The Secrets to Sales Funnels

Free Complete Guide for Building Sales Funnels

in Just a Few Clicks

How badly are you looking to generate a sustainable income online?

Have you tried different methods with barely any results?
Then, maybe what you’re lacking is a comprehensive sales funnel that
delivers the results you’ve been looking for.

By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to:

 Recognize the 3 sales funnel stages and why they’re important
 Build effective, sustainable, and optimized sales
funnels in anyniche
 Automate your entire sales funnel and easily scale (if you want
to)
 Figure out what to look for in your competitors’ sales funnels
and how to draw inspiration from them (we’ll show you 3
examples)

Are you ready? Let’s begin!

 What is a sales funnel?

In a nutshell: A sales funnel refers to the steps that customers go

through before making a purchase decision.

Regarding your online business, this translates to the web pages your
website visitors go through before deciding if they want to buy your
offers or not. (I.e. The customer journey, but with web pages)

So the whole purpose of a sales funnel is to drive your website’s

online traffic, generate qualified leads, and convert prospects into
paying customers.

— Pfff, but that’s the goal of every online business.

And that’s precisely the point! Each business (online or not) has a
sales funnel of some sort, the question is whether it’s effective or not.

And by effective, we mean, is it a personalized sales funnel that speaks

directly to the hearts and minds of your target audience?

To learn how to come up with such funnels, you first need to learn the
different sales funnel stages and how to structure them.
 Breaking down a basic sales funnel

Each sales funnel you build should have 3 stages:

 Top of the funnel — this is where you drive traffic and get
asmany people as possible into your sales funnels
 Middle of the funnel — here, you go through the process
of filtering qualified leads (potential customers) by
teaching them how you could solve their problems with
your offerings
 Bottom of the funnel — last but certainly not least, this is
where you close the sales process with those qualified
leads

Let’s take a deeper dive and learn how to build each funnel stage.
The top — Awareness & opportunity
Requirements for this stage: getting defined traffic from paid ads, social
media, and blog posts, to landing pages that would resemble the
entrance point of your funnel.

The first stage of any successful sales funnel involves customers

becoming aware of your offerings and why they need them.

At this stage, your business goals include advertising to a target

audience, creating awareness about the problems your offerings fix,
and building appeal to prospects.

In digital marketing, it’s imperative that you identify a specific niche

market to delve into, instead of trying to cater to everyone.

This is followed by vital lead nurturing which works like this:

 The person identifies a problem that they have
 They understand the different variables that form that
particular problem
 They see your offering as a possible solution that’ll get
them toa point where they no longer have this problem
 They start researching your online business more to see if
youmake a good fit for them or not

Most modern consumers are savvy, and they look through

a variety of available content across several websites
before funneling into thenext phase.

So you want to give them educational content that’s

suited to helping them solve their problem(s) and guide
them towards buying your offers.

The goal of this lead nurturing process is to hook prospects at the top
of the funnel right down to the bottom.

And in order to do that properly, make sure to develop positive

relationships with buyers through various activities, such as:

 Getting them to join your email newsletter — you can do that

with lead magnet landing pages
 Sharing your story to make yourself more relatable as a human
and let them know you were in their shoes
 Offering free trials and free tiers of your products/services

With that said, if everything goes to plan, you should currently have a
group of prospects ready to be introduced to your personalized offers.

The middle — Find solutions

Requirements for this stage: engaging prospects you have gathered

from the previous step with promotional content like emails,
notifications, sales pages, etc.

Think of it this way, you’ve now got their attention, and it’s time to start
the actual selling process.

That means showcasing your product/service paired with social

proof, actual results and data, pricing, and whenever possible,
guarantees.
This also means eliminating any leads who are not yet ready to buy
your offers.

This will guarantee that when you close the sales in the following
stage, you achieve the highest conversion rate possible.

Speaking of which, this is the perfect time to start calculating your

conversion rates to ensure that your online traffic is doing what it
should do — if you have a lot of clicks, but no conversions of any
kindthen something is wrong.

For content, you should start introducing product comparisons,

webinars, case studies, and engaging videos.

This will leave you with a handful of engaged leads who are highly
qualified.

The bottom — Time to make some sales!

Requirements for this stage: customized checkout pages, very

compelling and clear offers, and competitive pricing.

As a business that runs thousands of funnels every year, we can

describe this part of the sales funnel in four words: easier said than
done.

