. There is a whole strategy behind this, to be able to determine it you must consider all the factors that surround this person, their interests, tastes, which magazines or newspapers they usually read, where and how they shop, sports, places they frequent, ailments, aspirations, jobs they can do, age, gender, social status, geolocation, etc.
All this data will allow you to develop a much more accurate and, above all, profitable strategy. You will not waste time and money placing your information in media or places where your buyer persona is not located. For example, if your product is aimed at seniors or the elderly, handing out flyers in nightclubs will hardly give you any return on investment.
To be able to indicate that your sales funnel increases your income by keeping your user until the end of the process requires a deep understanding of the tastes and ailments of these people.
Value Proposition:
What ailment does your product seek to solve? How does it do it? What makes you different? Why should they choose you over someone else?
Your Offer:
Creating a product or service requires you to study your niche, conduct a study of the competition, and research prices and strategies. If what you are going to offer is not good, it doesn't matter how many funnels you build.
Lead Magnet:
An extraordinary way to attract people to your funnel is to offer attractive products that they can download for free, such as: ebooks, guides, tutorials, books, templates, among others. Make them quality and with good content so that your Buyer Persona gets to know your quality and considers you as an option.
Make yourself visible:
If you have just started your project, you will need to work on your SEO, your social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) and your guest posting strategy (if applicable) to start appearing in the searches carried out by your Buyer Persona. What is not shown is not sold!
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Step #2: Let's define your strategy for each phase of the Buyer's Journey
You must define what material you will deliver as support to your user to keep them in your funnel. Remember that the user will always resolve their ailment and your goal is to get them to decide on your product. Therefore, everything you deliver must be valuable and of high quality since it will be the user's first contact with your content. If what you deliver lacks value, they will discard you almost immediately.
✔️ Discovery: the user knows that they have an ailment but they don't know how to solve it yet, they don't have the answer, they are looking for it. This is your opportunity to show your solution through social media, advertising, SEO, articles, etc.✔️Consideration: the user has already seen some solutions and is in the phase of evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of each one to proceed with their decision. You must tell them why you are the best option, use testimonials, success stories, etc.
✔️Decision: The user will likely require an additional push to make their decision, so this is a good opportunity to offer discounts, promotions, among others.
Remember to create loyalty material , the kind that will win over the customer so that they stay with you forever, such as: products related to or complementary to the one purchased, loyal customer benefits, gifts, or others.
Step #3: It's time to tie your previous strategy to your Funnel (decide when and how)
Remember that a few minutes ago we defined the funnel as the place where you are going to decide when to show the touchpoints or contact points. Well, now is the time to define what those points will be and when they will be sent to your Buyer Persona. A sales funnel increases your income only when it is very well optimized.
Phase 1 | Starting the Funnel:
At this stage we must attract the largest number of people to your funnel (this part is tied to the discovery phase 1 of the Buyer's Journey). You can have a lot of web traffic but, if you don't get them to subscribe to your funnel you won't have achieved anything. How do we get them to subscribe? The most effective way is the famous "lead magnets" here are several examples:
✅Conduct Webinars.
✅Downloadable podcasts.
✅Create free downloadable resources such as: ebooks, guides, books, etc.
✅Implement Content Upgrades in your content.
✅Redirect from your social networks to a Squeeze Page where you offer a gift.
✅Create contests on social networks.
There are thousands of ways to achieve this, you have to try out which ones work best for you and then focus on those.
Phase 2 | Center of the Funnel:
Perfect, we have made a little more progress, we told our Bayer Persona that we exist and that we have a solution that could benefit them (linked to phase 2 of the Buyer's Journey - capturing interest and consideration ). Now, at this point we must measure and nurture our lead according to the level of interest they have shown in our product, so we advise you to divide the information that we are going to distribute here into two:
1️⃣ Information for cold or lukewarm leads: these users may be interested but still require more information to complete their analysis and move on to the decision phase. At this stage, we recommend that you send this type of lead email marketing with more general information showing your main products, testimonials, success stories, free resources for download, among others; so that you can cultivate and guide their interest and the person can evaluate the options you offer and their quality. 2️⃣ Information for hot leads: these users already have a particular interest in your product, it is even likely that they added it to the shopping cart and subsequently abandoned the purchase for any of the multiple reasons that may exist. At this point you cannot let your lead go, they have already discovered you, they have even considered you and were about to make their decision. To support them, you can generate direct content about the specific product they wanted to purchase, offer discount coupons, deals, promotions, and you can even send them a video of a person using your product and indicating the benefits they obtained from it.Phase 3 | End of the funnel:
Ready! The customer wants your product (linked to phase 3 of the Buyer's Journey - the decision ), but perhaps they need to clarify some doubts. You can create an email or landing page where you talk about the benefits, clarify frequently asked questions and make clear what the process of purchasing and using the product would be; if you wish, you could even leave a contact number to chat live with a person such as a sales executive or call center.
Closing this article , sales funnel increases your income. As we mentioned in the previous section, you cannot forget to create content for customer loyalty. For this stage, you can consider any of the following options:
✅ Create special discount coupons for loyal customers.
✅ Gifts.
✅ Private half-hour Skype or Zoom session after purchase to resolve any questions you may have.
✅ Discounts on product updates.
✅ Email marketing focused on getting the most out of the product or services by sending tutorials and tricks.
We can conclude that to make your sales funnel increase your income you must do three fundamental things: define your value proposition, know your buyer persona and create extremely valuable content.
Learning to create a Sales Funnel that increases your income IS possible
We invite you to learn about our Sales Funnel course in which you will be able to acquire all the tools and knowledge necessary to attract your target audience and boost your sales.
Courses that may interest you
Do you want to acquire more skills to master the world of digital marketing? We remind you to also check out our courses on Google Ads From Scratch, Digital Marketing Diploma and Email Marketing.
