A sales funnel is basically a tool to help you visualize how users would interact with your business and through what stages they would go to make a final buying decision. However, it isn’t just that.
A well-crafted sales funnel also offers valuable insights into your user’s journey, helps you identify shortcomings in your marketing strategies, and can help boost conversion rates. Regardless of how deep your sales funnel goes and how complex it is, by using the information it shares, you can optimize your strategy and provide your marketing efforts with a direction.
In this blog post, we are going to discuss 8 proven tips for profitably using a sales funnel.
Depending on your niche and business model, some of these tips will help you attract new potential customers, create better engagement with your existing customers and increase overall conversions rates.
1. Increase website traffic
The most important thing you need when optimizing a marketing strategy or sales funnel is a high volume of website traffic. Without a substantial amount of traffic, you will not get enough information to make data-backed decisions. Moreover, generating traffic caters to the first stage of the sales funnel, i.e., awareness.
There are various ways to increase website traffic. Here are some of them:
- Create high-quality content on a regular basis: Creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content is a proven way to get more traffic. A piece of well-crafted content that is better than everyone else’s content is likely to rank on top of the SERPs — resulting in free organic traffic.
- Search engine optimization: By optimizing your website and content pieces, you can gain higher positions in the SERPs and get more free traffic.
- Social media websites: By sharing your content, you can acquire free traffic from social media websites.
- Guest blogging: Guest blogging is another way to redirect targeted traffic to your website. Learn more about guest blogging.
2. Create an attractive lead magnet
As we just discussed, driving traffic to your website is the first step to utilizing your sales funnel. However, you can drive all the traffic you want; it’s not going to work for you without an attractive lead magnet.
What is a lead magnet?
It helps you convert random website visitors into email subscribers that you can later nurture and sell to.
Identify what your readers really want. Then create a lead magnet around that topic and give it away for free. Here is an example of an interesting lead magnet.
Also, notice how well-crafted the landing page is — the content, design, the visible call-to-action, and a lack of menu buttons.
With the help of pop-ups, you can redirect traffic from other web pages of your site to the landing page where visitors could download the lead magnet. As soon as they do, you get their email information, and contact is established — pushing those random website visitors into your sales funnel.
3. Promote your lead magnet
Instead of sharing blog posts and other pages from your site, you should also try promoting your lead magnet on different social channels and forums.
This will send all the traffic directly to the landing page and would likely increase the number of subscribers you get.
If you have the budget for it, you can also run paid ads on Facebook and other channels to get a lot of traffic and subscribers in a relatively short period of time.
4. Create an email drip campaign
Once you have generated a substantial amount of leads, it is time to start an email drip campaign. That email campaign will help nurture leads and inform them about the industry, educate them about your products or services, and share valuable information that the email recipients would find useful.
When designing an email drip campaign, it is important to pre-plan all the content and timing of the emails. The sales funnel should dictate some of the content. Moreover, for the timing and frequency of the emails, we suggest testing and optimizing as you move along.
5. A tripwire offer
Eventually, you will have to start selling to your email subscribers. There are two ways of doing that:
- Selling your core offer — this is what most businesses do, or
- Making a tripwire offer and segmenting your email list accordingly
The second option is a more strategic one that may lead to better results in the long term.
What is a tripwire offer?
A tripwire offer is a small-ticket item that is used to segment freeloaders from potential customers who are willing to pay you. Since it is a low-cost, low-friction offer, people would be less hesitant to buy from you.
Once they pay, they go into the “buying” mentality. Their concerns might get eliminated — which would pave the way for future transactions.
A tripwire offer can range from $0.99 cents to $5-$7 dollars. Ideally, it should cost less than $10. Generally, the lower, the cost the better it is. Some businesses may even bear a loss during this stage — just to move potential customers further in the sales funnel.
6. Nurture leads with case studies, product comparisons, and testimonials
After the tripwire campaign, you can segment people into two groups: Those who didn’t buy from you and those who did.
You should continue nurturing the former group with drip campaigns and informative emails. The second group, however, is the one you should really focus on as they are willing to pay.
Share case studies and testimonials them. Show how other customers have improved their life and solved their problems after using your product or service. If you can share facts and data with them, they may want your product even more.
7. Offer the main product or service
After nurturing them with case studies, informative articles, product comparisons, and positive testimonials, it is time to make the core offer to the paying segment. These would be the warm prospects who’d be very far in your sales funnel.
Many of your customers won’t convert on the first try. Keep segmenting them and continue making them offers after an appropriate amount of time.
8. Upsell and cross-sell
People who have purchased your main offer are prime candidates for upselling and cross-selling. Amazon does a great job with cross-selling and upselling different products.
Increasing the customer’s lifetime value is an integral aspect of any successful marketing strategy — and that does not only include selling the same product again and again. It also includes upselling and cross-selling different products to them.
9. Advocacy
The last step would be to encourage testimonials and feedback from your satisfied customers. This will lead to user-generated content that you can later leverage and share on your website, in your email marketing campaigns, and across different social channels on the internet.
Conclusion
Most businesses have sales funnel in some form or shape. However, not all of them will have profitable sales funnel. In this post, we shared 9 tips to help you make better strategies with your sales funnel and prospects.
Remember, however, that it all starts with high-quality content — either in the form of engaging blog posts or use lead magnets that you can promote and gather leads with. To learn more about content marketing, read:
