The truth is, turning visitors into customers is no easy task. With the growth of the internet, offers of all kinds proliferate on the market, many of which turn out to be deceptive schemes, which help to proliferate public fear.
WHAT IS A SALES FUNNEL?
A sales funnel is a digital marketing tool that aims to transform visitors into customers of your business, transporting them on a journey of several steps that allow you to acquire the knowledge and security necessary to buy products or services from your brand.
The funnel starts at the larger base, where the large audience of potential buyers is. As you advance, this audience narrows and reduces, becoming a more restricted group, very segmented and which translates into the largest and most interested potential buyers of your business’s products and/or services.
However, the sales funnel is not the same thing as the marketing funnel.
In a sales funnel, the objective is to get potential customers to go through different offers in order to increase their value as a customer, ensuring that the sales funnel is profitable both in terms of marketing and acquisition.
The Three Steps of the Sales Funnel
- Top of Funnel – All audiences
- Middle of Funnel – Potential customers
- Bottom of Funnel – Existing and New Customers
Regardless of the use of a sales funnel, all your customers will go through these 3 phases.
The key to success is delivering valuable content to your potential customers at each stage of the sales funnel. This will increase your sales volume.
- 87% of customers prefer to buy products from brands that offer them valuable content at every stage of the process;
- 63% of customers need to hear a company’s value proposition between 3 and 5 times before they can trust it;
- Leads with content make 47% more high-value conversions than leads without content.
THE MARKET
Nowadays there is a great convergence between online shopping and offline shopping. Customers search online to buy in a physical store, but there are also customers who search online, try in physical stores and go back online to make the purchase.
- 87% of shoppers start by searching the internet for products
- People spend about 5 hours a week shopping online
- $0.56 of every $1 spent in a store is influenced by an online interaction
Despite this, the worldwide conversion rate on online stores is 2.86%. And the worldwide lead conversion rate is 4.31%.
If 87% of purchases start online but only 3-4% convert online, that means the remaining percentage is consuming information.
And this is an essential point that will give you a huge competitive edge. Because with this information, you can make the best decisions from a marketing point of view.
SALES
Not all products are sold in the same way.
Products are distributed in 5 phases:
traffic, lead, frontend product, mid-funnel productand
backend product.
The only new customer acquisition phase is the front-end product, which as a rule is the lowest-priced, most affordable product that guarantees the entry of as many customers as possible into your business.
Product value ascendancy
The product value ladder concept aims to take your potential customer from the lead stage to the highest value product. In each of the stages, the potential customer will have the opportunity to ascend the ladder until buying the highest value product, being able to acquire several products along the way, increasing their value as a customer (lifetime value).
STEPS IN THE PRODUCT FUNNEL
1 | TRAFFIC
The first phase is bringing traffic from social media, websites and blogs into your sales funnel or content offer funnel.
At this stage, creating ads is critical, as they dramatically accelerate traffic generation and put your offer in front of thousands of potential customers. This phase involves optimizing ads, content, landing pages, etc.
But how can you know exactly who is the ideal person to attract into your sales funnel?
Dream Buyer Formula:
Pareto 80/20 principle = 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers
So the top 20% of the top 20% of total customers = 4%
4% of your customers generate 64% of your business revenue
These 4% are your dream buyers.
When we talk about building a Personna, we need to obtain the necessary information to correctly profile our ideal buyer. To help you, there are tools available on the internet for this purpose. Answer the Public, is a paid tool with a free version, which allows you to identify the questions people are asking online. Another indispensable tool for this type of analysis is Facebook Audience Insights, which allows you to understand who your audience is, what their interests are, demographics, relationships, etc.
2 | Content Offer
The second step of the product funnel is a content offer funnel. It is at this stage that high value products must be delivered, regardless of whether they are free or sold for a very low price.
On the lower rungs of the value ladder, the content offering can be an Ebook, a mini-course with an email sequence, or even product samples. It’s also important that you build audiences of people who aren’t interested in your content offering.
3 | Funnel Entry Product
The first paid product in your product funnel should be a front-end product, customer acquisition product, or entry-funnel product. This is your cheapest product of all and with the lowest associated risk for your customers.
After your potential customers accept your offer, you must send them to a sales page, presenting your premium offer. If you are able to keep the prospect’s attention and effectively communicate the true value of your offer, you already have a very interesting initial sales funnel.
A front-end product is an entry-level product that is intended to serve as a customer acquisition product. A front-end product serves as a product for acquiring new customers who can subsequently follow their path through your product value ladder and ultimately acquire the highest value products or services of your brand.
If you focus all your marketing on a very low value product, your efforts become much smaller as attracting new customers becomes a regular, daily and relatively simple process.
4 | Mid-Funnel Product
Arrived at the middle of the funnel, we have to present a progressively more valuable and intensive solution that help customers towards their highest value product or service. At this stage, you need to present an even higher value product that takes your customer to the next step.
5 | Bottom of funnel product
Your bottom-of-the-funnel product is your most valuable, intensive, and expensive product or service. It’s the crown jewel of your product value ladder. All the previous steps were taken with the hope of turning new customers into high-value customers for your company.
There is, however, no guarantee that your customers will move to the next level of value once they have tried everything you have offered in the initial stages.
The responsibility will always be yours and it involves convincing them that they have a lot to gain. Instead of offering them the most valuable product right away, what you want to do is keep them engaged with your brand for as long as possible.
You can, for example:
- Offer personalized content that allows them to get the most out of the product or service they are using
- To provide high quality service
- Gradually tap into the added value provided by your top tier service
- A community (Facebook group) where they can get involved
If you can continue to provide value to your customers – even those who have already purchased your products and/or services – they will be much more likely to trust your higher-value product offerings.
Different types of sales funnels
There are different types of sales funnels and lead generation on the market.
1 | Content Offer Funnel
The high-value content offer funnel is one of the most important in a strategy for converting leads into customers. It’s the best lead generation funnel out there and the simplest to operate.
The user enters the email list to download the content offer (an average conversion rate varies between 50-75% ) and receives an automatic sequence of emails programmed with various offers or discounts.
2 | Questionnaire Funnel
The Questionnaire Funnel aims to present different solutions for products or services, based on the answers given in the questionnaire by your leads. It’s an effective way to segment leads based on survey responses.
3| Product funnel
In a product funnel, the main objective is to turn leads into customers. The product funnel aims at direct marketing of the product. It is the most difficult and most used funnel for physical products, digital products and services.
4 | Webinar Funnel
The Webinar funnel aims to convert leads into customers of a product or service, through a launch strategy. It’s one of the best strategies for launching a digital product and filling available positions quickly.
The most important thing in this strategy is to work on the attendance rate of leads in the class, through a good email marketing strategy with content, and the possibility of repeating that same class.
5 | Application funnel
The application funnel aims to qualify leads through a complex application form for a program. Typically, this is a type of funnel used for high-value products, i.e. back-end and bottom-of-funnel products. Your highest value products should be worked from an application funnel.
Conclusion
A Sales Funnel is precisely what your business needs to start attracting more customers, completing more sales and making more profit. A Sales Funnel can step you in the right direction so your business can change and evolve overnight.
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