So what is a sales funnel and how do you go about making one? A sales funnel can refer to any sales process but it often now refers to an online sales funnel which is completely automatic. You could say that the checkout till in your local supermarket is the final process of the ‘sales funnel’ of a physical business: starting with advertising and promotion, bringing in customers to the supermarket, and finally selling the goods themselves. Then there is the after sales process of offering discounts and reductions to entice previous shoppers back to the store.
Sales Funnel Process
An online sales funnel is no different in principle and begins with bringing visitors either to a website or a landing page. In order to find the visitor in the first place you start with advertising or promotion. This can be done in several ways and one of which is content creation. By writing a blog such as this one, creating an interesting video post or some other content and sharing it, you can generate your traffic to the start of the sales funnel. You can also promote a landing page through advertising. Facebook or Google Adwords is often the starting point of a sales funnel.
The initial step of the sales funnel is to offer something of value to your visitor such as a video course, free download or some other such ‘ethical bribe’. In order to do this your landing page must be ‘pre-framed’ especially if you are paying for advertising. Your advert must describe correctly what you are offering and be targeted to your specific niche. For example:
Ideally your advert and landing page will be congruent so that when someone lands on the landing page they get what they are expecting and don’t click away.
Once they are on the landing page they should enter their email in order to access the information your are offering. They are then in the sales funnel. Once you have collected the email address the rest of the process is automatic and your visitor will continue to receive information provided by you until they ‘opt out’ of the sales funnel by unsubscribing to the email list.
Once subscribed, your visitor will receive the information they have been promised and can be sent offers and products via email. Ideally you would not spam your email list with a tonne of products and sales pitches. You need to gain trust by offering something of value. This is the ‘advertising’ step of the sales funnel. Before you can sell anything you first need to engage the customer/visitor and offer value.
Built into the sales funnel will be a list of emails which will be automatically sent out on a regular basis. These will contain useful information which is congruent with your advertising and landing page and also offers of products of membership to more useful information and training which you visitor would find useful.
If your email subscriber buys a product from your emails then you will make commissions based on those sales. Your sales funnel can contain whatever you choose to put into it but you don’t necessarily need to create your own from the ground up. You can use someone else’s sales funnel and simply promote the landing page.
Sales funnels typically contain several products which vary in price. Once someone buys the ground level product then they are offered a higher value product as they pass through the sales process. The beauty of an online sales funnel like this is that once it is set up it continues working without you having to physically be there. It can deal with multiple purchases and resales, continually offer quality information and up-sells and even monitor monthly membership fees, payments and cancellations.
Your job is to initially set up the sales funnel so it works automatically (which can be done for you with this company), and then build your list of email subscribers through either content creation or advertising or both. As your list grows so do your sales.
Hopefully this articles has answered the question “what is a sales funnel” but if you have any further questions please comment below.
You can learn how to build your own list and sales funnel here.