4 Steps to Creating a Successful Sales Funnel

Why You Need a Sales Funnel

Creating a successful sales funnel is an essential part of any business nowadays.

A sales funnel is a marketing system that helps guide your prospects, or leads through a systematic sales process that has many steps with the end goal of converting that lead into a customer.

Sales funnels will ensure your leads are coming in, and being nurtured properly. I use ClickFunnels for all of my online sales funnels. You basically want to bring the leads from “I don’t know you” to “Let’s do real business.”

A sales funnel is very similar to a regular funnel in the way it acts.. You should think about how a regular funnel works. It’s wide on one end, and narrow on the other.

You’ll want to “funnel out” anybody who isn’t going to purchase. You can use a sales funnel for lead generation, affiliate marketing, dropshipping, and any other business – it’s a necessity.

I personally use it with digital products for my affiliate marketing business! Anyways, let’s get into the jump into creating a successful funnel.

Step 1 of a Successful Sales Funnel: Awareness

The first step in a successful sales funnel is the awareness stage. This is when you are identify prospects, and driving interested parties into the funnel.

This is the stage right before you qualify the lead. Awareness in a sales funnel is how you generate leads. Whether through paid traffic, or organic traffic, this is the awareness stage.

You’ll want to define your target customer. It helps you understand what they are going through.

Here are some questions to think about when determining your target market:

• What do they NEED?
• What are their pressure points?
• Which Social Media platform do they use? (Traffic)

This will help you understand how you can create better awareness to your target market. Awareness is the first stage, and should be concise. Don’t pitch everything up front.

You should provide value and create interest, which we’ll go over in step 2!

Step 2 of a Successful Sales Funnel: Interest

After the awareness stage of a sales funnel, comes the interest stage. This is where you qualify the leads.

For example, if you are promoting a product that has a free trial and you get somebody to sign up, you qualify that lead and have peaked their interest.

At this point, you’ll want to create as much interest in your offer as possible. For this, you can send a few course, ebook, training, or something else – add a bonus.

My favorite way to qualify a lead is by handing out something like this in exchange for the email. A lot of beginners don’t understand how valuable email marketing is with affiliate marketing.

This is a great way to have a successful sales funnel because you are providing value up front. The email marketing sequence, or auto responder is the key to a successful sales funnel. GetResponse handles all of this for me on the back-end!

This is where you provide massive value and persuade the buyer. This is directly before the purchase decision so you will want to really show all of the benefits of your offer.

Step 3: The Decision

The decision stage is when the buyer is (hopefully) ready to buy the product or service.

At this point, you should have brought them through a funnel leading to their decision. The buyer may be deciding between a few different offers, so you have to make yours irresistible. This is the time where you should offer everything you can.

Aside from that, you just have to hope your funnel was optimized and leads to the purchase. The decision is important, but each step of a sales funnel needs to be optimized. After the decision, you will want to acquire new customers.

Step 4: New Customers & Retention

After the buyer actually purchases – we all know people can back out at any time – you will want to focus solely on retaining the customer and getting new customers.

Offer them an incentive if they refer a family member or friend. That’s a great way to get more customers and keep them happy. Trust me – Referrals convert WAY MORE than organic or paid traffic.

Make sure to provide value to the customers you’ve signed up or sold too. In the future, they will trust you and it’s another opportunity for a sale. A successful sales funnel creates a happy customer. That’s the truth because if they bought they were satisfied with the sales funnel, and it was successful in selling them the product or service!

“People are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend” – Nielsen

There’s a new funnel builder in town…