A sales funnel refers to a journey that prospects follow when buying a product, starting from the awareness stage to making a purchase. A typical sales funnel consists of multiple steps to guide the prospects through the buying process until they successfully complete a purchase.
The steps in a funnel are designed to lead the prospect to the next one. When you break down the buyer’s journey into smaller steps, it gives you control on when and how to pitch your products to the audience.
Have you ever thought of how McDonald’s manage to make so much profit? The answer is right here, sales funnel.
It costs McDonald’s $1.91 in paid advertising to get you to the drive-through. When they sell you a burger for $2.09, they only make $0.18 in profits. However, when they upsell you fries and a coke for $1.77 more, they make and notably keep $1.32, which is almost 8 times the profit of the initial sale. Interesting, don’t you think?
Let’s see how McDonald’s manage to do this.
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How Sales Funnels Work
Sales funnels are the next big thing in digital marketing regardless of niche, business, or industry. If you want to get better results from your digital marketing campaigns, you should start building sales funnels for your business.
The catch with sales funnels is that you guide the prospects from one webpage to the other instead of depending on one page to close a sale. With this, you ensure the prospect is in the right mood and attitude before getting to the next page. This process is what is referred to as pre-frame.
Pre-frame is the most important part of a sales funnel and many digital marketers ignore it or don’t use it accordingly. When visitors land to your landing page, your goal is to pique their interest to advance to the next page, and the other until the end of your funnel.
The whole process starts when people become aware of your business or product through various channels, such as blog posts, ads, or social media. They become fascinated about your service and click the link to your landing page, which is the first step in your sales funnel.
The landing page presents information about your service and a call-to-action at the bottom to let the visitor take action. The action can be a purchase or opt-in to collect emails.
The subsequent funnel steps guide the visitor through various pages meant to inform, build trust, and warm them up.
Here’s a visual presentation of a sales funnel designed to build an email list.
- Step 1. Offer. The company presents a free offer to their audience. The offer can be a discounted product, free eBook, or video.
- Step 2. Collect personal details. When visitors click the link to the free resource, it means they are interested with your product and are likely to do more. Present them with an opt-in form to collect their names and email.
- Step 3: Confirmation page. Offer gratitude for their interest and show them how they can access the free resource, mostly in their email inbox. Here, you can offer additional actions such as invite them to join your membership site.
In just three steps, you have taken your prospects from an ad to the point of purchase. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
Wondering how will this work with your product?
When building a sales funnel to sell your product, the landing page should include the main product of your brand. The subsequent funnel steps should present one time offers to the buyer in a series of upsells and downsells, just like the case with McDonald’s.
The goal is to sell your product with other additional supplements that can be used with your main product. This allows you to make a lot of sales from a single purchase.
What’s more interesting is that you need not build sales funnel from scratch, there are a lot of platforms that can do this for you, such as ClickFunnels, Builderral, Leadpages, Ontraport. They provide ready solutions and options to build a sales funnel that meets your specific needs.
While all the platforms provide a lot of digital features and plenty of templates to help you get started, I recommend ClickFunnels as the best platform.
Related articles: The ultimate guide to email marketing strategy and Linkedin marketing guide
What is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels is an online platform designed to help people build and implement sales funnels in their business.
Image credit: ClickFunnels
In my opinion, ClickFunnels is the best funnel builder that you will find on the internet. With a lot of features and selection of templates, your journey of building a high converting sales funnel ends at ClickFunnels.
Mind-Blowing Stats About ClickFunnels
A wide selection of templates
ClickFunnels provides lots of page templates to help you build your sales funnel within a short time. The templates are categorized according to the type of funnel you are building.
For instance, when creating a sales funnel to collect emails, your sales funnel will be populated with two funnel steps: an opt-in page and a thank you page. ClickFunnels let you browse a collection of opt-in and thank you pages templates to select the best fit for your pages.
Drag and Drop Page Builder
You do not need prior programming knowledge to build funnels with ClickFunnels. With the hard work already done by ClickFunnels engineers, your role is to set the design of your page and drag elements to your page according to your preferences.
If you don’t want to go through the hustle of customizing templates, you can import a ready-made sales funnel shared by your friends and associates or purchase a customized sales funnel.
