Your sales funnel – also known as your revenue funnel or sales process – leads prospective customers through their buying journey.
A well designed and properly executed sales funnel has four stages: awareness, interest, decision, and action. And it helps a business to convert their leads into paying customers.
It’s important – and not easy – to build a great funnel. One that helps you identify the right buyer early, and makes buying your product a happy experience.
If you’re about to create your first sales funnel, this post will help you understand the different steps of building a sales funnel.
Image courtesy: Shane Barker
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How to build the best sales funnel
#1. Know Your Target Audience
You need to understand your target audience before you begin to create your sales funnel. Base your research on the following points:
- The problems they’re seeking solutions for
- The social media channels they use
- Things that interest them the most
- Things they find the most annoying about online shopping
#2. Build Your Buyer Personas
You can build different buyer personas targeting your marketing campaigns for the various segments of your customers. You can derive different and accurate buyer personas from research based on these questions:
- Why will they buy your product?
- What are the things that influence them into buying a product?
- How are they going to use the product after purchasing it?
#3. Plan on Generating Traffic
If people are not aware of the products you sell, there will be no sale. Therefore, you need to adopt different lead generation strategies to drive users to your website. You can adopt the following measures for this purpose:
#4. Plan on Engaging Your Audience
Your lead generation efforts won’t be enough on their own if you fail to engage your audience. They need to learn about your product and services, and this goal can be achieved with the help of the following strategies:
- Creating engaging and high-quality blogs
- Creating interesting videos
- Involving influencers and requesting that they review and offer tutorials of your products
- Promoting your content on social media platforms
- Conducting email marketing campaigns to promote your latest blog posts and sending newsletters
#5. Convert Your Leads
Lead conversion is the final stage of the process during which the visitors convert into paying customers. Ensure that completing a purchase does not take too long by:
- Minimizing the number of form fields
- Lesser number of steps for completing a purchase
- One-click options for sign-in and sign up
If you want to learn more about creating sales funnels, have a look at the gifographic above, which explains it in more detail.
