5 Sales Funnel Strategies for Businesses

Sales Funnel Strategies

The sales funnel has been changed, modified, and adjusted for decades since its first inception at the turn of the century.

Whether you’re a small mom-and-pop shop looking for more sales or an eco-friendly business looking for more conversions, you can use a few extra sales funnel strategies at your disposal.

The basic concepts of using sales funnels are still the same. Then again, there are several ways to make more out of your existing funnels. Here are 5 strategies that your business can use to maximize the effectiveness of your sales funnel.

Building The Basic Sales Funnel

To understand the right sales funnel strategies, you need to understand first the stages of a sales funnel. By understanding its steps, you’ll know the best methods to apply at what phase. This can also help you formulate a new sales funnel if you want to build one yourself.

The basic five-step sales funnel consists of:

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Conversion
  4. Loyalty
  5. Advocacy

You want to reach step three, at least, to get the first sale and consistently cycle between steps 3 and 5 to maximize lifetime customer value.

This doesn’t make the first two steps useless; on the contrary, while the first two steps offer no short-term return of investment (ROI), they are essential in building towards steps 3 to 5.

1. Awareness: Build Better Brand Awareness

The foremost strategy to get more leads during your awareness stage is to get more eyes on your business.

Your goal is to build awareness of your business’s mission, goals, and values, then send branded signals to your target audience.

Tell them about your values. Are you fighting for net-zero emissions? Or are you looking to blaze a trail in the beauty and wellness industry?

There are several ways to bring traffic to your website and get more eyes on your branding efforts.

Start with building more awareness and getting your word out. Utilize keywords through search engine optimization (SEO) and use low-intent keywords to ease people buying from your brand. Pile on the high-ranking content for related interests and reference your products and services.

Use paid advertising and social media to build a bigger following. Social ads have several tools that can help you segment the target audience. Target a specific niche that you know would surely love to patronize your services or be interested in what you have to offer.

2. Consideration: Make Yourself The Best Choice

You want to show yourself as the best option among all customers during the consideration phase. It’s vital to target new users considering if you’re the right business for their needs.

You also want to target any leads you have and keep seeing your brand as someone they can trust.

Understand conversion points and determine how your sales team can start connecting with your prospects.

Understand who are the qualified leads in your list – those who are leaning on making a purchase. Change your SEO and PPC strategies and go for keywords that have a clear intent to buy.

Continue ads and link them to your sales funnel landing pages or even directly to product pages. You want all this organic activity to build towards conversions but don’t forget to collect data too.

Depending on your analytics setup, you can set up the heatmaps for your website and track specific user actions.

Capture email leads through lead magnets and tripwires, then nurture them. Set up retargeting measures to send customers a reminder of the products they want from you. Make your brand the most valuable option they can find.

3. Conversion: Encourage Split-Second Decision-Making

Once your target audience is prime for conversion, start pushing them towards something called “micro-moments”.

Micro-moments are instances when buyers form an opinion on brands and decide if they are ready to buy.

Capture the feeling these instances give your customers and implement lead conversion strategies.

Understand the market you’re trying to operate in and understand the behavior of your target audience.

Capture the right segment and segregate your leads according to demographics, geolocation, and socio-economic background.

Create search campaigns for people who are ready to buy. Give special offers and looking for keywords that signal purchase intent. These words include “buy,” “in my city,” “free delivery,” “for sale,” and “discounts.”

Optimize your landing pages and help improve your UX to zero in on the buyer’s needs. Remove conversion barriers and make your buttons easy to find.

You want your copy to be short, snappy, and convincing. Use convincing but straightforward calls-to-action to get their attention.

4. Loyalty: Maximize Customer Service

Once you have your conversions, congrats on your first sale. Now, your job is to get them to come back, buy more of your products, continue with their subscriptions, and cut down on your churn rate. This will help you maximize your return on investment (ROI) and close leads.

Build on your customer service. One of the most powerful elements that can build brand loyalty is having robust customer service.

It can come in several forms, from helpful FAQs, knowledge bases, and even troubleshooting information. You will also want easy access to call centers if you expect a significant volume of buyers or email chats.

Use chatbots if you can to simplify the entire process. Then again, nothing beats on-call support if you can.

5. Advocacy: Encourage Referrals

The last step towards completing your sales funnel strategy is maximizing customer advocacy. The goal here is to help turn your customers into people who can provide you with more leads.

You want them to be your brand ambassadors and believe that you are there for them. So, how do you do this?

Build positive reviews all over the internet. Let people talk about you, your brand, your products and services, and get positive ratings too.

Learn the success stories of your customers and feature them on your site. Build referral campaigns and reward customers who give you leads. Reward the leads too.

Incentivizing referrals doesn’t mean you need to give away big rewards. Coupons, discounts, and even small-dollar incentives can give the brain all the dopamine it needs.

Final Thoughts

Sales funnel strategies are potent ways to guide prospects and create more value for your brand.

Having the right strategy at every stage can help you generate more customers with high repeat rates and connect with your target audience. Follow these strategies, and you should be good to go for a long time.

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