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A sales funnel is the process of luring a potential customer step by step into buying your products through a strategic marketing action. Marketing helps to boost sales and can be conducted through articles, brochures, videos, and automated emails, to mention a few.
This marketing strategy is especially used as an upsell funnel to coax the customer into buying an upgrade. In this modern world, businesses should embrace this strategy if they want a visible change with their sales and customers.
It is never too late to learn a new skill that may make your business boom. That said, let us discuss the steps of a proper sales funnel.
Awareness
Once you and your staff have everything put together and expressed the goals you want to reach as a business, your first step would be to market your brand, products, services, or business. Marketing is simply creating awareness.
You have to market everything to people so that they know what you are representing. All this can be done through posts and promotions on all social media platforms, blogging, guest posting, and infographics, to mention a few.
During this technological era, nearly everyone has a smartphone making it easy to reach a huge number of people through posting on all social media handles like Instagram and Facebook. You can also have guests over who are celebrities or social media influencers with a huge following.
These guests can have a photoshoot with your products and later on post on their media handles. This way, you reach an even larger crowd, sometimes beyond your region. Another option is using infographics which is a combination of words and pictures created to communicate a message. For example, a boutique will have a poster up with information about its name, location, telephone numbers, and a few pictures up of the clothes being sold.
The best part about creating awareness using technology is that there are a variety of sales funnel tools that can be used to edit and help you broadcast your brand. Examples of these tools are buffer, pitchbox, Ahrefs, and more. Research about all these tools and learn what value they each contribute in marketing.
Interest
After a successful marketing, people are now aware of your brand and show an interest to know more about what you are representing. It is the most crucial stage because you need to keep prospect customers hooked to you.
The steps taken here should be well calculated so that people do not loose interest quickly. Give them content that enlightens them more about the brand. You can rely on blog posts, email campaigns, and chatbots to do this work.
There are tools that you can incorporate in your website to help understand which products are viewed the most by your potential customers. A Visual Website Optimizer allows you to see content in your website that has the most views and even allows customers to leave a comment.
Other tools are Leadformly and FullStory. All these tools helps a business person know which products or items are liked by most and needed in large numbers. If you can easily navigate through these tools then you will have an easy time managing your business.
Evaluation
Past the awareness and interest stage, one is really hooked if they reach an evaluation stage. Here, an individual is very interested in your product and services but still needs a little push before they purchase a product or pay for a certain service.
At this point, let them have the pricing pages of your products and services. You can also share a few testimonials with them. Testimonials are more like feedback from previous customers. This way, they get to read experiences other people had with a certain product or what they feel about this particular brand.
Positive testimonials positively impact on a prospect buyer because their desire to experience the same will increase. Give out promo codes whereby one gets a discount after paying for certain services or buying a number of products. After all, nobody turns down a discount offer.
You can also implement the common quote ‘seeing is believing.’ Do this by engaging customers in live demos or tutorials to wash away any doubts. Do product comparisons when you have an upgrade in products or when introducing new products. All these are necessary as it gives a client more reasons to buy from your brand.
Engagement
The fourth stage of the sales funnel is when the client is just a step away from buying from you. It is considered an action stage because you have already made contact with a client and your final step will determine whether they will close a sale or not.
Here, continue luring them by telling them about special offers where in most cases you get two services or products at the price of one or at a lesser price. Share with them customer or personal success stories and show proof where possible. This might just prompt them to close a sale with you. During the engagement stage, create a positive relationship with your prospective clients.
Purchase
This is the last stage of the sale funnel. At this point, transactions between buyer and seller is made. It is not the end of the road once a purchase is made. You will need the customer to comeback with a friend or two.
To keep the motivated so that they come back, embrace tools that the customers love. An example is use of PayPal to pay off their bills. Encourage them to refer other clients to you as well. Click here to learn more.
Conclusion
One has to be flexible and ready to learn if they want to be successful business owners. One should not expect analog techniques to help keep their business afloat. Instead, be ready to learn how to create a sales funnel.
A sales funnel is important because it helps boost sales and build trust between a seller and a consumer. Learn how to create and use one and watch your business thrive.
Photo by ANTONI SHKRABA from Pexels