Setting Up a Sales Funnel to Drive More Sales

As a business owner, it is critical to have a system for getting new customers. In this post, we will go through setting up your online marketing system.

The goal is to create a high-converting sales funnel for your business. 

Even if you have a sales funnel in place, you will want to make sure that it is effective to get the most sales possible.

Never Stop Getting More Leads

The most important thing businesses should do daily is to get new leads and turn them into new clients.  

The primary goal of any business should always be to get new sales and new clients…after all, they are the lifeblood that will keep your doors open and your family fed.  

Unfortunately, getting new sales is often viewed as difficult and time consuming, but this does not always have to be the case. 

Using this funnel method, you will be able to scale your business by bringing in even more monthly income.

Now, you may be saying “I already have plenty of clients and don’t need to worry about getting new ones right now”. 

That is one of the biggest mistakes that I’ve seen businesses make.  They reach a level of success that gives them a sense of security and they stop their marketing.

This is one of the worst things you can do as a business owner.  

The minute you stop prospecting for leads and getting new clients, you are putting your whole business in jeopardy. 

Even if you have 50+ clients paying you a monthly fee, there is the very real possibility that an external force could cause them to leave. 

A dip in the local market. A new tax or spike in supply cost. A severe hurricane. A new competitor in the field can cause you to lose clients rapidly.  COVID-19, anyone?

If you were to suddenly have fewer clients, would your business be able to survive? So you have a continuing marketing plan to bring in new leads?

Implement a marketing system that will run on autopilot and you won’t have to worry about this happening to you. You need a sales funnel.

Using a Sales Funnel for More Sales Leads

So, what exactly is a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is a way to filter your traffic.

Essentially, you put in a variety of visitors at the top and get out only the very best buyers at the bottom. 

More efficient funnels along with more overall traffic yields better results at the bottom.

There are several different ways to set up a sales funnel. They generally work best by having a dedicated landing page that captures the visitor’s basic information. This can include email address or phone number in return for some free content.  

The most effective sales funnels will have several tiers that offer multiple offers to your visitors. This helps to entice them to either sign up for more information or buy your product or service.  

From there, you can follow up to further convert them into sales by forming a deeper relationship.  

The goal of any sales funnel is filter out uninterested visitors until only the most qualified buyers are left to purchase your product or service.  

Think about a sales funnel this way:

Using a variety of traffic methods, you may be able to send a million people to your website. The problem is you don’t know if they are actually interested in your company. 

If you’re selling blue widgets, there may actually only be 5,000 people who would want to buy blue widgets.

Your marketing strategy should be to target those 5,000 people and convince as many of them to buy from you.  It may turn out that there are only 200 people who actually buy your blue widgets from that initial million.

A sales funnel will automatically find those people so that you don’t waste your time marketing to the wrong people. 

This can be worth millions of dollars to a company and should never be overlooked.

Get to Know Your Target Audience

Your first priority should be to understand your prospective clients to find out how they think when visiting your website. 

This means getting to know your target audience on a personal level and to determine what will entice them to become your customer. 

What works for some businesses may not work for others, so it is important that your solution is tailored to your niche.

Some industries, such as gyms and bars, may provide more effective marketing by using social proof to get new customers. Many of their members are younger and tend to use social networking extensively.  

Other types of businesses, like a construction company or law firm, may be better off using cold, hard facts to sway their potential clients.  

Ideas for Local Businesses

Here are some ideas of how different types of businesses may tailor their sales funnel to match their target demographics:

Business	Marketing Method	Why It Works
Bar or Restaurant	Facebook page featuring positive comments and pictures uploaded by customers	Young people view the bar as popular and want to join the fun themselves
Gym	Groupon to give discount on monthly membership	Combines the benefits of social proof with a high value coupon to get people interested
Construction Company	Landing page showing that by using Company A a customer may save $200 over using Company B	People are looking for the best value and using numbers is an easy way to demonstrate this
Nail Salon	Offer a discounted manicure with the purchase of a haircut at a nearby hair salon	Team up with other businesses to offer more value and expand your customer base

The bottom line is that you need to research and experiment with different tactics to find what works for you. 

Have your current customers take surveys and find out the real reason your customers need your services. Talk one-on-one with people who are interested in what you offer. 

Once you do this, you will be able to tailor your sales funnel to their wants and needs, which will improve its overall performance.

