Sales funnel is one of the core concepts of the Digital marketing industry that allows anyone to set up a multi-million-dollar marketing machine.

You can use Sales funnels to take your online business from zero to hero in no time. But first, you must understand what a sales funnel is and how it works. 

We have been in the Digital marketing industry for many years now. In this time, we have helped many digital marketers and entrepreneurs with Lead management through sales funnels.

Today, we have decided to share everything you need to know about Sales funnels- Purpose, definition, Stages.

Knowing every stage of Sales funnels can have a crazy impact on your business.

This is also a complete guide where I will demonstrate the entire procedure you can use to build your first sales funnel from scratch using the SME Site Builder.

Let us quickly get started.

• Sales funnel is one of the core concepts of the Digital marketing industry that allows anyone to set up a multi-million-dollar marketing machine.
• What is the purpose of a sales funnel?
• What is a sales funnel in simple words?
• What are the sales funnel stages?
• Why do I need a sales funnel?
• Increase your conversion rate
• Get to know customers better.
• Turn Cold Leads into Paying Customers
• Sorting and Ranking your Leads
• Sales Funnel Marketing will never go out of style.
• What is the difference between a marketing funnel and sales funnel?
• How do I create a sales funnel?
• Step 1- Choose a Funnel Template
• Step 2- Make changes to the Template using Builder.
• Step 3- Make Custom Steps for your Sales Funnel
• Step 4- Set Up Email Marketing
• Step 5- List Products on the funnel
• Step 6- A/B Testing
• Step 7- Connect an existing domain to the Funnel.
• What are the sales funnel strategies?
• 1- Build Awareness: Get your message in front of the eyes
• 2- Consideration: Make yourself the most compelling option
• 3- Conversion: Turn leads into profitable actions
• 4- Loyalty: Turn customers into repeat buyers
• Do sales funnels actually work?
• Conclusion

A sales funnel helps marketers provide a highly personalized experience to the customers. It illustrates the path that prospects take when making a purchase. 

You need to understand the funnel system completely so you can find flaws in your funnel- places where prospects drop out and never convert.

It is necessary to know all the basics to start optimizing your funnel. 

We will get into the specifics of how funnels help you convert traffic into verified sales, but for now, let us first get to the definition of a sales funnel.

A sales funnel, or a conversion funnel, is a process that allows you to decide the path your customers should follow when they go to your website to complete the sales process and become your customer.

In this digital age, sales funnels are useful for brands to track prospects while moving through different sales stages. 

This helps brands to adjust their strategies and come with marketing tactics in response to the customers' behaviour. 

It is a model designed with targeted stages to achieve different objectives. 

It has this name because it directly refers to the shape of a funnel: with a very wide side, through which many potential customers enter, and a narrow side, in which only those who finally make a purchase will remain. And it is that not all the people who are interested in a service or product end up acquiring it. 

Various types of funnels are built for specific purposes. Some of them are described below. 

• Sales funnel or Conversion funnel- This refers to a funnel built with all those steps or stages that the customer will go through from visiting the brand for the first time until they make the final purchase. 

• Marketing Funnel- This funnel is used for tasks of the marketing department. The main objective of a marketing funnel is to generate business opportunities or customer leads. 

These customer leads are potential clients for the business. Leads generated through marketing funnels can be used for Retargeting ads or promotional email marketing.

• Commercial Funnel- This refers to the end of the process. These are the last steps taken by the sales department to change potential leads into verified paying customers.

From the moment potential customers visit your product or service page until they finally make the payment, there are four stages that they go through. These four stages are:

1. Awareness- The first stage of any sales pipeline is awareness. Its main aim is to make your targeted audience or potential customers aware of your brand and what you offer. 

This can be done through advertising, social media platforms, or even word of mouth.

One example of this stage would be a buyer learning about your brand for the first time after clicking on one of your ads, reading your blogs, or getting a recommendation from a colleague. 

2. Interest- This is the stage where prospects research your brand and evaluate it as per their interest. 

Your responsibility in this stage is to give them a taste of your expertise by telling them about the problems your service or product can solve. It is necessary to offer value in exchange for the lead capture. 

3. Decision- When your prospects reach this stage, you finally get their full attention. They are now digging deeper into your pricing and comparing the plans with other competitors. 

As a Marketer, your best move at this stage is to put the best deal on the table. You can offer discount coupons, offers, free shipping to make the offer irresistible. 

4. Action- In this last stage, your prospects will either make the purchase or not. You can retarget that audience in your ad campaigns to stay on top of their minds if they leave while checking out.

Retargeted ads are excellent when it comes to turning leads into verified purchases.

Let us now discuss some of the benefits of Sales funnels for your business.

Sales funnels are one of the most effective ways to optimize your conversion rate. To convert more leads, you will have to understand your prospects’ journey while making a purchase.

By visualizing the customer journey and hyper-personalizing the shopping experience, you can pave the way for higher conversions. 

When combined with intrinsic business platforms, sales funnel marketing will allow you to analyze all the statistics and create marketing strategies using that data.

The average conversion rate of Sales funnels in most industries is 3%. 3% should also be your target conversion rate when using Sales funnels.

