A sales funnel is a business tactic that helps enterprises to expand and boost sales. When you build a sales funnel or sales pipeline management for your probable prospects, you set the foundation for a profitable business connection with them. People don’t just buy products from a familiar brand, but instead, notice the whole website before proceeding with the purchase.
In this blog, you will find everything to know about the sales funnel.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a proven-to-work marketing strategy modeled to define how probable prospects turn into leads and further become loyal customers. The funnel gets narrower as buyers get closer and more inclined to initiate a purchase.
At the top level of the funnel, the user has no idea about your brand and is like raw clay, ready to mold. The buyer accidentally visits your website or social media pages and shows interest in your products. It’s your task to grab the attention of the visitor.
If you are successful in impressing the visitors with your products, they will then compare them with your competitors and check feedback and third party reviews. They will also check with their social circle before finalizing the purchase.
Then comes the final decision-making part. Your prospect weighs the advantages and disadvantages of your product or service as compared to others. The result decides the conversion into a loyal customer or otherwise.
Source: entrepreneur.com
Sales Funnel Process: How to Do It?
A sales funnel is a customized business strategy designed as per the needs of the enterprise. It traces out your trading strategy based on the sales funnel and customers’ decision-making behavior.
You can compile data from the initial phase to understand the basics of consumer behavior. Google Analytics and CRM software serve best for data compilation; they are easy to use and require no processing cost.
The sole objective of sales pipeline management is to sum up data that can demonstrate user behavior and build a connection with the customers.
- Insight
To create awareness about your brand, use Facebook, and other social networking sites. Put up ads, publish interesting write-ups, optimize the content for SEO.
- Interest
Invite your prospects to sign up for your website’s newsletter. Develop and distribute a lead magnet.
- Initiate
Send attractive discount vouchers, bounties, and coupons to the prospects. It will initiate the purchase process.
- Action
Suggest related products to cross-sell.
5 Ways to Develop a Sales Funnel from Scratch
To build an effective sales funnel in CRM, you need some testing and forecasting. This will help you get a proper insight into what has worked for other brands in the past years.
Here are ten simple tips to build an efficient sales funnel that will help you expand your business.
Build a Productive Lead Magnet
A lead magnet authorizes you to incentivize sign-ups to compile more leads for your enterprise. The sales funnel opens with a wide brim and needs as many leads to advance into further steps. This is especially important because not all leads convert into a sale.
A majority of people won’t give away their email address until it has something for them. You cannot blame customers as most of them receive countless emails every day. Normally, people don’t like an overcrowded inbox.
To build a productive lead magnet, here are two questions that can help you gain clarity.
- What does your audience prefer?
A lead magnet needs a lot of planning and testing before execution. Find out your audience’s desires, needs, and pain points. Watch out the requirements and interests. Make a strategy to solve your client’s requirements and problems. You can use Open Source CRM software to analyze your own interaction history.
- Look up to your competitors
Spying on your contemporaries always helps to get an insight into past marketing strategies. Try to figure out the marketing strategies of others in order to stay ahead. Check out their lead magnets to know their core offer. You can always get inspired by others’ work.
Endorse Your Lead Magnet
As you move further, a value-packed lead magnet needs to be endorsed. Otherwise, how will consumers know about it?
Create a top bar for every web page, except the signup porter. Make sure to create two versions of the top bar for A/B testing. You can even operate A/B tests for fonts, headlines, colors, and more.
Automated Email Drip Campaigns
Email creation is just the stepping stone to building an efficient sales funnel. You have to start your sales communication journey from the first day itself. To make your prospects comfortable with the brand, email drip campaigns serve the best.
Email drip campaigns propose a standard opportunity to sustain daily interaction with your prospects. A drip campaign generally refers to a pre-written set of email content sending out to consumers on a usual schedule.
P.S. Test various time frames and see what works the best for your business. To begin, send emails on a weekly basis and then escalate your time frame.
- Why is nurturing important in your conversion funnel?
Drip campaigns, Google ads, Facebook ads are all part of the lead nurturing process. You have to take care of the smallest things to yield high conversion. However, this does not mean you have to spend a lot of time on it, overdoing can cause casualties.
- How to compose a content plan for your sales funnel?
You require expert level copywriting skills to sustain in today’s business realm. Content is the best way to approach the right audience, it is accessible and requires less time to target.
You can publish your content on blogs and social networking sites instead of emails. Both emails and blogs are great ways to target probable prospects.
Provide Valuable Content and Suggest the Core Offer
Interactive content works like magic and a comprehensive CRM software makes your content interesting. Forceful endorsement becomes a very bad idea if not strategized according to the consumers’ requirements.
Imagine walking down the street to buy milk. As you enter, a salesperson forces you to buy juice and leads you to the cash counter and pressurizes you to pay for it when you don’t even want it in the first place.
This is not the kind of user experience your customers want. You cannot force an idea on someone because the marketing industry is all about impressing people.
Introduce your core offer but don’t use palatable language. Focus on creating awareness so that your subscribers and audience can get all your latest updates.
Launch Your Core Offer Post-warming-up Sessions
You have already informed the audience earlier, now is the time to make the pitch. It should be crisp, apt, and a source of valuable information.
Consider you are selling health supplements, so your email content should include a short description and reason to initiate a purchase. Try to make your customer feel like geniuses post-purchase. This will expand your business and earn you some loyal clients.
Conclusion
If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, CRM software and a sales funnel strategy are indispensable. A good sales funnel will lead to a higher conversion rate.
Sales funnels are created based on the prospect’s marketing behavior. As you explore the market, you will understand what strategies will work the best.