What is a Sales Funnel,

Examples and How to Create

One
Each of the sales funnel stages has an impact on consumer behavior.
You need to know them intimately.

By knowing each step, you can use tactics to improve the number of
people that go from one step to the next.

This can have a crazy impact on your business.

Let’s say you double the number of people at 2 steps of your funnel.
You double leads and you double the percentage of closed
customers. That gives you 4X the number of new customers every
month.

Defining and managing your sales funnel is one of the most

powerful concepts in business.

Let’s dive in.

What is a Sales Funnel?

The 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. A
certain percentage of them decide to walk in, that’s the next next of
the funnel. 
 A customer sees a rack of T-shirts on clearance. He or she thumbs
through the rack, now they’re at the next step of the funnel. Then the
customerselects four t-shirts and walks to the check-out. They’re at
the last step. If all goes well, they finish the purchase and reach the
bottom of the funnel.

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
Any marketing channel can be part of your sales funnel. And your
funnel might be spread across several channels.

Why is a sales funnel important?

Your sales funnel illustrates the path prospects take. 

Understanding your funnel can helps you find the holes in the funnel
— the places 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, but for
now, understand that you can influence how visitors move through
the funnel and whether they eventually convert.

The Sales Funnel Explained: How it Works

While there are lots of words used to describe different sales funnel
stages, 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.

Let’s look at each stage in the sales funnel in more detail.

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.

More often, the awareness stage is more of a courtship. You’re

trying to woo the prospect into returning to your site and engaging
more with your business.

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.

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.

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 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.
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.
Sign up for a Crazy Egg account today to start
collecting real, relevant data about your
website visitors. There’s no substitute for raw
data, and you don’t want to use someone
else’s audience and reach to build your sales
funnel. It should be uniquely your own.

By: Angela Chapa… is an ecommerce/online retail marketing

expert with many years of ghost writing for the B2C tech space.
She lives in Toronto, Canada.