The sales funnel is a tool that allows us to visualise the path of a visitor to your website from the first moment they visit you until they finally make a purchase or contract your services.
It is called a sales funnel because as the visitor or user progresses through each stage, it becomes increasingly narrower and therefore the number of registered contacts decreases as they progress from one stage to the next.
Through strategic actions for the lead attraction, conversion, qualification and maturation stages, you can achieve your goal: to attract new leads and convert them into customers.
what is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is the process a marketing team follows from the moment they launch a marketing action until they get a business opportunity.
This means that this is a funnel that is physically located above the sales funnel.
When there is a sales funnel, the business opportunity goes through several more steps before reaching the sale. So, although marketing funnel and sales funnel are not the same, they complement each other very well.
- Similarity: the common feature that the marketing funnel has in common with the sales funnel is that a wide range of combined marketing and advertising techniques are also used to fill the top of the funnel.
- Difference: on the other hand, when you only have a sales funnel, the type of leads you receive are not well qualified. Depending on the method you use, they may arrive at different levels of qualification.
Once you have done all the advertising and marketing actions to capture potential business opportunities, the marketing funnel allows you to make processes to qualify these leads, and classify them into groups from more to less likely to buy our service or product. This information is invaluable for our sales team.
Advantages of the marketing funnel or sales funnel
Once we have managed to create a sales funnel for our brand, it is important to know what advantages it will offer us to create it and why it will help us to boost our sales and better understand the users who are going to become our customers.
this is why we want to detail the main advantages of applying the marketing funnel in the right way:
- We will obtain a highly qualified lead: this means that once we have gone through the whole process of our sales funnel, the final customer we will obtain will be one who is very convinced of our brand and the services and products we can offer, so it will be very easy for us to get a purchase from them.
- The effectiveness of our sales will increase: although you have to have an initial marketing cost that you did not count on when creating the funnel, afterwards it will be easier to obtain sales, so the costs will be reduced as there will be many more purchases.
- The process of obtaining customers is streamlined: this means that for each sale you will not have to follow up the customer manually, but by creating the sales funnel this whole process will be automated and there will not be a process of attrition in the sales of your brand.
What you also get with this type of funnel is that although at the beginning there may be an economic effort to carry it out, from a more global point of view you get to lower costs at the level of customer acquisition. What you end up getting is a constant source of new customers and in a much simpler way.
Some tips for success with your funnel
Once you know what the sales funnel is and the advantages and benefits it brings to your business, it is important that you understand some strategies to achieve success through it.
- First, you need to be clear about your target audience and what demands you can meet
- Publish your content and use social networks being active at all times.
- Create manuals, eBooks, webinars or videos, explaining how to solve the prospect's problem related to your product or service.
- Call To Action: Make them look irresistible in the articles and direct them to a landing page, which takes them to the shop or to request a quote or an appointment with the sales team.
- Review the buying process of your products. Carry out a traffic analysis of your website. A good SEO strategy ensures that users end up clicking on your website when using Google search engines.
- Weekly sales analysis will give you the behaviour and the evolution of the direction the acquisition process is taking with respect to your objectives.
The buying cycle covers the entire process that a user goes through, from the moment they discover they have a need to buy until they finally purchase that product or service. Therefore, it is important to accompany them throughout the sales process to guide them and thus ensure that they remain loyal customers and continue buying your product or service.
