6 Sales Funnel Strategies for Sustainable Business Growth
Although simple in concept, sales funnels can be slightly complex mechanisms that help brands identify target customers and cater to their needs at every marketing step. An effective sales funnel strategy helps your brand foster customer relationships early on. It provides a personalised customer experience, boosting customer retention and business growth.
A good sales funnel strategy revolves around key factors like raising awareness about your brand, capturing the interest of potential clients, helping them evaluate your brand value, encouraging them to purchase from you, consistently engaging with them, and monitoring the metrics of your sales funnel.
In this post, I list six strategies and tactics that will help you come up with an efficient sales funnel strategy that is sure to give you a boost in sales and customer retention.
1. Raise Awareness About your Brand
This is the first stage of a sales funnel marketing model where prospective customers gain awareness about the presence of your brand, product or service. While you can depend on the old word-of-mouth tactic, social media has made reaching a larger mass of people easier.
Social Media Marketing Funnel
You can run targeted advertisements on various social media platforms to reach your audience. Creating an Instagram page with engaging posts, stories, and reels can garner a lot of attention. If you keep up with trends, you can create viral-worthy content, encouraging the algorithm to boost your page.
You can also increase your engagement by allowing the customers to see behind-the-scenes content and user-generated content, such as posting glimpses of a product shoot, featuring your clients on your Instagram page, and creating a highlights section featuring product reviews and testimonials.
Affiliate Marketing Funnel
By collaborating with various influencers, celebrities, YouTubers and bloggers, you can promote your products or services to their audience. This kind of promotion also works as a stamp of approval for your brand by those promoting it, allowing their audiences to build trust in it.
Content Marketing Funnel
By creating content in various mediums, you allow your prospects to learn about you in the manner most convenient to them. This includes creating blog posts, ebooks, advertisements, informational videos, and podcasts.
SEO and SEM Marketing Funnel
Publishing a website can be very helpful when trying to establish your place in the market. By combining SEO and SEM marketing, you ensure that your website not only lands at the top organic SERPs but also gains more traffic with the help of ads.
My guide on building a great website teaches you about what components it needs to have.
Your prospects now have the option to choose how they want to learn about you. They can click on the advertisement if it intrigues them, or they may find you through organic results after a Google search.
2. Pique the Interest of Prospective Clients
This is a deciding point in the journey of turning prospects into potential clients. Your prospects are likely to know about your presence as a brand; however, they might be exploring other options available in the market.
During this stage, they will try to engage more with your brand or product to get to know you better and make an informed decision. This stage will also help you pick out and prioritise potential clients who are more likely to become paying customers.
Squeeze Page Funnel
A squeeze page funnel is a landing page designed to collect your potential clients’ contact information. Unlike a simple homepage for your website, this squeeze page includes a to-the-point message offering a valuable lead magnet in exchange for contact information.
You can offer a variety of tangible sources like ebooks, free courses, downloadable case studies, ungated whitepapers, templates, and checklists.
The contact information gathered from this page can be used in the later stages of sales funnel marketing, such as sending out advertisements and offers through emails and WhatsApp broadcast groups.
A funnel builder like ClickFunnels is the perfect software for creating different types of sales funnels.
3. Assist Potential Clients in Evaluating your Brand Value
The evaluation stage in the sales funnel model is when the potential client is about to decide if they will be converting into a paying customer. During this phase, the potential client might ask questions to help them decide if your product or service fits their needs.
In this stage, it is crucial that you provide your potential clients with incentives to lead them towards making a faster purchasing decision.
Webinar Funnel
Hosting webinars serves as great lead magnets that allow you to educate the target audience about a topic of interest to them. The webinars can be hosted online, in person, or recorded and provided on-demand post registration.
ON24, a company that bases its marketing on virtual events and the webinar funnel method, stated that 75% of surveyed marketers reported that webinars reduced their cost-per-lead.
You might need a detailed guide to marketing plan creation to learn how to do it the correct way like ON24.
