Complete Guide To Online Sales Funnel and How To Build One For Your Business

When running a business, often times we may be faced with various unknowns. That's why as marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs, it’s in our best interest to create systems in place in order to generate consistent results.

Online sales funnels are a perfect example of that.

While most people think that online marketing funnels is just a bunch of hype, it's actually very real and can make a big impact in creating a successful business.

Imagine being able to automatically attract leads or sales 24/7 without any additional work on your part after setting it up. Sounds impossible?

Well, these days, savvy marketers and entrepreneurs uses online sales funnels to grow their businesses by generate leads and sales even while they sleep. So today, we’re going to show you why online sales funnels aren’t just hocus pocus. In fact, they’re actually one of the best tool in running an online business.

In this article, I’ll show you:

What is an online sales funnel, how to build one, and what you require for each step of your funnel.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a marketing concept that highlights the checkpoints at which your customers will interact with you before they are ready to make a purchase. Think of the sales funnel as literally what it is, a funnel. You start with a large number of potential customers at the top and the goal is to guide them to the end at the bottom where you get a sale or lead. There are multiple steps to a sales funnel, usually called as the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, depending on the business model.

The four basic Sales Funnel stages are:

• Awareness

• Interest

• Decision

• Action

As your prospects pass through each step of the funnel, they are more likely to engage your service or purchase a product from your business. Through a sales funnel, businesses are able to filter out ready-to-buy prospects from the 'just looking' visitors. Helping them create more compelling ads and offers.

Implementing a top-notch sales funnel helps businesses pave the way to a successful sales strategy.

That said, the primary goal with an online sales funnel is to effectively move people from one stage to another until they are ready to purchase. By knowing each step, you can use tactics to improve the number of people that go from one step to the next.

Sales funnels also allows entrepreneurs to scale the business based on accurate data and analytics.

"Let’s say you're getting an average of 10 'Add To Carts' for every 100 website visitors but only 2 converts into customers. That’s about a 2% conversion rate. With this data and knowledge, you may want to focus your efforts to increase the number of interested prospects that actually converts into customer, thus improving conversion rates. Sales funnels gives you more control of your business marketing spend vs. ROI (Return Of Investment).”

One of the most powerful concepts in business is defining and managing your sales funnel so your business can scale infinitely.

Need For A Sales Funnel

If you are a business owner, you might be finding ways to scale up your business. After putting out content, ads, offers and so much more, customers are dropping out of your website without purchasing anything.

It happens. But with a sales funnel, you are able to work around that and optimize your business with a future goal. A sales funnel helps you understand your potential customers and what they are thinking, doing, and looking for at each stage of their journey. With these insights, you can invest in the right marketing activities and channels to create the most relevant and engaging messaging during each stage and turn more prospects into paying customers.

Proper sales funnels are essential in growing a business because it gives you valuable customer information and insights.

Understanding the Sales Funnel Stages

Customers passes through different stages of your sales funnel from the first time they hear about you up until the moment they buy something from you. This journey might differ from one prospect to the next depending on your buying personas, your niche, and the types of products or services you sell.

Before you start building your sales funnel, it is for you to have a clear brand vision, develop an digital marketing strategy, and then define your target customers to work towards your business growth.

If, for example, you are looking at how to create an online clothing store, you need to follow specific steps to develop your business to stay successful. You can add as many stages within your sales funnel as you want. In general, there are four stages of a sales funnel.

Understanding your funnel can help you find the flaws in your business — somewhere along the customer journey where prospects drop out and never convert.

If you don’t understand your sales funnel, you can’t optimize it. We’ll go into the specifics of how the funnel works below.

Sales Funnel Explained: How It Works

On average, it takes 7 impressions before a prospect actually turns into customers. But with a well-designed sales funnel, it may take even less than that.

Sales funnel illustrates the bigger picture of how prospects turn into actual paying customers. It helps marketers understand how each stage works as a consumer goes from a visitor to a prospect to a lead to a buyer. For example:

A visitor clicks a link from your Facebook ads and lands on your website. He or she is now a prospect. The visitor might check out your website, few of your blog posts or browse your product pages. At some point, you collect their email by opting them to subscribe your newsletter through a form pop-up.

