One of Digital Marketing core concepts is Sales Funnel. The sales funnel always existing in your business whether you know it or not.
In recent years, with rapid changes in economics and user behavior. Companies, businesses are racing to improve and optimize the customer experience in the online environment, which is attached to maximize the value per customer.
That’s why the Sales Funnel, Customer Journey, Marketing Automation increasingly interested and thorough research in the strategy of the business online.
Each stage of the sales funnel has an impact on customer behavior.
If you still do not know what is the sales funnel? Information you need to know, including the knowledge, tools, strategies all will be shared in this article. I will help you understand it in a simple way and the easiest.
Note: The article may be a little long, so you can bookmark to read at any time.
Contents
What Is A Sales Funnel ? How To Create One That Makes Money
Currently, there are many different concepts of sales funnel on the internet. According to major sites like Crazy Egg or Neil Patel then sales funnel is the journey of the customers on your website that the end result is the conversion.
It can be an Email, Phone number, register for the webinar, seminar, buy product, upsell, …
The Funnel is a future of website
To help you understand about sales funnel concept, you should watch the video below
Imagine you walked into a T-shirt shop near your house.
After consider you would like to buy a shirt for $15. Then when the staff consults, you know if you buy three at the same time, it will cost $ 40 (instead of $ 45). Now, if you buy a combo, you will save money, right?
So you are satisfied with the fact that you have bought a reasonable price, and the store is happy to have sold many products at the same time.
It is a customer journey – a pure sales funnel. Imagine that all of those stages will be optimized and set up right on your website in the proper order, what will happen?
You only need to pay attention to the input (traffic), and the result is MONEY.
Once you have a good Sales Funnel, you can pay more than your competitors but still ensure more profits. As Dan Kennedy-Business coach once said:
“Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins”
3 Types of funnel
Depending on your needs and purpose, there will be many different types of funnel. But overall, we will have three main types:
Lead Funnel: Funnel focuses on building a list of potential customers through creating value for them (free ebook, video tutorial, checklist, etc. That’s called Lead Magnet)
Buyer Funnel or Conversion Funnel: Focus on converting potential customers into customers. The activities like sales product, upsell, combos, … are taking place here.
Webinar Funnel: Focus on inviting visitors to attend your webinar session. We often use it when launching a product or sell a high-ticket product.
How to create sales funnel
After reading the concept above, you still have not figured out what you will have to do to be able to create a sales funnel, don’t worry. I have been like you before.
Now, I will try to help you figure out what we will do and make it understandable and applicable. I usually use this method for my online business.
We will go through 3 steps:
- Determine the goal of the sales funnel
- Draw customer journeys and stages
- Use the tool to show those stages on the website
Step 1: Determine the Goal of the sales funnel
What is your goal?
Please determine Input and Output for your sales funnel. Want to collect data from potential customers? Do you wish they purchase? Alternatively, do you want to increase your brand, a viral campaign?
Please identify it.
Now you have the goal to focus on (output). Now think about whom you will take to the top of the funnel (Input)? – It could be the people in the email list, people who reach your Facebook ads, through inbound marketing strategies, …
Why do I have to do this but not all? Because with every different marketing channels, the approach is also different. I will separate traffic into three types:
- Hot Traffic
- Warm Traffic
- Cold Traffic
Obviously, the approach to people who never know you (cold traffic) will be different from those who know you, know the problem they are having (Hot traffic).
If you do not know the traffic temperature, you can see the article here.
For example:
Output: I want to have new customers.
Input: I will reach new customers through facebook ads.
The first step is simple.
Step 2: Draw customer journeys and stages
By definition, a sales funnel has 4 stages:
- Awareness: Causing the attention of potential customers
- Interest: Create excitement
- Decision: Customers start thinking and deciding whether or not to act.
- Action: Call to Action (leave email, register for the webinar, purchase, ..)
I will not go dive into 4-steps here, because many websites share this issue.
