When talking about how to increase conversions, the sales funnel is impossible to leave out. It is a core concept in digital marketing and bears the power to drive exponential growth.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a visualization of stages leading up to a purchase. Like the actual instrument, it guides people coming in from the top towards the intended destination. In order to craft an effective sales funnel, you must first understand the four basic stages of the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness – the part where customers are made aware of your brand. Leads can find you through organic search, paid advertisements, or social media. At this stage, your goal is to encourage more interactions.
- Interest – leads have become prospects by confirming their interest in your product or service. While they do research and comparisons, it is your job to provide helpful content while telling your story.
- Decision – this is when customers are ready to buy. They have narrowed down their options and are just looking for one final push before checking out. Providing customer reviews and testimonials is one of the best ways to secure the sale.
- Action – where committed prospects become paying customers. After a transaction, nurture the customers’ relationship with your brand. Offer loyalty programs, customer support, or simply express gratitude for their purchase.
Although the concept seems simple, there are many intricacies involved in progressing through those four stages. The sales funnel is a multi-step, multi-modality process that requires you to optimize various aspects of your business. It’s all about building brand trust and consumer relations.
Of course, not everyone who enters a sales funnel will go all the way through to the other end. Leaky sales funnels fail to convert up to 79% of marketing leads. If you’re looking to improve your sales funnel, consider implementing the following strategies:
1. Start Blogging
Blogging is a great way to show off your expertise and narrate your brand’s story. By producing high-value blogs, you communicate that you are credible and trustworthy to do business with.
Consider your blog page as a virtual showroom — people come in to learn about you and what you have to offer. When done right, blogs become a valuable lead generation tool that helps your brand stay top of mind.
Blogging is also a major component of SEO. Companies with blogs get 97% more links to their websites and have up to 434% more indexed pages.
2. Get on Social Media
In 2019, 90.4% of Millenials and 77.5% of Generation X were active social media users. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have dominated our every day and have changed the marketing landscape for good.
Social media is a strong tool in developing brand awareness and loyalty. Maintaining an active presence on different networks humanizes your brand and empowers consumers to interact with you on a personal level.
More importantly, social media is an excellent avenue for data collection. You can gain valuable insights by analyzing user engagements, shares, followers, hashtags, and more. These allow you to make informed decisions when crafting ads and identifying influential customers.
3. Invest in Pay-per-Click Campaigns
PPC advertising is a key ingredient in upscaling small businesses. It involves having search engines display your ad on top of organic search listings and paying only for every click.
According to WordStream, 41% of clicks belong to the top three paid ads on the search results page. What’s more, 75% of users said paid ads give quick answers to their queries, compelling them to click. These make PPC advertising integral in boosting exposure and visibility.
PPC ads are cost-efficient because you can set parameters to make campaigns as targeted as possible. You can apply keywords, geo-targeting, and ad scheduling to generate traffic with minimal ad spend.
4. Optimize Your Landing Page
Landing pages are made specifically to capture leads and convert them to customers. They should load fast, feature quality images, and have copy that sells.
Providing relevant content is crucial in avoiding visitors from bouncing. Custom landing pages according to specific ads and tailor your offers to suit the needs of each user. You’d want the transition from ads to landing pages to be seamless in order to move people further down the sales funnel.
Landing pages also serve as a means to get insights and information. You can add forms to ask for a user’s email and manage multiple landing pages to conduct A/B testing.
5. Keep Forms Simple
Contact forms are used to expand your email list and gather feedback. In addition, they give visitors an easy way to send messages and help secure your website from spammers.
When designing contact forms, keep things simple. The last thing you want to do is overwhelm users with too many fields. A study by HubSpot revealed that reducing the number of fields from four to three improves conversion rate by 50%.
Make sure your forms are positioned conspicuously and appear at the appropriate time. They should also be responsive and easy to fill out on any device.
6. Add Clear Calls to Action
CTAs tell users what to do next and motivate them to continue down the sales funnel. Over 90% of visitors who read your headline will also look at your CTA. Hence, it must be clear, concise, and compelling.
Other than using a friendly yet authoritative tone, see to it the copy isn’t too long. Instead of saying “Make sure to sign-up for our newsletter”, simply write “sign-up for our newsletter” and place it inside a brightly colored button.
A good hack is to personalize CTAs according to users’ location, browser language, and page origin. This way, your CTAs convert up to 202% better.
7. Email Marketing
Email marketing is vital in building and maintaining relationships with consumers. More than 80% of SMEs rely on this practice to drive customer retention and acquisition.
The most pertinent advantage of email marketing is paving the way for targeted messaging and personal conversations. For every dollar you spend in email marketing, an average of $42 is expected to return.
You can leverage this strategy by sending promotions, newsletters, and reminding users of their abandoned carts.
8. Improve User Experience
Good user experience is at the heart of a frictionless sales funnel. Customers who get frustrated while engaging with a brand abandon their carts and never come back. This results in an annual loss of $62 billion.
The solution is simple: make customers’ lives easy. Stick to uncomplicated web designs and ensure users can navigate through your web pages effortlessly.
An effective user experience is possible through the smooth interplay of content, code, and design. If you don’t have the technical skills to build your own website, it’s best to outsource web development and work with a team of professionals.
9. Incentivize Referrals
Customers acquired through referrals are 37% more likely to keep supporting your brand. They are also inclined to spend more money on your products or services. To spread the word quickly, incentivize customers who help you gain followers.
A common practice is the direct referral program. This is where you explicitly offer a reward to a customer for referring more clients. You can also do tangible referrals where you send out a gift certificate the customer can share with a loved one.
Referral programs don’t need to be expensive. In fact, it can be the most cost-effective strategy for customer acquisition. Set goals and identify incentives early to keep things realistic and within your budget.
10. Track Your Progress
The success you’ll get from rolling out these enhancements won’t be sustainable if you don’t monitor your progress. Take advantage of data analytics tools and do split tests so you can make the best decisions moving forward.
Whatever tactics you end up implementing, remember that seeing results takes time. Prospects don’t become loyal customers overnight. But through consistency and constant testing, you’ll gain a massive following and establish yourself as a household name.Ready to upscale your business? Let us help you optimize your sales funnel and landing pages. Get in touch with DevWerkz today.