Have you been struggling with the conversion rate in your online business or site? Your lead generation is perfect. You have a lot of visitors to your site but they are not converting into subscribers or paying customers. If you answered yes to this question, you need a sales funnel to improve your conversion rate.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a diagram that shows the process that your customers follow in the purchase process ending in conversion. It follows the AIDA theory of selling which states that a customer goes through four stages namely awareness, interest, desire and action. It is important to add satisfaction to this list and you’ll see why in the next section. The funnel shape indicates that only a percentage of your prospects convert into paying customers.
Importance of sales funnels
Did I congratulate you on your lead generation? Well done. This notwithstanding, you are still not seeing results. Why? You have only focused on one part of the sales funnel- lead generation and ignored lead nurturing. For example, you could have focused in raising awareness and forgotten to nurture a long-term relationship. Sales funnels are important as they ensure that you lead the prospect through the five stages from unawareness about your product to closing the sale. Skipping any stage means that you are losing potential customers. Not a good thing, right?
My Building an Effective Email List course will help you to not only grow your email list, but will ensure that you have a properly nurtured list that converts! Having a large email list means NOTHING if you don’t have a nurtured list that converts from subscribers to paying customers!
How do you create a sales funnel?
Building a sales funnel that works is not complicated. Here is a step by step ultimate beginner’s guide to creating a sales funnel.
-
Creating awareness
At the start of the purchase process, customers become aware of their needs. Your role is to create awareness about the existence of your product. Notably, your customer might not be aware of their needs but being aware of your brand might shine a spotlight on these needs.
So, how do you create awareness? The options are endless including your blog and sponsored ads. Your content on your landing pages must, however, leave a good first impression. You must also infuse SEO into your valuable content.
-
Gaining interest
Creating awareness begets a new problem. How will you get the prospect to become interested in buying your product? The prospects have reduced from the top of your sales funnel. The remaining ones have needs that might be met by your product or services.
You should begin by researching the prospect’s needs, frames of reference and likely objections. This is where you showcase your product’s ability to meet the prospect’s needs. Appeal to their emotions and their rationale. This strategy should be tailored to each prospect in your sales funnel.
-
Stimulating desire
Congratulations for gaining the attention of the prospect. Next, you have to kindle enough desire that the prospect wants to buy the product. Begin by handling objections as they determine whether you will proceed with the sale.
When you handle objections well, they can kindle desire by acting as a stimulus for conversion. For example, you might say, “now that we have cleared your doubt on the durability of the product, can we wrap it up?”
-
Inducing action
At this point, you have successfully taken the prospect from unawareness to a point where they are interested in your product’s match to their needs. Buying, however, is not automatic. This is because although the prospect might have the desire, they might not act on it.
This is where you capitalize on your nurtured lead to induce action. In a concession close, for example, you could give a final push by offering a discount associated with an immediate conversion.
-
Building satisfaction
Conversion is not the end of the sales funnel if you want it to work. You should follow- up on the customer to gauge on satisfaction. This could be a gateway to repeat sales.