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

This allows businesses to retarget existing leads using special discounts, information about new blog posts, or recently launched products. Since leads are people who have already heard about your brand before, it’s much more likely that they will re-visit your website if you have something new to offer.

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 marketing messaging needs to become increasingly targeted for that extra push to convert those ’ready-to-buy’ prospects into customers.

Stages of a Sales Funnel

The four sales funnel stages is represented by the acronym AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. These four stages represent your prospective customer’s current mindset.

Don’t be a weirdo. 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 inviting someone on a date before even asking their name! (Yikes!)

Now, let’s get into more detail at each stage in the sales funnel.

Awareness

Customers usually enter the awareness stage when a they learn about your company for the first time. This is perhaps of stumbling across one of your ads, read your blogs, found your website through Google search, or heard a colleague talking about your product or service.

Interest

Once a prospect has learned about your brand, they will evaluate it based on the level of interest and the solutions you provide.

At this stage, prospect are now aware of a problem or the solution. They might be researching for solutions on Google. They’ll think about the problem they’re trying to solve and conduct competitive research to make sure your offer is the best solution.

Decision

Also called the consideration stage, now that the prospect knows about your company and the solutions it provides for the prospect’s pain points, they will dig in deeper. The prospect will find information like pricing and packaging options. Sales pages and customer support are very helpful in this stage to help the prospects make their decision.

Action

The most important stage of the funnel — whether the prospect actually makes a purchase or not. If they don’t buy from you now, that doesn’t mean the deal is lost forever. You can create nurture campaigns to make sure you stay on top of their mind for future needs.

Retention — Keeping The Flow

70% of companies agree that it’s cheaper to retain customer than aquiring new ones. So when you have customers on board with your brand, it is important that you do everything to retain them and keep the flow going. This stage requires you to focus on keeping customers happy in order to convert them into repeat customers and brand advocates. Word of mouth from happy customers can take your brand to a whole different level without any additional marketing spend.

Basically, you want customer to stay engaged with your brand even after the sale. You can do that by sharing content such as:

• Emails

• Special Offers

• Surveys/Outreach and follow-ups

• Product usage guides

• Technical assistance literature

Hot vs. Cold Audiences

Some other terms you might have heard from when talking about sales funnels are cold, warm and hot audiences. Typically, cold audiences are people on top of the funnel, and as they journey through the stages they become your warm and hot audiences.

Similar to talking in-front a room of cold audiences, you need an ice-breaker to warm up your audiences. Eventually, once they start to get comfortable with you, they’ll open up with questions and comments. Ultimately, that‘s the goal your sales funnel is looking for.

Your Most Important Sales Funnel Tool : Websites

Retails stores are quickly shifting their efforts and budget to their online stores. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. In our opinion, online stores won't replace traditional brick-and-mortar stores. The shopping experience in-store and online are completely different. However, businesses that quickly adopted and embraced online shopping saw great profits to their business.

Now, you can find lots of small businesses online and some of them may not even have a retail store. Online webstores offers more flexibility to businesses. Retails stores that opens only 9-5 on weekends are now suddenly able to sell 24/7 around the clock through their website. Businesses were able to relocate to lower density areas to offer better parking, security because brands are more engaged with customers online than ever before.

People are also constantly searching for solutions online. Remember when the last time you were looking for something? I bet you went on your phone or desktop, and Google-d something like this : 'How to do online digital marketing?'. Having your brand on there competing gives so much awareness and exposure or even better, consideration.

Few decades ago, businesses was racing to open more cash registers. But today, the winner goes to who builds the best sales funnels.

Need experts to help build your custom sales funnels? Get a free consultation today.

Just A Matter Of Time

Hundred of online websites are popping up daily. But in fact, it's not something that you build overnight. It takes research and strategy to implement sales funnels that actually works. You might think getting any kind of website would do. Since, as long as it works right?

Well, not if it's costing your business money. What's wrong is that you are trying to solve a million dollar problem with pennies and dimes. You need experts to make sure that your investments will bring in returns. And not a website that's costing your businesses maintenance fees monthly without bringing in any profit.

