SALES FUNNEL.

Sales funnel purchase funnel, or purchasing funnel, is a consumer-focused marketing model that

illustrates the theoretical customer journey toward the purchase of a good or service

Sales funnel is each step that someone has to take in order to become your customer. Let's
look at a brick-and-mortar sales funnel. The people at the top of the sales funnel walk by your
store.

This same process plays out for every business in one way or the other. Your
sales funnel could exist as:

 Retail store
 Sales team
 Website
 Email
 Personal consultation
we’re going to go with the four most common terms to explain how each
stage works as a consumer goes from a visitor to a prospect to a lead to a
buyer.

A visitor lands on your website through a Google search or social link. He or

she is now a prospect. The visitor might check out a few of your blog posts or
browse your product listings. At some point, you offer him or her a chance to
sign up for your email list.

If the visitor fills out your form, he or she becomes a lead. You can now
market to the customer outside of your website, such as via email, phone, or
text — or all three.

Leads tend to come back to your website when you contact them with special
offers, information about new blog posts, or other intriguing messages.
Maybe you offer a coupon code.
The sales funnel narrows as visitors move through it. This is partially because
you’ll have more prospects at the top of the funnel than buyers at the bottom,
but also because your messaging needs to become increasingly targeted.

Understand the 4 Sales Funnel Stages

It’s easy to remember the four sales funnel stages by the acronym AIDA:
Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. These four stages represent your
prospective customer’s mindset.

Each stage requires a different approach from you, the marketer, because you
don’t want to send the wrong message at the wrong time. It’s kind of like a
waiter asking you what you want for dessert before you’ve even ordered
drinks and appetizers.
Awareness

This is the moment at which you first catch a consumer’s attention. It might
be a tweet, a Facebook post shared by a friend, a Google search, or something
else entirely.

Your prospect becomes aware of your business and what you offer.

When the chemistry is just right, consumers sometimes buy immediately. It’s
a right-place, right-time scenario. The consumer has already done research
and knows that you’re offering something desirable and at a reasonable price.

Interest

When consumers reach the interest stage in the sales funnel, they’re doing
research, comparison shopping, and thinking over their options. This is the
time to swoop in with incredible content that helps them, but doesn’t sell to
them.

If you’re pushing your product or service from the beginning, you’ll turn off
prospects and chase them away. The goal here is to establish your expertise,
help the consumer make an informed decision, and offer to help them in any
way you can.

Decision

The decision stage of the sales funnel is when the customer is ready to buy.
He or she might be considering two or three options — hopefully, including
you.
This is the time to make your best offer. It could be free shipping when most
of your competition charges, a discount code, or a bonus product. Whatever
the case, make it so irresistible that your lead can’t wait to take advantage of
it.

Action

At the very bottom of the sales funnel, the customer acts. He or she purchases
your product or service and becomes part of your business’s ecosystem.

Just because a consumer reaches the bottom of the funnel, however, doesn’t
mean your work is done. Action is for the consumer and the marketer. You
want to do your best to turn one purchase into 10, 10 into 100, and so on.

Imagine that you own an ecommerce business that sells vintage signs. You
know that your target audience hangs out on Facebook a lot and that your
target customers are males and females between 25 and 65 years of age.

You run a fantastic Facebook Ad that drives traffic to a landing page. On the
page, you ask your prospect to sign up for your email list in exchange for a
lead magnet. Pretty simple, right?

Now you have leads instead of prospects. They’re moving through the funnel.

Over the next few weeks, you send out content to educate your subscribers
about vintage signs, to share design inspiration, and to help consumers figure
out how to hang these signs.

At the end of your email blitz, you offer a 10 percent coupon off each
customer’s entire first order. Bang! You’re selling vintage signs like crazy.
Everyone wants what you’re selling.
Next, you add those same customers to a new email list. You start the process
over again, but with different content. Give them ideas for gallery walls,
advise them about how to care for their signs, and suggest signs as gifts.
You’re asking them to come back for more.

There you have it:

1. Awareness: You created a Facebook ad to funnel (pun intended)

people to your website.
2. Interest: You offer something of value in exchange for lead capture.
3. Decision: Your content informs your audience and prepares them for a
purchase.
4. Action: You offer a coupon your leads can’t resist, then begin
marketing to them again to boost retention.

How to Build a Sales Funnel Fast

Step 1: Analyze Your Audience’s Behavior

The more you know about your audience, the more effective your sales
funnel becomes. You’re not marketing to everybody. You’re marketing to
people who are a good fit for what you sell.

Sign up for a Crazy Egg account and start creating Snapshots. These user
behavior reports help you monitor site activity and figure out how people
engage with your site
Step 2: Capture Your Audience’s Attention

The only way your sales funnel works is if you can lure people into it. This
means putting your content in front of your target audience.

Take the organic route and post tons of content across all of your platforms.
Diversify with infographics, videos, and other types of content.

If you’re willing to spend more cash, run a few ads. The ideal place to run
those ads depends on where your target audience hangs out. If you’re selling
B2B, LinkedIn ads might be the perfect solution.

Step 3: Build a Landing Page

Your ad or other content needs to take your prospects somewhere. Ideally,

you want to direct them to a landing page with a can’t-miss offer.

Since these people are still low in the sales funnel, focus on capturing leads
instead of pushing the sale.

A landing page should steer the visitor toward the next step.

You need a bold call to action that tells them exactly what to do, whether it’s
downloading a free e-book or watching an instructional video.

Step 4: Create an Email Drip Campaign

Market to your leads through email by providing amazing content. Do so

regularly, but not too frequently. One or two emails per week should suffice.
Build up to the sale by educating your market first. What do they want to
learn? What obstacles and objections do you need to overcome to convince
them to buy?

At the end of your drip campaign, make an incredible offer. That’s the piece
of content that will inspire your leads to act.

Step 5: Keep in Touch

Don’t forget about your existing customers. Instead, continue reaching out to
them. Thank them for their purchases, offer additional coupon codes, and
involve them in your social media sphere

Measuring the Success of a Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel might need tweaks as your business grows, you learn more
about your customers, and you diversify your products and services. That’s
okay.

A great way to measure the success of your sales funnel is to track your
conversion rates.

Why You Need to Optimize Your Sales Funnel

Here’s the truth: Your prospective customers have lots of options. You want
them to choose your products or services, but you can’t force it. Instead, you
have to market efficiently.
Without a tight, optimized sales funnel, you’re just guessing about what your
prospects want. If you’re wrong, you lose the sale.

How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel

You can optimize your sales funnel in myriad ways. The most important
places to put your focus are on the areas when consumers move to the next
point in the funnel.

We talked about Facebook Ads. Don’t run just one ad. Run 10 or 20. They
might be very similar, but direct them to different buyer personas and use
Facebook’s targeting features to make sure those ads appear in front of your
target audience.

How Social Media Fits Within Your Sales Funnel

Awareness and Traffic
Generating Leads (lead magnets)
Engagement.

Creating your Sales Funnel

Gather Data and Understand Your Customers
 What are your current challenges with [the area that you cover]?
 What are your current fears and frustrations? What are your goals and aspirations?
 What have you done to try to solve your problems/achieve your goals? How well
did it work?

Create Buyer Personas

 They have different reasons for buying your product
 They’re going to use it differently
 They make buying decisions in different ways