The digital revolution has changed the way of doing business, imposing certain rules that, if followed, can bring your business on a whole new level.
But here’s the bad news: if you continue doing what worked in the past, and disregard them, sooner or later, you are destined to fail.
Becoming the new industry standard, these “new rules” have created many job openings on the market for experts in these areas.
Just open any freelancing site, and you will notice a long list of people calling themselves “sales funnel experts,” and an equally long list of employers asking for content creators with sales funnel expertise.
During our career, we’ve met many people who were wondering who, in their right mind, would pay someone to jot down a few emails, when it’s a thing that anyone can do in just a couple of minutes, but these people don’t get the gist of content marketing.
Nowadays, regardless of what you offer, chances are, someone else is offering the very same thing, so it is no longer the WHAT that sets you apart from your competitors – it is the HOW that ultimately sells your products.
Knowing this, it is logical that you would put a lot of thought and effort into the HOW, and find the best people that can pack your offerings in a way that will turn your audience into your paying customers.
Now, let’s see what these people know, and you still don’t.
To understand sales funnels, it’s enough to understand what an ordinary funnel is. For that purpose, let’s take a look at the basic definition.
funnel
ˈfʌn(ə)l/
noun
The word “funnel” used in the marketing concept “sales funnel” is a metaphor for the process of redirecting the vast pool of potential customers towards your business and becoming actual (repeating) ones.
Sales funnels have been a marketing system that has been around as long as marketers can remember, but since email marketing and web pages have made the building and implementation of sales funnels far easier than it was before, the digital economy has repositioned them as the foundation of sales.
A sales funnel is built of four parts, each of which has a different goal. Let’s go through each one of them.
At this point, you know the ultimate goal of building a sales funnel: turning potential customers into paying leads. However, before you can get to that stage, you first need to spread the word about your business and get to the stage of your target audience is aware of your products and services.
We won’t sugarcoat it: it is extremely hard to stand out in a sea of online content, and getting the attention of your customers is far from a simple feat.
There are many ways you can get traffic and based upon the source of that traffic, your visitors will view your funnel and offerings differently.
Being an industry leader and having authority is the easiest way you can turn your prospects into repeating customers; hence the hype that surrounds SEO, which positions you in a way that increases your organic traffic.
Of course, that does not mean that visitors that landed on your page through a paid ad, or an affiliate link cannot be turned into leads. After all, what would be the point of such traffic if that was the case?
So, regardless of the means you use to get to the awareness stage, your goal is the same: move through the funnel those that got in, up until the point when they become your loyal clients.
People are wired to be interested in stories.
When we are kids, we fall asleep with stories, and when we are adults, we get excited whenever we hear that the new blockbuster arrives at our city’s cinema.
Stories are everywhere: they are hidden in the retells of the “last nights” to our friends, in the advertisements that catch our eye while we are stuck in traffic, in the songs we sing along with when we hear them playing on the radio, and even in the memories that imprison our minds in those long, sleepless nights.
So, in order to create a successful sales funnel, you need to learn how to create a successful story around your brand and bond with your customers.
To do that you need to do two things: create the feeling of empathy, and offer a solution. The combination of these two things is what is known as “providing value” among marketers.
The empathy is what will get your followers to listen to you. To learn how to create it, take a look at the work of the greatest storytellers of all times.
When you do, you can notice a pattern which consists of:
How does the craft of great novelists relate to your business?
Well, your job is no different than theirs – you basically have to do the same thing as they do, just in a much more condensed space.
In other words, when you are starting creating the content for your funnel you should try to present a situation that your reader relates to and would want to change, and do it using persuasive, catchy language. After that, you can proceed to the solution to their problem, which is, of course, your product or service, as well as to presenting the picture of the problem-free life they would have if they become your customer.
Here’s another harsh truth: people are smarter than you think they are.
Underestimating your customers is the single biggest mistake you can possibly do. They’re not going to become buyers unless they feel they get something from it (remember that “value” everyone talks about?). Your funnel needs to deliver this value to your prospects, and even more significantly, needs to position you as an honest and relatable vendor they would like to build a relationship with.
You can do this utilizing the six principles of influence that Robert Cialdini introduced in his book of the same title, published in 1984:
Out of these principles, the principle of social proof, or showing your prospects that you have delivered what you promised to all of those who already decided using your services, is the most powerful one.
The fourth and final stage of each sales funnel is the action that you are leading your customers towards taking. Usually, this action is the purchase of your products or services. This is the stage where you make money, and create a following.
But, in order to make enough money to cover your expenses, and get some extra on the side, you need to perfect your sales funnel building, just like you build every other skill: by constant tracking, analysis and improvement.
When you find the sweet spot of your offers, and start seeing the returns, you’ll never go back to the old ways of doing business.
When your products and services have delivered value and met, or even exceeded your customers’ expectations, the buyers go through extra two stages: reevaluation and repurchase, after which they become your loyal following with high lifetime value.
We feel the need to add this section before continuing, since a lot of people get the mistaken idea that sales funnels are, in fact, landing pages.
