Understanding where in your customer journey your customer sits is important for determining the right objective for your sales funnel. Delivering the right message at the right time for your sales funnel comes down to knowing the purchase intent of your customers: Navigational, Informational, and actively Shopping. Knowing where in the sales process your customers are and how to effectively track your funnel is key to a well-managed sales funnel.
Benefits Of Creating A Sales Funnel For Your Business
A Successful Sales Funnel Identifies Where In The Sales Process Your Customers Sits
The sales funnel is a tried-and-true marketing tool that can be used to identify where your customers are in the sales process.
The sales funnel typically consists of four stages: awareness, interest, consideration, and decision. You may have heard this framework mentioned before, AIDA, [Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action]
Understanding which stage of the sales funnel your customers are in can help you tailor your overall marketing objectives to better meet their needs.
For example, customers in the interest stage may need more information about your product before they are ready to make a purchase decision. On the other hand, customers who are already in the decision stage may just need a reminder about why your product is the best option. By understanding the sales funnel, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are focused on the right audience at the right time.
Sales Funnels Focus Your Content On One Of These 3 Areas: Navigational, Informational, Or Shopping
Not only do you need to be aware of the stage of the sales funnel your potential customers are in but the search intent of the customer.
Tracking the stage of the sales funnel process can tell you how aware or close to purchasing a visitor could be thus informing the objective of your campaign.
Deciding on the focus for your sales funnel will inform the message you should use for this objective. There are three focuses for your sales funnel.
Navigational Content - The prospect is looking for a specific result. For example, Amazon or Facebook.
Informational Content - The prospect is doing research on a particular topic. For example, "How are road bikes different than all-road bikes."
Shopping Content - The prospect is in-market for a product and is looking to buy, "Top 10 companies that make custom bikes."
As an example, we can use a bike company. Prospective customers know the problem a bicycle solves. However, they do not know about our bike! Our bike is custom-made for each rider from recycled materials.
To grow our business, our sales funnel begins targeting users in the awareness stage. So that we can begin creating a sales pipeline of customers who would be interested in custom bikes made from recycled materials. The objective for this campaign is to build up our re-marketing audience to run Facebook ads too.
These customers are in the awareness stage, our objective is awareness of our brand. The focus is informational with a message focused on differentiating ourselves from the competition.
To attract a broad range of customers, we decide to focus on an informational campaign. We don't choose navigational as most customers probably won't be searching our brand name as we get started and we may have other sales efforts focused on shopping campaigns. These, however; are separate from customers in the awareness stage.
Benefits Of Focusing Your Messaging
In addition to focusing your message in your sales funnels. Focusing on your message can:
Provide greater engagement with your audience
Increase the authenticity of your brand as you meet your customers where they are in their journey
Help avoid selling to customers who are not ready to buy or using the wrong message for the stage of the funnel they are in.
What Is Sales Funnel Management
A sales funnel is the process that companies use to move potential customers through the sales funnel stages. By understanding your objective and messaging customers correctly businesses can optimize their sales efforts to make more sales.
Every business needs at least one person who is responsible for managing the sales funnel. At each stage of the funnel, your business needs to take specific actions to optimize its chances of making a sale. This process is known as sales funnel management, and it can be a complex and time-consuming task.
However, by understanding the basics of the sales funnel, businesses can take steps to ensure that they are maximizing their chances of making a sale at every stage. In doing so, they can optimize their overall sales and improve their bottom line.
By efficiently managing your sales funnel, you can optimize your sales process to increase conversion rates and achieve desired results.
The Leaky Bucket: Where Are Your Customers Leaving Your Sales Funnel
Once you have a well-defined sales funnel in place the next step is to make sure that you are tracking your funnel metrics.
A common refrain at this point is to find where the hole in the leaky bucket is. This refers to finding where there is a drop-off in conversion.
Is your CTR low from ad to a landing page? This means creative or messaging is not connecting with your audience.
Are landing page visitors not taking the next step to add to cart or join your email list. Your messaging on the landing page is probably not matched with your ad or other marketing efforts.
Are people adding to cart and not purchasing? You may need more social proof or credibility to help push your target audience over the line.
One way to find these leaks is to use your ad platform manager to find CTR. Using something like Google Analytics can help you find where the drop-off happens on your site.
Go to behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages
Once on all pages, you can look up a page of interest and see your bounce rate and exit rate. You can also see a value associated with each visitor to this page.
This is helpful if you want to compare a page in one funnel to another page in another funnel to find out which page is more valuable to your business.
Last note when looking to optimize your site. Just because people drop out of your sales funnel doesn't mean they aren't the right customers. You may just need more time to convert these people. They may be at another stage awareness or Informational. Consider re-marketing to them or collecting their SMS.
Sales Funnel Stages: Connecting Your Sales And Marketing Teams
You know now the benefits of having a sales funnel that can deliver the proper message to the right target audience.
Now let's dive into some examples of funnels we can build at various sales funnel stages.
Wholesale: How A Good Marketing Funnel Can Connect You With Qualified Leads.
