A sales funnel remains a critical aspect of the sales pipeline, moving a prospect from their initial contact with a company to their ultimate conversion to a paying customer.
Understanding what is a sales funnel and the various sales funnel stages is key to a sales team creating an effective conversion funnel, as described in this article. With that knowledge, small business owners are ready to design their own sales funnel that boosts sales and increases profits.
How to Build a Sales Funnel for Your Business
Will an effective sales funnel help your small business convert more customers and close more deals? Have you learned the four sales funnel stages and looked at various sales funnel examples, and now you’re ready to build a sales funnel for your business?
The following steps will help you create the right sales funnel to support your marketing strategy:
1. Gather Data on Your Target Market
Information is key to understanding your prospective customers, and the first step to building an effective marketing funnel is gathering data about your current customers and target audience. What interests your current paying customers, and what attracts them to your brand?
Conduct competitive research to better understand why potential customers prefer other brands. The more information you gather about your target market, the more effectively you can learn how to create a sales funnel.
2. Capture Attention with Value
Your sales funnel will not be effective unless you attract potential customers to it. To grab their attention, provide something valuable. For instance, a restaurant could offer a coupon for a free dessert to customers who subscribe to its email newsletter.
Other ways of capturing attention include SEO strategies, social media posts, and customer referrals. A diversified sales funnel will employ multiple methods of attracting prospects.
3. Nurture Prospects with Content
It’s one thing to have the interest and desire to build a sales funnel for your small business; it’s entirely something else to design a conversion funnel that will attract potential customers and close deals. Once you’ve attracted customers with a valuable offer, where will they go?
One way of nurturing prospects with content is by building a landing page to which other marketing efforts can provide a link. There, customers can be offered engaging and useful blog posts, videos, and ebooks to further educate them on a brand, its products, and services. Another method of nurturing prospects with content is by establishing an email drip campaign, sending information to customers’ inboxes over time.
4. Encourage People to Take Action
Once you’ve added sales funnel stages to attract interest in your company, products, or services, it’s time to encourage prospects to take action. Continue your marketing efforts along the sales pipeline, attracting website visitors with a landing page and engaging blog posts, gently nudging prospects from the interest stage to the finish line.
Don’t assume your prospects will automatically make a purchasing decision based on the content you provide them. Be sure your content includes a clear call to action, asking for a sale or requesting a follow-up appointment.
5. Finalize the Deal and Keep in Touch
Your sales funnel doesn’t end with a call to action. Whether the sale occurs online or in a brick-and-mortar store, the final stage of the sales funnel occurs with the monetary transaction. Only then is the customer fully converted to a sale.
Of course, a successful sales process doesn’t just accept a customer’s cash and forget about them. It’s important to promote repeat business and retain hard-won customers. Keep in touch with clients along their customer journey, providing more content to encourage additional sales.
6. Optimize Your Sales Funnel
Just because you’ve built your sales funnel, that doesn’t mean the process is complete. It’s vital to continuously monitor your results and look for weak areas of the funnel where more prospects drop. Properly managing your sales funnel means optimizing it for continued improvement.
Unsure how to optimize your sales funnel? The following tips should help you along the way:
- Evaluate your content at each stage of the sales funnel. How is each piece performing, and how many prospects is the content capturing? If some content is performing worse than others, or if prospects are not clicking on the calls to action, it’s time to rework your marketing content.
- Review your landing page. Does the content mirror the offer that brought the customer there in the first place? Is there a call to action, and does the page collect prospects’ contact information?
- Compare the results of various offers to better understand what value is capturing customers’ attention and what isn’t attracting interest. How many purchases are resulting from various email and other marketing campaigns? If none of them are gaining momentum, it might be time to rework your sales funnel.
- Keep track of your customer retention rates. How many conversions lead to upsells, cross-sales, or repeat purchases? Are your existing customers recommending the small business to new customers? If the answer is no, it’s crucial to enhance communication with your current customers to improve retention, which is vital for success.
Best Sales Funnel Software
Still uncertain about how to create a sales funnel? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many small business owners look for help in crafting effective conversion funnels, and they utilize sales funnel software tools to assist them in designing, implementing, and optimizing the most effective sales and marketing funnels to enhance the buying process.
Looking for the best sales funnel builder? The following five software tools offer some of the best options when building effective sales funnels:
GetResponse
The all-in-one sales funnel software is popular because it offers a complete marketing solution, including assistance with everything from social media campaigns to landing pages to email automation. Users can even sell products through GetResponse or integrate the software with their existing e-commerce solution.
Pricing: $49 to $165 per month for 1,000 to 10,000 users
Kartra
Ideal for agencies, Kartra offers an all-in-one solution to optimize your sales cycle. This comprehensive software enables you to create a company’s sales model by providing tools for website and landing page creation, a CRM lead database, email marketing automation, opt-in forms, video hosting, live chat, and checkout forms.
Pricing: From $79 to $249 per year
Leadpages
Entrepreneurs can collect unlimited leads with the Leadpages sales funnel-building software. The popular unlimited plans let users build their own mobile responsive websites, landing pages, sales pages, and pop-ups using a simple drag-and-drop editor. While the software does not include email marketing tools, it’s also a less expensive option than many alternatives.
Pricing: From $37 to $321 per month
Systeme.io
The software offers a free plan with plenty of features, making it a popular sales funnel builder. Systeme.io helps users manage and automate their email campaigns, sell products, offer online courses to attract attention and gain credibility, and set up their own affiliate programs to boost their marketing efforts. The service even features a free sales funnel example template.
Pricing: Free for 2,000 contents, then $32 to $116 per month for more
ClickFunnels
Sale teams can manage their sales funnel process for unlimited contacts ClickFunnels software. The user-friendly tool is designed for small business owners with little to no coding knowledge, and it includes features like a landing page builder, a pop-up editor, and plenty of helpful sales funnel examples.
Pricing: $97 for unlimited contacts to $297 per month for unlimited everything
How much does it cost to build a sales marketing funnel?
An effective sales funnel can range from $30,000 to $50,000, as per the experts at Stashlr. This price varies based on the number of funnels, their functions, and the tools integrated within them. Alternatively, you can use sales funnel software to create your own sales funnel for under $100 a month.
How do you create sales funnel stages in Excel?
You can design your own sales funnel stages in Excel by using the popular software’s funnel chart. In fact, Excel users can create the built-in funnel chart in a few simple steps:
- Create a chart with a column for the funnel’s stages and a second column for the values.
- Highlight all the data.
- Open the “Insert” tab.
- Choose “Insert Waterfall, Funnel, Stock, Surface, or Radar Chart.”
- Select “Funnel.”
Image: Depositphotos
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