Whether you are an entrepreneur or budding entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard about the term – ‘sales funnel’.

Having a sales funnel is vital if you want to grow your business regardless whether you have a brick-and-mortar or purely online business. No matter how good your products and services are, this will be meaningless to your business if you do not have an effective sales funnel that can transform your ideal customers into raving fans and paying customers.

In a nutshell, a sales funnel is a process whereby you are guiding your potential or existing customers towards making a decision to purchase either a product or service from you.

If you want to learn more about the strategies behind creating a sales funnel, check out my blog article, titled –

How To Create A Profitable Sales Funnel That Converts (even if you’re a beginner!)

In this article, I’m going to dive right into talking about the basic elements that you need to start building your first sales funnel as a complete beginner.

If you master the steps that I’ll be mentioning below, you’ll be able to create a powerful and high converting sales funnel within days!

Brand Awareness At The Top Of Your Funnel

The top of your funnel is the widest part of your funnel. Many people could potentially consume your products and services. These people are your ideal customers because they are going to be able to benefit from using what you are offering.

At this part of your funnel, these people would either have not heard about you or have heard about you but have not considered buying anything from you.

You need to create brand awareness for your business and brand at this stage so these people will start to get to know about you.

You can create free content or use paid advertising to get in front of your ideal customers.

When creating content to attract your potential customers, it is really important to be able to truly understand your ideal customers’ challenges, wants and needs. This is so that you won’t waste time creating content that attracts the wrong target audience.

Once you are able to reach your target customers, they may become interested in your content and want to learn more stuff from you.

Creating Your Landing Page

The next step is to encourage your ideal customers to opt-in to become your valued subscribers.

Your free or paid traffic may come from various channels. But to capture the attention of your ideal customers to opt-in to your list, you would essentially need a landing page.

A landing page would be able to minimize any distractions your target customer may have so that they can focus on deciding whether or not to opt-in to your email list in exchange of something that would be of great value to them.

The best way for you to encourage more people to opt-in to your email list especially if you are a beginner is to offer a free downloadable content that will help your ideal customer to solve a pressing challenge that they have.

The purpose of the landing page is to capture the email addresses of your ideal customers so that you can follow-up on them.

When they opt-in to your email list, they become your ‘leads’.

Introducing An Irresistible Front-End Offer

Once they have opted-in to your email list, you can introduce them to an irresistible front-end offer at a very affordable price.

Your front-end offer has to be related to the ultimate thing that you’re going to promote to them in the future.

By presenting your front-end offer, this will encourage them to purchase from you immediately.

Once a customer purchases from you, that customer will be more open to making more purchases from you in the future!

Offering Upsells

When somebody buys your front-end product, you can then offer that person an upsell product or service.

By doing this, you increase the amount of spend a customer makes with you, which in return will help you to generate more revenue. The upsell will essentially offer greater value compared to the basic front-end offer that they have just purchased.

Offering Downsells

And if that customer is unable to buy your upsell product or service, you can offer that customer a downsell.

Some customers actually want to buy the upsell product or service, but for some reason, they are unable to make that purchase at that point of time, usually because of budget constraints.

A downsell offer can provide them with an alternative payment plan so that they can get the upsell product anyway but by paying by instalment.

You can also consider having a downsell that has less features and benefits from the upsell product or service and sell it at a cheaper price.

This will still help you to increase your customer spend in addition to your initial frond-end product or service sale.

Keeping In Touch With Your Contacts

Most people who become your leads will not want to buy from you at the first instance of them becoming your email subscribers.

So it is important to continuously keep in touch with them so that they can be reminded about you and choose to buy from you in the future.

There are so many ways you can keep in touch with your email list contacts. You can follow-up on them by sending them email sequence campaigns or email broadcasts. You might also want to retarget them on social media.

And for people who have bought from you, they can also be nurtured into becoming your loyal customers and brand ambassadors. This will also encourage more repeat purchases from them in the future.

To organise your email subscribers and create automated email campaigns for the best results, you can use an email autoresponder like ConvertKit.

I love using ConvertKit because it has great segmentation and automation feature which makes it so easy for me to streamline my email campaigns.

Evaluating And Improving Your Funnels

Your sales funnel may not work as great as you want it especially if you are a beginner.

So it is important to evaluate the conversion of your funnel at every stage of the funnel.

So if you do not get the results that you want, pick yourself up and try again until you get things right.

If you want to grow continuously to make more online sales, then you should get ongoing support from online communities that are experts in this field.

Need Help With Your Sales Funnel Copy?

I help coaches, consultants and trainers with non-salesy copy that converts. If you’re interested in having me create your sales funnel copy for you, check out my sales funnel copywriting services here.

References:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245730
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/6-step-guide-creating-sales-funnel-converts
https://au.oberlo.com/ebooks/sales-funnel/build-sales-funnel
https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/sales-funnel/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-build-a-conversion-funnel-that-will-triple-your-profits/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/profitable-conversion-funnel/
https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/content-marketing/how-to-create-marketing-funnel/