7 Easy Tips To Guarantee Your First Sales Funnel’s Success
You might wonder why there’s a funnel.
You’d think it is usually used in a laboratory and not specifically in sales.
Not that there’s any liquid to transfer in the marketing industry (unless you’re dealing with logistics)…
But the sales funnel is pertaining to the customer’s path when they first encounter your brand’s advertisement.
The first tier of the sales funnel gets the most customer attention.
As the customers go through the journey, their initial population decreases as they journey further.
This explains the shape of the sales funnel if drawn as a diagram.
As the quantity decreases, the customer quality increases. These customers are truly curious and about to make a purchase.
The smaller parts of the funnel refer to customers who have “converted” and have become advocates and “religiously” preaching your brand to other like-minded consumers in the form of referrals.
If you feel sales funnels sound good, then that positive mindset would be your springboard to success.
In fact, here are a few more advantages from using funnels.
Automation
Sales funnels are a one-time setup tool.
However, you have to make it correct the first time because if you do, you can free up more time on you or your sales department’s behalf to focus on other tasks.
In fact, it helps them create and juggle more funnels to give your brand better outreach and maximize its sales potential.
One great example is CrazyEgg’s sales funnel.
It doesn’t look like it wants to sell because it just asks a simple question: What’s making your visitors leave?
Its answer: it gives you access to a truly effective and quality tool in the form of a landing page heatmapper.
If you choose not to test the heatmapper, then you can scroll down the one-page website and check the tools available for its consumers.
Discount coupon retailer Groupon is another site that uses its landing page well despite the discount coupon industry’s saturation of service providers.
Their sales funnel has played a huge role bringing in customers.
It makes use of a homepage pop-up with different incentive offers such as huge discounts on first-time sign-ups
More Sales
If you position the right sign-up offers to initiate a positive consumer experience the right way, then you can generate more sales in the process.
Indeed, discounts take a small cut from your profits.
However, the increased number of customers looking through the content and offer on your website makes up for it in quantity.
The more fulfilled customers, the better outreach you can have.
Remember, happy customers who become brand advocates and raving fans bring in huge numbers of guaranteed sales.
The best thing about it? The customers do it automatically because they believe in your brand’s capabilities due to their consistent positive experience interacting with your business.
They also speed up your ROI for your sales funnels because they are repeat buyers.
In every chance they encounter a new acquaintance who had faced a similar dilemma your brand has resolved, they will recommend yours first.
Despite its seemingly-static appearance, sales funnels can do this efficiently.
Just set up your first funnel correctly, and you’ll see your sales figures and advocates grow!
Maximizes The Potential Of Your Offers
Your brand produces excellent results.
You know this through the product or service data you have collected during your “beta” or testing phase.
Your target customer sample responded positively to all trials including repeated ones.
With data-backed evidence, you definitely know your brand’s produce will surely sell.
However, you still see inconsistent sales figures.
You only see a small number of advocates with varying referrals.
If you think the sales funnel can fix this, you’re definitely on the right track.
The funnel cannot fix bad offers. It can only improve the sales performance of excellent products and services.
Take for example the rise and fall of “clickbait” content.
It has received its notorious name because it urges audiences to access the content due to its deliberately-misleading headline that focuses on urgency or incomplete content.
It grabs attention but fails to deliver its headline’s promise of something amazing, inspiring, or anything else that is provoking.
However, the idea behind clickbait headlines except for its exaggerations is applicable for sales funnels.
Telling your audience in an attention-grabbing manner that you promise your brand can deliver results for specific cases is not at all misleading if your brand’s produce, tried-and-tested multiple times, does deliver.
In turn, it maximizes the potential of your offers.
When To Launch a Sales Funnel
It does seem quite tempting to just jump into a sales funnel, plan it, and then execute it.
However, there’s one thing to consider: when should you develop your sales funnel?
Most specialists will tell you the best time is always as soon as possible.
However, they forget about the offer’s quality and timing the right implementation date.
As mentioned earlier, the offer’s high quality is its main selling point.
The funnel is only there to help generate attention and visibility for the brand.
People might not pay attention to offers despite its potential to become evergreen/industry-standard hallmarks.
However, a live launch, a little incentive here and there, being greatly and consistently informative about your offers, and the ability to review these offers later on will do wonders.
Doing such will grab your target audience’s attention, retain it, and enable them to consider purchasing offers because of their advantages.
If you are generating inconsistent sales but are receiving excellent reviews for the handful of sales you have made, then this is the perfect time to create a sales funnel.
Seven Ways To Guarantee Your First Funnel’s Success
Parts of the Sales Funnel
A sales funnel’s entrance is the widest.
This is because you are creating consumer awareness.
In fact, this is the name of the customer journey’s first stage.
In the awareness phase, an advertisement, search engine result, or any digital or televised medium had informed the consumer about your brand.
These audiences have decided to check on your digital channels including your website and social networks.
Once they are curious and convinced about the offer’s promised solutions in different cases, content that caters to these curious audiences’ situation will urge them further to make a purchase.
These readable or viewable materials that show them how the offers solve their current dilemma must be informative and excellently-produced.
The third level is conversion or the offer sale.