Understand Your Customer Data

The next piece of this puzzle is to determine the cost to acquire a new customer. This will tell you how much you can afford to pay while still making a profit. 

Start by looking at the last several months of sales to determining the average charge per customer. Then, calculate how much was profit.

For example, let’s do some math for a restaurant owner.

After looking through their records, the owner may determine that the average customer will spend $12 when they come into the restaurant. 

Of that $12, they may determine that $3 is spent on the actual food. $2 goes towards the employees, and another $2 goes towards monthly fixed costs.  This means there is $5 profit from that one sale.

Now, how much is that owner willing to pay to acquire that customer?  In this case, they decided that they would be willing to spend between $3 and $7 per new customer.

Customer Lifetime Value

Now, you’re probably saying, “they would be losing money if they did that!”  

You’re right, except that the owner also knows some additional information.

The average customer comes into the restaurant at least 10 times a year after being introduced to their food.

This means that they are really profiting $43 or more each year. 

As you can see, it is important to assess the recurring value of your customers, as well as the one-time value.

A high-end jewelry store may know that their average customer will spend $5,000 in their store. This earns them a profit of $3,000. 

They would be much more willing to spend $500 to acquire a new customer when they know they can profit by more than 600%!

Of course, this type of analysis is essential to make sure your business is not losing money as well.  You don’t want to pay $500 per lead if they will only make back $50 in profit for that year. 

Tailoring your sales funnel to meet your financial goals will help to save you money and maximize your profit.

You will be much better positioned to strategically explode your sales if you know:

• Your target demographic
• How much they will spend
• How much you will profit,

Sales Funnel Overview

The physical sales funnel is composed of several different pages and offers. These can be tweaked for whatever audience you are currently targeting. 

In some cases, it may be better to have 2 or 3 different funnels for different types of traffic. They can be tailored to different visitor demographics.

Now, you probably want to see a specific example of how a funnel can be set up. 

Here is an outline of a sample funnel that includes several different upsell options. Many offer a bonus and then eventually lead to your thank you page.

As you can see, all traffic starts with a sales page (or landing page). Then they are sent to several tiers of offers that get progressively more valuable.  I’ll repeat that…each new tier in your funnel should offer something more valuable in order to fully benefit from each visitor.

Warm Your Visitors

In order for a funnel to work effectively, you need to warm up your visitors slowly. Through multiple interactions, you can convert them to warm leads and then into buying customers. 

Most people will not just give away their email address for free or buy a product without some convincing.

To get the most sales possible, you’ll want to follow a method similar to this:

1. Landing page – free offer in exchange for an email address
2. Sales page – main offer you’re promoting, may cost $47
3. Upsell 1 – secondary offer, may cost $147
4. Upsell 2 – additional offer, may cost $347
5. Thank You page – thanks the visitor

Creating an Effective Landing Page

The next step is to design and build a landing page that will capture your visitor’s attention. Convince them to become a member of your business. 

This does not mean forcing them to buy your product or service that second. It also may not be directly related to final offer. 

Most buyers require at least 7 points of contact before they pull the trigger. Your goal of the landing page should be to develop a longterm relationship.

To do this, try giving away something for free in return for submitting their email address or phone number. 

What Type of Lead Magnet Should I Use?

What you give away depends on your business, but it could be something as simple as a coupon or free product. 

A roofer may offer a free video on how to install a skylight. A dentist can provide a free report on proper oral health for children.  The key is to find something of value that people are willing to give away their personal information for.

Once they opt-in to receive free content, direct them to a sales page to sell them your premium product. 

Then, follow up with them using their email over the next several days to build their trust and confidence. 

Over time, it is possible to successfully turn a lead into a paying client by demonstrating your value to them.

What should a landing page look like?

The page should be simple, attractive, and have few distractions since the primary goal is for the visitors to simply enter either their email or phone number.  Any other buttons, graphics, or links will just distract them and lower your opt-in rate.

A simple layout with a bold headline, a smaller sub-headline, and a strong call to action usually works best for landing pages. 

A high quality, relevant video can also be used to help improve performance, but should be tailored specifically for your offer.

One of the best ways to increase your opt-in rates is to not include the email opt-in form itself on the main landing page.  Instead, have your normal call to action but just have a simple button that says “Click here for free (report, video, coupon, etc)”. 

Once clicked, this will take them to another page to enter their information, but this one step is very powerful psychologically.  

