Sale is a process that starts from the point when a visitor visits a website or comes across a brand to the final stage of making a purchase decision. Businesses have been using the concept of a sales funnel to manage their sales processes efficiently and swiftly.

However, the process of lead nurturing and sales is not as simple as it sounds, and that might be the reason why businesses are moving away from the concept of a sales funnel. Do you also think that a sales funnel sounds too mechanical and mathematical?

What is a Marketing Funnel?

Moving from the awareness stage to the purchase stage is a long journey, and it is dotted with several unexpected events and gaps. It is never a swift journey, and the simplistic concept of a funnel can't describe it. Yet, it offers an excellent visual description of the entire process and helps you to understand and implement a marketing strategy in a better manner.

This article will try to describe the funnel concept and how it can be successfully employed to increase conversion and sales.

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Making the buying decision isn't the end of the funnel. Often it goes beyond the purchase stage to post-sales follow-ups, cross-sales, and retention.

The process begins with attracting visitors to your website, and to make this possible, you should work on your website SEO, content, offline promotion, and backlinks.

However, as the lead progresses and moves forward in the funnel, it needs a more personalized outreach. You may directly make a phone call or arrange a product demo, to begin with.

To complement a well-crafted marketing funnel strategy, high-quality free templates design can significantly streamline your content creation process. By utilizing these templates, you not only save time but also ensure that the visuals adhere to a professional standard, enhancing the appeal at each stage of your funnel.

What Works and What Doesn't?

We will discuss two examples to explain the difference between a successful sales process and an unsuccessful one. Jeff runs a gift shop. He is not a savvy businessman, so he bought a list of toy buyers from the market and handed it over to his outbound sales team. The team had a tough time closing sales from the list as most of the buyers were either not interested or not fit for the products. He had to shut down their outbound sales operations as the conversion rate was less than 1%.

On the other hand, Robert runs a digital marketing agency. He created a website first and worked very hard on its SEO, local SEO, and content marketing. The right kind of optimization led to massive traffic from search engines.

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He created a sales funnel and developed content according to the various stages in the funnel. His content marketing team developed useful, attention-grabbing, and engaging content for the users and attached it to his landing pages to feed the funnel. These were white papers, user guides, templates, eBooks, articles, and tutorial videos.

They created the content to inform and educate the readers about his company's digital marketing services. It also answered various questions.

He successfully created a community through social accounts and shared his content on social media channels. He developed an opt-in system on his website to collect leads. His sales team didn't have to work hard for sales as conversions started raining. It had an apparent reason, and these were the high-quality leads obtained through opt-in forms. The customers were engaged by informative blogs, videos, and infographics.

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The leads were further nurtured by email marketing, product demos, and question-answer sessions. So, the rejection rate was pretty low, and the sales team didn't have to put in too much effort to convert.

This example best sums up the narrative of the sales funnel.

Why Do You Need a Marketing Funnel?

Every marketer needs the buyer's journey completely mapped into an actionable plan to create the right kind of content and implement the right strategy at each stage of this journey, which can best be done with the help of a sales funnel.

It helps you to make the efforts in the right direction and achieve the best possible results. It also enables you to identify the right tactics to implement at the right stage of a buyer's journey.

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Marketing funnels may sound too scientific and mechanical, but they can help you save the time, effort, and money required for conversion. Using funnels is the best-known way to increase your marketing ROI.

Using sales funnels is also one of the most effective tactics to divert leads in bulk into the sales process and nurture them to achieve maximum conversion. It reduces manual effort, uncertainty, and cost involved.

How to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel?

Here are the steps to create a marketing funnel that will work for you and help you achieve your business goals.

1. Understand Your Audience and Behavior Patterns

A sales funnel that is built for conversion will work best if you know your audience.

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It should be built in a way that you can quickly achieve your business objectives. You can use numerous methods to understand your target audience. Some of these methods are as follows:

1. Taking feedback from your existing customers
2. Social listening
3. Surveys
4. Web analytics

Apart from understanding your audience, you should also know their online behavior. It includes how the visitors interact with your website and the content in it. Knowing your audience's online behavior will help you design your funnel and add or remove various stages.