The question is how to apply it to your business. What does it mean for sales funnel, and what phase does it take?
Make it simpler.
In my opinion, depending on your strategy, a sales funnel will be separate into how many stages and what we will do each step is.
After all, in an online environment, for a sales funnel usually consists of only three main elements:
- Traffic
- Lead
- Conversion
Traffic
According to step 1, we have the goal of the bottom of the funnel and traffic source.
Note: depending on the temperature of the traffic we will create different types of funnels (may vary in the approach, the first page, headline, …).
For me, sales funnel starts from when we approach customers (advertising, SEO, Direct, …).
When carefully analyzing traffic sources, we will have different scenarios to reach customers. This thing helps the conversion rate better.
This is a simple but essential step. So please don’t ignore it.
In short, this is what you need to do at this stage:
- Identify the niche
- Determine the problem customers are having
- What solution do you have to help them (Blog, video, free ebook or trial account)
- Traffic source to promote funnels (Hot, Warm, Cold)
- How to reach them (I will share below)
Leads
The goal at this stage is that you need to have potential customer information (email, phone numbers, …).
To get this, you must have something valuable to exchange. If you pay close attention, this is Awareness.
You will create a page that I call the squeeze page to collect information. You will draw attention to customers through promoting the lead magnet. When customers enter this squeeze page, they only have 2 choices: leave information or exit.
For those who leave information, it will be taken down to the next stage.
Convert
Now you have information from potential customers. What you need to do now is to convert potential customers into buyers.
This is a long process.
Why? Because you have to go through the training process as well as build trust.
Those who have left the email will redirect to the next page. Here we will connect with potential customers; the goal here is to build trust and elicit their problems and pain.
Here some people will buy your product, but most do not.
These people will be taken care of through email, videos, blogs, remarketing, etc. Through the information, potential customers will trust you more and gradually become more interested in your product.
Finally, they buy your products.
As you can see, this is Interest, Decision, and Action. So you have completed a sales funnel. At the end of this process, you can bring customers through other sales funnel to help sell many different products as well as the maximum value per customer.
Why sales funnel important
By this time I thought maybe you understand why sales funnel essential, right?
Any company should have a sales funnel. Whether or not it is still there, have a customer journey, we have a sales funnel (of course, this sales funnel has not been optimized yet, so it is not good to convert).
However, once you have a good understanding of it, optimize each stage of the funnel, plus if you have combos, gifts, up-sell, down-sell it will be great.
Sales funnel is the current trend because of personalization and increased customer experience. Imagine that for each different audience; different cases will have different scenarios that help you convert potential customers into paying customers.
Does it make sense to you? Do you like this idea? (Of course, I will share the tools for you below. You do not need to be a designer, coder, … You just need to have a good idea and specific strategy)
Sales funnel copywriting
When you have the strategies, you know what you need to do, how to attract customers, what do you talk about in each stage of the funnel.
Now is the time to turn the idea into reality.
Many people have problems with copywriting. They don’t know how to create a compelling Ads, a sexy headline, and what each landing page needs to write, what to say in each video.
Essentially “COPYWRITING” will make you spend much money. A “good copy” really expensive.
If you know Mr.Fire (Joe Vitale), he is one of the top copywriting and author of best-selling books Spiritual Marketing and Hypnotic Writing.
Let see the price list of his services below.
$5 per word… Unbelievable. I can’t hire or use this service because of it’s really expensive for me. Not to mention that you don’t know does it works or not because we still need to test the funnel continuously.
Now, try to reseach on Upwork.
Is it a little cheaper but it is still relatively expensive.
So what we should to do?
Learn It
If you want to build the content of the sales funnel for yourself, I recommend reading Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets book . You can buy it directly from Russell Brunson or on Amazon very quickly.
Also, in this article, I will share with you a script I often use: “Who – What – Why – How Script.”
- Who: Who are you?
- What: What do you have? Introduce briefly.