By applying a sales funnel, it is possible to observe the customers’ expectations in each of the stages.

Through the funnel, you can discover the factors leading the potential customer to pass from one phase of the funnel to another. It is necessary to know both the positive and negative aspects to understand what your audience needs. 

A proper understanding of this demand can help you to create personalized campaigns. These, in turn, manage to put a greater impact on every segment, thus increasing the return on investment.

Marketers have been using Sales funnels to turn website visitors into qualified leads for years now. It is a proven strategy that you can use to turn cold leads into a warm audience or paying customers.

It is so effective because it provides your sales team with all the valuable insights about the actions taken by the prospects. This allows you to dive into your clients' thought processes, problems, challenges, and decisions.

You can enhance the shopping experience for your prospective customers using this data.

You can also use an online sales funnel to sort, evaluate and rank your prospects. Every lead requires a different amount of attention from the sales team.

If you start ranking your leads, you will know who requires immediate attention and who needs long-term nurturing. 

This will help you to prevent any missed opportunity for conversions. After all, not all leads are created equal.

Sales funnels are proven marketing systems that have been out for more than a century, but they remain relevant in this digital age.

This is because they represent an evolution of marketing efforts from interruption to engagement followed by conversion. 

They let you hyper-personalize the experience of your existing customers, which is why they remain popular.

It is necessary to know the difference between a marketing funnel and a sales funnel to systematically use these for the specific tasks they are built for.

A marketing funnel aims to control marketing and advertising activities to attract large numbers of visitors and followers to transform them into qualified leaders. A series of work-related processes to engage users with relevant content and following a segmentation process.

On the other hand, a sales funnel is already designed to work on the leads qualified by the marketing team to turn them into qualified leads. It qualifies users with a lead scoring system.

You need a reliable sales funnel builder to create a sales funnel using Drag & Drop options.

We have an amazing tool for you, SME Site Builder. SME Site builder makes it easy for anyone to set up a website or a sales funnel without any knowledge of coding. It is a website and sales funnels builder with many more advanced options to help you with marketing.

There is a huge variety of templates of websites and sales funnels for you to pick from. You can customize any template with inbuilt settings and customization options.

We help our clients convert their traffic into paying customers by offering tools like integrated CRM, Email Marketing, Analytics & Tracking, Memberships manager, Form builder, etc. 

You can even create multiple landing pages and test them using advanced A/B testing. We will talk about some of the useful features in a bit. 

Before that, I will demonstrate the complete tutorial you can use to build a sales funnel from scratch using SME Site builder. Let’s dive in.

The first step is to select a Funnel template for your website. The collection is filled with tons of options for different niches including Furniture, Electronics, Ebooks, Cosmetics, Fragnance, Multi-Product, and many more.

Let us select a theme from the lead generation category to build a sales funnel to generate leads.

After you have selected the Funnel template, you will then need to set up an account on SME Site Builder (No Credit Card Required).

There is a 14-days free trial available where you can use our product free of cost to see if it makes your job easier. The monthly subscription plans start from as low as $37 per month, and we also offer a sweet discount on yearly subscriptions.

Pricing explained:

Small Website- $27 /month annually or $37 month-to-month

Business Website- $47 /month annually or $57 month-to-month

Website + Funnels- $79 /month annually or $89 month-to-month

Growth- $147 /month annually or $167 month-to-month

Each package has different features assigned for various use cases. You will need a higher plan if you need unlimited storage, bandwidth, and pages in your SME Site builder account.

We offer an incredible love modification to our clients, which allows them to edit the template in real-time with a few drags-n-drops here and there.

Every text or picture on the funnel can be changed and resized according to your needs. You can double click on any image to edit it or change it. An image settings menu pops up when you double click. You may also add shadows to the image or replace it.

This makes it very easy for even beginners to organize the content and arrange the position of elements by dragging and dropping them in real-time.

The funnels are usually divided into various columns. You can edit or delete any column by going into the column settings.

You can also add custom blocks from the gallery of hundreds of blocks with cool design and UI elements. Just drag and drop any element to your direction of choice, and you are good to go.

Play with all the tools in the Builder to make your website look reliable and stunning!

To access the steps of your funnel, click on the “Funnel Controls” located in the menu bar on the left side of the builder. Here you will find all the steps to your funnel.

In this case, you can see three steps; Landing Page, checkout, and Thank you.

This area is the Dashboard of your sales funnel. You can find the number of your visitors on different pages displayed in front of the steps. All the other statistics of your audience are also located here.

You can use this menu to add new steps and pop-up windows for more conversions. The library has hundreds of pop-up windows, pages and section labels that you can use to get the highest conversions.

A lot more things are possible here in the funnels controls menu. You can create promo codes or discounts for different products.

One can also add upsell or Downsell in the steps, and the steps can also be duplicated when needed.

Email Marketing is one of the best options for a brand to engage with its customers.

Many big brands are running promotional campaigns through email marketing to keep the brand alive. This helps in getting more orders from the paying customers.

In SME Site Builder, you get an inbuilt email marketing automation system that you can use to collect emails using a lead generation funnel.