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For example, if you have an engaging blog section on your website that attracts massive traffic, you could make it your top-of-the-funnel tactic. That means you should try to divert more and more visitors to your blog section through paid advertising, SEO, backlinks, and social media. It would help redirect visitors to your specific product pages for conversion rate optimization from the blog section.

So, to make a practical buyer journey map or funnel, you should try to understand your audience's online behavior first.

2. Determine the Number of Stages in Your Funnel

Understanding your audience and their online behavior will help you in identifying your buyer's journey. Journey mapping is an essential step that enables you to build your funnel and determine its various stages.

According to each stage, you can create your content strategy and employ other marketing tactics to move your audience in the desired direction. Thus, building a funnel and deciding its various stages becomes a crucial step that improves your sales process, minimizing time and money.

Various Stages in a Sales Funnel

Let's delve deeper into how to decide the different stages in your sales funnel through the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action) model. You can also club the "interest" and "desire" stages as the consideration stage.

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A. Awareness Stage

It is the first stage of a buyer's journey because a buyer needs to be aware of your brand before even considering your product. The purpose of this stage in the sales funnel is to attract more and more people and make them aware of your products and services. In this stage, your prospect first hears about your product or the brand and gets to know what it is all about and how it can be helpful for him. It is important to note that not all people in the awareness stage are supposed to go to the last stage of the funnel, i.e., the purchase stage, and the number of people will continue to decrease as we move down the funnel.

B. Interest Stage

It is the stage when the customer is already aware of your product but not too interested. So, marketers should focus on generating interest and curiosity by creating engaging content. To generate enthusiasm about your products and services, you can try paid advertising and social media. It can also be explained as a stage in a buyer's journey when a customer at a retail store looks at some product with interest and enthusiasm. In the meantime, the sales assistant comes and asks, "May I help you?"

C. Desire Stage

In this stage, the customer is already exposed to paid search and social media content about your brand. He has also gone through compelling ads that generate desire. So, it falls under the consideration stage. Most customers would like to do comparisons online.

People tend to know the best option available in the market in that specific product category. So, at this stage, most of your marketing efforts should be directed toward creating content that helps people understand the value your product offers and why your product is better than the alternatives available in the market. The content created for this stage should be so compelling that it creates a buying intent and directs the customer to the next step of the purchase. If your content fails to do that, the customer would leave the funnel and go to your competition.

D. Action Stage (Bottom of the Funnel)

The action stage is the final stage of your sales cycle where your customer already has the purchase intent, and your job is to help them close the deal. So, at this stage, all your efforts should be directed to get the sales closed. You should help them find the right product with the right attributes the user needs and a smooth checkout process. It also includes allowing them to use their preferred payment mode to avoid any problem in this last and crucial stage.

Tip: The other valuable action stage tactics can be newsletter signup, webinar signup, signup for a demo, etc.

3. Add Marketing Tactics to Each Stage

Your funnel can be long or short, depending on your needs and target customers' online behavior. So, once you determine the various stages in your funnel, it's time to think of the best tactics you can apply at each stage.

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Here are some tactics that you can try according to the stage in your buyer's journey:

A. Top of the Funnel (ToFu)

At this stage, you can try various strategies directed at increasing awareness among the masses. Indeed, very few people know about your brand at this stage because it is comparatively new, and people need to learn more about it and its features.

i. Social Media Marketing

Increasing traffic on your website should be a prime concern at this stage. So, invest in social media marketing to increase traffic from social media, which might be the low-hanging fruit for you.

ii. Influencer marketing

You can also try influencer marketing which has become a trend these days. However, you should identify the reach of the influencers you want to rope in and verify whether their audience falls in your niche. You should also check engagement levels on their posts.

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iii. Paid advertising campaigns

Running paid advertising campaigns is extremely important in the initial stages because many users won't reach using the organic methods. This method is fast and precise when you are desperately looking for customers in the initial stages.

iv. Blog Posts and Other Types Of High-quality Content

Organic search traffic is essential these days, and you can get it by creating quality content like blog posts and videos. According to a study conducted by Content Marketing Institute, blog posts, podcasts, videos, and eBooks are the most effective content types in the early stages of a buyer's journey.

73% of the respondents believed that blog posts and articles were the most effective content types, whereas 57% favored podcasts against 54% who thought it was video content. An impressive 56% of the participants believed that eBooks were the most effective.