However, although most of the time your funnel is going to be a landing page, there’s a difference.
Namely, a landing page is a page that is created with one goal in mind, usually for a user to subscribe or buy a product.
A funnel, on the other hand, is a system of landing pages, emails, and sometimes other elements as well, like, for example, ads, that takes the user through the user journey: visitor, customer, repeat buyer.
The funnel ends only when the goal is met and the visitor makes the purchase.
There are generally three types of funnels, based on their purpose:
Another common misunderstanding is that landing pages and websites are the same thing. As you are probably already guessing, that’s not the case.
As we said, landing pages have one goal which is turning visitors into leads, and are usually not using any elements that are distracting the visitors from that goal.
A website, however, has many goals – whether it is signing up to a newsletter, selling your services, getting people to contact you, offering customer support etc.
So, a website is the place where all your visitors gather, and then continue down different roads, depending on what they’re looking for. Since the focused call to action is the best way to make sales, a landing page is generally the one that makes sales, and a website has a more informative role because of the plethora of info available.
As we already explained, your marketing efforts yield results only in cases when you deliver value.
And value is all about content.
There are different ways you can structure your content, and if you want to make it work for you, you need to align each of these forms with the sales funnel stages. In other words, if you decide to sell too early – you won’t sell much, and if you decide to sell too late, you might lose your prospects’ interest before you get them to buy.
Knowing that achieving this balance is not always intuitive, we decided to share some guidelines as to how each form of content fits each stage.
Have you noticed that most of the businesses today offer a “Blog” section on their webpages or a free eBook where they offer free information for no other price but your email address?
By now, this shouldn’t come to you as a surprise.
Articles are where businesses can showcase their expertise, and optimize their texts with particular keywords that can drive organic traffic.
Moreover, people like getting and sharing valuable, free information, so with each customer sharing some of your posts across their network of friends and followers, your brand name gets a broader audience.
Lead magnets are created with one thing in mind: spark interest. Usually, lead magnets are some kind of free info or advice, shared in exchange for your prospects’ email address. When your audience signs up for your free eBook, webinar, or tips email sequence, you can be sure that you already have their interest.
We already explained that out of the six principles of influence, the principle of social proof is the one you can expect to bring you the best results. That is, if you tell your prospects that your products are great, you’d have a much harder time convincing them you are telling the truth. If some other customer that has tried your products says they are great, on the other hand, your trustworthiness will skyrocket with minimal effort.
The bottom part of the funnel should be reserved for placing what is known as a ticking clock offer that plays on the principle of scarcity and pushes individuals from being an interested party to becoming a paying customer.
Once upon a time, you needed a step by step guide in order to make use of all of this knowledge that we served you just now. Doing this now would be very complicated and time-consuming, as for every different product, service, or offer, businesses would have to build a new funnel from the ground up, and understand what kind of funnel each offering requires.
However, times have changed, and now you have a number of tools available at hand that can simplify, and even automate parts of your efforts.
ClickFunnels, for example, simplifies the building of sales funnels by providing companies with various funnel options which are pre-built for different types of offerings. So, the only thing you need to do is to choose the goal of your sales funnel. Providing you with a template, ClickFunnels ensures that you create the right kind of funnel for your needs and saves you a lot of time and effort that you would spend on setting it all up.
Moreover, since all of the templates the tool offers are proven to work, you do not have to go through the A/B testing phase to weed out the templates that are not bringing in satisfactory results. You can, of course, A/B test all the extra elements that you can easily integrate into your template like videos, images, animation, clocks and so on.
Note that although we’re talking about building digital funnels, they work for every industry and type of company. So, it does not matter whether you sell a digital product, or you are a brick and mortar store – you need to capitalize on the possibilities a sales funnel offers all the same.
Sales funnels help companies build interest and increase brand awareness, even if the actual purchase is done offline. If you don’t believe our words alone, trust our experience: so far, we’ve worked on building sales funnels for many offline businesses and physical products, which led to great results every time.
If you’d like to try ClickFunnels and see how it works out for you, you can sign up for a 14 day free trial by clicking here. If you sign up through this link we provided, you will also get FREE access to our online course that teaches you how to build a landing page funnel step by step.
But the free course is not the only thing you’ll get!
You’ll also have Kaizen Sigma build you the first funnel for FREE as well. That way, you can see all the stages of the funnel in an example, and get a deeper understanding of everything that we talked about.
We’ve sparked your interest but you’re still not sure how you can get your free products?
Feel free to contact us so we can explain everything in detail.
Oh, and if, by any chance, even after trying ClickFunnels and attending our course, you do not feel that you can build your funnels yourself, remember that whether you are in need of strategizing before building a new funnel, the actual creation of it, or optimizing your existing funnels to improve your conversion rates, remember that in times of need – we’re there to help.
Disclosure: Kaizen Sigma is an independent ClickFunnels Affiliate, not an employee. Our agency receives referral payments from ClickFunnels. The opinions expressed here are our own and are not official statements of ClickFunnels or its parent company, Etison LLC.
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