Why Build a Sales Funnel?
After that overview, you may recognize how you’ve become part of other people’s sales funnels when you have visited their websites, read content, taken advantage of free offers or discounts, downloaded free information products or tools, or booked a free consultation.
That experience should hint at why you need to build a sales funnel.
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Simply put, a sales funnel is a highly effective tool to maximize your profits, with minimal human intervention.
Sales Funnel Process
Warm up leads
Sales funnels take cold leads – those whose prior knowledge of you or your product was non-existent – and warm them up.
Creating warm leads is a process that depends on content marketing to a large degree and that’s what the outermost layer of your funnel will consist of…
Content
Web content comes in many formats, each appealing to a different kind of customer.
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Many businesses offer discount fliers to the public, offers like buy one get one free, and free samples. They are all examples of businesses turning cold leads into warm. They want to build a rapport with you without pressuring you into a sale.
The idea is that if you like the sample or freebie, you’re going to trust the business enough to buy from them.
That’s how cold leads are turned warm in the offline, real world. Online, it’s not so different.
Even in today’s highly connected society, we tend to distrust a website where the landing page asks for our credit card number in return for a product. We need to be wooed a little.
Building Trust
We need to learn more about who’s behind the website and why they are a good choice to buy from. Trusting that they are an authority in the niche and not someone who set up a website to dupe us out of our money.
That’s why businesses who sell through a website face the greatest opposition to the sale and it’s also why you need to establish and maintain an effective sales funnel if you hope to make your site profitable.
Doing anything else only strengthens the perception that your site is untrustworthy.
Do Your Research
First Search
You find a website when searching for a wedding photographer but there are no photos of previous weddings, no blog posts that share information about the site owner, and no pricing breakdown.
Instead, there was just a button asking for you to click the buy button on an expensive photography package.
Your first reaction would be to leave the site and go look elsewhere, right?
Second Search
Now you do the same search, but instead of the last website, you find a site where you could browse through lots of photos from previous weddings, see the social shares of other pictures, read customer testimonials, see the pricing structure and a breakdown of services offered, and download a free guide to getting the most from your wedding photographer.
I’m guessing that given the choice, you’d go with the latter.
Take this analogy a step further. You’re not fully committed to the second photographer but continue to look for your ideal guy or gal.
In the meantime, you receive emails from the second photographer who shares valuable tips and insights with you about making the most of your wedding photography with fun ideas like leaving disposable cameras on the dinner tables for your guests to use.
He even sends you a discount voucher for his own services and offers free framing for a photo of your choice.
Since visiting his site, not only have you been engaged via email, but during your other web searches, you continue to see his website advertised online.
By now, this photographer is front and center in your thoughts whenever you think of the words wedding photographer.
You know a little about him, you trust him because you have evidence that he knows what he is doing and you feel some rapport because you have been reading his emails.
This is what going through his sales funnel has done. And the best part for him? After setting up the sales funnel, he didn’t need to become involved in following up with you at all. It has all been automated. The next thing he needs to do is pick up the phone when you call him.
Are you ready to build your sales funnel?
This working example of a sales funnel should fill you with excitement at how effective a marketing funnel can be – turning your website into a real 24/7 salesperson.
This post is part of a series to help you understand what a sales funnel is, why it’s so important, and how to set one up. View the other posts here:
- Understanding What Sales Funnels Are
- How To Build A Sales Funnel
- 4 Stages of a Sales Funnel
- How to Provide a Good User Experience For a Successful Sales Funnel
- Why You Need To Track Your Sales Funnels Conversion Rates
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