7 Stages of a Sales Funnel

How to use a Sales Funnel Template to Guide Your Customers Towards Purchase.

Sales Funnel has become a popular marketing term in recent years. But what exactly is it, and how can it help you to guide your customers towards making a purchase to make your business more profitable?

The term Sales Funnel is used to describe the journey each customer goes through, from being identified as a potential lead (top of funnel) to landing on your sales page and making a purchase (bottom of funnel). The steps or stages they pass through on their customer journey is known as the sales funnel template.

From campaign to campaign, sales funnels can be incredibly simple or they can be extremely complex, and creating one is most often a job best left to a marketing professional. A well designed sales funnel will help you to identify leads, allocate a lead score, and ensure there is no lead leakage and every lead is properly worked by your sales team.

 

First Things First – What is a Sales Funnel?

We already mentioned it’s a journey. But let’s take a look at it in a bit more detail. Consider a Sales Funnel as a long form sales tool that maps every potential customer’s journey from the moment they start thinking they need something, to the moment they put in their credit card and buy it.

CRM systems are a great way to track consumer behaviour from stage to stage as they move down your funnel to the purchase point. The main factors that impact this are the line of business you’re in and the product you are selling, as well as your sales process and of course, the target audience you are working with.

And while we could make things very simple or very complicated, we’ll go for the middle ground and show you a sales funnel template with seven steps.

 

The Seven Sales Funnel Stages

Stage 1: Targeted Traffic

The long time rule of online selling is that more traffic should equal more sales. But as you probably already know, it’s not that simple.

Maybe you are already driving thousands of visitors to your long form sales page but they are bouncing off. Maybe your blog posts have a high readership, but are not converting visitors into paying customers? Maybe your PPC campaign has resulted in generating a lot of bad traffic that isn’t moving you even one point closer to increased sales and higher revenue growth?

If this is happening to you, then chances are you are not accurately targeting your ideal customer.

Any profitable small business knows you need to drive targeted traffic to your online asset to get paid. Targeted traffic are visitors that are actually interested in your product or service, and are more likely to buy it than other consumers.

To attract the right customers you need to understand your ideal customer’s needs and behaviours, and where such customers can be found. Ask yourself, what search engine do they use? Which influencers do they follow? This is the customer information you need to store in your crm platform so you can use attraction marketing to create a reason for them to visit your website.

Stage 2: The Landing Page

Once you are attracting targeted traffic, your next step is to guide them to an online asset. Please note you should never point traffic at your website homepage. This is because your homepage was not designed to convert leads into paying customers.

Instead, you should create a sales page (landing page) that is purpose built for selling your produce or service to your customers and draw visitors to a purchase decision. And because they have clicked on a clear call to action or cta button, they know exactly why they are there.

Stage 3: Conversion

Guiding visitors to your landing page may not be difficult, but trying to convert them into leads and customers is a whole other problem.

First, you need an attention-grabbing headline that will pique their interest and explain why your product or service is worth their time and why they should stick around. A headline is an instant message the will get them hooked, so they want to learn more.

Second, you want your copy to keep them hooked. Write copy that answers a common problem they might have. Speak directly to the reader, mentioning interesting or shocking statistics that support your case and tells a personal story that paints a picture in the reader’s mind.

Stage 4: Get Them to Love You

You can, in fact, make your visitors fall in love with your business and this is easier to do than you may think.

Remember the promise you made when you were getting them hooked? Well, delivering on that promise is how you can get them to love you. People that love you are known as evangelists or fans, and they will tell everyone in their sphere of influence about how you gave them exactly what they needed when they needed it.

And just like that, they become your devoted fans, ready to turned into paying customers again and again.

Evangelists are also great resources to tap into when looking to expand your marketing footprint. Survey them to get new small business ideas. Offer them free products in exchange for online reviews or testimonials. Create reasons to stay connected with them via events, product launches, factory tours and more.

Evangelists will love the attention, and will help you grow your business.

Stage 4: From Fan to Customer

Every sales funnel template has one simple goal – to make you money. This is known as closing, and is an artform that begins with your sales page.

Your sales page should be specifically designed to do one thing – separate your fans from their money.

Create your sales page with your ideal customer in mind, answering all of their Why, What, How, and Who questions, and clearly explain what your product actually is.

Show social proof with customer testimonials or reviews. The more social proof you can show, the more likely it will be that your fans will buy.

Last but not least, add a CTA button with a strong call to action. When they click on that button, you know that they are really engaging with you, and are demonstrating that they need or want your product or service.

Converting a fan into a customer is not easy. But if you have prepared them well, and answered all of their questions by the time they get to your call to action, they already know they need to buy.

Stage 5: Bring it Back

There is an old saying, Buyers are Liars, which really means people are known to back out of a sale at the last minute. In a sales funnel, that’s known as the CTA decision we mentioned above.

A customer will often abandon the cart just before payment, which can be really annoying. This is when you need to reassure them that buying is a good decision. People will abandon a sale for many reasons. But, even if they do, you can often bring them back to complete the purchase by using a paid retargeting campaign or by dropping them into an email drip campaign that reminds them they have not yet completed the sale.

Using a paid ad or an email campaign will show them you are following up on your promise, and will let them know you are still waiting to solve their problem. This lets them know you are worth doing business with.

Stage 6: Close!

The last step of the journey is to wrap everything up and make money. If you’ve played your cards right up until this point, closing the sale should be easy.

 

Wrapping Things Up

When all is said and done, a sales funnel is an absolute must when you are looking for potential customers because it will automatically weed out the tyre-kickers and time-wasters for you, so you don’t waste time, effort and funds chasing them for a sale.

If they are interested, they will move down your sales funnel easily, and turning them into customers that love you and your business will be easy.

Operating a sales funnel is not free, and takes a lot of consumer knowledge and marketing finesse. But it will be an investment that will likely make you money.

Which is why, unless you are absolutely certain you know what you are doing, you need a team of content marketers to do it for you. The team at Liquid Digital have many years of experience in boosting lead generation with a carefully crafted sales funnel to get new and repeat customers for our clients.

If you would like a sales funnel that converts, then get in touch. We are very happy to discuss your unique business needs.