Yes, in theory, all you have to do is push your qualified leads onto
your checkout pages, and you’ll generate sales.
But in practice, it’s much harder. Allow us to explain that with a few
questions:

1. Is your offer better than what everyone else is bringing to your

customers’ table? Or better yet, what distinguishes you from the rest?

2. Have you clearly addressed all customer doubts and concernsabout

your offer?

3. Have you shown enough social proof and 3rd-party reviews of

your offer?

Many fail when answering these questions, that’s why almost 70% of
customers leave their carts without completing purchases.

Here, your marketing brilliance should come to life with a set of

tactics that would position your offer as a prime candidate for your
prospects.

This includes offering:

 Bundle deals
 Discounts
 Money-back guarantees

This extends to promising customer support, providing a FAǪs

sectionor a help center, video demos, and boasting top benefits.
You also need to optimize your checkout process to include:

 A simple form that’s easy to navigate and provides a simple way

to insert payment information
 Trust symbols to show that your website, products and
transactions are are high-quality and secure
 The original price is followed by the discounted price
 A clear list of the items in the cart (don’t include packages they
didn’t ask for!)

Then, if you want to take your marketing efforts even further, you can
offer upselling, cross-selling, and downselling to prospective
customers.
By using all these techniques in conjunction, you can offer exclusivity
to your customers, without paying for additional marketing channels.

And finally, this purchasing experience allows for balanced growth

between old and new customers, especially since it’s easier to sell to
an existing customer than a new one.

Note: You’ll notice that these stages blend in nicely with the AIDA
marketing formula, which is:

 Awareness — Happens at the top of your sales funnel

 Interest — Happens at both the top and middle of your sales
funnel
 Decision — Happens at both the middle and bottom of your
sales funnel
 Action — Happens at the bottom of your sales funnel
How to create a successful sales funnel

Somewhere out there, there’s a whole graveyard of “bad” offers that

didn’t get a single sale — simply because there was nobody
wanting/needing to buy them.

On the other hand, you’ll rarely find demand for a product/service

without finding competition. And this means you'll have to try your
utmost best to stand out in the crowd.

But no worries, we’ve got you covered in this section with a proven
blueprint that you can use to create any type of funnel that'll blow
your competition out of the water. It includes:

 Doing proper research

 Determining traffic sources
 Building the web pages of your sales funnel
 Optimizing your new sales pipeline to perform the best it can

Let’s dive into it.

Research is vital

It’s simple really, if you mess this step up, you’ll generate little to no sales.

Imagine spending days and nights building something you’re

planning to sell only to get hit with a wall on launch day with other
competitors offering better versions of your offer at a 10th of the
price…

Or worse, not finding a market for your offer at all.

Unfortunately, a lot of people make this mistake by having an attitude

of “build now, find customers later” when they really should be going for
the “find potential customers now, build along the way according to their
needs and budgets” attitude.

But we’re not going to let that happen to you, here’s how to do your
research before building any marketing funnel:

1. Analyze your audience:

If you’re at the stage of building sales funnel pages, then you should
already have a buyer persona figured out along with characteristics,
arguments, and wording that speak directly to them.

You also want to get that hook that’ll allow you to swiftly capture their
attention.

This means addressing their main issues, presenting solutions that’ll

resolve their biggest fears, and showing them where they can be after
taking you up on your offer.

2. Know your offer:

This seems trivial, but when was the last time you took the time to
truly think about what you’re selling?

So if you haven’t already, start building a list of features, benefits,

reviews, and all the constructive feedback that you can get.

This will later help with building effective web pages that actually
convert.
 3. Conduct competitive research:

By this, we don’t just mean going to your competitors' websites and

checking out their offers, design, and pricing.

You want to get a level deeper than that, check out their reviews on
3rd-party platforms like Trustpilot, G2, customer reviews on
YouTube (not affiliate ones!), and other independent reviewers in
your industry/niche.

You could also visit Facebook groups, Reddit threads and Ǫuora
questions where your target audience is actively discussing your
industry/niche. You'll find honest answers that haven't been
influencedby companies or influencers.

Then, you want to identify places where you excel over your main
competitors, which will help you write better copy when trying to sell
yourself to prospects in all funnel stages.

All of these steps would give you:

 A clear idea of how your audience thinks, how you can help
them, and how to communicate with them in the best way
possible
 A list that would guarantee that you know your business better
than anyone and everyone at any given time
 Ability to generate highly targeted sales and marketing efforts
that would focus on your strengths and compensate for any
weaknesses your competitors can capitalize on
Determine your traffic sources

Traffic is the true currency of the web, and if you consistently have it,
you’ll always have a chance of succeeding.