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v. Search Engine Optimization

An SEO technique is also quite effective in pulling organic and referral traffic to your website, so you can't ignore this proven evergreen technique.

vi. Videos and Podcasts

As evident from the above study, marketers should also experiment with videos and podcasts, which are the most famous content formats people love to consume these days.

vii. Giveaways, Contests, Promotions, Early-Bird Discounts

Hosting giveaways and contests is also a prevalent and proven technique to attract organic traffic from engaged audiences.

Middle-of-the-Funnel

While the general tactics at the top of the funnel include creating informative content in different formats, have you ever wondered what should be your tactic during the middle of the funnel?

Content marketing is an effective tactic here as well, but at this stage, you will need different content to engage your customers so that they don't leave the funnel, or else all the efforts you made in the first stage will go to waste.

i. Create Unboxing and Trial Videos (By Influencers and YouTubers)

Have you seen those unboxing or trial videos people watch before they buy the actual product?

People at this stage want to get the touch and feel of the product. They trust influencers, so it would be an added advantage if an influencer does it. Furthermore, they also trust the "honest" review of an influencer.

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So, you may easily guess how important such content can be for a buyer in the consideration stage, where people are more likely to compare your products with other products before they make a final buying decision. Positive input from an influencer can change the game at this stage.

ii. Product Reviews

Product reviews are also critical at the final stage of a funnel. These reviews decide whether we are going to purchase a particular product or not. You might have experienced it on online shopping sites such as Amazon that even a single negative review that genuinely highlights a problem in the product or seller's services might change your purchase decision at the last minute. And vice versa is also true.

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Therefore, product reviews are also a powerful form of content that can help you build trust in the middle of the funnel.

iii. Case Studies

Case studies also serve as a compelling form of content, which is quite effective in the consideration stage, especially in B2B businesses. People love to know how your products and services have benefited people and their businesses. They might also be interested in getting more profound insights into how you work so that they can make informed decisions.

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iv. User-Generated Content

User-generated content about a particular brand or product is also a powerful form of content as it acts as social proof and helps you build trust in your brand.

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v. eBooks

eBooks are also among the most effective types of content formats. eBooks and white papers are not only engaging but highly informative and educational.

These content types provide in-depth information about your products and services, how they work and how they can benefit you.

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You should also invest in content marketing and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) of your website.

It will engage your visitors and hook them for a long time. With CRO, you can divert the website traffic to the desired product or service pages from blog posts and home pages.

C. Bottom-of-the-Funnel

You can identify the last stage with very high purchase intent, where a slight push in the right direction may lead to a purchase.

Here are some of the marketing tactics that can help you in the final stage of the sales funnel:

i. Limited Period Discounts and Offers

Since this is a stage when customers are ready to buy the product, they might be looking for a slight push regarding limited-time offers and discounts. Such tactics work wonders while closing sales.

ii. Remarketing

Remarketing is highly effective in converting the customers who have visited your website once or interacted with your brand in any manner whatsoever but left without buying anything. Remarketing has a high conversion rate.

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iii. Free Trials and Free Demos

Offering free trials and demos can also be an excellent step to get the customers to use your products and services and then decide for themselves whether they need it or not.

Free trials have a great advantage. When people start using your product, it becomes easy to convince them to buy it or recommend it to others.

iv. Use Deadlines

Fear of missing out (or FOMO) is also a prevalent tactic that marketers employ to close the sale. You can use the deadlines in your ads to prompt your customers for instant purchases. In the example below, fashion brand ASOS uses FOMO and announces 20% off for 24 hours only.

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The Final Stage - Beyond Conversions

Most marketers have this wrong notion that the utility of a sales funnel finishes when a lead is converted into a paying customer. It's a big marketing fallacy, and we shouldn't fall into it. For a salesperson, who has been in the industry for a long time, this can be an entirely wrong notion.

Conclusion

Customer retention is more important than customer acquisition because, in the long term, repeat customers are much more profitable for a business than fresh customers. So, the most effective sales funnels don't end with a purchase. You should also have a post-purchase relationship with your customers.

So, you can add one or more post-purchase stages in your funnel for customer retention. The chief objective of adding these stages into your funnel is to retain the customers and keep them happy and delighted rather than making the sales a lousy and one-time activity.

A website, a landing page, and a sales funnel are three different terms, but they can be used together to create a winning marketing strategy.

