Though the funneling process was introduced in the business world long ago, the use of the online sales funnel blew the market after the 2020 pandemic. Digital entrepreneurs get to learn the immersive possibilities to use this point of sales tool to optimize their marketing budget and increase sales volume.
Russell Brunson (Founder of ClickFunnels) regularly shows how his funnel marketers earn six-figure plus revenue through his system. However, many people still don’t know what sales funnels are or how they add value to the business.
In this introductory post, I’m gonna share these insights so that you can escalate your knowledge as a beginner funnel market. Let’s start with the definition section first.
What’s a Sales Funnel?
Sales funnel is a 21st-century digital marketing tool. It lets you track your targeted customers’ interactions after seeing your advertisements online.
Though the name indicates “sales,” these funnels are used to get information on customer actions at all stages, including awareness, interests, actions, etc.
For instance, it can be prospects’ email subscription, showing their interest in learning more about your product or services before purchasing.
So, basically, sales funnels are a tool to track the entire journey of your target market with your business offering.
Sales funnels can have web pages, popups in general, to track these data. In addition, you can use one or multiple funnels, connecting to single or several channels as your marketing plan requires.
These are also known as revenue or marketing funnels by internet marketers. These online funnels represent how you end up with a small customer acquisition from a big slice of the people you show your marketing content to.
That way, you can thoroughly understand how your marketing budget and strategies are performing in the real world.
6 “Stages” of Sales Funnel with Examples
Most digital marketers believe there are 4-5 stages of sales funnels in general. However, at Agent Writing, we’re biased towards a profoundly analytical mindset to provide all information you need.
And according to our research, if breaking down these traditional funnel marketing stages, there are 6 stages you should be focused on. I’ve shared how these are segmented so you can thoroughly understand your customer’s buying journey.
Figure 1: All 6 stages of a sales funnel
1. Awareness Stage
As ranked, it’s the primary step of your sales funnel. The awareness stage in sales funnels is the point at which a customer learns about your product or service.
They might learn about your offering from a YouTube video, social media-boosted content, influencer posts, email marketing, or else depending on your marketing technique.
At this stage, you must create a strong marketing campaign to get the customer’s attention. You must also provide good quality content on your website and social media platforms to keep the customer informed about what’s new with your product or service.
“If they visit your funnel through any advertisements, don’t expect them all to buy. However, if your product or service really has potential, some visitors might buy at this stage.”
And most of them won’t buy, which is natural. You’re supposed to ask them to share their contact details or allow them to contact you via mail or other methods. When you get this step done, you successfully achieve your sales funnel’s first marketing goal.
2. Interest Stage
At the interest phase in funnel marketing, a prospect becomes intrigued by your brand, product, or service and wants to learn more. You or your marketing team can trigger this stage by lots of factors.
For instance, providing valuable information about your offering, demonstrating its benefits, etc.
During this phase, you must maintain good communication with the prospect and encourage them to explore further.
Another way to create a solid bonding is to offer them additional resources or demonstrations to provide a better overview of your product. Once they’ve shown an interest in learning more, it’s time to move on to the next step in the sales funnel.
3. Evaluation Stage
At this point of sales, you can expect to get the first live interaction from your customers, showing deeper interest in your business. They may ask for a custom quote or share queries regarding the offering.
And don’t be mad, but prospects also annoy you with tons of questions at this stage. They would compare you with your competitors and tell them why X, Y, and Z companies are better.
Remember, they are still communicating because they are still interested in your products. You or the team should find out the hidden gem, trigger it positively, and inform them why you stand out from the rest.
“Most performing funnel marketers believe having a live chat via customer care representatives can increase the chances of confirming the sales at this phase.”
4. Decision and Negotiation Stage
At this phase, you can expect 80% confirmation that your funnel customers will eventually order from you.
However, before confirming the order, as biased as human instinct, they would negotiate the pricing, ask for offers, or just share their positive concerns, like the payment process.
5. Sell Confirmation Stage
And finally, the time comes when the angels fall from the sky and decide to purchase your product.
When they are settled with these negotiations, they proceed with the order. It’s always better to have an online secure payment method at this stage. It ensures the customers feel confident when checkout.
“For both verified or personal payment methods, you should provide an invoice of the purchased order to your customers’ mails.”
6. Renewal or Repurchase Stage
People don’t want to be forgotten, especially when their money is at stake. And it applies to your customers and you too.