Targeted online traffic is even better, and by now you should have a
type of traffic you want to attract, which you can do so with these
methods:

1. Paid advertising:

If you want results fast, go with paid ads from Google, Facebook, etc.
If you don’t want your marketing budget to disappear, make sure you
know what you’re doing.

Be careful, paid ad platforms aren't easy to master, and you could risk
losing a lot of money if you don't run your campaigns in the right
way.

If you don’t want to risk it, you can always hire a freelance paid
media consultant from places like Upwork and PeoplePerHour, just
make sure they have good ratings and reviews.

2. Social media:

Never underestimate the role of social media platforms in your

marketing and sales efforts. Make sure to constantly share updates,
new announcements, educational content, and lead magnets.

Social media algorithms are designed to surface content that is most

relevant and engaging to users. By understanding and leveraging
these algorithms, you can generate free traffic to their sales funnels.

Aligning your content with platform algorithms ensures higher

organic reach, driving interested users to your sales funnels.

This not only improves cost-effectiveness but also enhances your

credibility and trust among users, as they are more likely to engage
with content that appears organically in their feeds.

Taking advantage of user-generated content and real-time feedback,

you can refine your strategies to create more effective sales funnels.

Additionally, social media traffic contributes to improved SEO, which

further benefits your overall visibility.

In summary, using social media algorithms to your own benefit by

regularly posting high-value content helps you increase visibility,
target the right audience, and optimize your return on investment
while building trust with potential customers.

3. SEO:

Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to reach potential

customers that are ready to buy your offerings IF you’re a good fit for
them.

Since they all conduct searches based on the problems they’ve

noticed, your blog content will get them one step closer to making a
purchase decision.

Problem is, coming up with a content plan and following it for

months could be a little too much for people looking to get some cash
flowing as soon as possible — play your cards wisely and according
to your unique situation.

4. Running an affiliate program:

If you want an “easy” way to grow, you can try your luck with affiliate
marketing.

In a nutshell, you can create an affiliate program that handles

recruiting affiliate marketers — each time an affiliate makes a sale
with your offerings, they get an agreed-upon commission.

(You can set up your affiliate program with systeme.io in 30 minutes

for free).
This is neat because it trims a lot of your marketing costs, the
affiliates would do the heavy lifting with running ads and nurturing
leads.

5. Running a referral program:

Not to be confused with the previous traffic source, a referral program

is concerned with engaging existing customers and offering them
incentives (like discounts) to bring new customers from their circles.

Build personalized sales funnel pages

Here comes the fun part! Get ready to create your various sales funnel
stages.

The first thing you’ll need is a tool to build your funnel web pages,
more precisely, a sales funnel software that delivers a no-code
experience and in-house hosting.
How to build a sales funnel with systeme.io

For example, consider this situation:

1. You go sign up at systeme.io and get your lifetime free

account

2. On this clean dashboard, you click on “Funnels” in the menu

3. Next, in the following screen, you simply click on

“Create”and choose the name, type, and currency of your funnel
 4. Afterward, when greeted by the funnel dashboard, you add a
new step/web page that resembles the first page your visitors will
land on

5. Next, the extensive library of templates appears

 6. After picking one, you press the “magic wand” to edit the
template with our blazing fast drag-and-drop editor

7. Here, you just click on the elements that are in the template to edit
them to your liking — of course, you can add, delete, and organize
elements as you please

8. Finally, click “save changes” on the top right to be back to your

sales funnel dashboard
That’s it, your first web page of your new sales funnel is ready and
live on the web. That took what, 5 minutes?

We know, we know — you’re probably thinking to yourself “But

creating an effective sales funnel that generates a lot of money is way
harder than that!”

And you’re right.

Remember, you already did most of the heavy lifting in the research
step, this is where you unload everything in a neat, personalized, and
influential way for your customers to experience.

In fact, if you really got the previous parts right, don’t be surprised if
your first sales funnel ends up with stats like these:
Notice how on the left, your funnel pages will actually resemble your
buyers’ journey.

By now, you’ve got a solid plan of:

 Defining your target audience and doing proper research

 Having your website/sales funnel pages up and running

The next step is to iterate and excel when communicating with your
customers.

And for that, you can use 4 methods:

1. A/B testing
2. Email marketing
3. Marketing automation
4. Monitoring performance

(Which conveniently, are all available with systeme.io!)

