If you’ve been dabbling into online marketing for some time than you have no doubt come across the term ‘funnels’, but what exactly are they? How do they benefit your business and how to set them up?
Sales Funnel
Simply put: A sales funnel is the process by which you guide the customer’s journey through steps and processes, in order to facilitate sale(s) / purchase(s)
The process
We’ve all signed up to a newsletter or opted-in to get a freebie from websites and blogs, yea? That’s us entering the sales funnel. As we progress and develop a relationship through content and email marketing, coming back to the site for coupons or special gifts and even make a small purchase, that’s when we move further down the funnel. The bottom of the funnel is where you get the highest quality customers who have consistently engaged and purchased your products.
Why do you need a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel enables you to engineer and facilitate the sales process, sliced into many levels of customer engagement and makes it easier to craft content for that audience in a step by step fashion.
Look at it from a physical store point of view, before you have a relationship with the customer, for a first-time walk-in (top of the funnel), how would you speak to this customer? How would you engage them?
Would you entice them with a discount? A freebie? A great combo deal?
Now imagine this customer purchases something from you, and down the line, you send them a promo code or a discount sale voucher or maybe a loyalty card to further develop that relationship. (middle of the funnel)
Now that you know you’ve got the customer cooked, and they are happy with your products/services, you’d want them to refer others to increase word of mouth. This would be the bottom of the funnel for you, inevitably resulting in more customers which you would engage through your top of the funnel methods.
In the online world, you simply engineer this process through several web pages and pieces of content all linked together, targeting and speaking to the segment of audience accordingly to their position in the funnel.
For a new customer, you’d want them to at least subscribe, so you’ll set up the top of the funnel with freebies and gifts or discount coupons for them to put in their email address.
Once you’ve got the opt-in you move them further down the funnel with email marketing and engage them through valuable content and once they make a purchase, you move them to a separate list which offers them further One-time-offers and Upsells and send them targeted content accordingly.
If it sounds like a complex process, you are probably right. In the early days of internet marketing and product launches, you would have to set up these pages and email marketing systems manually but thanks to technology, that has changed. Digital marketing platforms like Kajabi and Clickfunnels have now made it easy to set up your funnels and automate the process in a matter of minutes. Check out the Kajabi and Clickfunnels comparison at Digital Domination Dojo where they go into detail on the pros and cons of both, so you can decide and set up for sales funnel easily.