Email Automation
ClickFunnels provides an integrated email autoresponder called Actionetics. Actionetics let you build smart lists by automating the process of managing your contacts, email lists, and broadcasts. You can configure Actionetics to automatically send welcome emails to new subscribers and remove bouncing email addresses from your lists.
With this, you don’t have to pay for external email marketing tools like MailChimp to manage the process for you.
Now that you have an idea about ClickFunnels and why it’s the best funnel builder, let me teach you how to build a sales funnel with ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels Ultimate Guide
Step by Step: Create a Sales Funnel with ClickFunnels
To create a sales funnel with ClickFunnels, you need to have an active ClickFunnels account. Luckily, you can start with a 14-day trial to experience the full force of ClickFunnels.
Here’s a detailed guide on how to create your first sales funnel in ClickFunnels:
Step 1: Add a New Funnel
- Log in to your ClickFunnels account. Click the + New Funnelbutton to create a new funnel.
- Choose the goal of your sales funnel in the classic funnel builder pop-up. Select Collect Emails and click the + Choose button to specify your funnel’s goal. ClickFunnels let you create sales funnels for the following goals:
- Collect Emails
- Sell Your Product
- Host Webinar
- Enter the name of your funnel and select group tags in the Choose Type section. ClickFunnels uses group tags to organize your dashboard. For instance, you can have active funnels or inactive funnels. Click Build Funnel to add the funnel to your dashboard.
- A basic sales funnel will be populated in your dashboard with two funnel pages: a landing page and a thank you page. A list of customizable page templates will also be added to your account.
Step 2: Select Page Templates
- ClickFunnels let you build your funnel pages by using a template from the list. Select a page from the left sidebar and browse for page templates from the list. Click + Select Templateto add the template to your funnel page.
- Select the other page, browse the list of thank you page templates to select your preferred template. Click + Select Templateto add it to your page.
- Please notethat all the page templates are customizable. You can change the font, color, layout, and other elements to match your business needs.
Step 3: Customize Your Page
- Select the page you want to customize and click Edit Pageto open the page builder.
- ClickFunnels let you customize your page using a drag and drop page builder. You can add and remove elements from your page.
Please notethat if you want to launch this funnel, you’ll need to set up email integrations to handle your emails. ClickFunnels has an integrated email autoresponder and gives you the option to integrate other external autoresponders such as MailChimp and GetResponse.
Common Mistakes When Creating Sales Funnels
ClickFunnels helps you generate and convert a lot of leads to increase sales. But not everyone achieves the ultimate goal of making lots of sales, and it all comes down to the mistakes they do when creating sales funnels.
Here are the common mistakes that people do when building sales funnels:
Focusing on upsells only
The goal of a sales funnel is to make a sale. But what happens when a visitor isn’t interested in the products on offer?
Aboard your marketing campaigns, you will come across visitors who will always click “no” to your products and upsells. If you are focusing on upsells only, you are more likely to lose a lot of prospects.
The best option is to offer an alternative when your prospect hits the reject button. Provide another enticing offer as a down-sell to your prospects when they reject your first one time offer.
Building a complicated funnel
Before publishing your sales funnel, ask yourself these questions: Is it easy to use? How long will a prospect take to checkout?
The reason you might be losing sales is because of the design and layout of your funnel. If visitors don’t see a clear call-to-action button or the payment process is complicated, they will likely leave without making a purchase.
Inconsistency in following up leads
The efficacy in nurturing leads is one of the reasons why ClickFunnels is the best funnel builder. When using an ordinary website, you might drive a lot of traffic to your site but fail to make a single sale.
With ClickFunnels you can nurture your prospects and introduce them to your product until they become buyers using a series of marketing emails using Actionetics. However, if you do not follow up on your leads, you are likely losing a lot of revenue out there.
Conclusion
Sales funnels are the new generation of digital marketing. A sales funnel let you guide users through the buying process giving you the advantage to control what they see and do on your page. With this, you can present offers to the visitors when you are sure that they are in the right state of mind to make a decision.
Sales funnels have been successfully used by multinational business such as McDonald’s to drive a lot of sales.
Building a sales funnel today is even easier thanks to automated funnel builders like ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels let you build a sales funnel within no time by using ready templates and page elements to build the right sales funnel for your business. If you want to make the best out of ClickFunnels, avoid all the identified mistakes and follow the best practices in creating a sales funnel that converts.