Use A/B testing

Sometimes called split testing, A/B testing is a method where you

split online traffic coming to a specific URL between 2 variants of a
web page.

This can be used to increase conversion rates on different sales funnel

stages by testing how different elements of your pages (i.e. headlines)
perform.

Note: Periodically run A/B tests, simply because there’s always

something that you can improve.
How run effective A/B tests:

Here are a few tips on running effective A/B tests that will help
optimize your funnels and achieve your desired goals:

 Define clear goals: Before beginning an A/B test, clearly define

the goals you want to achieve, such as increasing sign-ups,
boosting sales, or improving engagement.

 Develop a hypothesis: Formulate a hypothesis about the changes

you think will lead to better results, and make sure it is based on
data and insights from previous user behavior, industry best
practices, and competitor analysis.

 Choose the right variables: Select elements on the page that are
likely to have the most impact on your goals. These could
include headlines, calls-to-action, images, or form designs.
Focus on one variable at a time to ensure the test results are
caused by that specific change.

 Determine sample size and duration: Calculate the appropriate

sample size and test duration based on your website traffic,
desired level of statistical significance, and minimum detectable
effect. This ensures your test results arereliable and meaningful.

 Implement and iterate: If the test shows a clear winner,

implement the winning version on your website. Keep iterating
and running new tests to continuously improve your website's
performance.
Incorporate email marketing

You should use email marketing to fuel your different marketing

efforts.

Why?

Because it has an ROI of $42 for each $1 you spend — pretty

convincing if you ask us.

So here’s how to use this brilliant method:

 Collect emails from people who sign up on your landing pages,

then segment them accordingly to focus your efforts (you can
easily do that with Tags in systeme.io)
 Set up different email campaigns that each serve a certain
aspect of your sales funnel (i.e. welcoming new users with a
welcome campaign)
 Make sure the emails of your campaigns are personalized,
exciting to read, and truly valuable to your prospects

Next is finding the right balance of sending emails to your customers,

you don’t want them to quickly get tired of you — which they
eventually will so regularly clean up your email list by removing
contacts who haven't been opening your emails over the past few
months.

Also, don’t forget to follow up with existing customers by offering

them upsells and special deals via your emails.
Automate your sales funnels

So far, we’ve been talking about creating the perfect sales funnel, but
a successful online business would have multiple sales funnels for
promoting different offers.

As you can imagine, this creates complexities when trying to manage

multiple funnels and different types of customers.

But fear not, automation is here to save the day and let you easilyscale
your business.

Top-rated platforms will allow you to set up automation rules that

basically boil down to this concept:

“If X happens, the platform will perform Y”

For example, say you have set up a welcome email campaign in your
systeme.io account, you can easily enroll new prospects into it as
soonas they sign up to one of your top-of-the-funnel pages.

This can be extended to:

 Sales
 All email marketing efforts
 Affiliate marketing
 Upselling, cross-selling, and downselling
 Other marketing efforts

Remember to always be creative with this, don’t just copy what

works and roll with it — that’s fine at the beginning when starting
things, but you want to have your own touch on things as well.

Finally, as a general compass, make sure you’re on top of your

revenue metrics and sources for different funnels, study your
incoming traffic behaviors, and analyze different KPIs that describe
how well your business is doing.

3 high-converting sales funnels to draw inspiration

from

Now you’ve got the knowledge of everything you need to build and
publish successful sales funnels, let’s draw some inspiration from
businesses that are already using said knowledge to generate a
sustainable income online.
The Epik Summit

Source: Created by systeme.io

This virtual summit was created by systeme.io — it featured 40+

world-class marketers and entrepreneurs like Aurelian Amacker (our
founder and CEO), Rich Schefren, Dan Lok, Matt McWilliams, and
more.

The premise is simple, we planned an epic event that would give

people a ton of value in the form of cutting-edge techniques and
strategies for their different niches — plus, it was free so anyone
couldjoin.

Okay, but how did we possibly make money doing this?

Well, here comes the marketing part. Once people reserved their seats
they’d get a confirmation email with all the details needed and the
specific date the virtual summit would be held at.

But they’d also get the chance to get immediate access to the summit
for a fee — this was convenient for those who didn’t want to wait to
watch the summit on a later date.