If you're an entrepreneur that's determined to grow your sales to 10k or even 100k per month online, would you think that a $500 investment would suffice?

So, make sure your pick your designer wisely knows your budget, what they're doing and what your requirements are. Your online store is an investment and must be treated as such. A smart investor will make decisions based on options, budget and value outcomes, not only at the price tag.

Case Study: Effective Sales Funnel Examples For An Online Business

Imagine that you own an ecommerce business that sells scented candles. You know that your target audience hangs out on Facebook a lot and that your target customers are females between 25 and 55 years of age.

You run a 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 10% off.

Now you business is flooding with leads interested with your products.

Over the next few weeks, you send out blog content to educate your subscribers about benefits of scented candles or how to incorporate candles into their daily meditation exercise.

At the end of your email campaign, you remind them about their 10 percent off coupon. Bam! You’re selling candles like crazy. Now everyone wants what you’re selling.

Then, you add those same customers to a new email list. You start the process over again, but with different content. Give them this season’s top picks, and suggest candles as a gift. In this process, you’ll be able to ask customers to come back and buy some more.

The sales funnel stages:

1. Awareness: Created a Facebook ad to funnel people to your website.

2. Interest: Offer something of value in exchange for their email.

3. Decision: Provide content that informs audience and helps them ready for to make a purchase.

4. Action: Offer a coupon that leads can’t resist, then begin marketing to them again to boost retention.

As you may have noticed, sales funnels help define the tools you use to market your business. Such as: ads, blog posts, social media, website and email. In sequences specific to your business & marketing strategy.

How to build a sales funnel for your business

For a properly built sales funnel to exist, you first need potential customers who can move through that funnel. Once you have those prospects, you can track behavior and engagement using Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel to understand how far along your customers are in the sales funnel.

Let’s dive into the steps to help you create a sales funnel:

1. Research & Data Gathering

For starters, you must first understand your customers. Do some research on who your potential customers are. Then, move onto creating unique personas for your target customers. This allows you to market to someone based on the persona you invented, and finding hundreds or thousands of people that’s similar to them.

One important thing to remember is — you aren’t marketing your business to everyone. You are marketing it to people who are a good fit for what you sell.

That way, you can adjust your funnel to focus on those key personas and most relevant selling points. You may also gain insights that lead you to adjust your product or service and make it better.

Finally, help prospects to move down the funnel by curating each content based on the data.

2. Capturing Attention

Put your content in front of your target audiences. The only way your sales funnel works is if you can lure prospects into it. Without prospects interested in your business, there is no sales funnel.

For new businesses, we suggest investing in digital ads. That’s because attracting organic website traffic has become harder and harder over the years. We suggest starting with a minimum budget of $5 per day on Facebook Ads to see how prospects react to your sales funnels. Then scale up only once your sales funnel is proven.

If you don’t mind spending a little more time and effort, try reaching audiences organically through the worldwide web. A wise move would be leveraging different content forms like infographics, videos, social media content, and other types of content to attract all kinds of readers. Organic traffic includes:

• SEO

• Social media traffic (non-paid)

• Referral traffic (from other sites linking to you)

• Direct traffic (from people who know about your brand and have visited your website before)

You should also add forms and popups to your website to capture leads. Remember, although it takes longer to build, organic traffic campaigns like SEO or blog posts increases the trustworthiness of your website and therefore something you might want to explore into eventually.

4. Drip Email Campaign

Once you have captured leads through the landing page, you can drip feed email campaigns to automatically go out at a certain time. Let’s say, 2 days after not making a purchase on your site, you may send a welcome email to your leads, and following up with a discount offer a few days after that.

Plan your email marketing by providing valuable and engaging content to persuade your leads into make a purchase. Send updates regularly, but not too frequently. One or two emails per week should suffice.

It’s also important to start by educating your prospects first. That way you can build more trust before sending promotional content. You can always build up to the sales later. Educational blog post ideas:

• What can you educate them on your brand/ products?

• What obstacles and objections do you need to overcome to convince them to buy?

Once you’re ready to make sales, provide them an incredible offer they can’t resist. That way it will inspire your leads to act now and make a purchase.

