A Simple 2-Step Guide to Writing Sales Funnel Copy that Sells

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Are you looking to learn how to write compelling copy for your own or someone else’s sales funnel?

A well-written sales funnel can be an automated selling machine that operates nonstop for your business, even when you're sleeping or on vacation.

Who wouldn’t want that for their online business?

Here's a quick 2-step guide to writing sales funnel copy that sells.

Let’s get started!

What is sales funnel copywriting?

We’ve got 2 keywords that need to be explained here:

1. Sales funnels

Think of them as visual representations of the customers’ buyer’s journey, a step-by-step process of how prospects move through all the sales funnel stages — from the first exposure all the way to the final sale.

A typical buyer’s journey looks a little something like this:

2. Copywriting

This is the process of writing compelling copy on your web pages that encourages the readers to take action — usually a purchase decision.

Sales funnel copywriting is the process of writing captivating sales copy that’ll smoothly guide each of your prospects through the customer journey.

The primary goal of your sales funnel copywriting process is to write a sales copy that’ll interest your target market and push them to engage with your business.

This engagement comes in 2 forms depending on context:

The visitor subscribes to your list
The visitor buys a service/product you’re offering

After reading this article, you should have a good understanding of how to write compelling copy and get more leads and sales for your business.

But before we cover how to write copy, you need to understand how sales funnels work.

Or else, how are you going to know when to adjust your sales copy based on the condition of your leads?

The 5 stages of a sales funnel

Awareness

This is the first stage of your sales funnel. It’s where prospects become aware of your product or service for the very first time.

Awareness typically happens through:

An advertisement that prospects find on social media
Reading a blog post
Finding your website via Google
Recommendations from your existing customers

The main purpose of this stage is to pull as many prospects as possible into the top of your sales funnel.

Interest

So, you’ve managed to grab your customer’s attention. Now, it’s time to keep them interested and engaged.

At this stage, prospects are generally busy researching your product or business.

They might even have a look at other products you offer.

As a result, your content and copy should be super compelling!

However, you’re not trying to close them just yet; rather, you’re simply informing prospects to drive interest.

There are a few ways prospects can show interest:

Provide an email address in exchange for a free digital product
Follow you on social media
Sign up for a free trial
Ask to learn more about the product or service you offer

Basically, this stage acts as a qualifier — it ensures that the leads in your funnel have a high probability of converting into customers.

Decision

To buy or not to buy.

In the decision stage, potential customers need to decide whether they’ll be making the purchase or not.

Ideally, you want your sales copy to lead prospects to the next part of the funnel, which is to make a purchase decision. To help them decide, you can:

Drive one specific action
Ensure your copy is concise and packed with value
Use engaging language and don’t make it complicated
Prioritize the benefits of your product
Address any concerns they may have

Armed with information about your product, prospects are now ready to complete the purchase.

Action

All your hard work has come down to this stage — will the prospect complete the purchase or not?

At this stage, you need to ensure a smooth transaction experience. In fact, research shows that 70% of users abandon shopping carts due to a poor checkout experience.

Here are a few ways you can keep your customers happy during this stage:

Present well-written content
Ensure your website's loading time is quick
Include clear instructions on your order forms
Mention the exact details of the offer
Ensure your site is compatible with all devices
Include social proof, such as reviews from existing customers
Add a “contact us” and “frequently asked questions” sections
Offer free shipping (if possible)
Allow customers to save their cart, and allow guest checkout

If you get this step right — congratulations — you have successfully converted leads into paying customers!

In the case where the customer didn’t complete the purchase, all hope isn’t lost.

You can create nurture campaigns and guide prospects into a satisfying and fruitful relationship with your business for future sales.

After the sale is completed, there’s one final stage left — retention.

Retention

Retaining customers is a long-term strategy to keep your customers coming back for more!

