7 reasons why you need a sales funnel: benefits and advantages
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7 reasons why you need a sales funnel: benefits and advantages
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Black Pearl Matrix
You should implement a sales funnel in your business to:
- Improvement in Productivity
- Facilitates the Identification of Opportunities
- Make the Prediction of Results clearer
- Optimize Business Management
- Bring inputs for Product Development
What is a sales funnel, what is it for and how to set it up?
As in all relationships in the digital environment, in the world of online shopping everything happens much faster than in physical stores. That’s because the purchase process is done in the same space: the screen.
But then, how not to lose a customer to “the next site”? The answer is not simple, but it is effective: mapping the purchase journey and having a very well-structured sales funnel.
If you’ve never heard of a sales funnel, don’t despair! This post was made to help you.
We’ll tell you what it is, what the steps are and why you need it and how to build your own sales funnel in digital marketing. Cheered up? So, check it all out below.
1- What is a Sales Funnel?
The sales funnel is a strategic model used by the marketing and sales areas of companies to map the main moments of the consumer acquisition flow, along with the customer’s purchase journey. It can also be called a sales pipeline.
This model (represented, literally, by a funnel) divides the purchase decision process into three stages:
• Top of the funnel (or ToFu)
• Middle of the Funnel (or MoFu)
• Bottom of Funnel (or BoFu)
What are the stages of the sales funnel?
The sales funnel is divided into three stages. Let’s look at the characteristics of each of them:
1.1 Top of the Funnel
The top of the funnel (ToFu) is the discovery phase, where there is awareness of a need and awareness of your brand. That is, in this part of the funnel are people who did not necessarily have a problem or were looking for a specific product.
This is the typical case of someone browsing social media, seeing an interesting ad for a cool brand and ending up buying a product they didn’t need, but ended up falling in love with.
Here, we are still talking about the first phase of the buying journey: that moment when the person becomes a potential customer because he ended up being interested in your brand and/or what it offers.
The consumer can make the purchase immediately or take days, or even weeks, to move down the funnel. So, your challenge here is to come up with strategies that get you to the next stage of the funnel as quickly as possible.
1.2 Middle of the Funnel
In the middle of the funnel are people who have already identified themselves with the need or desire to buy the product or service. That’s where remarketing strategies come in to rescue that user and revive the person’s interest in your brand.
You know when you search for a product on Google and spend weeks seeing ads for similar items from different sites and brands? Well, this is the most common remarketing strategy.
Another option is email marketing, which can be used to bring content, exclusive offers and special discount coupons to try to win back the customer.
For this strategy to work, it is necessary to capture leads, that is, potential consumers who give their contact information in exchange for some benefit (such as a discount coupon or an e-book on an interesting subject, for example).
If your company offers high-value services that require a maturation decision process, such as a course, for example, a good solution is to have a relationship ruler like a newsletter. Thus, you gain the trust of the public, gaining relevance at the time of purchase.
In the middle of the funnel, it’s time to communicate with that potential customer and not let them forget about you! A good option is to offer exclusive discounts to those who have registered on the site and nurture this base of future customers with special advantages.
1.3 Bottom of the Funnel
There, the user returned to your site after the remarketing strategy and is now at the bottom of the funnel. This means that this customer is about to close the deal and it’s time to not let him get away.
As soon as he puts the products in the cart, remind him of the discount for the first purchase, make a lightning offer to create a sense of urgency and bring him closer and closer to the end of the purchase journey in your store.
At this stage, the customer is just a few steps away from completing the process. So it’s time to play the final card for conversion. In these cases, mental triggers, such as showing few items in stock or setting a deadline for the end of the offer, can be decision makers.
2- What is the Sales Funnel for?
The sales funnel is used to predict and follow the path taken by the potential buyer from the first contact with your brand to the purchase on your website.
From predicting your persona’s behavior through the customer journey and the sales funnel model, it is possible to create actions specifically aimed at each stage of this model and, consequently, win more consumers.
3- How to build a sales funnel?
Setting up a sales funnel is a laborious task, but it can pay off a lot. So, check out the step by step to plan yours:
3.1 Map the Shopping Journey
The buyer’s journey is the path your customer takes to make a purchase from your company. To determine how that journey happens, you need to know your audience in depth.
Therefore, it is necessary to research and understand some important things, such as:
• What kind of content does your audience consume on the internet?
• Who are the possible digital influencers to help you in the persuasion process?
• What do your customers consider when choosing a product?
• How long, on average, does it take them to go through the journey and make a purchase decision?
• How do they go about comparing brands and products?
• What makes them give up on a purchase?
With all this information in hand, you’ll be able to design your customers’ buying journey and better understand what are the most important moments for your website and the opportunities you can’t miss.
Also remember that, most of the time, this journey will not be linear, as several internet and offline factors can influence the decision. But that doesn’t mean you should give up, just that you need to be aware of this online consumer particularity.
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3.2 Define Milestones and Strategies for Each of your Funnel Stages
When we talk about important moments and unmissable opportunities to sell online, we cannot leave out the milestones. These are the crucial moments of your journey, that is, those in which you can win the customer for good or lose a sale. It is precisely in these moments that you need to invest most of your strategy.
But, after all, what can be a crucial moment of your journey? To show what a milestone can be, let’s look at examples from an online store:
3.2.1 Ads
It’s the moment when your customers see an ad for your brand or watch the digital influencer’s story about your products. Those seconds are an important decision moment between continuing to browse your social media feed or going to your website and seeing more.
3.2.2 Coupons
When the person enters your website, you can take the opportunity to capture a lead (offering the benefit of the discount to him in exchange for his contact) and still earn an incentive with a 15% discount coupon on the first purchase.
3.2.3 Navigation Experience
When browsing your e-commerce, browsing experience points can also be milestones. The first aspect to highlight is the ease with which the customer finds something of interest and adds it to the cart. The more fluid the experience, the less time he will have to give up on the purchase.
3.2.4 Shopping Cart
The shopping cart is also a big milestone. Here, advantages such as flexibility of payment, either with the various options and installment possibilities, or delivery facilities, such as free shipping or “lightning delivery”, can be good triggers for the customer to be convinced to take advantage of the opportunity.
3.2.5 After sales
After your customer buys, do the milestones run out? Do not.
To retain a customer, it is very important to have a good after-sales rule. This means keeping the customer informed about the delivery time of the product and notifying them of status updates such as “order confirmed”, “order shipped”, etc.
These points control expectations and make the shopping experience more satisfying. That way, you gain the trust of your customers.
4- Measure your Results
After putting your funnel into practice, you need to measure the results of each stage of the funnel.
Continuing with the case of the virtual store, it's time to understand:
• Is the influencer story or social media ad bringing new customers to your site?
• The discount coupon you offer on the first purchase is used by how many people? Do you have a good conversion rate?
• What is your shopping cart drop rate?
In addition to these analyses, it is possible to invest in qualitative research to understand the reasons for evasion.
So look for the following answers:
• If people browse your site for a long time but don’t buy anything, are they finding what they’re looking for?
• If they put several products in their cart and then give up, what’s the reason? Price? Payment methods? Shipping too expensive? Delivery time too long?
There are many tools to track these metrics and each company has its preferences. However, a good option to track these indicators for free is Google Analytics.
With the answers to these questions, you can modify your planning and adjust the strategy for each step to improve your performance as needed.
5- What is the Importance of the Sales Funnel in Digital Marketing?
The sales funnel is important because, by mapping your buyer persona’s journey and defining the strategies for each stage, you know exactly what to do to win over your customers. Thus, you reduce the loss of potential customers along the journey.
In addition, with a well-structured funnel, you can follow the flow of your customers and understand the main moments of your brand’s purchase journey. That way, you can keep improving your strategies to increase conversions more and more.
For example, if you have an e-commerce that sells accessories and your audience is made up of young women who have access to a lot of content on the internet, you need to get their attention quickly. This could be done with a social media ad or a story from a digital influencer that your audience follows, for example.
This is an effective top-of-the-funnel strategy. However, if potential customers don’t take any action when they land on your website, it could indicate that your middle funnel strategy wasn’t as well thought out.