5. Keep the communication going

Once prospects converts into paying customers, your job now as a marketer is to retain them. Grow your newsletter and keep them updated on new products and educational content that might be useful. You might never know when they will need to come back for extra product/ services. Involve existing customers in your marketing strategy and build a community to develop brand trust and loyalty.

Creating Contents For Each Stage Of The Sales Funnel

Every successful online sales funnel is made up of several key ingredients. We call these key ingredients the three F’s. They are (from the top of the funnel to the bottom) fuel, foundation, and follow-up

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make when building out a sales funnel is not creating content that aligns with their strategy. Every piece of content should help the business goal of moving prospects through the funnel.

Let’s see how you can create different content that makes sense for each stage of your sales funnel.

Blogging (Awareness and Interest)

Your prospects are searching for solutions everyday. ‘How to’ blogs are super effective on growing your readers list. It can help generate interest and awareness around your business by sharing valuable content.

Keep in mind that you should optimize your blog contents with the right keywords so customers can find you through organic searches. The last thing you want is to have a candle business but blogs about benefits of talking long walks. As people searching for that kind of content might not be interested in purchasing the product.

It’s also important to state that blogging is a “top of the funnel” activity.

In other words, it won’t lead to people making a decision to buy from you. For that, you will need to create other types of content or push people to go on a sales call with you.

Lead Magnets (Interest)

Growing email lists is one of the most important aspects of your business. Lead magnets helps create interest in what you’re offering in exchange for their email. Imagine having an infinite list of customer emails that signs-up on your website. It would be much more easier to convince them to make a purchase by following-up through email as they have already shown some kind of interest in your business.

Businesses that don’t collect email information from their customers are losing bug time on remarketing strategy. Remember, the follow up is where the money is at.

Webinars (Decision and Action)

Webinars can help convince people to enter the decision stage and hopefully make a purchase. When people sign up for webinars, they’re already pretty interested in achieving a certain goal or solving a specific problem that your business can provide them.

Your goal with the webinar is not only to educate them but to convince them why your products/ service is the perfect solution for their problem. Keep in mind that customers don’t just buy products, they are buying products that solves their problems.

Videos (Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action & Retention)

Videos are very impactful during the awareness and interest stage, as videos tend to capture more attention than static images.

You may even promote your videos to educate your audience on topics that interest them through Facebook Ads. Reaching a bigger audience that might be interested in your offer.

Explainer videos can build demand for your product or service as it directly addresses customer issues and pain points. Prompting eager prospects to flood into your website to inquire more.

Last but not least, with sales videos, you can entice people to make the final step and take action. You can also create tutorial videos for customer retention by giving customers a detailed tutorial on how to use your products.

Measuring the Success of a Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel might need tweaks and adjustments as your business grows. With more data about your target audience, you learn more about your customers, and understand their needs better.

Tracking your conversion rates is a great way to measure the success of your sales funnel.

For example, how many people sign up for your email list after clicking on a social media ad?

Pay careful attention to each stage of the sales funnel:

• Are you getting the attention of enough consumers with your educational content?

• Do your prospects trust you enough to enter 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?

• How can you optimize to get even more prospects?
  

By answering these questions, you will know where you need to change your sales funnel accordingly.

Conclusion

Your work is not done when you create your sales funnel. In fact, this is where it all begins.

Keep an eye on your results that your sales funnel is bring in for your business. Choose KPI’s that align with your business goals, which may be purchases or leads. Take time to figure out how you can create a funnel that adds to the customer journey.

Nothing comes out exactly perfect. Learn to optimize your funnels over time, adjust your approach to various stages, and find out what’s not working in your strategy.

Gather data, analyze, and improve your funnel for better results. Figure out where your strengths and weaknesses lie and then focus your resources there.

A good flow of people right from the top all the way to the action stage will ensure you have a healthy sales strategy for your business.

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About Undoubt Studio: Based in Malaysia, the design studio‘s mission is to create brands that sell in online markets. Our team is experienced in a variety of backgrounds and shares a passion on helping businesses, start, run and grow. Book a free consultation today.