Here are a few strategies you can implement to retain customers:

Optimize customer experience
Thank customers after a purchase
Build a relationship using social media, emails, and posts
Offer discounts or a limited-time sale
Surprise loyal customers with gifts
Ensure you have a friendly and competent customer support team
Run a rewards program

Maintaining a relationship with your customers will assure them that you haven't abandoned them after receiving their money, that you are accessible, and that you can address any questions they may have.

This will increase their loyalty and trust in you and your business, causing them to buy from you again and possibly even tell others about your business.

Each sales funnel stage, from creating initial awareness to supporting new customers, brings its unique challenges.

But why exactly is it important for you to understand all the different sales funnel stages?

Because each stage of your sales funnel requires a specific kind of sales funnel copywriting.

Writing compelling copy for sales funnels involves using words that:

Elicits a reaction from the reader
Advance potential customers based on where they are in the funnel right now
Ask them for their information such as email addresses
Will help them develop into devoted, long-term customers

Let's now explore in greater detail how copywriting might be applied at various points throughout your sales funnel.

The 2 steps to writing compelling sales funnel copy

Sales funnel copywriting is complex — The key is not to reinvent the wheel and do what already has worked for others!

Pro tip: Use this proven method.

Step 1 — Research

The very first step you’ll need to take is to do your research and figure out what exactly your end goal is.

Identify and establish the sales funnel copywriting goal

To figure out your goals and objectives, you need to ask yourself the following 2 questions:

1. Where are you now?

2. Where do you want to be?

We recommend you create a text document where you can centralize all this information.

Research your target audience

Knowing your target market is crucial! This way, you can find out exactly what your audience’s needs are and how to provide solutions.

If you have an email list, you can get to know your audience by running a survey or analyzing case studies.

On the other hand, if you’re a startup with no contacts, you can use marketplaces like Amazon or Clickbank to find reviews and testimonials to better understand your average customer.

Pro tip: write down commonly used words, what people want, and what they don’t want.

Then, write answers to these questions:

How could this copy benefit prospects/customers?
What exactly are the problems that get prospects/customers to react?
What are the goals of an average potential customer?
What are the potential objections prospects/customers might have?

All of this should help you create a buyer persona.

Having it will give you an idea of the type of customer that would be interested in your product or service.

Remember, the primary goal of this step is to know your competitors’ products and your potential customers better than they know themselves.

Determine the method of lead generation

When producing sales funnel copy, there are primarily 2 ways to get leads: organically and through paid advertising.

Here are a few ways to generate leads organically:

Send a sales letter to prospects
Make use of non-paid social media traffic
Do keyword research and rank for related content on search engines
Create compelling lead magnet landing pages to push prospects through the first stage of your sales funnel

Additionally, you can use paid social media or search engine ads.

Figuring out your primary goal and doing the needed research will all help you craft compelling sales funnel copy.

Speaking of which, the next step is to start writing!

Step 2 — Writing

Instead of giving a step-by-step guide on how to write great copy, we’ll briefly look at how to write clear and compelling copy for every step of a sales funnel.

Stick to these guidelines and your sales funnel should do just fine.

Copywriting for ads

We already know that a sales funnel consists of different stages.

The first step is awareness.

You’ll need to make people familiar with your offer in some way, but how?

— with ads, of course!

A great ad can win the hearts and minds of your prospects and can quickly turn leads into customers.

Here are 5 quick tips for writing captivating ad copy:

1. Curiosity: Great ads intrigue customers and pique their interest

2. Clarity: Confusion is one of the biggest conversion killers of them all! While piquing curiosity is essential in ad writing, you don’t want to cause any sort of confusion

3. Call-to-action: Your ad needs to tell your prospect what to do with one clear and concise CTA. You should only be asking your prospect to do 1 thing — to click, signup, or buy

4. Consistency: There must be consistency and overlap between your ad and your sales offer, they should look coherent and serve the same goal you’re trying to achieve

5. Compliance: You need to know precisely what you can and can’t do in your online advertising. So, do yourself a favor and go read up on what’s allowed and what’s a no-no on all the platforms you plan on advertising on

Here’s an example of one of our own ads:

systeme.io Google ad

Why does this ad work?