With a well-structured funnel, defined metrics and continuous monitoring of the conversion of each phase, you will discover where your points of improvement are and you will be able to plan actions and campaigns to act on these focuses.
7 Tips to Apply to Your E-Commerce Sales Funnel
At first glance, the sales funnel can seem like a beast with seven heads. But don’t be scared: with the right practices, you can design an assertive strategy for your business and increase your conversion rate.
In e-commerce, the sales funnel goes hand in hand with Inbound Marketing (or attraction marketing), a very effective strategy for generating and nurturing leads. Through content of interest to your audience, you can make customers come to your store spontaneously.
With that in mind, here are seven tips to help you build an efficient strategy for your online store:
1. Work with Attractive Offers
Whether through blogposts, videos, posts on social networks, email marketing or banners in your e-commerce, your offer needs to attract the consumer’s attention in the first contact.
Therefore, think about competitive campaigns in relation to the market in which you operate. Explore the possibilities: when we talk about e-commerce, there are several ways to create promotions, such as free shipping, discounts for quantity of items, etc.
In addition, it is important to consider two balance points when creating offers:
The competition is right next door, so it’s crucial to stand out from the crowd.
The offer needs to be attractive, but it must be profitable and positive for your business.
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2. Be Objective
In e-commerce, everything happens very quickly. Therefore, we need to work with fast and effective methods of attraction. For this, nothing is more effective than objectivity.
With so much information available, we need to focus on the right words to grab the user’s attention. Before creating a campaign or publishing content, try to understand how your target audience will see the materials and whether they are engaging and easy to understand.
For example, if the idea is to create a promotion for the first purchase, avoid information such as: “Click and check the special condition for the first purchase”. This type of approach can make the user give up clicking. Bet on more direct language, such as: “Go to the store and get 15% off your first purchase”.
Notice the difference? The second example not only invites the user to access the store, but also makes it clear that he will have access to a promotion and the amount of the discount. In this way, the chances of visits are greater.
3. Focus on the User and Their Needs
Knowing consumer behavior is very useful when creating content and campaigns. That’s because our customers don’t move through the funnel stages together. Therefore, they will not respond in the same way to certain stimuli.
So, when designing a strategy, know exactly which group of customers you want to reach (those at the top, middle or bottom of the funnel) and focus on their needs. Once we understand exactly what this part of our target audience is looking for – and how they go about it – it’s easier to provide the solutions they need.
A very effective practice is to observe how people search on search engines like Google. By identifying keywords in tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, for example, we have the opportunity to optimize our content and campaigns with the right terms, increasing the chances of users reaching them.
Having a website and content optimized for SEO, that is, for search engines, will make more people access your online store without having to pay for ads.
4. Provide Quality Content
Competition in e-commerce is not limited to stores that operate in the same niche market as you. The competition for good spaces on the internet is very fierce, and that’s exactly why we need to deliver quality content to users.
In addition to understanding what your target audience is looking for, you need to deliver the answers they need, right? Imagine if a user enters your blog and finds shallow or incomplete content? The image he will create about your brand will certainly not be a positive one.
Therefore, understand what your audience needs and deliver the best possible solutions. That way, you develop a relationship of trust between the consumer and the brand — and this is essential for them to move forward in the sales funnel.
5. Use Simple Forms
One of the most effective techniques for obtaining contact details is forms. Usually, to guarantee a positive buy-in, we need to offer something as a bargaining chip (an e-book, a catalog, a discount coupon, etc).
However, it is very common for customers to give up when filling out the form. Either because of the excess of information requested or because of that same laziness. So for lead capture, focus on simple forms.
When creating the form, think about the information that is really important to you right now. Typically, essential data is name, email and phone. So try not to go too far beyond what is necessary.
If your intention is to do some kind of research, draw actions separately. Thus, the results of the fundraising form are not compromised.
Please remember that only requesting the necessary information and making clear the reasons why you are requesting this data will result in a better user experience.
6. Make good use of CTAs
The CTA (Call to Action) — is a very important element of digital marketing. It is nothing more than a text, on a button or hyperlink, that clearly informs the next step that the user must take.
