The sales funnel remains a critical aspect of the sales pipeline and takes a prospect from their initial contact with a company to their conversion into a paying customer.
Understanding what a sales funnel is and the different sales funnel stages is key for a sales team to create an effective conversion funnel as described in this article. With this knowledge, small business owners are ready to design their own sales funnels that increase sales and increase profits.
How to build a sales funnel for your business
Will an effective sales funnel help your small business convert more customers and close more deals? Have you learned the four stages of a sales funnel and viewed various sales funnel examples, and are you now ready to build a sales funnel for your business?
The following steps will help you create the right sales funnel to support your marketing strategy:
1. Gather information about your target market
Data is key to understanding your potential customers, and the first step to creating an effective marketing funnel is gathering information about your current customers and target audience. What interests your existing paying customers and what attracts them to your brand?
Conduct competitive research to better understand why potential customers prefer other brands. The more information you gather about your target market, the more effectively you can learn how to create a sales funnel.
2. Grab attention with value
Your sales funnel will not be effective until you attract potential customers to it. Offer something of value to grab their attention. For example, a restaurant might offer a coupon for a free dessert to customers who subscribe to an email newsletter.
Other ways to get noticed include SEO strategies, social media posts, and customer referrals. A multifaceted sales funnel will use multiple methods to attract prospects.
3. Nurture prospects with content
Having the interest and desire to build a sales funnel for your small business is one thing; designing a conversion funnel that will attract leads and close deals is quite another. After attracting customers with a value proposition, where will they go?
One way to nurture prospects with content is to create a landing page that other marketing efforts can provide a link to. There, attractive and useful blog posts, videos and e-books can be offered to provide customers with additional information about the brand, its products and services. Another way to nurture prospects with content is to create an email drip campaign, sending information to customers’ inboxes over time.
4. Encourage people to take action
Once you’ve added sales funnel stages to generate interest in your company, products, or services, it’s time to encourage prospects to take action. Continue your marketing efforts along the sales funnel, engaging website visitors with a landing page and engaging blog posts, gently driving prospects from the interest stage to the finish line.
Don’t assume that your prospects will automatically make a purchase decision based on the content you present them with. Make sure your content has a clear call-to-action, sales request, or follow-up meeting request.
5. Complete the deal and contact
Your sales funnel doesn’t end with a call to action. Whether the sale happens online or in a brick-and-mortar store, the final stage of the sales funnel happens with a cash transaction. Only then does the customer fully convert into a sale.
Of course, a successful sales process doesn’t just accept the customer’s cash and forget about them. It is important to encourage repeat business and retain hard-won customers. Engage with customers throughout their customer journey, provide more content to drive upsells.
6. Optimize your sales funnel
Just because you’ve built your sales funnel doesn’t mean the process is complete. It is crucial to continuously monitor your results and look for weak areas of the funnel where more prospects fall. Managing your sales funnel properly means optimizing it for continuous improvement.
Not sure how to optimize your sales funnel? The following tips should help you along the way:
- Evaluate your content at every stage of the sales funnel. How is each piece performing and how many prospects is the content attracting? If some content is performing worse than others or prospects aren’t clicking on calls to action, it’s time to rework your marketing content.
- Review your landing page. Does the content reflect the proposition that brought the customer there in the first place? Is there a call to action and does the page collect contact information from prospects?
- Compare the results of different offers to better understand what value attracts customers’ attention and what doesn’t. How many purchases result from various email and other marketing campaigns? If none of them are gaining momentum, it may be time to rework your sales funnel.
- Track customer retention rates. How many conversions lead to upsells, cross-sells, or repeat purchases? Are your existing customers recommending the small business to new customers? If the answer is no, it’s critical to strengthen communication with your current customers to increase retention, which is critical to success.
The best sales funnel software
Still unsure of how to build a sales funnel? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many small business owners seek help in developing effective conversion funnels and use sales funnel software tools to help them design, implement and optimize the most effective sales and marketing funnels to improve the buying process.
Looking for the best sales funnel builder? The following five software tools offer some of the best options when building effective sales funnels:
GetResponse
All-in-one sales funnel software is popular because it offers a complete marketing solution, including help with everything from social media campaigns to landing pages to email automation. Users can even sell products through GetResponse or integrate the software with an existing e-commerce solution.
Price: $49-$165 per month for 1000-10000 users
Kartra
Ideal for agencies, Kartra offers an all-in-one solution to optimize your sales cycle. This comprehensive software allows you to create a company sales model by providing website and landing page creation tools, CRM lead database, email marketing automation, opt-in forms, video hosting, live chat and payment forms.
Price: $79 to $249 per year
Leading pages
Entrepreneurs can collect unlimited leads with Leadpages sales funnel building software. The popular unlimited plans allow users to create their own mobile responsive websites, landing pages, sales pages and pop-ups using a simple drag and drop editor. Although the program does not include email marketing tools, it is a cheaper option than many alternatives.
Price: From $37 to $321 per month
Systeme.io
The software offers a free plan with many features, which makes it a popular sales funnel builder. Systeme.io helps users manage and automate email campaigns, sell products, offer online courses to gain traction and credibility, and build their own affiliate programs to boost their marketing efforts. The service even provides a free sample sales funnel template.
Price: Free for 2,000 pieces of content, $32-$116 per month for more
ClickFunnels
Sales teams can manage the sales funnel process for ClickFunnels software for unlimited communication. The user-friendly tool is designed for small business owners with little or no coding knowledge, and it includes features like a landing page builder, a pop-up editor, and lots of useful sales funnel examples.
Price: $97 for unlimited data, $297 per month for unlimited everything
How much does it cost to build a sales marketing funnel?
According to Stashlr experts, an effective sales funnel can cost anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000. This price varies according to the number of funnels, their functions and the tools integrated into them. Alternatively, you can use sales funnel software to create your own sales funnel for under $100 per month.
How do you create sales funnel stages in Excel?
You can design your own sales funnel stages in Excel using a popular software funnel spreadsheet. In fact, Excel users can create an inline funnel chart in a few simple steps:
- Create a chart with a column for funnel stages and a second column for values.
- Highlight all information.
- Open the “Insert” tab.
- Select “Insert Waterfall, Funnel, Stock, Surface or Radar Chart”.
- Select “Funnel”.
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