After the order accomplishment, you want to ensure another order from him as an entrepreneur. And if you’re in the SaaS niche, you want them to renew their subscription plan. You can achieve any of these through the final stage of funnel marketing.
To get the most out of your funnel targets, you should provide some additional value to second-time customers. You can start reward programs, discounts, etc. These influence them to become your regular customers.”
The Importance of Sales Funnel In Business
Figure 2: Importance of sales funnels for a business
Sales funnels are one of the best marketing tools if you want to understand the target customers’ psychology. Because:
- You get to know a customer’s thinking process in every step, from the first visit to ordering your product
- Enables you to find the performing marketing tools and strategies
- With these insights, you can save the waste of marketing investment in the ineffective media
- As a result, you can minimize the CAC (customer acquisition cost)
- If using it for existing users or customers, you can understand their current requirements and perception of your brand.
- So, you can take the necessary steps to diminish the churn rate by initiating updates or improving the service quality.
“Churn rate describes the ratio of your existing users who stop using your service or product.”
Some sales funnels creation tools come with integrated payment gateways so that you can accept easy customer payments for your products or services.
As sales funnels are light and load faster than general pages, your web traffic enjoys a smooth experience, influencing their psychology to buy you.
These are just a few of hundreds of possibilities and benefits of modern sales funnels.
6 Types Online Businesses Need Sales Funnels Now
As mentioned before, these tools deliver a deep sense of how your marketing investments work, including monetary and even intangible resources.
And you can optimize your marketing strategies, product features, or pricing according to the insights to boost your conversion rate.
“Under the intangible resources category, even the sales funnel itself is involved. So, if you’re confident that all the marketing contents, your products, pricing everything is up to the mark but you’re not getting conversion yet, means, there's a problem with the funnel. These can be funnel design, structure, anything.”
To get a more idea of the importance of these tools, you’ve to understand who needs sales funnels.
In the modern world, every business category needs a sales funnel tool to acquire buyers through an online presence. Let’s take a quick look at the common business type that need funnels below:
1. Course Instructor
Figure 3: Example of sales funnel for course instructors
The top-grossing Udemy course instructors don’t limit themselves to selling on the marketplace only. They also sell via personal funnels.
For course creators, funnels aren’t only a way of selling; they also help them increase the sales margin.
Online course sellers need sales funnels to market and sell their courses effectively. It helps them identify potential buyers by filtering their interaction on the sales page.
Because of the tracked progress report of their customers (throughout the entire buying process, from initial contact to before final payment), they can get a clear view of what the web traffic wants. It establishes an easy orderly process for converting leads into customers.
“Leads are the first-stage target prospects who show interest in your product or services.”
2. Small Social Media Business
Figure 4: Example of sales funnel for small social media businesses
A small social media business may not need a complex sales funnel, but it’ll need to create an effective way to capture leads and convert them into paying customers.
With this sort of funnel, you can offer a group of customers incentives or special discounts, which eventually confirms a final order.
Finally, though the internet user ratio is 5 billion-plus, many people hesitate to order products on social media. Having a branded sales funnel adds confidence in these customers to complete the purchase.
3. SaaS Business
Figure 5: Example of sales funnel for SaaS businesses
SaaS business owners mostly use sales funnels. These businesses sell their software as a service monthly, weekly, and yearly. Whether an early-stage startup or a big enterprise, it delivers outstanding values.
Saas entrepreneurs don’t follow a concrete business model. Often they share big discounts, like lifetime product access, free plans, etc., to scale the user onboarding ratio.
“Business model refers to how a venture generates revenue from their users or customers. It’s also known as revenue and pricing model.”
A sales funnel can give them pretty advantages in this context. Firstly, they can create a funnel under a separate subdomain for the experiments.
Besides, they can share these funnels with affiliate marketers to measure their performance ratio otherwise, which may require tons of time and technical resources to build a separate page.
4. Digital Marketing Agency
Figure 6: Example of sales funnel for digital marketing agencies
Marketing agencies provide different sorts of internet advertising solutions for their clients. Their service list includes SEO (search engine optimization), regular or ad copywriting, content marketing, and so on.
A digital marketing agency can utilize the power of sales funnels in 2 ways. Firstly, they can use it for their own service marketing. And secondly, they can use it for their client’s business marketing.
