What does every business want for themselves?
What do you want for your business?
A steady flow of Leads…
…that could be converted into customers, isn’t it?
Sales are the life and blood of every business in this world and if you want more leads and more sales for your business as well, the fastest way to achieve that is by…
Having the knowledge about how to build SALES FUNNELS.
But:
What is a Sales Funnel?
The easiest way to explain a sales funnel is the path your prospect takes on the way to becoming your customer. In other words, it refers to the buying process that leads their prospects through to convert them to a customer.
Like the real-world funnel, the top category of your sales funnel is the biggest one and represents the largest number of people — potential customers and the bottom category represents the smallest number — committed customers — which is why it’s smaller, just as shown below:
Now that you know why a sales funnel is important for any business, let’s jump straight into the…
9 Steps To Building Your First Product Sales Funnel (How to build sales funnels)
1. Identify Your Audience
Lets start with the first step on how to build sales funnels.
For your sales funnel to be effective, you need to understand your audience. Conduct research on your target customers to fund out:
✅ What are their pain points?
✅ What are their interests and expectations?
✅ What are their demographics?
✅ What are their needs and wants?
✅ What solutions are they looking for?
✅ What problems do they think about all the time?
Understanding your audience better will help you determine:
✅ How to position your brand/product uniquely…
✅ How to address their pain points effectively…
✅ Where to find your audience…
After identifying the audience for your products/services, create different and accurate buyer personas as not every single customer is the same.
Their buying journeys and motivations for making a purchase may differ. Therefore your personas should be based on:
✅ Why they want to buy the product/service
✅ How they are going to use the product/service
✅ What motivates them to buy the product/service
By creating different personas you can personalize and enhance every individual customer’s experience by grouping them into a relevant buyer persona.
2. Choose the Traffic Source
Now when you know whom to target, the next step in building your funnel is to choose and decide where you will attract your target customers from.
Your target customer will be hanging out at various places online, connecting with other like-minded people in forums, groups, pages, blog comments, search engines, social media, etc.
It’s your job to find where they are and choose the best traffic source to attract them to your products and services. So your traffic and lead generation strategy may include:
- Influencer Marketing
- Guest Posting
- PPC Campaigns
- Social Media Advertising
- SEO
- Forums, etc.
The fastest method to launch, test, and scale your business is by employing Social Media Advertising to drive people to your offers on your website.
Other organic methods like Guest Posting, SEO, Forums, etc, will take a lot of time and there will be no guarantee that people coming from these sources are your target customers or not.
But with Social Media Advertising, you can target people based on their Demographics, Behaviors, and Interests which helps you narrow down your target audience to the T and you can be sure that people engaging with your ads are potential high-quality leads and customers for your business.
You can also retarget people multiple times if they don’t complete the specific task that you wanted them to do. This is a feature that isn’t available with other traffic sources present online.
3. Develop a Strategy to Engage Your Audience
Once you have the attention of your audience, you need to engage them. The goal is to educate them about how your product or service can benefit them, so they develop an interest.
Your audience engagement and lead nurturing strategy may include:
🟢 Creating relevant, engaging, and useful blog posts
🟢 Creating engaging and informative videos
🟢 Creating Social Media Posts
🟢 Sending Value-Driven Emails to your Leads
🟢 Creating Tutorials about your Product/Service, etc.
4. Craft your Front End Offer
After the strategy to engage leads after acquisition has been crafted, the next step is the meat of your sales funnels, i.e crafting a Front End offer.
A front end offer is the first product that you want your target audience to take their credit card out of their wallets for, and buy upfront.
Providing an offer is not just about presenting your product to them but about planning and offering the right solution to your customer. Therefore, this offer should be irresistible to the customer and should provide 10X value compared to the price that you are charging for it. This is how it will act as a frictionless entry step in your sales funnel.
So, plan and build a meaningful offer that your customers will see when you target them through the traffic source chosen above.
Also, keep in mind that while crafting your FE offer you should also prepare, or might I say, presell your target customers for the next step which is…
5. Setting up Your Up-sells
It is 5X – 25X more expensive to acquire a customer than retain an existing one. So, you should maximize this opportunity when your target customer has gone ahead to buy the FE offer, by providing up-sells to the FE offer.
As the name indicates, the up-sell will obviously be charged higher than the FE offer.
And having a series of up-sells, related to the FE offer can help you make more money at no additional cost of acquiring a new customer for these offers separately.
The thing is that when the customer buys the FE offer, he has already eliminated the resistance of thinking about just the money and is now highly engaged towards solving the problem that the FE offer promises him to do.
So when you present a series of up-sell offers which help reduce the gap between the problem and the solution by offering more benefits than the FE offer, the customer will now be less resistant to spend money to get his problems solved as quickly as possible because the trust is now already established.
