How to Create an Effective Sales Funnel

All businesses require some sort of sales funnel because it helps them understand what’s working, and keep statistics. As the customer goes through the sales funnel, you can see what they have clicked, opened, or what caused them to purchase a product. Online companies and bloggers have been using sales funnels ever since the model became more affordable. Clickfunnel and Unbounce are two companies that provide you an all-in-online solution to build and test your entire sales funnel. However, it still helps to know what elements matter when trying to build effective sales funnel because this will help you avoid some of the common, time-consuming mistakes.

I decided to do some research and put together a list of the most important elements of an effective sales funnel. Let’s get started.

A Great Product

For you to find out what parts of the funnel are most effective, it’s important people “actually” go through the funnel. One way to keep customers enticed is by offering great content or a great product—if I know that each time I receive an email from you guys I’ll save money or learn something new, then I’ll interact with your messages. To decide what products or content your audience wants to read, you should know more about them. One way to do this is by studying your competition, especially, those that have been around longer. I’m sure they have done all the work and figured out who their audience so learns from them.

Once you determine your audience, you can start building sales funnel around the products, content, and services they want.

A Landing Page

There needs to be a point in your funnel where you capture the email address of the visitor. Many companies will have two sales funnels, one for returning visitors, and the other for new customers retained through marketing (will discuss later). For new visitors, you need to find a way to contact them after they leave your pages or you’ll have a hard time finding and attracting them later on. For this reason, it’s important to split test different landing pages to see which ones attract the most email addresses. The higher email opt-in rate, the more sales you can get from these new subscribers. Both Clickfunnel and Unbounce have several landing page templates that you can put together and create a split test.

Try different things when creating landing page like – headlines, buttons, text, videos, and images.

Marketing Channels

A business only grows when you start to attract new customers, so you have to find ways to bring new people into your sales funnel. You should know how to utilize the different marketing methods online like social media, pay-per-click, and banner advertisements. All these marketing campaigns should be tested and optimized so you can continue to drive people into your funnel increasing opt-ins and conversions. You should always start slow and keep an eye on your budget because costs can get very high quickly. Once you find a winning combination, you can increase your marketing budget because by then you’ll have conversions from your funnel too.

Analytics

To really understand what’s working, you’ll need tools to keep track of visitors, landing page statistics, sales, and click-throughs. With high numbers across the board, it’s very easy to determine that you have a winning combination. The good news is that if you’re using a complete funnel solution you’ll have a reporting system built within. The first couple of days of setting up a sales funnel, it’s important you keep a close eye so you can make tweaks when required. However, you need to have actual data collected to find out what’s been working so I would suggest to give it 30 solid days before making any changes.

Final Thoughts

An effective sales funnel can be huge for business because it automates all the tedious stuff like sending single emails, running manual tests, and collecting data. This can be done easily now, and is affordable at the same time. You should take some time right now to figure out how you can implement a sales funnel to your business.

Featured photo credit: easyautomatedsales.com via easyautomatedsales.com

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