Small agencies don’t always have their in-house website development team. They mostly rely on freelance developers who ask for high prices for relevant tasks.
However, a funnel can serve the main benefits that can mitigate the cost of developing a website.
On the other hand, they can use separate funnels for different clients’ marketing support. Using these, both they and the clients can measure real-time analytics of the marketing performance.
“Real-time analytics are the data processed from an advertisement approach and shown concurrently to the users.”
5. Personal Consultation Provider
Figure 7: Example of sales funnel for personal consultancy service providers
Thanks to different social media, video streaming, and podcast platforms. Now, many people are breaking free, sharing their intellectual skills and experience with others in return for an honorarium.
From legal consultancy to fitness advice and medical to business mentorship support, the demand for these services and supplies is growing exponentially.
If you want to shine in this business earlier, without wasting lots of time on branding, and personal portfolio website development, a sales funnel is the best road to drive your car.
“Nowadays, you can create long single-page sales funnels by using services like ClickFunnels. With these web funnel creation tools, you can add different sections like a catchy cover photo, describing why people should buy your services, instructions to buy, payment methods, etc.”
Completing these sections in an organized and user-friendly way raises your service standard in the buyers’ minds.
6. Digital Assets Seller
Figure 8: Example of sales funnel for digital assets sellers
Asset marketplaces always don’t allow you to throw offers and sometimes make you biased to reduce your creative creation price. Besides, these websites are flooded with other authors, making you sink into an ocean of competition.
Marketing through a different point of sales can give you immersive advantages. You can organize your sales page and experiment with free offers or trial packages.
“Digital assets are any intangible products that the creators sells to people who can then use and customize it accordingly. The buyers get yearly, custom or lifetime licensed ownership to use these gigs. Some common digital assets are web templates, scripts, graphics, songs, ebook, etc.”
For example, you can create a lead capture form on your funnel. When marketing your content on social media, you can offer a free ebook (can be anything else) for the visitors who’ll fill up the form with their contact information.
In that way, you can use this information to create a custom audience and retarget these interested and most potential future customers.
6 “Types” of Popular Sales Funnels
Indeed, sales funnels are limitless. There are various types of funnels built for different natures of businesses and their targeted sales accomplishment. Though I’ve shared a few of them below, there are tons of more funnel styles.
1. Lead Generation Funnel
Figure 9: Example of lead generation sales funnel
A lead generation funnel helps you collect leads from potential customers. It consists of a series of steps or screens that help you identify your target market, convert them into leads, and close sales with those leads.
The main goal is to capture the contact information from your target market. This can be done through forms such as contact forms or email campaigns.
You should also make sure to include beneficial content in your lead funnels so that the prospects feel like they are getting something valuable in exchange for their information.
Ensure the following traits in your lead funnels to get the most results out of it:
- An enticing landing page with a proper call to action button, including testimonials, visual contents
- An irresistible offer that web visitors can’t ignore, such as free templates
- A media to exchange the offer to the users
2. Webinar Funnel
Figure 10: Example of webinar sales funnel
It’s a funnel marketing strategy used to increase the number of people attending your virtual meetups, meetings, and summits, also known as webinars.
Using this, you can engage your target audience and get them interested in attending your webinars. Your goal is to ensure the maximum number of attendees registered through this funnel.
“The use of webinar funnels increased after the recent pandemic when people couldn’t attend in-person events or business meetings.”
Here are three tips for creating a webinar funnel:
- Create a sign-up form for your webinars. This form will allow people to sign up for your upcoming events. You can use different methods, such as online or email forms.
- Send out confirmation and follow-up emails about upcoming events. This way, people will be able to remember the date of the show.
- Conduct live sessions during your webinars. It gives people the opportunity to ask questions regarding the online event.
3. Content Funnel
Figure 11: Example of content sales funnel
Unlike others, content funnels involve lots of opportunities for a marketer. These allow you to sell your content to a persona, whether it’s a video, image, or article.
On this funnel page, you share the glance of your final content that people get after purchasing. Though as a sales funnel, you use it for confirming orders, you can also use them for other stages of funnel marketing that I mentioned earlier.
The good practices for content marketing funnels are:
- Choosing and writing a unique content niche. It gives users a clear vision of why they should buy only from you.
- Ensuring high-quality file format that people will download after purchase.
- Provide a trailer to give target markets an idea of what they will get.