It’s simple, straightforward, and clear about what the customer will get.

So, the secret to smart advertising is simple — focus on adding value first and let the customer decide if they want to engage.

Copywriting for your landing page

After someone has clicked on your ad, they’ll land on one of your landing pages — the type of landing page will depend on your overall goal.

Your landing page is the most important part of your sales funnel!

— Why?

Because landing pages are great to direct traffic, improve SEO, build your brand, and more.

Fortunately, we have 5 tips for writing landing pages copy that’ll help you sell anything:

1. Create a strong headline and hook: Make your headline unique and specific, and try to incorporate emotional words

2. Sell the benefits, not just the features: Communicate your product's benefits to make your sales page relate to your potential customer by highlighting their pain points

3. Personalization: The more you personalize your sales page to appeal to the specific needs of your target market, the more likely they’ll be inclined to buy

4. Social proof and testimonials: Give potential buyers social proof that your product works and display testimonials from others who have bought it before

5. Instill a sense of urgency: Limited time offers are one of the best sales tactics in the book that basically force people to take action

Let’s take a look at how our team here at systeme.io approached copywriting for one of our landing pages that offered a 30% discount on our Startup Annual Plan:

Source: systeme.io

First, we hook our readers with an irresistible headline and create a sense of urgency by warning them they’ll only have a few hours to get access to some crazy bonuses.

Instantly, readers become curious — what bonuses will they be getting?

And they keep on scrolling, only to find bonus #1.

Source: systeme.io

This brings us to our second tip — sell the benefits, not just the features.

Our team made sure to inform our page visitors exactly how much they could be saving and how they would benefit from this offer.

Next, we provide a brief introduction to our platform’s key features.

Source: systeme.io

Our landing page is personalized to target online businesses that are just starting out and provides all the necessary tools for them to run their startups successfully.

Source: systeme.io

Our team added loads of social proof on this landing page to show readers just how good we are — readers can immediately see our platform’s overall rating on Trustpilot and how it compares with other platforms.

Pro tip: Don’t just go with the first landing page copy you create, be sure to test different variations to see what works and what doesn’t.

For instance, we A/B tested different variants of our home page and after just 1 month we managed to increase our conversion rate by more than 30%!

Copywriting for upsells and downsells

Upsells and downsells are offers that provide extra, beneficial products to increase the average order value.

These pages typically appear after a customer has:

1. Finished filling in their payment information and clicked through to reach the checkout page (upsells)

2. Decided not to accept your upsell (downsells)

Copywriting for these pages is simple:

1. First, create a catchy headline to grab your customers’ attention

2. Next, the copy doesn’t have to be long, you only need a couple of hard-hitting sentences that describe what the offer is and why it’s awesome

3. And finally, make sure to add a compelling CTA

Here’s an example of an upsell page created by systeme.io:

Source: systeme.io

Why does this upsell work?

It has a captivating headline and a sub-headline that instills a sense of urgency
The copy is short and tells the customer exactly what they’ll get and how they’ll benefit from this offer
It contains a compelling CTA that shows customers what they’re getting by clicking

Copywriting for thank-you pages

The customers’ journey shouldn’t end immediately after they’ve hit the “complete purchase” button.

A thank-you page is the start of the customer retention process that makes sure they keep coming back for more.

Reminder: It costs 5x as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.

A thank-you page is the page customers are redirected to once they’ve converted in some way — downloading your ebook, signing up to your platform, or purchasing your product — and often looks a little something like this:

Source: systeme.io

Why does this thank-you page work?

The title shows a little enthusiasm from your side by adding “!”
The CTA button is bright and super clear
It displays another offer to entice customers to signup to the platform — for free!
It’s short with minimal copy

Copywriting for follow-up funnels

In addition to the thank-you page, there’s really only one thing left — the follow-up funnel.

You can also consider this step as copywriting for follow-up email campaigns.