By using this format, your visitor has already sub-consciously agreed to opt-in when they click the button, making them much more likely to sign up on the next page. 

Most people are hesitant to give away their personal information, so this is a good way to assure them that it is not a cheap offer or spam.

Connecting with Your Audience

Once a visitor decides to submit their email address, the next step is to immediately send them a follow-up email.

This email should help to introduce your business and provide some value, whether it is giving them the free report they requested or providing a bonus coupon.

The point of this follow up is to give you an extra point of contact that will help to remind them of your business. 

Since it usually takes a potential client anywhere between 3 and 7 points of contact before the purchase something, it is important to quickly build your relationship.  

Then, you can follow up with them a few days later to add more value. Just continue to nudge them in the right direction to buy your product or service. 

Within a couple days, you will have built up a better rapport with your lead and will make selling your service much easier.

Using an indirect pre-selling method is usually better when building a business because it does not come across as a sale pitch. 

For the first few days that you email your leads, do not directly mention your services and instead focus on the value you can provide them.  

Follow-up Sequences

Going back to the roofer example, an excellent follow-up series would be:

• 1st Day: Video of how to install a skylight
• 3rd Day: More detailed video of how to cut a skylight hole in a roof
• 4th Day: Report on where to get the best skylight materials
• 5th Day: Gently remind them that, as a professional local roofer, you can provide the same service for a low price

By using this method, you:

1. Constantly remind your prospects about your company (they keep seeing your name)
2. Position yourself as an authority in your market (you are the only one sending them detailed information)
3. Provide an easy solution to their problems (low-cost service at their fingertips)

Testing and Optimizing

So, by now you’ve set up a sales funnel and are driving traffic to it, but what if it doesn’t seem to be doing as well as you’d hoped?  Don’t give up just yet!

Even the best designed systems don’t always work right away and need to be tweaked and optimized. 

This is part of the process and if you don’t do enough testing, you could be losing out on thousands of dollars in potential profit.

As you watch the results come in for your first campaign, you can start to test to find out what works the best. 

Perform Split Testing

The first step is to create 2 or 3 different landing pages to see what converts the best.  A darker background, a different button, or an alternate picture may make the difference in making or breaking your whole campaign.

In this step, you goal should be to tweak small aspects of the funnel. Then, test to see how well it performs with more traffic. 

When split testing, it is important to change just one thing at a time. Use strong tracking analytics to be able to determine what truly works better.

This process may take several weeks and may require a considerable investment in traffic at first, but it is well worth the time and effort to find out what performs best. 

That could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra revenue to your business simply by doing the due diligence to optimize the funnel.

Automate the Whole Process

Now that you have your sales funnel operational and working efficiently, it is time to put it all on autopilot so that you don’t have to worry about getting new leads. 

This is done in several ways but always starts by integrating an autoresponder with your sales funnel.

An autoresponder is an email service that allows you to preload email messages into a queue. They can then be sent out in a predefined order when someone signs up to your opt-in form. 

Autoresponders make it very easy for follow-up emails to be instantly sent out to your subscribers, drastically improving your sales conversion rates.

Aim to load between 5 and 7 days of messages to be sent out to your subscribers to remind them of your company. 

For example, it is a good idea to send a follow-up email immediately after they sign up. Send out more the next day and then at least every other day for the first week.  

Get Traffic on Demand

Once you’ve dialed in the best-converting traffic for your company, you will need to automate the process. Automation will help to continue to get new visitors without having to worry about it. 

For paid traffic, this means setting up an effective campaign and having someone periodically monitor its performance.

For organic traffic, you will want to use tools to automatically post updates and do the heavy lifting for you.  SEO can be difficult in the fact that your rankings could drop at any time if you don’t consistently work at it. 

Auto-posting tools can help to keep your rankings by updating your blog or social media sites with relevant content.

One of the easiest ways to ensure optimal success with your sales funnel is to outsource it to a professional. 

Qualified online marketing consultants are able to build a complete funnel for you and manage them on a daily basis. They will make sure you get the best results that your business deserves.

How Can a Sales Funnel Impact Your Business?

The bottom line is that a properly constructed online sales funnel can have a huge impact on your business. 

Companies that do not perform proactive marketing strategies on a daily basis fight an uphill battle.  

Even if you are able to keep your doors open for a while, you will never reach the true potential for your business without implementing a funnel.

An effective sales funnel practically forces your visitors to become paying clients, so start building one today!