- Why: Why do they need your product? The benefit.
- How: How they get it? Tell them how to orders your product or service.
Next, explain to them why you sell this product at a cheap/expensive price, why free trial, etc. People always think you are hiding something.
Why need to buy this product now but not another time? Enclosed is the guarantee of eliminating any possible risks.
Recap: Remind what they are receiving and why.
Funnel Scripts software
If you’re not good at copywriting, don’t want to hire freelancers and never want to learn it?
Here, I will introduce you a tool called Funnel Scripts.
As its name suggests, this is a software that helps you build content for sales funnel such as Ads, headline, squeeze page, Upsell page, webinar presentation, Email, etc.
You can see the funnel scripts review here.
If you are interested in this tool, you can see how it works and how to use it in the link below.
Sales funnel software
After having a script on each stage of the sales funnel, we will now show it on our website as landing pages.
Here are some tools that can quickly create a sales funnel.
Thrive Architect
This is a WordPress plugin. You can easily create a quick and straightforward landing page with drag & drop.
Because this is one of the most commonly used plugins, there are many tutorial videos. So don’t worry about how to use it.
Price: $67/Website or $97/ 5 website
Pros:
- Easy to use.
- If you already have website on wordpress platform, this is a reasonable choice.
- Price is relatively cheap compared to similar products.
- 1 year support.
Cons:
In some cases, it conflicts with the plugin and theme you are using.
- Do not integrate to payment applications, so it is challenging to upsell because customers must re-enter the card info many times.
- Can’t create webinar funnel or survey funnel
- Difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of sales funnel. It would help if you used the 3rd software (like google analytics to check traffic and email marketing tool to check leads).
Clickfunnels
This is a great funnel-making tool used by famous marketers and many businesses. Not only developing software, but Clickfunnels also has a large community on Facebook who has been using and succeeding with Clickfunnels.
After joining, you not only get support for tools but also learn a lot from the members of the group (ideas, strategies, funnel design tips, …)
Along with the features and enthusiastic support, so Clickfunnels has a high price.
Price: $ 97 / month or $ 297 / month and 14 days free trial
To get a better understanding of Clickfunnels features and the differences between $97 and $297, you can read the Clickfunnels review here.
Pros:
- Easy to use.
- No need to have website, code or design knowledge.
- No need for hosting because you will create sales funnel directly on the Clickfunnels platform.
- When using hosting or vps you need to have security knowledge to avoid attacks on servers such as DDOS, hackers, viruses, malicious websites. When using Clickfunnels you won’t need to worry about this issue.
- Support support enthusiastically.
- They have a funnel marketplace – because Clickfunnels has a share funnel function, you can buy the optimized sales funnel or beautifully designed.
- Statistics of clear conversion rates (traffic, opt-in, sales,%, …)
- Integrated with payment applications. So up-sell is easy (When customers click the button on OTO page, the money will be automatically deducted from the account previously provided. This helps to increase the conversion rate and maximize profits)
- Create affiliate systems that help increase sales (When you use the Actionetic plan)
- And so much more…
Cons:
- For some peoples, priced at $ 97 quite high.
- Sometimes the page loads slowly.
- No live chat support, They will support via mail.
Sales funnel template
If you are new and want to be able to create sales funnel for your business, you can click on the link below to receive Sales funnel template.
All pages are pre-designed, your job is to use it only.
Sales funnel tracking
After having a sales funnel, now is the testing phase.
If you use Clickfunnels, everything is already set up, and it’s easy to see on the dashboard. Great, isn’t it?
However, the question is, what if you are using another platform (Leadpage, thrive architect, …)?
There is no other way that you need to do it manually. You can use Excel or Google Sheet to analyze whether the funnel works well.
Here are the basic parameters you need to know:
- Traffic Number
- Opt-in
- Conversion rate
- Tracking sales
- …
In case that you still have not figured out how to create a sheet, you can at sales funnel excel template here.