But you need to understand that not everyone will buy your up-sell offers. The advantage is that even if some of them will, you will make more money than what you would’ve just with the FE offer alone. This significantly improves your profit margins and boosts your business revenue.
Therefore, one of the key aspects of building your sales funnel is to create enough up-sells for your products and offers.
We have reached the midway of how to build sales funnels for your first product.
There is still plenty more to it.
6. Setup Your Down-sells
In the same way that you encouraged customers to upgrade services in the up-sell step, this element of the funnel calls for you to offer a downgrade option to certain customers.
No, a downsize option doesn’t represent a failure and should not be looked upon as the loss of a sale. Instead, consider this a way to keep a customer who is unable to buy from you due to budget constraints.
Keep in mind that those constraints may change.
Be considerate and offer cheaper options to these individuals to keep them as potential customers.
A good example of presenting a down-sell offer is to present them after a customer declines for a higher valued up-sell. This down-sell can still be a little costly than the FE offer but very cheap compared to the up-sell offers. Therefore, you might still end up making more money than from just the FE offer alone.
Just like this, you can craft your own down-sell strategy for your business.
7. Set up your Landing Page
After all the planning has been done, now is the time to build the visible part of the funnel for the world to engage with. This step requires you to create a landing page that will showcase your FE offer to the world and will be connected to other landing pages that showcase your up-sells and down-sells as per your plan.
Your website’s landing page is the first impression potential customers will instantly have of your business. Therefore, take the time to make sure that it looks great as you don’t just want people to visit your landing page. You want to drive them to take the desired action while they are on your website.
Some of the key elements that you can include in your landing page to make it visitor worthy and valuable are:
🚀 Effective Headline and Subheadline
🚀 A demo video of your product or service
🚀 Bullet Points explaining features and benefits
🚀 Call to Actions at multiple places on your landing pages
🚀 Social Proof – Media Mentions, Statistics of how the product has performed, etc.
🚀 Testimonials – To build trust that people have already benefited from the product
🚀 Guarantees – To ensure that customers can get their money back if they are not satisfied with the product/service
All these elements have a psychological reason to convince people to buy your product/service therefore make sure to add them in your FE offer landing page.
You may skip some of these in the landing pages designed for your up-sells or down-sells, as the trust and credibility would have already been established on the FE page.
8. Engage Your Customers, Build Loyalty
Sales conversion is just one aspect of the customer relationship puzzle, you also need to focus on building a strong after-conversion experience. The final step in building your sales funnel is to keep the momentum going by engaging your customers effectively.
It is important to follow up with the customers you acquired and ensure that they are happy with your products and services.
The key is to understand that customer engagement is all about value creation and the way you can start providing value is by integrating the customer data with your Email Marketing Service.
When customers will provide you their contact details at the time of purchase, use the email addresses to send them valuable content that will help them use your product better, clarify their doubts, encourage responses to questions like:
- How easy or difficult is it to use your product?
- Is your support team easily reachable and responsive?
- How you can serve them better?
Using Email Marketing will help you not only build trust and relationships after the purchase but now you can also pitch your existing customers with more of your products in the future at no new acquisition cost.
This is a huge advantage of using Email Marketing, with ad costs and customer acquisition costs increasing day by day.
So go ahead and craft your email copies that you’ll send to your customers after the purchase.
9. Attract Attention By Creating Content
Let’s start with the last step on how to build sales funnels.
Now when you are done with your front end offer, up-sells and down-sells, have created your landing pages, have written your emails, and integrated all of this together with your email marketing service, the time has come to start attracting people towards your offer.
Depending on the traffic source you choose for your business, you will have to create different formats of content to get your message out there to the right audience.
Like, if you want to attract people through SEO, you will have to create long-form blog articles for your own website or you could guest post on some other website to attract the readers of that website to your offer.
But as I recommended in the 2nd point above, if you use Social Media Advertising to get your message to hyper-targeted traffic, you will have to create ad copies and ad creatives (images and videos) that people will see on their social media feeds.
After that, you can schedule and launch your campaign for your target audience to see your ads, engage with them, and enter into your funnel and bring your business more sales.
Conclusion
Executing these 9 steps on how to build sales funnels will help you:
✅ Identify the right audience for your products/service…
✅ Choose the right medium to connect with them…
✅ Create the right content to help build trust and relationship with your brand…
✅ Generate sales with not only your FE offer but also from your up-sells and down-sells, and…
✅ Make more money from the same customers without having to spend more money on advertising.
I hope you now to know how to build sales funnels.
So what are you waiting for?
Go ahead and set up your first product sales funnel NOW.
But keep in mind about sales funnel copywriting, you don’t want to miss out on that.
If you still have doubts and want a FREE consultation, let me know in the comments below.
