What Is a Sales Funnel and Why Do You Need One?

Congratulations! You’ve started your online business. But no one is buying your products. In an effort to find out how to make more sales, you may have heard the term “sales funnel” and asked yourself “what is a sales funnel, and why do I need one?”

Running an online business without a sales funnel is like opening a brick and mortar store and not having a grand opening sale. It’s how you convert website visitors into paying customers.

So how do you set up a sales funnel? It can range from a simple process to a very complex one with lots of moving parts. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll focus on a simple sales funnel process.

Sales Funnel Stages

In order to understand any sales funnel, you need to understand the four sales funnel stages:

• Awareness: Your prospect stumbles across your product or service thanks to seeing a Google ad, a Facebook ad campaign, or another traffic source.
• Interest: This is when your prospects likes what they see and starts following you and subscribes to your email list.
• Decision: At this point, your prospect is deciding that they are interested in your product or service and starts paying attention to what you have to offer. This is when sales offers like sales pages, webinars, calls are made.
• Action: Your prospect likes what they see, and they decide to buy your product or service.

Creating a Simple Sales Funnel

All sales funnels follow the same stages seen above. If you’re new to sales funnels, we suggest following these four simple steps:

1. Create a landing page (or sales page) delving into all of the reasons why your prospect should buy from you. It should have a clear CTA (or call-to-action) button or link for them to take action now or lose out on your offering.

2. Develop an opt-in page where people provide you with their contact information (first name and email). This is where they will land after clicking on your CTA.

3. Don’t forget the thank-you page! While it is optional, you could be missing out on a chance to redirect your prospects to your product page (the end of your funnel), have them follow you on social media, etc.

Note: We recommend LeadPages, our landing/opt-in/thank-you page creator of choice. But you can also try InstaPage if you want to shop around.

4. Promote your offer via an email series: Send emails to your prospects encouraging them to buy your product or service before your cart closes. An email service like Mailchimp or AWeber has great tools for automating this process.

Of course, there is a little more to it than this, but this quick overview should give you an idea of what’s involved. If you need help with your sales funnel, Smart to Finish has created and launched hundreds of successful sales funnels for our clients. Why not contact us today to learn how we can help you convert prospects into sales!