Funnel Hacking Blueprint
If after you have tried all of these methods and you still can’t create a sales funnel with a reasonable conversion rate, or you even don’t know how. Then this is the last method that I often used
Funnel Hack
This is a concept I learned from Russell Brunson – author of two best books selling Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets.
You can understand simply that this is “Spy” your opponent, to see how they do by going inside their funnel as a customer.
I have guided very carefully in Funnel Hack 101. Specifically, there are the following main steps:
1. Research competitors who have a proper funnel. (If you already have, skip)
2. Buy the product
3. Screen capture all landing page, upsell page (or down-sell), email sequence, the script inside the page, Url video,…
4. Funnel Clone
5. Research traffic source (The traffic coming from Facebook, Pinterest, Direct, SEO, Email, or Banner?)
6. Do they have to retarget on google or Facebook? (if yes, screen capture it)
7. The Ads script (what the Ad talk about? It has an image or video? The image look like or video talk about?)
8. Clone it.
When you apply this method, although at first, you have to spend some money on the product. However, the success rate will be much higher.
Also if you want to learn and study about sales funnels seriously, you can see some of the books and courses you recommend below.
Sales funnel books
Dotcom Secrets Book: The book talks about the necessary knowledge and practical applications of the sales funnel. There is Includes types of the Funnel, the funnel scripts. You need to read and follow very simply by fill the blank.
Expert Secrets Book: The book launches after Dotcom Secrets Book, focusing on finding niche markets and how to build “Fan” for yourself.
Many people out there have perfect knowledge. However, no one wants to hear them, nobody wants to listen to their advice, and nobody wants to pay for it.
Do you find this quite common?
Besides, this book also helps you have a good script, a perfect presentation to sell high-ticket products through the webinar, direct sales, or seminars, …
Blue Ocean Strategy: Systematically guide you to stay out of competition in your market. Also, you can find a new, fertile market that we call it. is blue ocean
Breakthrough Copywriting: Many people will feel that copywriting is hard, but David Garfinkel makes it simpler. Everything will be guided step by step.
Sales funnel training
One Funnel Away Challenge
For $100, the course will help you know how to find the potential market, thereby creating your product or service. Then start building a sales funnel and launch it within 30 days.
If you do not have one of the following:
- Expert in something
- Product
- Traffic
- Leads
- Funnel
Funnel Builder Secrets
This is Clickfunnels most expensive course which includes all the things you need about the sales funnel to make sure you succeed:
- Six months of using Clickfunnels
- 1 Year of using Funnel Scripts
- Funnel Builder Secrets Course
- Traffic Secrets Course
- Funnel Hack Course
Conclusion
I Hope this article can help you better understand what sales funnel is and how to create it for your business. As you can see, this is a relatively long article, and if you read it all, it might be boring, right?
Even so, I admit that it’s still not enough for the sales funnel. I will try to update the sales funnel information continuously to help you understand and apply better.
If possible, read more books, join a sales funnel course that will help you a lot. The last, if you have questions regarding sales funnel, leave a comment below.
My goal for www.Funnelsecrets.us is really very straightforward. To help you make money. To provide you with actionable strategies that you can use to grow your business beyond anything you ever expected, or even hoped.
You simplify the explanation and now I fully understand it. But what if I can’t design or have a website? Is it still possible for me to have the “sales funnel” lead and conversion thru other means besides social media? “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins”- is that suppose to mean the cheaper the cost the less possible to acquire leads? Is that true to life?
Hi, Hipcraft thank you for reading my blog.
First, we need to understand what is cheap, and it depends on each specific business. We can’t compare the cost of getting a lead in real estate with selling books … Because it’s not the same. In my opinion, whether cheap or expensive, in the end, what important is profitable. If your ad is cheap but not profitable, it is useless.
Also, the reality today is that the cost of ads continually increasing. So we should increase conversion rates or increase value per customer. That is the goal of the sales funnel