Sales Funnel Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Boosting Sales and Brand Awareness

Long gone are the days of selling door-to-door (unless you’re a Girl Scout). In this day and age, developing a solid sales funnel is the heart of every ecommerce strategy. Without a user-friendly sales funnel, many potential customers could be slipping through the cracks of your website without you knowing.

An effective sales funnel should offer valuable content and incentives that customers can’t find anywhere else. Here’s everything you need to know about sales funnels before we dive in:

What is a Sales Funnel?

Simply put, a sales funnel is the means of attracting new clients, selling to them, and keeping them. We’ve mentioned funnel content in our web design piece, and the same applies to online sales. Providing top, middle, and bottom-of the funnel content in the correct manner and order are crucial to converting leads and making sales. To recap,

• Top-of-the-funnel (Attract): General, educational content. This includes industry trends, webinars, and blog posts that don’t explicitly mention your business at first.

• Middle-of-the-funnel (Convert): Why your brand. Also referred to as “gated†content, this is where you explain the benefits of your brand specifically, and what unique services you bring to the table.

• Bottom-of-the-funnel (Grow): Connecting people to your brand directly. These call-to-actions (CTA’s) usually offer one of your services instead of just educating people about your brand. These include demos, consultations, trials and more.

Stages of a Sales Funnel

Stage 1: Awareness

The ultimate goal of your sales funnel is to make sales and keep customers. But before that, you need to pump out engaging content that’s going to pull interested people into the funnel. Use blogs, ebooks, cheat sheets, tutorials, podcasts, newsletters and more to attract leads. While this content is meant to educate and show off the value your brand brings to the table, it’s smart  to throw in some mentions of your brand – such as case studies, to associate your brand with the information you’re offering.

Stage 2: Interest

Getting people to click your content is one thing, and getting them to keep scrolling is another. If your content isn’t of value or interest to your target audience, there’s no incentive to keep going down the funnel. The content should be something your target audience would love to have access to but also lead them to take a step closer towards converting into a sale. For example, perhaps your blog post includes an incentive to join a webinar that’ll dig deeper into a topic. That webinar would lead to another action and so forth. Compelling headlines, easy readability, and engaging elements are crucial. If you’ve ever read a Buzzfeed article, you know what we mean about headlines. Creating blogs that are guaranteed to be followed up are a great way to get leads, take our three-part Event Marketing series, for example:

Stage 3: Decision

Right before the final CTA comes lead nurturing. That means being timely, friendly, and accurate with automated or manual responses. Transaction confirmations should contain user-friendly language and clear instructions/expectations for what’s next. This content should follow your gated content and share your company’s knowledge and expertise that other brands don’t have. Nurturing B2B leads can be a lot trickier than B2C leads during this stage, so curate these messages meticulously.

Stage 4: Action

The average ecommerce conversion rate is 7.2 percent. While most people won’t end up getting to the bottom of your funnel, those who will are the most valuable in marketing and remarketing your business. With your amazing content and positive customer experience, you’ve successfully managed to convert some leads. To keep the B2B or B2C bridge standing strong, continue to deliver convenient experiences – implement upselling elements where you suggest similar products or services. You can also begin to suggest higher price tag items to new customers you’ve started building trust with. Other elements to incorporate could be  discounts, free digital downloads, private Facebook group access or thank-you notes in order to encourage more transactions and further establish a strong relationship with the consumer:

Sales Funnel Examples We Love

Since now you know the backbone of sales funnel, we’ll show you some effective ones in action. The 4-step template is up for interpretation – and the biggest companies are the ones that have mastered it. If done correctly, sales funnels won’t be boring. Here are some of our favorites from top businesses.

Example 1: Crazy Egg (B2B)

• Awareness: Crazy Egg’s blog is a harbor of tips, tricks, and hacks for analytics and ecommerce. Their free content is clear, concise, and incredibly useful. With easy-to-comprehend cornerstone content, Crazy Egg’s blogs spread fast.

• Interest: At the head of all their blogs, lies this banner below. People who are unfamiliar with heat maps are drawn to this, because it generates curiosity. The interactive component is also a refreshing change from “Sign up for our newsletter.† 

• Decision: After you’ve entered the URL, Crazy Egg encourages you to create an account with the page below. With user-friendly language like “Try Crazy Egg for FREE†and boasting the 30-day free trial, Crazy Egg ends up pushing users to decide in their favor.

• Action: At checkout, Crazy Egg assures users they won’t be charged for the free trial and you can view your heatmap immediately. They also offer multiple programs, ranging from basic to pro – which can convert more leads than a company with fewer options. The attention to detail doesn’t stop there. Once signed up, Crazy Egg will send follow-up emails to ensure any questions are answered in order to facilitate the purchasing process.

Example 2: MailChimp (B2B)

• Awareness: This email marketing campaign brand spreads the word through social media, blogs, helpful tutorials, and obviously – emails. At the bottom of all their emails from free plans, was the watermark: “Powered by MailChimp,†which spread awareness fast.

• Interest: Once you decide to check out pricing, there are 2-minute videos that walk you through each feature of each plan. The videos offer both text and tutorials – which generates interest.

• Decision: In their Knowledge Base, they have real examples of how MailChimp boosts ROI, like the one below. However, you have to search around for it – which cuts steps in the sales funnel.  

• Action: With plenty of real brand experience with MailChimp and videos, the sales funnel acts by showing all the possibilities and the proof. The simple website, light text, and tutorial videos create an effective sales funnel. The free option makes it accessible for all and signing up for the paid version is encouraged when free users find the need to send more frequently or to larger batches of people. Given that they’ve had time to test functionality through the free version, users have established trust and confidence to invest in a paid plan.

Example 3: Netflix (B2C)

• Awareness: Netflix, a streaming site, is a master at raising awareness via social media – especially on Twitter. Using witty jokes appealing to a younger audience, Netflix creates content relating to new show and movie releases that’s too funny not to share – like this:

This is me knowing you pic.twitter.com/gp6pbkowrY

— Netflix US (@netflix) July 19, 2018

• Interest: At Netflix’s current level, word-of-mouth is enough to spread interest. With major channels also promoting their shows on Netflix, they don’t really have to do much on their part of the sales funnel to attract users.

• Decision: A major factor that consumers consider when signing up for businesses with repetitive charges is a cancellation fee. Netflix makes their policy clear that with each plan, you can cancel anytime and get the first month free.

• Action: With the monumental power of its brand and a clean sales funnel, there’s no denying Netflix continues to grow. By highlighting the users’ concerns and amplifying their social media, Netflix’s sales funnel provides a useful template.

How to Get Started With Your Sales Funnel

Although many sales funnels resemble one another – no two are alike. Each sales funnel differs by industry and audience – so constructing the right one for your brand can be like sailing in unknown waters. Luckily, Into the Blue can create a unique and effective sales funnel for you. With experience working with beauty, fitness, lifestyle, and more industries’ sales funnels – Into the Blue can create one to generate more sales and raise brand awareness. Contact [email protected] today to learn how to adjust your sales funnel to reach your brand’s full potential.