As for the funnel stages:

 The top of the funnel — we sent out an invitation to our email list
subscribers (the English market) and posted about it on our
social media as well. No paid advertising was done
 The middle of the funnel — Traffic was sent to a long-from
landing page (featured at the start of this section), and all they
had to do was insert their emails to join the virtual summit
 The bottom of the funnel — Email marketing did most of the
heavy lifting as we sent out detailed emails about what the
viewers should do and how they can join (plus, giving them that
upsell to get immediate access)

Dot Com Truths Membership

DotComTruths.com, which is run by Eran Bucai, offers a membership
that includes multiple services that revolve around building sales
funnels and increasing online sales for businesses.

Here’s what their sales funnel stages look like:

 The top of the funnel — Traffic is gathered from their social

media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
 The middle of the funnel — Traffic is sent to a sales page that
explains what they do and displays solid social proof (plus
pricing)
 The bottom of the funnel — Those who are “sold” on the sales
page continue to a checkout page where they can pay for the
membership, they also get upsold with a 1-1 hour session

And that’s pretty much it for the funnel structure.

Funnel Vibe

Funnel Vibe is a dedicated service for building automated sales

funnels with systeme.io, it was created by Bolivar Muniz.
They sell custom and responsive templates of sales funnels for
different niches (ecommerce, courses, etc) and they’re always looking
to innovate.

If you consider their whole business as a 1-big funnel, then their

funnel stages look like this:

 The top of the funnel — They attract traffic using their blog, and
social media platforms
 The middle of the funnel — They run different sales funnel for
personalized offers, they also have a marketplace where they
display their templates for anyone browsing their website
 The bottom of the funnel — Each template has its own little sales
page, followed by a clear and detailed checkout page

Of course, behind the scenes, they could be doing a lot of different

marketing tactics that include email marketing or other methods.

Why choose systeme.io to build your sales funnels

Systeme.io logo

You already know that you can easily build top-quality sales funnels
with systeme.io.

But did you know that our platform is an all-in-one platform that was
built to launch, grow, and scale your online business in the same place?

That means you get all the tools you need to be successful online,
under one roof.

Systeme.io’s features

Just take a look at these awesome perks you get:

 Drag-and-drop builder: No code, no hassle. Simply edit your web

pages to your liking and publish in no time!
 Modern templates library: Use proven formulas to accelerate the
growth of your sales funnel
 Email marketing at its best: Play like the pros by utilizing email
marketing to engage customers and prospects as you’ve never
done before
 Sell online courses: Easily upload and host your online courses
library, the sell courses to your students with an impressive setof
features like drip courses, membership sites, communities, and
more
 Run your affiliate program: Build an army of affiliates that sell
your offers day and night (you can also promote your affiliate
program and your sales funnels on our affiliate marketplace!)
 Automate your entire business: Set up automation rules and
workflows to completely run your online business on autopilot

Of course, a host of other features like A/B testing, evergreen

webinars, coupon codes, assistant accounts, blogs, and more are all
waiting for you!

Maybe that’s why we have more than 3,600 reviews on Trustpilot

with an amazing rating of 4.9/5:
Systeme.io’s pricing

We have 4 plans:

 Free plan: $0/month

 Startup plan: $27/month or $228/yearly (save 30%)
 Webinar plan: $47/month or $396/yearly (save 30%)
 Unlimited Plan: $97/month or $828/yearly (save 30%)

The Free plan is free forever — you can build 3 sales funnels with
unlimited hosting and storage space, and connect your own custom
domain.

Plus, the ability to send unlimited marketing emails, access to tags,

automation rules, blogs, A/B testing, online courses, and your own
affiliate program.

Oh, and sell unlimited products/services with 0% transaction fees! (You

can get a free migration for your online business if you go with the Unlimited
plan or any annual billing plan).
But hey, don’t just take our word for it, go try it out yourself and get
your free account now — we won’t ask for your card info!

Conclusion

So, what did we learn today?

 A sales funnel helps you focus your marketing efforts and deliver
personalized experiences to your customers and prospects
 In the beginning, you don’t need a huge budget or entire sales
teams to get your online business off the ground — especially if
you use a tool like systeme.io
 Knowing the different sales funnel stages will help you get better
results in the long run as you can optimize each 1 for their
respective goals
 Building a sales funnel is not a 1-time thing, it’s a process that
you iterate on and get better at doing with time
 Always look to optimize the best performing funnels with
methods like A/B testing and automation rules
 You should look for inspiration from successful sales funnels in
your niche

And that’s it! You’re now ready to build thriving sales funnels, what
are you waiting for?

Get your lifetime free account at systeme.io and start building your
own sales funnels in minutes right now!