It is a crucial point because an excellent conversion rate returns your ROI quickly.
The audience is still trying to make up his or her mind about your product or service.
Serving content that iterates the usefulness and efficacy of your brand’s solutions on a case-per-case basis further can push the consumer make a purchase and continue down the funnel.
However, the sales funnel does not end when you make a sale.
A loyal customer who finds more uses and experiences continuous positive experiences from a brand including efficient resolutions for product troubles is valuable.
Providing after-sales content helps create more loyal customers.
In fact, if they find your offers truly useful, they will advocate and urge peers with similar issues to use your brand’s offers as solutions.
Because they are convinced of your problem-solving capability, they have full confidence that you will deliver the same experience for other people.
Now, if you can make sure each of these funnel aspects work in your favor, you need to do the following.
Raising More Awareness
The reason Google has a page loading and website optimization test is to ensure all the top-result websites offer an excellent user interface experience.
Indeed, you won’t spend more than a minute loading a sluggish website with poor navigation and content organization.
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, websites have 20-60 seconds to catch the attention and compel customers to read the content further.
What do these technicalities mean for raising awareness?
Improving your site load speed and navigation and offering high-quality informative content compels customers to read and engage your site.
The longer they stay on your website, the more they develop brand awareness.
The more content the reader consumes, the more they will consider buying your offer because of its proposed advantages.
However, raising awareness is not just about improving your page technicalities.
You can begin a social media campaign with a message crafted for your target audience.
In addition, you can offer a free tool on your home page to help viewers solve small issues or for easy content navigation.
Case-Specific Content
If longhand writing was vital to your occupation, then you would know the specific pen that can make your everyday job easier.
However, digital writers might not find it as compelling because they would rather look for a nifty and ergonomic keyboard.
Creating case-specific content is crucial.
They help you resolve specific situational customer issues through something as simple as written or video-recorded content.
Aside from your target audience’s general problems, position your product or service in situations where it can be of the best help.
For example, as a car wheel manufacturer, you can describe how rough terrain bursts open a typical road-only tire.
Then, you can give readers tips on efficiently patching up the wheel with common items to earn some mileage to reach the nearest car repair shop.
Lastly, you can then suggest your wheel’s efficiency that can help readers avoid the entire headache described in the content.
Concentrate on Informative Content
Informative content depends on your audience’s knowledge level.
If your product is an innovative, never-before-seen solution, then you need to let audiences know its capabilities and efficiency in resolving a problem.
Writing copy about it on a blog or through website article is not enough.
One way to create informative content is to create case studies.
For example, as an HVAC services specialist, you can document a home insulation project from one of your clients.
You can record the thermostat settings and the initial overall heating or cooling levels of the home. Make sure to describe each item and tool you used during the insulation process.
Then, let the data show the positive results from your case study.
Technical data is informative but can be difficult for a non-professional to understand. So break them down effectively into easy-to-understand instructions.
Other ways of doing so: cite studies conducted by similar companies; create a hypothetical solution to a common or trending problem relevant to your business.
Excellent After-Sales Support and Additional Content
Cited earlier, loyal and advocating customers make up a major chunk of your marketing efforts. Referral marketing still remains the strongest.
The best way to do this: handle complaints effectively.
If you need to invest on a dedicated support team, then do so.
There are plenty of opportunities to turn disappointing customer experiences into enriching and fulfilling ones.
According to Kissmetrics, if you make your customers feel heard and that “help is on the way” even if it isn’t, it helps with the entire situation.
You might dread getting brand complaints, but the truth is, it’s a gold mine.
You can use the most common consumer troubles and create a tips “listicle.”
These after-sales additional content can help resolve plenty of consumer issues. You can even add content that pertains to maximizing the capabilities of your offers.
Upsell and Downsell Opportunities
As you create loyal customers vouching for your brand, you can give them a token of appreciation.
These could come in the form of “VIP”-style add-ons that they can purchase to enhance their experience with your brand’s product or service. In this way, you can “upsell” to them a guaranteed positive experience.
However, in the entire sales funnel, you can maximize your conversion opportunities by offering a chance for consumers to upgrade or downgrade their orders.
For example, a customer has finally added your premium offer on their cart.
You can use a pop-up to inform them that if they purchase an upgrade on the same day, such as some crucial item parts that are sold separately, then they can receive bigger discounts.
A great downgrade opportunity is to show them the full potential of the package and upon checkout, show the option to minimize costs by removing certain features.
For example, cellular network services allow users to remove certain features from their phone line deals to reduce costs yet increase the chance of a favorable decision for both customer and service provider.
Improvements from Correct Data Interpretation
Sales funnels are automated customer-oriented facilities that create sales while you focus on expanding your business’ different areas.
They might appear static at first, but they can be improved as you analyze the information on their performance.
Funnel analytic platforms are plenty. Choose the one that best suits your funnel’s style while balancing costs and features; in some cases, you wouldn’t need all the features the platforms offer.
Conclusion
Analytic information allows you to create precise changes that positively affect the performance of your sales funnels if done efficiently.
Invest in experienced funnel data analysts to maximize the potential of your platform and funnel.