A landing page is a web page where marketers send users upon clicking on an ad on social media, a website, or an email. It is your website's first touch point for users. Meanwhile, a sales funnel encompasses a buyer's entire journey, involving many such landing pages with different calls to action (CTAs), directing and educating the user along the way with the ultimate objective of closing the sale.

The primary aim of both a sales funnel and a landing page is to generate leads and close sales, but they vary significantly in implementation and use. Here, we will explain both these terms, how you can use them to run successful ads, and highlight their significant differences.

What is a Landing Page?

It is a single webpage with a predefined objective. Its design is usually minimalistic to propel the visitor to take the desired action. It looks like the website's homepage, but it lacks many website elements to keep visitors scrolling down without any distractions until they take the intended action.

For example, if a landing page's objective is to get the visitor's contact information, it would act as an opt-in page. You can use it to offer your potential customers something of value, such as a free video tutorial, in exchange for their email addresses. Once they give you their email address, you can take them to a "thank you" page that gives them the link to the video.

Most landing pages aren't used as a stand-alone tactic for conversion. Instead, they are used alongside paid promotion or as part of the sales funnel to push the visitor into the final stages of the buyer's journey.

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Landing pages pursue a single objective and ask the visitor to either take action or leave. They usually have the following three elements:

1. A scrollable page with a compelling offer, often with a video for powerful messaging
2. A section that asks the visitor to take action, such as a submit button and blank fields for entering contact information
3. A “thank you” page for follow-up. It usually contains something of value for the customer or more related information

You can create landing pages for multiple objectives, such as increasing footfall at your brick-and-mortar store, getting customer details, pushing educational content, or populating your email subscriber list.

What are the types of Landing Pages?

There are mainly two types of landing pages:

A. Lead Generation Landing Pages: They are also known as lead captureā  pages. They often use a form as their CTA to capture lead data, including the visitor's name and email address. B2B marketers use these landing pages to sell expensive items that require building a list of prospective customers and then nurturing those leads. For instance, if your company sells a B2B IoT infrastructure solution like an MQTT Broker, its language should speak directly to its target audience. To achieve this level of clarity and engagement, we recommend it contain a mix of technical and high-level information to communicate the benefit to its end user.

Businesses also use these pages to offer free ebooks and webinars in exchange for visitors' contact information.

B. Click Through Landing Pages: These are frequently used by eCommerce businesses and are tied to a CTA to close sales or subscriptions. They use a button to send the visitors into the checkout flow to complete a transaction.

What is a Sales Funnel?

It is a path in a buyer’s journey that often involves several steps that a prospect can take to become your paid customer.

Here is an example of a sales funnel for physical store shopping:

The passersby spot your store while walking on the street. They are considered top-of-the-funnel prospects. A few of them decide to step in; it is the next stage of the funnel. A customer spots a rack of casual shoes with discount offers. He decides to have a look, taking the next step. He then selects a pair of shoes and heads toward the checkout. He is at the last stage of the funnel now. When he makes the payment and finishes the purchase, he is at the funnel’s bottom.

A similar process plays out for online businesses. The steps involved in online sales funnels are:

Step 1: Analyze your audience’s behavior pattern using various tools
Step 2: Capture their attention through compelling offers
Step 3: Build a landing page with a specific CTA and conversion goal
Step 4: Run an email campaign to educate your audience about your brand and current offers for recurring sales
Step 5: Keep in touch

Your sales funnel represents the path your prospective customers take when making a buying decision. If you understand the funnel, you can find the exact stages where your prospects are moving out of the funnel, never to return. A close analysis will help you find the key issues and resolve them. You can’t optimize a funnel for conversion if you don’t understand it. It’s crucial to know how your website visitors walk through the funnel and are they likely to convert.

Sales Funnels vs. Landing Pages

The prime difference between a landing page and a sales funnel is that the sales funnel includes many landing pages with different CTAs throughout each stage in the buying cycle. You can use both tactics based on your marketing and ad plan.

How Do Sales Funnels Work?

A sales funnel is an essential element of the sales process marked with a series of well-defined stages, where businesses choose and monitor their interactions with the prospects from the first contact to the last stage of the purchase decision.

