Thomas Griffin July 3, 2021 Although it’s essential for every business to have a website, a static website isn’t enough to help your business survive.
It’s critical to think in a different way. When creating your online presence, you need to approach it from the point of view of creating a sales funnel.
A website and sales funnel are two different things. Although your website plays a crucial role in setting up and facilitating your sales funnel.
Websites are static. They hold information for your audience. But unless you leverage it correctly, it won’t automatically lead to sales.
Let’s look at what a sales funnel is and how to build one. When you develop your online presence by focusing on the overall process that leads to sales, you’ll create your website in the right way and grow your business fast.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a journey. It’s a journey that begins when customers learn that your business exists for the first time right until they buy from you. Often, the journey continues as customers contact you for support or buy more.
A sales funnel consists of certain commonly accepted steps that include:
Awareness: At this stage, the customer learns about your business through some means. It could be that they clicked on your paid ad campaign or through an organic search result when they typed something specific.
Interest: Here, customers register an interest in what you have to offer. If your product fulfills a need for them or creates a desire for your product, then they’ll continue to engage with your business.
Decision: Once a customer believes that your company and product can be of use to them, they’ll start to dig deeper. At this stage, they’ll look for detailed information and will also compare offerings across different brands.
Action: Your potential customer is at the point where they’re ready to take action. Once they’ve completed their purchase, they’ve moved through the sales funnel and you’ll know that your process is working successfully.
Creating your first sales funnel
Building your first sales funnel can be a tricky process for someone who’s new to it. But the important thing is to get started and to lay down the foundations of the entire funnel.
Over time, you’ll be able to refine your funnel, learn from your mistakes, get feedback and improve conversions.
Here are the basic steps to build your first funnel.
Reach out to your audience
Creating awareness of your brand is the starting point of the sales funnel. This is a topic that deserves a post of its own but chances are that you’re already building awareness of your brand in the following ways:
- Creating blog posts
- Placing ads online
- Sharing social media content
- Hosting giveaways
- Creating physical ads in the form of posters, newspaper ads, and more
At this stage, the more people you can reach out to, the more you can convert to create sales. Focus on what works best for you, whether it’s creating tutorials on YouTube, hosting webinars, or making social media ads.
Create a landing page
A landing page forms the first significant point of contact for many marketing campaigns. It’s the page where people arrive once they click on an ad, a social media post, or if they sign up for a lead magnet.
To make a high-converting landing page, you’ll need the following:
- A compelling headline
- A hero image that captures people’s attention as well as other high-quality images
- Excellent copywriting
- Calls to action
- And a sense of urgency in your content that gets people eager to sign up
It’s important to use a good landing page tool. You’ll be able to set up a great page using pre-existing templates that are proven to work.
Offer value
One of the little-known rules of online marketing success is to give as much as you can before expecting something in return from your audience.
One reason is that it invokes the desire to reciprocate in your audience when you give them content or offer them free gifts, products, or other things.
To generate interest in your business and to stay in touch with your audience, it’s important to add lead magnets to your landing page. Gifts like white papers, discounts, free videos, a checklist, and other items give you a chance to educate people on your brand and product.
You’ll also build an email list that allows you to contact people directly.
As you send newsletters to leads, you’ll also nurture them and keep your business at the top of their minds.
Offer additional value
Some customers get stuck at the price point. To induce customers to take action at the final stages of the sales funnel, you need to showcase additional value.
Here are a few suggestions for ways to create added value:
- Offer a related product for free or at a discounted price. Upselling other products at the purchasing stage is a great way to increase sales
- Give customers free educational and training content
- Create an online community that only paying customers can join
When you add more value to a purchase, it’ll create a compelling reason for them to buy. Adding a time-based discount or deal will also help you see quick responses from leads.
Re-engage customers
Some portion of customers who’ve made it all the way down to the decision and action stage won’t go forward.
For these customers, you need to re-engage them using a custom drip campaign or by nurturing them for a longer time.
Careful re-engagement and the offer of a discount will convert more customers to create more sales.
Over to you
With the steps outlined above, you won’t just have a static website, you’ll build an entire process that encourages users to buy from you.
As you build your sales funnel, make sure to check your analytics and continue refining your content, offerings, and other elements. With a dynamic sales funnel, you’ll build a successful business that supports itself.
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