Your sales funnel strategies will determine the number of prospects you successfully convert into paying customers. It is a simple measure, but one that is giving numerous marketers sleepless nights.
No sales funnel can be said to be perfect. But that does not mean you should stop striving to achieve perfection. You have the opportunity to reduce the number of prospects who drop out and continue nurturing your prospects through the sales funnel.
Here is how to take advantage of this opportunity.
The Importance of a Sales Funnel to Your Business
Your sales funnel represents your prospect's path to becoming a paying customer. Therefore, it is an opportunity for you to influence your prospect’s purchase decisions.
Despite using the best marketing tactics to acquire traffic, the reality is that half of your prospects won't be ready to convert immediately. They need some convincing to turn into paying customers.
The idea is to improve the purchase decisions of your prospective customers by optimizing them using certain sales funnel strategies. Below, find some of the best strategies to use.
1. Understand Your Audience
It may sound like an obvious thing to say, but it is not. The success of every marketing strategy relies on understanding your target audience. A marketing strategy may be right, but it will fail when used in the wrong target audience.
You need to learn your target audiences’ behavior. Understanding the prospect's behavior helps you build their personas. You will be particularly concerned about the following patterns in their behavior.
The offers that excite them
How much time they spend on a particular page
Where most of your traffic originates
When they are most active
All of these data points will help you refine your buyer personas.
2. Create Lead Magnets
You will be glad you took the time to learn about your target audience. It will minimize your effort in determining the suitable lead magnet for your target audience. Now that you know the target audience persona, focus on determining the type of content that will attract them into your funnel.
Make sure the content you produce provides solutions to the current specific needs of your target audience. Then, spice up the content with infographics, videos, and other likable formats by your target audience. Examples of lead magnets you can create include free:
E-book
Masterclass
How-to-guides
Downloadable resource
Checklist
Remember to accompany all your lead magnets with a call to action button. It is the smart way to collect new leads.
3. Create an Email Campaign
Once you have captured your leads, you can enter them into an email subscription list. Then use this list to nurture your leads through a series of email campaigns.
The first series of emails should create brand awareness for your target audience. How does your product or service help your target audience solve their specific needs?
Also, your emails should highlight how your target audience derives value from using your products and services. What makes your products or services unique from the rest? You will be answering these and more questions in your sequence.
Once the leads understand the value of your products, make them an incredible offer. That should come in the last series of emails. The content of these emails should inspire your target audience to act fast in responding to your offer.
4. Build Social Media Awareness
Creating social media awareness is vital in the first stages of your sales funnel. Remember, some of your prospects are looking for a reason to stay. Social media platforms are one of the places they visit when seeking assurance from other customers who have used your products or services.
Social media statistics reveal that there are currently about 3.96 billion social media users across the globe. And on average, an adult spends about 95 minutes daily on social media.
Without a doubt, your target audience must make up part of this large number of social media users. Therefore, creating engaging content that targets this audience will help increase your leads.
5. Keep in Touch after the Sale
Building and maintaining an effective sales funnel will take up much of your firm's resources. Therefore, it beats sense to use all these firm resources to convert a customer only to lose them after making a purchase. The journey doesn't end at sales.
You have to let your paying customers feel valued. Start by sending them a thank you email for making a purchase.
Then, continue to cultivate them using a reward system. For example, offer to pay customers additional coupon codes. Starbucks rewards paying customers with points, free drinks, and other incentives to keep them coming back for more coffee
Also, use the post-purchase relationship to upsell and cross-sell other products and services you offer. When you already have a good relationship, you can present it casually to the customer.
Let’s Help You Build and Automate Your Sales Funnel
You cannot implement all these sales funnel without an automated sales funnel. Before you hit the panic button, we have you covered on this. All we require from you is to select your automation package here. Just like that, you are free to go focus on how you will implement the strategies we discussed.