TUTORIAL: How to Secure Sales Using a Sales Funnel

Without a sales funnel in place, 79 percent of your potential leads will fizzle out without a conversion.

Sales funnels – the paths through which B2B and B2C consumers come to an eventual purchase or partnership – aren’t difficult to craft. You can break these funnels down into three segments:

• ToFu – The top of the funnel, where your goal is to familiarize consumers with your business.
• MoFu – The middle of the funnel, where you need to personalize consumers’ interactions with your business.
• BoFu – The bottom of the funnel, where you’ll secure conversions and encourage post-purchase engagement.

These terms help simplify the process of transforming a cold lead to a conversion. To create a successful sales funnel, craft your sales model with these steps in mind.

Secure Sales Start at the top of the Funnel

The top of the funnel is a spotlight for brand awareness. Here, you’ll do your research, bait the hook, and let consumers know that you have a product worth purchasing.

Step 1: Get to Know Your Audience

A business doesn’t survive without its audience, and neither does a sales funnel. To develop a better understanding of the type of leads you want to generate, you’ll need to break your audience down. You can use a third-party tool such as Google Analytics to assess the types of consumers who most frequently pay attention to your posts on social media or the content on your platform.

To create a property through Google Analytics, you need to:

• 1. Sign in to Google Analytics using your Gmail account.
• 2. Click “Admin.”
• 3. Find the “Account” column and choose the Gmail account you want to be affiliated with your platform.
• 4. Find the “Property” column.
• 5. Select “+Create Property.”
• 6. Choose between using a website or a mobile app.
• 7. If you choose to track a mobile app, select “Firebase” under the “Tracking Method” column. Once you’ve selected your chosen app, click “Connect App.”
• 8. If you choose to connect a website to your Analytics, enter your website’s name.
• 9. Enter your URL.
• 10. Select an industry category.
• 11 Select a reporting time.
• 12. Receive your tracking ID.

Once you have a Google Analytics account, you can break your audience down into the following categories:

• Demographics – Discover the primary age group and gender of your consumers.
• Interests – What kind of activities (casual, hobbies, work) do consumers most frequently pair your products with?
• Location – Where are your consumers coming from, and can you take advantage of local SEO?
• Behavior – Has a consumer visited your platform before or is he or she dropping by for the first time?
• Technology – What browsers, operating systems, or networks do your potential consumers consistently use?
• Mobile – Do your consumers prefer to use mobile devices to access your platform, or do they primarily utilize their desktops?
• Flow – How do consumers move through your site? Are there certain pages that are significantly more popular than others?

Step 2: How to Create Content That Appeals to Your Audience

When you get to know your audience, you can figure out what kind of questions they’re asking about your competitors and the other products circulating through your industry. You need to craft content that answers those questions, and that establishes your business as an industry authority.

Content goals are crucial for sales funnel success. You should determine early on what you want your content to accomplish:

• Sell products
• Make announcements
• Tell a story
• Educate

When you establish content goals, you’ll be able to more readily create unique and information-rich content. Eye-catching content in your funnel can include:

• Photos
• Infographics
• Videos
• Lists
• Tutorials
• News updates
• Videos
• Infographics
• Paid advertisements
• Facebook carousels

The top of your funnel serves first to educate, then to sell—make sure you align your content strategy with this goal.

Step 3: Find What Works through A/B Testing

This is where you transition from the top to the middle of the funnel. Make sure to craft landing pages for your ads that discuss your platform’s ambitions more than a sale. Your advertisements need to lead your consumers to compelling pages that’ll encourage them to learn more about your site.

But how do you tell which pages are speaking your customers’ language, and which aren’t working for you?

The answer lies in A/B testing. To be thorough, you should test several versions of your landing pages to ensure that the images, videos, text, backlinks, and other elements are effective conduits of your business.

Several different tools exist to run one of these A/B tests. Google offers Google Optimize. You can create a Google Optimize account through your Analytics account:

• 1. Log in to Google Analytics
• 2. Click “Behavior”
• 3. Click “Experiments”
• 4. Click “learn more” to navigate to Google Optimize

Alternatively, traveling to the Google Optimize home page allows you to immediately sign up for the tool-free of charge. Click “Create Account” and provide your personal information to get started.

From here, you’ll need to create a container for your platform. Click the button on Optimize’s interface and use your platform’s URL to indicate which site you want to diversify.

With a container completed, you can link your existing platform to Google Optimize. Do this by clicking the “link property” tag in the interface’s drop-down menu. Select your property of choice, and you’ll be good to go.

Now, create an experiment for your platform:

• 1. Click the “Create Experiment” button.
• 2. Enter the URL of the page you want to duplicate and test.
• 3. Choose your preferred test – A/B test, multivariate test, or a redirect test.
• 4. Click “create a variant.”

Note: an A/B test lets you change one element of your chosen page. Multivariate testing lets you change multiple elements of a page. Redirect testing compares the data from two separate pages to determine which is working better.

