How to create a sales funnel

Every customer goes on a journey to find you. And your goal, as an entrepreneur and a business owner, is to make their journey as short and as lucrative as possible.

In sales and business, this journey is called the sales funnel, and it occurs even without your input.

However, just because the sales funnel occurs naturally doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything to optimize it.

In this article, we’re going to show you how to create a sales funnel.

Let’s take a look!

A sales funnel (also known as the sales process, purchase funnel, and marketing funnel) is a sales model that illustrates all the things your prospects do on their way to becoming your customers.

Let’s consider a traditional example:

You’re walking down the street when a shop display catches your eye. You come in, and spot the sweater you need immediately. The shop assistant tells you it’s on sale, and you go whip out your credit card immediately.

Congratulations: you’ve successfully navigated through the sales funnel!

Every action you took and everything the business owner did to motivate your purchase is a part of that sales funnel.

In reality, the term sales funnel is used to describe all the steps your potential customers take that will or won’t make them paying customers.

A sales funnel consists of four basic stages:

In the awareness phase, your potential customers are called visitors. In the interest phase, leads (as they have shown interest). In the desire phase, they’re prospects.

And finally, in the action phase, prospects take action to transform into customers.

When we talk about sales funnels, we’ll often use the term “conversion.”

Conversion can pertain to conversion between stages – when a lead becomes a prospect, and so forth.

However, conversion can also pertain to the ultimate phase: the moment when a prospect turns into a customer.

In order to win that ultimate conversion, you and your potential customers must first travel through the funnel stages. And every stage is different.

In the awareness stage, your customers are vaguely aware of your offer.

They might have seen an ad, or they’ve googled a particular search term that you rank highly for. Consider this stage to be their first point of contact with you and your brand.

For example, if you have an eCommerce site, the meaning of the awareness phase, here in this eCommerce sales funnel, would be to bring people looking for products you sell to your website.

Once they land on your website, you have to leave a good first impression.

The goal of this phase is reaching the right audience and capturing their attention. You want to find people who have problems your product can solve.

At the end of this phase, you should capture the qualified visitors’ information so you can advance them through the rest of your funnel.

This is typically done through lead magnets (e.g. eBook downloads, discount codes) and landing pages where you’ll obtain their email addresses.

In the interest stage, you provide your leads with content that makes the product even more relevant to their needs and lives.

This is where you’ll nurture leads into becoming prospects.

It’s typically done through email campaigns.

You’ll show them the value of your product through a combination of personal stories about your brand, testimonials, and even blog content.

The best possible option is to show them testimonials from people just like them.

The goal of this phase is to solidify the interest of your leads. You want them to be sure that your product is the right fit for their needs.

When your leads are sure that your product fits their needs, it’s time to pitch and make the sale.

You can retarget leads and visitors with paid advertising. You can use highly-specific customer testimonials. Or you can offer them a discount or a special, time-limited offer.

If you’ve provided your customers with enough value throughout the previous stages and they’ve made multiple micro-commitments, it’ll be much easier to convert them at this stage.

At last, we come to the action stage.

This is where your prospects follow through with a purchase.

Sometimes, entrepreneurs are shy to invest into their funnels. However, once you’ve tweaked and optimized them, you’ll get a lot of return on investment.

So if you find that retargeting works better than email sequences, calculate the costs and the revenue, and go bravely forward.

It also pays to keep emailing your customers to make sure you retain them and even win referral traffic.

Word of mouth is still one of the best marketing methods. Incorporate it into your sales funnel.

And now that you know all the basic sales funnel concepts, it’s time to create your very own sales funnel.

After you’ve gathered all the information you need to understand your customers’ journeys, it’s time to create your sales funnel structure.

First, decide on the primary channels you’ll be using for each stage.

For example, some companies target their potential customers in the awareness phase with social media ads.

Those ads then lead to landing pages where they capture their contact information with lead magnets and lead gen forms.

Then, they proceed to email marketing in the decision stage, ultimately giving prospects an offer they can’t refuse.

The second step is to chart out the predicted progression and interaction:

It’s best to do as many things on as few platforms as possible.

So if you have a blog for SEO (incredibly important in the awareness and interest phases), you’ll want to set up your email marketing accordingly.

Making different apps work for your sales funnel is easy with Systeme.io.

With Systeme.io, you’ll be able to set up effective sales funnels in a few clicks:

The two stages of your sales funnel that you’ll promote the most will be awareness and interest.

We’ve found that the following methods work best for getting your business up and running as soon as possible:

You’ve probably noticed how much we rave about email marketing.

In reality, it’s because it’s one of the most powerful ways to turn visitors into customers. On average, you’ll get $32 for every $1 you spend on email marketing.

It’s more than worth it.

You can also setup targeted outbound email sales pipelines

Get more customers with email marketing by:

Finally, one of the perks of Systeme.io is that you can set up your sales funnel and forget it.

However, if you want to maximize the amount of conversions you’re getting, you can use a few tricks:

Finally, some of the simplest sales funnel metrics you can use are: