Top Ways to Increase Your Sales Funnel Conversion
The sales funnel is something that any business owner is familiar with. It works simply — you accumulate potential customers and walk them down a funnel, so some of them convert into loyal customers and buy something from you.
The sales conversion funnel is a powerful tool when you need to convert people into your customers. Many marketing specialists have their points of view on this tool and ways to reach the desired goal. But with the development of marketing and the trends in this field, we can say that the important part of any tool is personalization. People don’t vibe with generic solutions and businesses that don’t care about them or any general issues.
If you already have a built funnel conversion, you should think about optimizing it. Here you can check the steps that might be helpful for your conversion funnel optimization. They will be important for both marketing and sales departments as they are part of an overall strategy to make more deals that bring money.
You can optimize your funnel sales to grow revenue and boost your marketing game. And the sooner you’ll understand what a sales funnel is and how to improve conversion rates, the sooner you’ll convert users into loyal and paying customers.
Table of Contents
2. Why Is a Sales Funnel Such an Important Part of Your Strategy?
What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a graphical depiction of the sales stages that a customer goes through while buying a product. This concept is based on the idea that when making a purchase, all customers go through more or less the same involvement of the content and personal desires.
Although the number of levels assigned to the sales funnel may vary, the classic model includes the stages of awareness, interest, evaluation, decision-making, purchase, and post-purchase evaluation. The most crucial stages are awareness, interest, desire, and purchase. The number of potential customers involved in the information phase decreases in the next stages of the funnel, so the end result is a much smaller number of real customers.
Awareness
At this stage, people learn about your business. It can be any channel — social media, print media, famous people, or any people that can suggest your products and services.
Interest
After hearing about your product, the person wants to learn whether it is suitable for their needs.
Desire
Here the potential customer checks the price and takes time to compare your product or service to another and find the best option.
Purchase
At this stage, the customer buys your product or service.
It is called a funnel as there are lots of potential customers in the awareness stage, but only a small number of people actually purchase something from you. Thus, the graphical representation looks like an upside-down triangle that looks similar to a funnel.
The effectiveness of this tool can be assessed based on the number of leads found at each stage and the sales conversion rates.
Why Is a Sales Funnel Such an Important Part of Your Strategy?
A market funnel is not only helpful in planning your activities but also in understanding the customers’ journey from the moment they found out about your product to the point when they are ready to give feedback.
We are sure that your business is growing every day, and you have more and more potential and options to upgrade your sales funnel. Here, at Claspo, we hope that you check your tools once in a while and make adjustments to achieve your strategic goals. This is why the sales funnel is a crucial part of your business strategy.
It might provide you with a better understanding of customer behavior, which leads to new hypotheses and better tools to get data to optimize the sales funnel. With each optimization of funnel conversion, you will bring more loyal customers, push more prospects, see a better marketing strategy, and enjoy your power over competitors.
Ways to Optimize Your Sales Funnel
Learn the 10 steps that will help you boost your funnel sales and increase sales conversion rate.
Step 1. Know Your Audience
It is important to target those who might want to buy your product, thus, understanding your audience is key. Targeting the wrong people might cost you money and lead to zero purchases. You can’t be liked by all, but you need to find your people.
During the awareness stage, at the beginning of the sales funnel campaign, you should get as many potential customers as possible. If you have a small number of potential customers or they seem way too good for your business, it means that something might go wrong. Make sure to get as many as possible. In another case, you might end up with no purchases.
Your goal is to create a customer persona for your audience, including age, gender, income, location, and more, depending on how important your product or service is for these people. That’s why you should study your audience, and you’ll then understand where exactly to target them. Not all people check Instagram or read newspapers every day. Do you get the point?
Step 2. Set Goals
When you’ve set your business goal, you can work on your sales funnel. During this step, you move from the awareness to the interest stage. Now you can track how many people are interested in your product and predict further work of your campaign to optimize the sales funnel.
The obtained data helps you get the necessary information on your target audience and see the weak spots of your websites. Now you can see where and when exactly people leave their carts and close the website.
Step 3. Analyze Landing Pages
Analyze your landing page as it should be relevant to the interests of your customers. Simply put, try to personalize it to the needs of your target audience. It means that you don’t need to place pictures of dogs around if your target audience prefers cats. And be clear with the things you offer.
This step is crucial as people will head to your website after finding out about your business. This means that the landing page should meet all the marketing requirements before people see it after the start of your campaign. Be clear and work on your copy and CTAs. This is the page people will see after using the Google search, and they will, most likely, end up on your landing page. Communicate with your reader, describe your USP, and state clearly what you want from your customers.
One of the most important things here is the loading speed of your website. We all know that if the website is slow, we will look for another one. So, why will our customers wait?
Step 4. Social Media Activity
It is not a secret that lots of audiences come via social media. This is a customer conversion funnel channel that requires extra attention as it reaches most people. People are scrolling day and night, so you need to constantly remind them about yourself, creating valuable and engaging content. Among the many benefits of social media channels, we can highlight the following:
- it allows building brand awareness with the help of content, ads, influencers, activations, etc;
- it places you among your competitors, so the users that look for a specific niche will most likely see your business;
- it offers your followers to visit your website to buy items;
- it offers your followers to buy your goods from the social media page.
For several years, social media has been nothing but a powerful marketing tool that connects audiences with businesses, bringing benefits to both of them. After learning your target audience, see which social media channel has the biggest number of potential customers. Some of them might be using Instagram and Facebook, and some might be using Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Step 5. Learn Feedback
There’s nothing better than a happy customer. To go further, you can be sure that if the customer is happy, they can share a word about your business. This is an important element of your sales funnel strategy as you expand your audience without paying money for that. And with each review, people build more trust in your brand, and you can expect them to come back to you for purchases again.
Even if potential customers start by looking for feedback and reviews, it is a great chance to make them fall in love with the brand through the experience of other people. Good feedback can arouse the feeling of desire as the customers see that it is of good quality and looks nice.
It is not hard to get truthful reviews as many websites have the option to share your thoughts linking to the specific topic, brand, or idea. For example, there are plenty of reviews on TripAdvisor, Google, Twitter, etc. You can also integrate feedback into your website and create an extra page where you place all the reviews, including photos and videos.
Step 6. Create Superb Content
Superb content is the key to customers’ hearts. This is not just a way to say it but actually a part of the relationship between the business and customers. As a brand, you should have a tone of voice, personality, identity, big ideas, and overall goals. Imagine your brand as a person and let it talk to your audience.
When the customer feels that the brand understands their needs and desires, they will fall for it and be loyal to the end. This will result in sales funnel conversion rate growth as well as purchase rate growth.
Think about developing a brand communication strategy if you don’t have one yet. Depending on the goals, you’ll build your content. Do you want more followers to raise awareness, or do you want people to share your content? Or maybe you want people to leave social media and visit your website? Each action needs to be thought of and developed into clear content.
Step 7. Work On Your CTAs
Encourage customers to go down the sales funnel and purchase your products or services with powerful CTAs. Feature the CTAs in your content heavily. Use sentences that clearly state what you need from your customers, for example, “Buy now!”, “Download the demo!” etc.
For any last-minute offer, CTAs must be included in the promotional email and shopping cart stage. This encourages clients to make a purchase or spend a little more than they’ve planned. Take your time to make sure your CTA is appealing: use bright colors and bold, clear text. This will catch the users’ eye, which might result in your desired action.
Step 8. Be Ready To Help Out
Are you ready to help your customers if they have questions? You should be able to do that as promptly as possible. Make sure that customers can contact you at any moment and get answers immediately. This is very crucial when the customer is in the final stages of your funnel sales as each step takes less time to make a decision.
You can provide customers with a phone number and email address or implement a chat on your website where a 24/7 operator will be ready to answer all the questions. At this step, you will be able to trade as much as you can for your potential customers if you handle customers’ inquiries properly.
Step 9. Personalization
Personalization is the key tool that draws the edge between you and others as it is the way you communicate with your customers. The smallest thing you can do is personalize your calls. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how many emails or messages you send. The only thing that can convert a random user into a loyal customer is personalization. Try sending out emails with specific goods that the person was interested in with a nice discounted price. We guarantee you that you will see the difference between the effect of your regular generic and personalized emails.
Step 10. Use CRM
Implementing a CRM system helps improve your sales conversion rate as it stores all the information on your leads and keeps track of any cracks.
You can set reminders to run specific actions for your customers to lead them to the purchase, catch up with their birthdays, and offer possible discount options. The CRM will show you how many times each customer bought items from your website. And depending on this information, you can run campaigns for different groups of your customers.
Conclusion
We hope that this article has brought light to your funnel conversion question. If done right, you’ll see how well it can work. Remember about your target audience, think about their expectations and what you can do to be different from your competitors.
Follow and check each of the above-mentioned points to step your marketing game up. This will not only help you make new purchases but also build a strong brand that will bring happiness and profit to both you and your customers.