Simply because it refers to the emails that are sent to a customer after a purchase has been completed or abandoned — in addition, there are a variety of email types you can send to your mailing list.

Email copywriting in particular can help engage your subscribers and turn them into loyal customers.

Here are a few tips to boost your email copywriting skills:

1. Use a proven method: Learn from the successes (and failures) of other entrepreneurs (start looking at successful competitors)

2. Do your research: Focus your research on your product, competition, and customers

3. Keep it short and simple: Research shows that between 33% and 64% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone

4. Ask a question: When you use a question as your subject line, you automatically promise the answer in the rest of your email content

5. Align your copy with your subject line: Only include relevant content

6. Use personalization: Write your copy as if you’re speaking with one specific person

7. Tell your story: Share experiences and create compelling and relatable content

Now that you’ve learned how to make copywriting your superpower, allow us to introduce the ultimate sidekick for your sales funnel copywriting success — systeme.io!

Systeme.io: The ideal email marketing tool to grow your online business

systeme.io logo

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing platform that was built from the ground up to launch, maintain, and scale online businesses.

— Ok, so how is that supposed to help me craft the perfect sales funnel?

You see, we realized early on that if you aren’t able to easily build your sales funnel, how the heck are you going to spend enough time working on your copywriting?

You need something to make the building process of your sales funnel — and your online business for that matter — as less time-consuming as it can be.

And that’s why we put power tools in your hands that will enable you to:

Build a high-converting sales funnel with our easy-to-use sales funnel builder

Quickly create landing pages, upsells and downsells, and thank-you pages from scratch or from the proven templates library

Run deadline sales funnels with timed offers to captivate traffic into making a purchasing decision
Automate the sales process and practically all of your digital marketing efforts with action-based triggers
Tap into email marketing, set up all kinds of email campaigns, and send unlimited emails and offers to subscribers at different stages of your sales funnel

But why stop there?

Advanced features like affiliate marketing management, A/B testing, evergreen webinars, and more are all just a few clicks away.

Pair all that with an awesome customer support team that has an average response time of less than 2 hours.

And then you begin to understand why we have more than 1,100 reviews on Trustpilot with an amazing rating of 4.9/5!

But what if we told you that it gets even better?

Systeme.io’s pricing

systeme.io’s pricing

Systeme.io’s Free plan comes with:

Space for 2,000 email subscribers
1 contact tag and automated campaign
3 sales funnels with 10 steps (connect your custom domain as well)
1 blog with unlimited posts
1 online course with unlimited students
24/7 online support via email
A 1-click upsell
1 A/B test

And more — everything you need to get your business up and running!

Our 3 paid plans are built to scale alongside your business and give you more access to all of the above features, plus useful extras like evergreen webinars.

You can also sign up for annual pricing, save 30% on your subscription, and have our support team migrate your entire business to our platform, for free!

Systeme.io is a real game-changer for any online business — just ask our customers!

FAQs about copywriting

Source: freepik.com

Here are some frequently asked questions on sales funnel copywriting — with answers — just in case you have any other queries on the topic.

Can effective sales funnel copywriting increase sales?

Yes absolutely! As a matter of fact, research shows that 7.8 times more people visit websites with compelling copywriting, which simultaneously increases brand remember and engagement rates.

How do you ensure that your sales funnel copywriting is SEO friendly?

Search engine optimization (SEO) copywriting can be tricky, but by providing good content you’ll not only improve your search rank but also build your credibility and enable you to create long-term relationships with your audience.

Conclusion

It’s quite clear that the sales funnel copywriting process isn’t a quick one.

Luckily, now you have a relatively simple 2-step guide that gives you the tools to create compelling sales funnel copy that will not only drive traffic but also increase sales.

And if you can write copy that gets people to take action — there’s no telling how far you’ll go (the sky’s the limit).

You now also have the tool that’ll help you craft the perfect sales funnel — systeme.io!

Get your forever-free account and start practicing what you’ve learned today with state-of-the-art features!