Building a sales funnel

AIDA

Awareness: Prospective clients come across your product or service either through a google search, an
ad or you personally reaching out.

Interest: You offer something of incredible content that helps them, but doesn’t sell to them in
exchange for their email which is of less value (a lead magnet). 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.
Some leave after having this content but you now have their contact information and you can tell them
of other things of value which they’d be paying for. Some go on to see what else is in the store and end
up paying for your product or service.

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. Next, you want to do your best to turn
one purchase into 10, 10 into 100, and so on. In other words, you’re focusing on customer
retention. Express gratitude for the purchase, invite your customer to reach out with feedback,
and make yourself available for tech support, if applicable.

Example

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.

Converting the example to selling beats

Imagine that you own an ecommerce business that sells beats. You know that your target
audience hangs out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Soundcloud, Youtube a lot and that your
target customers are males and females between 15 and 50 years of age.

You run a fantastic Ad or personally reach out and this 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 beats, to share
recording inspiration, and to help consumers figure out how to record on beats. Its good to have a
bunch of songs recorded in a period even if you wouldn’t be releasing a body of work. Talk
about a release schedule.

At the end of your email blitz, you offer a 10 percent coupon off each customer’s entire first
order. Bang! You’re selling beats 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 Things that’d help a good mix, Things that’d help the
sales of records

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

You’re stoked now, right? You want to create a sales funnel now — and fast. Don’t worry. It’s
not as difficult as it might seem.

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.

Where do they click? When do they scroll? How much time do they spend on a particular page?
All of these data points will help you refine your buyer personas.

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 Success

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.

How many people, for instance, sign up for your email list after clicking through on a Facebook
Ad?

Pay careful attention to each stage of the sales funnel:

 Are your capturing the attention of enough consumers with your initial content?
 Do your prospects trust you enough to give you their contact information?
 Have you secured purchases from your email drip campaign and other marketing efforts?
 Do existing customers come back and buy from you again?
Knowing the answers to these questions will tell you where you need to tweak your sales funnel.

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.

Use Crazy Egg Recordings to watch how people engage with your site during a session. Where
do they click? Does anything seem to confuse them? Are they focusing their attention where you
want?

This is particularly important for those landing pages we talked about. If they’re not optimized
for conversions, most people will just click away.

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.

A/B test your landing pages. It takes time, but you’ll reach more people and convert prospects
more reliably.

You can also A/B test your email campaigns. Change up your language, imagery, offers, and
layouts to figure out what your audience responds to.

The best way to optimize your sales funnel, though, is to pay attention to the results.

Start with the top of the funnel. You’re creating content, whether paid or organic, to get eyeballs
on your brand and to encourage people to click on your CTA. If one piece of content doesn’t
work, try something else.
Move on to your landing page. Make sure the offer and CTA mimic the content in your blog post
or Facebook Ad, or whatever other asset you used to drive traffic there. Test your headline, body
copy, images, and CTA to find out what works best.

When you ask people in the Action stage to buy from you, A/B test your offer. Does free
shipping work better than a 5 percent discount? These little things can make a huge difference in
your revenue.

And finally, track your customer retention rate. Do people come back and buy from you a
second, fifth, and twentieth time? Do they refer their friends?

Your goal is to keep your brand top-of-mind. If you never disappoint your audience, they won’t
have a reason to look elsewhere.

Conclusion
Creating and optimizing a sales funnel takes time. It’s hard work. But it’s the only way to
survive in a competitive marketplace.

Believe it or not, a detail as small as font choice can impact conversions. And if you ask people
to buy from you too quickly, you’ll chase them away.

Take time to build out a sales funnel that represents what you want and what your audience
wants. Cultivate it over time, adjust your approach to various sales funnel stages, and find out
why your efforts aren’t working.