Free Trial Funnel
62% of attendees request a free trial post-webinar. By providing your potential customers limited or short-term access to your products and services, you allow them to experience various features during the trial period that will encourage them to become paying customers.
Suppose you are a professional promoting your skills as a service, such as a consultant, tutor or coach. In that case, you may use the appointment funnel to offer free consultations to potential customers.
Free + Shipping Funnel
In this funnel, the company may offer a low-cost product or service free of cost while charging the customer a shipping and handling fee. This type of sales funnel tactic is often used to entice a customer to join a mailing list or sample a product or service by providing an offer that is too good to refuse.
For instance, a cosmetic brand might offer free product samples but charge for its shipping, which customers are happy to pay. The shipping charges likely include the price of the free product. However, it is important to remember that this funnel method does not earn profits but generates leads that will convert to paying customers.
Upsell Funnel + Downsell Funnel
The upsell funnel has been crucial to the success of companies like Amazon and Wayfair. It offers a product upgrade, add-on or a related product to potential customers who already have an item added to their cart.
It presents a squeeze page to the customer right before the checkout, which showcases other related products, discounts on quantity purchases and add-ons at discounted prices. If the customer declines the upsell, some funnels can lead them to a down-sell page which offers those products or services at lower prices.
Tripwire Funnel
The tripwire funnel uses a design similar to ‘limited-time offer’ marketing to generate sales. It convinces the customer that such not-to-miss offers are scarce in the market and induces a fear of missing out, forcing them to give in and make the purchase.
It begins with a landing page that contains a low-cost offer. When a customer opts in for the offer, the system redirects them to a second landing page which offers an upsell of another product or service.
Coupon Funnel Paired with Cross-sell Funnel
Coupon funnels are the most common method of generating leads. You can offer these coupons as lead magnets in exchange for the potential customer’s contact information.
This funnel can help you gain more profit when paired with the cross-funnel tactic. A cross-sell funnel is used to make a customer spend more money by suggesting the purchase of a product related to what is already being purchased by the customer.
A simple example is when a food chain suggests you buy a side of fries along with your burger order. A study by Gitnux 2023 revealed that cross-selling techniques generate approximately 10% to 30% of eCommerce revenue.
4. Help Clients Act on their Decision
This is the final stage of the sales funnel marketing strategy. Instead of waiting for your clients to proceed to checkout and place their order, you can help them make fast purchasing decisions to ensure they don’t turn back.
Create a seamless and straightforward checkout experience by providing all necessary information, such as pricing, delivery charges, and available coupons.
5. Engage with your Clients Consistently
You will want to keep your brand memorable in the minds of your customers so that they can come back for your products or services and refer you to other potential clients.
It is essential that you do not disappear after a customer successfully makes a purchase. Consistently engage with your customers via targeted advertisements and email outreach. You can use the data gathered to provide a more personalised experience at this stage.
Email Marketing Funnel
You can provide exclusive offers and personalised content that caters to your customer’s specific needs and interests using your email list. This can include discount codes for previously bought items or even early and exclusive access to new products or services.
You can also create feedback forms allowing customers to rate their experience and review your products or services. This will give you a deeper understanding of what aspect of your brand requires improvement while simultaneously building a database of organic testimonials.
You can use this funnel to implement a series of follow-up emails with reminders to complete a purchase if a customer leaves a product in their cart but does not checkout.
This type of targeted communication builds trust and credibility towards your brand. It allows the customer to remain involved and interested in your offerings.
6. Analyse your Funnel
Your funnel continues once you have sealed the deal with a customer. You must analyse key components of your sales funnel metrics to track the outcome and progress of each.
Consider monitoring important key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLTV), conversion rates and churn rates.
My article on conversion rate optimization will help you boost your sales numbers.
To increase the impact of your funnels, you can also conduct split testing by comparing two versions of squeeze pages, email subject lines and landing pages.