You can do this by going into “Email Marketing & Automation” and clicking on “Create a new campaign”.

An automation page will show up, which you can use to change various email settings and play with the template. There are multiple delays and If/Else Triggers that you can add to create your custom roadmap of email marketing.

The triggers can activate if a user performs a certain task on your funnel. This email marketing automation unlocks the door to a vast set of possibilities.

Imagine how many leads can be generated when email marketing is currently done on your Sales funnel using SME Site builder.

Adding your products to the sales funnel is also quite simple with SME Site builder. Click on the “Store” icon and choose the “Add Product” option.

You can add either a Physical or Digital product or even a service or membership plan.

If we select the physical product, these options will show up. You can add the product title, description, price, quantity, variations and category.

Once you are done with this, click “Save” to continue.

Advanced A/B Testing is one of the most highly appreciated features of SME Site Builder.

It allows you to duplicate the steps of your Funnel and test different landing pages to determine the land pages with better conversion rates.

You can give different names to each landing page, and then the results will tell you about the conversions. It is a very powerful tool that can help you to increase your online business ROI.

If you are aware of Facebook ad marketing, this is a similar tool you can use to disable campaigns or landing pages that bring in fewer conversions and scale the ones that are selling more.

You can do multiple tests to get the most potential from this excellent feature!

You can do this by going into the “Steps” section under the “Funnel Controls” menu from the top left menu bar.

Select any particular step from here, and you will see an option to start the “A/B Split Test”.

You can easily connect your existing domain address to your sales funnel by going into the “Domains” Section under the “Funnel Settings”.

You can manage multiple domains from here. Enter your domain name and click on the “Connect Domain” option.

Your existing domain address can be linked to your sales funnel or website within seconds, and there are many more great features that come with SME Site builder.

Another really exciting part is Integrated CRM that you can access. You can get details about every lead of yours. With a few clicks, you will receive all the order details and contact information of your customers.

This is your chance to never miss a lead or a sale. Manage all your contacts and customers in your own Dashboard. Get the free trial of SME Site builder from here.

There are many different strategies that marketers use while generating leads through Sales funnels. Once you start with a marketing strategy, you can make tweaks as you proceed.

Check out some great sales funnel strategies:

Firstly, you need to target relevant audiences and build awareness about your brand and what it offers. You can raise this awareness using SEO, paid advertising or using social media. Let us discuss all of these options in detail.

• Build awareness using SEO

To generate leads using SEO, you will need to target low-intent keywords from users who may not even realise they’re interested in making a purchase.

So your goal is to build a collection of high-ranking content targeting the topical interests of your target audience.

By doing this, you will make relevant audiences aware of your band while they take value from your content. If you do not know much about SEO or keywords, you can skip this test and learn about paid advertising.

• Build awareness using Paid advertising

The best way to find a narrowed audience for your tropical products is to spend some budget on paid advertising.

You can use platforms like Google Adwords, Facebook ads, Tiktok ads to get visits on your funnel. These platforms allow you to target users from different geographical locations and interests.

To find the winning campaigns, you can test multiple ad campaigns in different interests.

• Build awareness using Social Media

If you want to engage with your prospects using social media, you can create a brand page on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

You can also partner with Facebook and Instagram influencers and pages to reach mass audiences.

When the awareness stage is done, you should now focus on targeting the existing leads who are aware of your brand and bringing them here into the next phase of the funnel.

The best way to reach your existing leads is through email marketing.

Use the inbuilt email automation tool of SME Site builder to reach people with active carts so you can convert them into verified purchases. You can offer them discounts or gift coupons to make the deal irresistible.

Now, it is time to create campaigns for prospects who are ready to make a purchase.

You will need to do Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) in your sales funnels to get the best conversion rate.

Make sure that your content is SEO friendly and loading times are fast. Remember that you will get the contact leads of the customers who don’t even complete the payment so you can target them again.

Once you have got a list of customers that have already paid for any of your products, You can use them to maximize that ROI.

Make sure to keep engaging with your customers and give them good service when needed. You can run upselling/ cross-selling campaigns to increase the value of every existing customer.

Upselling: Encourage customers to purchase more products from your business through upselling.

Cross-selling: Cross-selling refers to encouraging customers to buy additional services or products when they make a purchase.

Give them rewards by offering free services now and then. It encourages them to keep buying from your online business.

Yes, Sales funnels have been doing their work for a long time now. It is a great working method to set up an automated lead generating system for your business.

When marketing is done correctly, you can turn any small business into a profit-generating machine using a successful Sales funnel.

All you need to do is find a targeted audience for your product or service, and a sales funnel works for you to hyper-personalize the shopping experience for your prospects.

Your main goal should be to optimize your Sales funnel as much as possible. Optimizing your Sales funnel ultimately results in an increase in Return on your investment.

You will need to keep testing Different strategies and make tweaks that are necessary now and then.

This article discussed everything you need to know about Sales funnels.

You can create your sales funnel using the SME Site builder to enjoy all the benefits of automated marketing. Sign up for the 14-day free trial from here.

Leave your doubts in the comments, and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more amazing content around marketing and sales funnels. Thanks for reading!