Problem
In this example, we run an energy drink company. This company is looking for wholesale opportunities to increase sales velocity.
To do this we design a sales funnel.
Solution
We design a landing page that delivers informational content to prospects in the interest stage. We have a video, previous and existing customers, testimonials, as well as additional content with messaging that promotes messaging around the features and benefits of our product.
At the end of the day, we are looking to collect sales leads in the form of email addresses of interested parties. We are tracking leads collected from this page to see what % of prospects drop off and % that continue to schedule a call with us.
In the sales stages, as the sales funnel narrows, we have our sales department track these new leads and compare our close rate results with these new leads verse qualified leads from other sources.
Below is an example of what the funnel could look like when expanded.
For Wholesale marketing and sales efforts make sure to treat your sales funnel exactly as you would any eComm effort.
Navigational Funnel: Create Brand Awareness Searching For A Specific Product Or Brand
Problem
In this example, we are running a clothing business. We have a few retail stores and decent revenue coming in from our online store.
However, we believe we are leaving revenue on the table by not focusing on customer retention at the bottom of the funnel.
Solution
To increase our customer retention rate we decide to create a sales funnel around collaborations we have with fellow designers.
We first offer this to our most loyal customers and opted-in customers via email or SMS to build customer loyalty and provide incentives for staying engaged with us.
We can also display this on our site so that anyone navigating to our brand name and coming to the site sees a banner directing them to our landing page promoting the collab.
We can do a similar thing with our socials by posting a link in our bio that points to our collab page. With this, any followers who navigate to our profile will see our collab announcement.
The goal of the collab page is to show a sneak peek of the product. If the collab partner is a well-known designer in the space we might feature the designer talking about the piece.
The CTA on this page should collect an email address or SMS number. We will use this to provide updates on the collab and build excitement leading up to the launch.
As the last step, we can create a list of anyone who touched or opted into our sales funnel. And target them on the day of or days before the launch with a Facebook ad.
For this sales funnel important to be sure and have your partner drive traffic both to the landing page pre as well as post-launch.
Informational: Sales Funnel For Those Looking For Information On A New Passion
Problem
For the next example, we have an online business that is in a highly-congested space. We are selling kitchen utensils.
Solution
There are many types of sales funnels you can build to bring awareness and interest to your brand. For this sales funnel though I'm going to use Youtube and google search.
Our objective is to capture a target audience who is interested in cooking and bring awareness to our brand. We do this by showing them new recipes on our Youtube channel and providing them with information on how to make that new recipe.
Bonus: Chop this same material up into smaller segments to be used on Tik Tok, IG story, and IG reels.
Once we have our Youtube video. You can use a transcription service to transcribe your Youtube video into text. With some modifications. you can use this content as your blog post.
We can measure success by the growth in our Youtube channel as well as the email list growth.
This sales funnel map is super easy...
Shopping: Actively In-Market To Buy A Problem And Searching For The Best Product To Meet Their Need
Problem
We own a bedsheets company and are attempting to reach those who have decided they need new bedsheets yesterday.
Solution
For those who are actively in-market and shopping for products, the best sales funnels are those that are centered on Google Shopping ads or Content.
We will focus on the content strategy. This bottom-of-the-funnel strategy focuses on reaching out to affiliates and bringing them on board to write content with us featured in it.
First, we will create a landing page with all the benefits of joining our affiliate program. This can include a percentage commission for each sale, and special newsletters informing them of the promotional calendar with a side benefit of building loyalty.
Once we have our affiliates we can have them feature us in a stand-alone article about why our bedsheets are the best. Or more likely feature us in their top 7 or top 10 bedsheets for X person. Where X is our target audience.
If we actively pursue new affiliates and reach out to those who are at the top of our desired search results. Over time we will be able to convert prospects who are in-market to buy bedsheets and increase our future customer list.
Sales Funnel Software
Looking for some tools to help you along your way and make your life easier. Below are some will know tools that I like.
Use Google Analytics To Track Conversion Rates On Page
We've touched on Google Analytics already, but this is by far my favorite tool. You can answer pretty much answer any question you may have about your online business. Don't know how to use GA. No worries ask GA your question and they can help you out.
There is also plenty of Youtube videos to help. If you haven't already. You can also schedule a call with me and I'd love to help you dive in.
Marketing Tools To Help Build Your Sales Funnel
Looking for a landing page builder for your sales funnel if you are using Shopify. I'd recommend using either Shogun or Pagefly.
If you are not using Shopify I would recommend using something like lead pages or ClickFunnels to build out your sales funnel.
Stand Alone Checkout Page Builder
I'd recommend using SamCart to build beautiful checkout pages.
Complete Review of Sales Funnel Tools
If you are looking for a thorough review of sales funnel tools I will be doing a thorough analysis of tools you can use in the future so be sure to join our newsletter to stay in the loop with future posts.
Final Notes On A Well Managed Sales Funnel
A well-managed sales funnel focuses on the right messaging for the right customer: Clear objectives based on where the customer is in the sales funnel, focused messaging based on the search intent of our target customers, and fixing of any whole in our leaky bucket.
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