Once you’ve created your variant, you can start to play with your duplicated page. Simply click “edit element,” and you’ll be able to modify your page’s architecture.

As soon as you’re satisfied with your modifications, your new page needs to collect data. Move to the “Reporting” tab in the Optimize interface to assess this data via the platform’s Summary Card.

The Middle of the Funnel: Craft a Connection

Once you’ve developed a consumer following, you’ll be able to personalize your interactions with interested consumers.

Step 4: Connect with Your Leads via Email

One of the best ways to connect with your audience is to start a newsletter or email marketing campaign.

At the top of the funnel, give leads an incentive to give you an email address—that can be a coupon, a free guide, or some other piece of valuable content they’ll want access to. Email addresses, after all, are the key to successful email marketing.

In the middle of the funnel, start sending emails.

While you can organize and operate an email marketing campaign from an unaffiliated business account, it’s significantly easier to do so from an email marketing tool. The tools you have available to you include:

• MailChimp: This tool is one of the few that allows smaller businesses to create an email marketing campaign at no cost. The free plan allows you to send 12,000 emails per month but caps you at 2,000 subscribers. From here, email marketing plans range from $10 to $250 per month, with costs changing based upon the number of subscribers your campaign has.
• Sendinblue: Like Mailchimp, this platform offers users access to a free email marketing program, albeit one that’s more limited than those of its peers. Unlike those peers, Sendinblue charges users based upon the number of emails they send per day, as opposed to subscriber count. Consequently sendinblue is based in Europe; thus, regardless of where you are, you’ll be charged for your needs in euros. Costs range between €19 and €129 per month, with the free plan allowing you to send 300 emails per day and 9,000 per month to an unlimited number of contacts.
• Constant Contact: This tool comes with a 60-day free trial of all services and is open to customization. Email plans range in cost based upon the number of subscribers you have, ranging between $20 and $95 per month.
• GetResponse: This tool operates as a landing page creator as well as an email marketing tool. You can build your campaign’s emails in a 30-day free trial through a drag-and-drop template.  Eventually the cost of email plans changes based upon the number of subscribers you have, ranging from $15 to $1,199 per month. Note that these plans are broken down into Email, Pro, Max, and Enterprise categories as well.
• Keap: This tool doubles as an email marketing interface and a segmentation asset, reminding you to break down your audience and send differently targeted emails to different consumers. Prices start at $79 a month for an account with discounts available to new subscribers. These plans break down into Grow, Pro, and Infusionsoft categories with different and more complex tools made available with each upgrade.

Not all email marketing campaigns merely encourage consumers to make a purchase. Instead, choose a genre for your email marketing campaign to more effectively connect with your researched audience. These include:

• Newsletters
• Announcements
• Event invitations
• Welcome emails
• Nurture emails
• Promotions
• Triggered emails
• Post-purchase follow-ups
• Abandoned cart
• Multi-platform engagement
• Encouragement

Secure Sales with a Purchase

When you’re consistently sharing emails with consumers and generating consumer engagement, you should prepare for an eventual conversion. Don’t content yourself to waiting, though. The BoFu stage is the most essential, as you can lose conversions here as easily as you can gain them.

WELCOME TO THE BOTTOM OF THE FUNNEL 

Step 5: Create an Offer They Can’t Refuse

Utilize Google Analytics to keep track of how many consumers have leftover items in their shopping carts. Although if you want to turn these abandoned carts into conversions, you need to show your consumers that you can offer them something that your competitors can’t.

At this stage, use your existing email lists to check on the consumers with abandoned carts. Here, offer consumers a deal  certainly a free trial of your service, a coupon, a sample;  additionally something that relates to the product or service they left on hold.

All things considered this kind of personalized engagement makes the consumer feel as though he or she is having a one-on-one conversation with your business. By offering something that’ll make the purchasing experience easier, you’re reminding that consumers – and others – that you have their best interests at heart.

Step 6: Encourage Post-Purchase Engagement

Basically upon the successful conversion of a consumer, you might think you’ve come to the end of a sales funnel. This isn’t the case. BoFu marketing requires you to encourage post-purchase engagement that’ll turn a one-time consumer into a frequent buyer accordingly.

Once again, you can utilize MailChimp or an email equivalent to reach out to consumers after they’ve made a purchase. Use the MailChimp platform to craft an email inviting consumers to:

• Submit a review of your product to your platform
• Review your product on Amazon or an equivalent site
• Share the news about the purchase on social media

Calls for post-purchase engagement are more successful in pulling action when they’re partnered with a reward. Coupons or discounts encourage repeat purchases while also considering your consumers’ wallets. Above all Consumers will appreciate the personalized outreach and the deal, both of which improve the chance that they’ll return to your business in the future.

Want to Ensure a Successful Funnel? Reach Out to MV3.

In addition an effective sales funnel takes time, finesse, and internet savvy, no matter if it’s for a B2C or B2B business. MV3’s team can help you analyze your audience, craft compelling MoFu content, and follow up on consumer purchases. All you have to do is ask. Secure Sales Now!