Through it, it is possible to encourage the user to do something, such as: download, buy a product, subscribe to your newsletter, etc.
To create effective CTAs, it's important to think about some details, such as:
• CTA layout and location with high visibility;
• Flashy colors and fonts;
• Attractive call.
7. Use Captivating Language
Last but not least, let’s talk about proper language. This tip works in conjunction with almost all of the ones we’ve seen above, as it deals with how we will communicate with our target audience.
Everything users read on our website needs to be functional, that is, somehow direct them through the sales funnel stages to becoming customers. Therefore, it is necessary to use language that catches the reader’s attention. Your copy needs to be able to avoid losing interest and leaving the page without any action, especially if we are talking about a sales page.
In this way, try to communicate objectively and intuitively, focusing on the points that may attract the attention of the public. For example, if the idea is to promote a product section, use clear titles that arouse the interest of those reading.
6- 5 Advantages of the Sales Funnel
With so much work, is it worth investing in the sales funnel? We separate five benefits that will convince you that this is a valid strategy for your business.
1. Improves Productivity
With well-designed strategies, it is easier to focus on actions that can actually bring good results. The sales funnel allows you to work with customer approaches at different stages and thus the plan becomes much more effective.
2. Facilitates the Identification of Opportunities
The sales funnel allows you to monitor, in real time, your audience’s behavior and how it advances in your strategy. With this, you can more easily identify opportunities to improve your prospecting and business conversion processes.
3. Makes Predicting Results Clearer
A key part of sales funnel management is measuring results. Therefore, as this methodology allows you to observe the progress of users between the different stages of the funnel, it is easier to understand the effects of each action.
4. Optimize Business Management
With the stages of the funnel properly aligned, your company’s commercial management becomes more practical. This is because it is possible to design and monitor the development of strategies separately, according to each stage of the funnel.
5. Brings Inputs for Product Development
With frequent monitoring of how customers behave, what they are looking for and what they need, we can understand what improvements we need to make and even what innovations we should invest in. These inputs are very rich for any business, as they allow us to follow the right path according to the needs of our target audience.
7- CRM: The Sales Funnel Tool
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a tool that automates all customer contact actions and can be very useful in ensuring that your sales funnel strategy works.
After structuring your conversion stages, purchase journey and personas, CRM marketing can deliver accurate and didactic results, in addition to making the entire process much easier to manage.
With the use of a CRM, you can develop a funnel according to your business objectives. In addition, you can centralize the information you need to track the progress of your strategy.
Check out the main advantages of using a CRM:
• Process automation;
• Customer follow-up;
• Relationship history;
• Registration of information and data;
• Result forecasts.
Now that you understand the importance of having a well-structured sales funnel in a business, nothing better than learning how to be a good salesperson, right?
Check out the main advantages of using a CRM:
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FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Funnel
1- What is a sales funnel?
The sales funnel is a strategic model used by the marketing and sales areas of companies to map the main moments of the consumer acquisition flow, along with the customer's purchase journey. It can also be called a sales pipeline.
2- What is a sales funnel for?
The sales funnel is used to predict and follow the path taken by the potential buyer from the first contact with your brand to the purchase on your website.
3- How to ask strategic questions?
The questions asked must surprise the customer, that is, questions that are not standard, what he is used to hearing. So he won't have a standard answer ready. The question cannot be predictable for him. Another important tip: when the customer asks you something, answer with another question.
4- How many sales funnel models are there?
There are more than 20 types of sales funnels that you can choose from and use in favor of your business.
5- What is the importance of working with a sales funnel?
Using a sales funnel allows marketing and sales areas to work in an aligned and predictable way, generating more efficiency in customer acquisition and scalability in the process.
Conclusion
The sales funnel is a fundamental process to increase a company’s customers in a simpler and more practical way, knowing your audience and providing them with everything they need before closing the deal. Trust is the result of this relationship and results in a considerable improvement in your company’s results!
In each of these stages, it is essential to develop assertive actions, as a way to effectively attract customers and increase your sales.
Now that you know what the sales funnel is, try to understand more about digital marketing strategies.
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