Here is a walk-through of how a sales funnel works in an online marketing and sales ecosystem:

1. Lead

As soon as a user clicks on an ad or a link on social media or Google search results, they enter into your sales funnel as a prospect. They may browse through some of your products or check out your blog posts. You can seize this opportunity and ask them to sign up for a newsletter using a pop-up or opt-in form on your web page. If they show interest and fill out the opt-in form, they become a part of your email list. In other words, they become your business lead, which you can nurture over time through regular messaging.

2. Sales Call

Once you have their contact information, you can expand your sales interactions beyond your website through calls, text messages, and emails. For example, you can make an introductory sales call or send them an email to initiate the process.

3. Follow Up

You may use all three communication channelsā€”email, phone, and text messagesā€”to follow up. If you've already had an initial interaction with your prospect and didn't receive a clear, definite no, then follow up as long as it takes to receive a response.

4. Conversion

Answer their queries and dispel doubts to remove obstacles in the funnel that might be preventing them from moving further and make a purchase decision.

5. Sales

Many of these leads are likely to revisit your website if you contact them with a compelling offer or a coupon code. As a prospect moves through the funnel, it narrows down, so the people near the bottom are often fewer than the top. Therefore, it's crucial that your messaging is highly focused and targeted during all these stages.

How to Run Ads According to Various Stages in the Sales Funnel?

The average customer engages with three to five pieces of content before talking to a sales rep. So, you can start your ad campaign by building email lists and asking users to subscribe to your newsletters. Once they become a part of your email lists, you can share with them your best and most appropriate content according to their stage in the funnel by inviting them to the specific landing pages on your website.

Tip: Content plays a vital role in conversion, and users need different kinds of content at each stage in the sales funnel to move toward a purchase decision. You can use your ads to divert users to such pieces of content.

Right Messaging and Timing

Each of these stages requires a different marketing approach. A wrong message is not only wasteful but can potentially interfere with the entire sales flow. The paid ads you run can be the strongest channels for messaging and communication. You can tweak the messages in your ads according to these stages in the funnel.

The timing of a message is also essential. You don't want a dessert in a restaurant before you order food and drinks.

What are the Stages of a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel's various stages can be defined with AIDA, the acronym for Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. You can identify these four stages after a deep analysis of the sales process and customer's mindset.

1. Awareness

Use messages at this stage to catch the attention of your prospects. The objective is to make them aware of your business and what you offer.

• Tips for creating ads at the “awareness” stage

You can explain the features, benefits, and USPs of your products through your ad messaging at this stage. You can also use your ads to direct the visitors to relevant content such as blog posts, sales videos, podcasts, infographics, and social media updates, to create product awareness.

2. Interest

At this stage in the sales funnel, the user is already familiar with your brand and products, but they need more information and education. Your prospects must be researching, comparing, and weighing the various available options.

• Tips for creating ads at the “interest” stage

At this stage, you can use your ads to invite visitors to attend educational webinars, videos, informative blog posts, and ebooks. You should tweak the ad script accordingly.

3. Decision

At the decision-making stage, the prospect is ready to buy and has narrowed down their options to just two or three you can be one of them. Here, you need to give them a compelling offer such as a discount code, free shipping charges, or a bonus product.

• Tips for creating ads at the “decision” stage

At this stage, use your ads to make a compelling offer, such as discount codes, lifetime memberships, etc. Make it so irresistible that your prospect can’t say no to it.

4. Action

At the action stage, the customer makes a purchase and becomes part of your network. It is the bottom of the funnel, but your job doesn’t end here. You need to work towards building a lifetime relationship with your customer and aim for recurring sales.

• Tips for creating ads at the “action” stage

Aim for retention at the action stage and use your ads to offer tech support. You can also use them to show other products that might be of value or interest.

All these actions at various stages in the sales funnel bring the visitor one step closer to the buying decision. You can use many software programs such as ClickFunnels and GetResponse to build sales funnels and streamline the entire sales process. You don’t require any technical skills to use these software programs.

Conclusion

The ultimate objective of both landing pages and sales funnels is to build a relationship with potential customers and convince them to make a purchase.

However, a sales funnel significantly reduces the conversion cost and increases the conversion rate. It also provides you multiple opportunities to upsell and downsell customers.

If you want to be successful with your conversion funnels and landing pages, keep on testing, optimizing, and re-testing your funnels and ads and focus on your messaging.