The Definitive Guide You Need to Boost Conversion Throughout Your Sales Funnel

Digital Marketing Indonesia, Digital Marketing Agency Indonesia

The Definitive Guide You Need to Boost Conversion Throughout Your Sales Funnel

Updated on: 17 September 2021

Digital Marketing Indonesia, Digital Marketing Agency Indonesia

Whatever you want to sell, whether online or offline, getting customers to buy it is going to take a lot of time and effort.

What happens when you set up a business is that the sales process goes through several stages. With consumers being more meticulous and competition getting fiercer nowadays, getting more customers to spend their hard-earned cash on your brand is no easy task.

If you’ve ever sold something in the past, you should know the feeling of offering a genuinely valuable product only to not get a lot of sales. The pain is magnified a thousand times when you’ve spent a lot of money on marketing and advertising with little to no return.

By now, you’re probably questioning yourself what you could have done differently or what you could have missed.

Businesses that have succeeded over the years only have this to say – create a sales funnel that’s proven to increase your sales conversion exponentially.

Defining what a sales funnel is

Before a visitor becomes a customer that buys from you, they will need to go through different steps first.

Picture this: people who walk by a brick-and-mortar shop are at the top of the sales funnel. Those that decide to walk into your store get to the next level of the funnel. A certain percentage of those who came inside your boutique checks out the racks on display levels up to the next step of the funnel. Once those prospective customers walk to the checkout counter goes to another level. After purchasing, those customers have reached the bottom of the funnel.

All prospective customers go through the same process in one way or the other, whether you have a physical store or an e-commerce site.

What makes a sales funnel important is that it illustrates the path prospects take. As a marketer, it is your responsibility to understand your sales funnel to ensure that you’ll be able to find loopholes that cause prospects to not continue to the last step of the funnel.

Understanding the 4 sales funnel stages

Imagine an inverted triangle as your sales funnel.

At the very top is where your prospects will be. As they move to the next level, the funnel becomes narrower. This is because some of the prospective buyers will drop out of the process at some point.

Use the acronym AIDA to remember the four stages of the sales funnel: AWARENESS, INTEREST, DECISION, and ACTION. All of these four stages represent your audience’s mindset. This means that every stage of the funnel requires a unique approach to ensure that prospective buyers will stay and continue until the final level of the sales funnel.

  • Awareness

The first step of the sales funnel is where you first grab people’s attention. This can be through a Facebook post, a tweet, a Google search result, or other digital marketing efforts. This is the step where prospects become aware of your business and what you are offering.

With the right messaging, you’ll be able to connect with those prospects, prompting them to take the next step of the funnel. In other words, this stage is like a courtship stage. You woo the prospects into engaging with your site.

  • Interest

When prospects reach this stage of the funnel, they are of have already researched your business. They are weighing their options and comparing between brands. This is your chance to convince them that you are the better option. You need to help them understand the incredible benefits of your product over the others, but don’t push it too far.

Pushing your product to the prospects while still at this stage can turn them off. What you need to do at this point is to establish your authority. Help them make an informed decision.

  • Decision

Once you’ve successfully persuaded a prospect, they will move down the next level of the sales funnel, which is DECISION. At this point, your prospect will be considering buying.

This is the perfect time for you to put your best foot forward. It could be offering free shipping, a discount code, or a freebie – it has to be something that most of your competitors don’t offer. Whatever added value you offer, make sure that it will be hard for the lead to resist it.

  • Action

This is the end of the sales funnel. This is where the prospective buyer acts, purchases your product or service, and becomes a part of your business’s ecosystem.

While this is the bottom of the funnel, your work isn’t done yet. You want to make sure that that customer returns to your site to make more purchases in the near future. In other words, you need to make your messaging focus on customer retention. You can do this by offering after-sales support (if applicable), encouraging feedback, and giving a special offer for purchasing from you.

Building a sales funnel: the basics

Now, that you know what a sales funnel is and how important it is for your business, it’s time you build your own.

1. Analyze your audience’s behavior.

Get to know your audience. The more you understand your target market’s behavior, the more you’ll be able to create a powerful sales funnel. Keep in mind that you’re not selling to everybody, but rather to those who are a good fit for what you are selling.

Find tools that will help you easily create user behavior reports that will help you figure out how your audience engages with your site.

Which pages do visitors usually go to? How much time do they spend on a certain page? Such data points can help you build and refine buyer personas.

2. Grab your visitors’ attention.

You’ll know your sales funnel is effective is if you are able to entice people into taking the first step of the funnel. This means that you need to get your content out there for your target audience to find you.

Make sure you create different types of content for different platforms. Use infographics, videos, blogs, stories, and more to lure different types of audiences. You should also run a few paid ads to target specific buyer personas.

3. Create a compelling landing page.

If you’re promoting a high-value product, something that provides a solution that fully satisfies a need or problem, you need to direct your prospects to a landing page. This will help you capture your leads’ interest more without pushing the sale. Additionally, a landing page will steer users toward taking the next step.

Keep in mind when creating a landing page that you need bold calls to action to direct prospects into taking the next desired action.

4. Formulate an email drip campaign.

An email drip campaign is an automated set of emails that are sent out with a specific timeline or user action. This allows you to stay in touch with your audience on a regular basis without pushing for a sale right away. A drip email comes from a queue of pre-written emails personalized with your subscribers’ names and other info.

The goal of an email drip campaign is to provide prospects the right information at the right time and to eventually lead them to complete the sales funnel.

5. Continue reaching out to your existing customers.

In an era where consumers demand personalization and connection with brands, it’s important that you stay in touch with your loyal customers. As a way of thanking them for their loyalty, you can offer exclusive discounts, coupons, and other offerings. You should also encourage them to follow you in your social media sphere to keep them in the loop with what’s happening with your brand.

Final words

It’s a competitive world out there and now is not the time to be lax with your marketing efforts. Take time to build a foolproof sales funnel that will help you achieve your marketing goals.