The sales funnel is a marketing concept that has been around for more than a century. It was first introduced by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898 and is widely considered to be the first formal theory of marketing.
Lewis created the shopping funnel, which has become a ubiquitous tool in the world of marketing. Although he didn't draw a funnel, he drew a scale, the concept was the same. The idea of a sales funnel is to illustrate the customer journey from the moment of attracting customers to the purchase of a product or service. It allows marketers to determine and reflect on the actions their customers take at each stage of the buying cycle.
With the help of a sales funnel, businesses can design an excellent customer experience throughout the customer journey. In e-commerce, for example, we use the term conversion funnel to describe the customer journey from the knowledge phase (usually driving traffic to a website through paid advertising on search engines and social media) to the conversion stage, when a website visitor becomes a customer. If you're looking to use a sales funnel to sell an online course, be sure to watch the recording of our webinar with Leslie Samuel. You'll get a step-by-step demonstration on how to create a sales funnel for an online course and much more. The model presents the customer journey as a series of stages, from knowledge to the moment of purchase.
You can generate more sales by planning your marketing communication throughout these stages. When you make potential customers aware of your product or service, your main goal is to reach your target audience - especially those who haven't heard of your business yet but could benefit from using your product or service. A landing page is an effective way to do this. It's a simple website designed to help you achieve a clear goal, such as adding new contacts to your email list or selling a product. A landing page should contain the most important information and key benefits of using your product or service, as well as a clear call to action for people who are interested and want to learn more. You can set up targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram and reach new audiences.
If you have a well-segmented contact list, you can use the email addresses of your current customers to create a similar audience: Facebook users share similar characteristics with people in your contact list. In this way, you can use the Facebook algorithm to find people who are most likely to become your customers. You can learn more about other useful targeting options and ad design best practices in our Facebook advertising tutorial. A magnetic lead funnel is an automated way to generate leads for your business. It allows you to set up a campaign consisting of paid ads that promote a landing page and offer a relevant registration incentive, series of follow-up and analysis emails that show you key statistics in real time. When some people actively express an interest in what you offer, it's time to provide them with all the crucial information about your product or service.
They need to know if and how they can benefit from your offer. By observing contact activity, you will see who is participating and who is not participating in the communication. You'll be able to see what information seems most valuable to them and segment your contact list accordingly. Through segmentation, you'll send much more relevant communication. After creating segments based on participation, you can start using them to send better-segmented emails.
You can decide if you want to regain interest from contacts or simply maintain their high level of interaction. You can use marketing automation to create workflows that automatically send emails and assign tags based on user behavior. You can use tags to determine what type of content your audience is most interested in. The Facebook pixel allows you to track visitors to the landing page. You can see what people like and create personalized remarketing campaigns based on their landing page visits.
Define custom audiences based on pages they visited or didn't visit in order to get the most out of your social media ad budget. Push notifications are another great way to stay connected with website visitors. Web push notifications don't require an email address, so you can send quick, hard-to-miss messages to everyone who subscribes after visiting your site. Webinars are also an effective tool for engaging with your audience. First, you can contact people who have expressed interest in a particular topic and ask them questions that will help you create the webinar they really want. In this post, you can find more information about how webinars work and different types of content you can use in them. At this point, your audience has all the necessary information about your product or service - they know if it's exactly what they've been looking for.
If the answer is yes, you can move on to the next stage: segmenting your contact list into groups who have already received all the information they need in order to decide if they want to buy your product or service.