Pipsqueak Media

Understanding your sales funnels is a pivotal aspect of marketing and driving up sales.

A sales funnel is a way of planning and detailing how your target audience goes from product, service or brand discovery to becoming loyal paying customers. As such, underpinning your sales funnels is fundamental for developing a powerful marketing campaign that yields a high return on investment. Here’s what you need to know.

What are sales funnels?

Sales funnels is a term used in sales, marketing and business in general to describe customer journeys. It is a means of plotting how customers may transition from developing an awareness, recognising a need or desire to eventually becoming paying customers. So as the name indicates, they’re sales-orientated and grant a deeper understanding of the micro-conversions that occur.

Sales Funnels are structured in four stages – Awareness, Interest, Decision and Action (AIDA).

• Top of the Sales Funnel: Marketing strategies that attract prospects and pique interest. (e.g., Billboards, Pay-per-Click advertising and T.V. Adverts)

• Middle of the Sales Funnel: Encapsulates all elements of the sales cycle prior to reaching the point of purchase. (e.g., Browsing reviews, perusing blogs/vlogs and trying on clothes)

• Bottom of the Sales Funnel: The point of purchase (POS) stage where customers carry out a transaction.

So whether you’re selling products and services, wanting more subscribers or high-quality leads, mastering your sales funnel is a must. But why exactly are they so important?

Why are sales funnels so important?

Whether you trade online or from brick-and-mortar stores, sales funnels are essential for creating effective marketing and sales strategies. Using reliable market and consumer research, a well-constructed sales funnel allows marketers and salespeople to further their understanding of a prospect’s thinking, level of understanding and how much interest they have in your goods, services or brand.

Possessing this knowledge places you in a stronger position to serve relevant information through the right channel at the most opportune moment. This also lowers the risk of losing a prospect’s interest by helping you plan and pace your communication so you aren’t sounding too pushy or overloading them with information. Remember, the aim is to nurture a prospect’s interest so they feel comfortable and confident on their journey toward the final purchase.

How to build a high-powered sales funnel

A powerful and robust sales funnel is pivotal for forming and nurturing trust-infused relationships that drive prospects toward the point of sale. Although there is a number of ways to create sales funnels that converts, here are some of the steps you need to follow.

1. Create your landing pages

Be you arrange your advertising, make sure to create and get your landing pages in order first. Landing pages are usually the first priority for digital marketers because these are the first web pages that prospective customers land on after clicking a link or advert.

Landing pages are meant to pique a prospect’s interest and convey relevant formation about your goods, services or brand. The aim is to prompt prospects into performing some sort of action such as clicking a call-to-action (CTA). For example, a CTA could direct prospects to an online store or payment area.

To be effective, landing pages must clearly express information about your business and the unique positive attributes of your products and services. Landing pages are a crucial aspect of your sales funnel because they might be your only opportunity to convince and impress prospects. So ensuring the landing page contain high-quality compelling copy is of utmost importance.

2. Offer something valuable and enticing

Make sure that you are offering prospects something valuable to draw and retain their attention. If your goal is to get visitors signed up to your mailing list, consider offering them a free Ebook containing useful information in exchange for their email. This way they benefit from greater knowledge of your business, and you gain consent to send marketing messages.

3. Nurture the prospect

With the prospect interested in what you have to offer and given consent to receive marketing emails, be sure to maintain regular communications with them. This could involve newsletters, blog updates, social media content and any important notifications regarding your terms of service.

Aim for no more than 2 email marketing communications per week which are targeted, relevant and provide consistent value. Over-communicating and filling their inbox can become spammy and boring, leading to them unsubscribing.

4. Seal the deal

As prospects progress through each stage of the sales funnel, consider how you can seal the deal at the Point-of-Sale. Make an offer that your prospects will find irresistible. You try providing product demonstrations, free trials or limited-time discount codes.

5. Maintain the relationship

When prospects reach the Action stage of the sales funnel, they may either become paying customers or decide to abandon their purchase. Regardless of what they decide to do, maintain the relationship. Depending on the prospect’s decision, here’s what you can do:

• If the prospect converts and becomes a paying customer: Continue to nurture the relationship that exists so they’re more likely to become loyal return customers. Send out emails in forming them of other relevant products or services on offer. Share interesting news and notification so they’re frequently engaging with your brand.

• If the prospect decides not to make a purchase: If the prospect decides against the purchase or abandons their basket at the last moment, maintain communications through a personalised re-marketing campaign. The prospect may still be looking for more information, considering alternatives or got dragged away from their device – so there is still potential to convert them into customers. Using channels such as email and display advertising, prospects could be convinced of the merits of your offering.

6. Optimise for peak performance

Even though you’ve established an operational Sales Funnel, you now need to look for ways to optimise your performance. As with any area of marketing or business, it’s to review how well it’s performing and identify areas for improvement. Since consumer tastes and preferences often change over time, what works today may not be as effective tomorrow now established. Monitor and evaluate areas where prospectives progress from one stage of the funnel to another.

• Top of the sales funnel: How well is your advertising and marketing content performing? Is your content creating enough attention and intrigue amongst your target audience?

• Landing page effectiveness: As well as communicating information about your brand and the benefits of your offering, landing pages should be prompting visitors to perform an action. If not, consider whether prospects trust you with their information or believe in the benefits on offer. Using A/B Testing, evaluate the effectiveness of every part of your landing pages including headlines, images, copy and CTAs.

• Review the appeal of promotional offers: If you’re using any promotional offers to progress prospects into the Action stage, compare their results. Which offer garners greater attention and purchase intention from prospects. Does the promotion offer enough value in exchange for their money? Focus on the on most effective offer and use that to progress further sales.

• Keep track of your churn rate: Retaining customers is pivotal to the success of every business. For subscription-based companies, one important metric that can help identify how well you’re serving customers is Churn Rate. A high churn rate indicates customers are dissatisfied and abandoning your business. To calculate your churn rate take the customers lost at the end of a period, divided by total customers at the start of a period. Then multiply the resulting figure by 100.

Need help creating a powerful marketing campaign?

Marketing is an excellent way of getting your goods and services in front of consumers and enticing them to make a purchase. But for a marketing campaign to be successful it needs to target the right audience through the correct channel at the most opportune time and place. If you need help developing a marketing plan for your business or brand, give Pipsqueak Media a shout and get the bucks coming in.