4. Hero Funnel
Figure 12: Example of hero sales funnel
A hero funnel is inevitable for you if you’re planning to be a public figure with a month-over-month solid marketing plan. These funnels are used to brand a person to web traffic by showing off his expertise, achievements, etc.
You can use social media to promote this funnel page. People who visit the funnel page by clicking on the shared link. And the fun fact is you then again drive them to follow you on one or multiple social media channels.
The marketing funnels aim to create your public exposure while connecting you with future loyal subscribers. Let’s check out the necessary measurements of this funnel:
- Stories are the prime factor of hero funnels. Take time and patiently organize the script.
- You need to add a bio in hero funnels. You can share the bio via image, text, or embedded video.
- Add a newsletter section to grab audience data. It’ll allow you to send them any news regarding your initiative in the future.
5. Product Launch Funnel
Figure 13: Example of product launch sales funnel
Launching events are a big part of business today. In the world of tech-based products, companies are launching new products every now and then. You would see them regularly, whether it’s an app or a game.
Using a funnel for your upcoming product launch is probably your best decision. They are a way to get the word out about your product and get people excited about it. Think why the GTA game series gets hyped even when the game is at the beta stage.
For a successful product launch funnel, you need the following;
- Trailer of the product must leave a pang of hunger in the audience to check out the final product.
- Let them know about your product features.
- Pre-registration or pre-order module that suits your product type.
- If needed, add a survey or poll system to get their feedback or suggestions regarding any feature.
6. Membership Funnel
Figure 14: Example of membership sales funnel
A membership funnel can be used for both traditional consultancy firms and software businesses.
For example, if you’re in the fitness niche and want to provide training guides to people, you can use this funnel. Through this funnel, you’re gonna charge the clients monthly or on a custom date.
The same goes for SaaS businesses. Even though SaaS startups do have a membership page, they can use this separate funnel for new user acquisition with a new business model.
This allows you to test the market before making any big changes in the pricing model. You should consider the below facts while creating membership funnels:
- Must add a trial package section so that buyers can get a test of the product or service before the final investments.
- Share all unique and alluring features at first, then sort others specs placing high demanding to least demanding ones.
- Make sure to add a newsletter section.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the differences between the sales funnel and the marketing funnel?
Both marketing and sales funnels are related, share their effects on each other, and can act as a single or separate funnel. The core differentiation factor is sales funnels are mainly created for accomplishing a purchase from the customers.
On the flip side, marketing funnels represent the rest of the funnel stages, like, informing the target market, collecting leads, etc.
Where can you get sales funnel templates free?
There are a variety of sales funnel templates available online, and many of them are free. You can try using Bitrix24, for instance. It has a free sales funnel builder.
What is a B2B sales funnel?
As the name suggests, B2B sales funnels solely focus on marketing to enterprises. So, the service or product provider and the buyer are both basically businesses.
What are the stages of a B2B sales funnel?
Like the D2C or B2C funnels, B2B sales funnels also have similar stages. However, depending on the product or service type, some new marketing stages may seem to be necessary. Also, you can skip a few stages as your plan requires. The basic stage framework is as follows:
- Prospecting or creating awareness
- Interests
- Measure or evaluation
- Qualify leads.
- Closing the deal or sales
- Follow up for renewal or repurchase
- Bonus stage: reviving dead leads
Which funnel is the best?
A funnel is best or not entirely depends on the success or the conversion rate. In addition, a funnel type that works for an ebook seller may not work for an f-commerce business. It’s wise to choose the funnel that would be best suited for your style business.
How can I create sales funnels?
You can use different funnel creator tools available online and used by hundreds of thousands of people for their businesses. A few of the most renowned funnel creators are ClickFunnels, Hubspot, Wishpond, Leadpages, etc.
Is SEO top of the funnel?
SEO can be a part of your sales funnel, but it shouldn’t be the top priority at all. The primary stage of your funnel starts from awareness. However, depending on the business type and age, it may vary.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, with a sales funnel, you can easily reach out to new customers through social media ads, Google ads, and other sorts of PPC advertisements. Though the primary stage of sales funnels is creating awareness of your product or service, you can customize the goal as per your marketing plan.
If you’ve got a sales funnel page or are planning to create one, the most important factor is the content. We at Agent Writing have an experienced writers team to create service or product marketing content that generates sales. Feel free to reach out to us anytime.
