How to Create a Sales Funnel to Sell Digital Products.
What are a sales funnel?
The sales funnel (also referred to as a revenue funnel or sales process) refers to the buying process companies lead customers through when purchasing products.
The definition also refers to how a corporation finds, qualifies, and sells its products to buyers.
Any business owner knows the pain of just missing a purchase.
After weeks of pitches and demos, chatter and charm, the prospect drops out of the sales funnel without buying.
It happens. But it happens less often if you have the proper sales funnel.
Many small business sales funnels are like sieves, with holes left by patched-together spreadsheets, sticky notes, missed appointments, and forgotten follow-ups.
There is a better way. Sales and marketing automation software can plug those funnel holes and switch near-misses into sales.
What is the Importance of sales funnel?
In a sales funnel, you understand what potential customers think and do at each stage of the purchasing journey.
These insights allow you to take a position within the suitable marketing activities and channels, create the foremost relevant messaging during each stage and switch more prospects into paying customers.
A sales funnel may be a step-by-step process that permits you to bring your potential customer one step closer to your offer and a buying decision through a series of selling actions like automated emails, videos, articles and landing which will do the selling for you.
5 Steps of Sales Funnel :
1. FREE CONTENT: Free Content within the sort of blog posts, you-tube videos, podcasts, and more will catch the eye of your readers.
2. Gated Content with an Optin: FREEBIEs like ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, and quizzes provide an amazingly valuable freebie in exchange for an email address.
3. Tripwire Product: Monetize your email list by employing a limited-time low-priced offer; for a B2B, it can be a demo or a product, 1–1 consultation, or an Audit.
4. Welcome Email Sequence: Nurture your new subscribers employing a 5–9 step welcome email sequence that builds trust and authority
5. Product Offer: Showcase your related product employing a single email or a sales email sequence -depending on price.
What are the stages of a sales funnel?
Stages of a sales funnel: While each organization has its way of managing the sales process and customer touch points towards the purchase, these are structured into three distinct stages.
1. Top of the sales funnel: Awareness and Discovery
Early in their journey, your potential customers are browsing a selected problem and are researching and learning about it.
This early in the journey, they’re still identifying their challenge.
They may have many questions on it as they likely haven’t named the matter itself-they; they just know the symptoms.
They’re trying to verbalize their problem and find a trusted source of data and education.
Here are some samples of questions they could be having for specific industries:
At the Top of the sales funnel, your prospect wants to feel educated and assured to be ready to mention their questions and problems when the time comes.
From a marketing perspective, they need Content that will guide them through the subject that matters to them, including blog posts, videos, and even quizzes.
2. Middle of the sales funnel: Researching Solutions
In this stage, you’re not handling nameless and faceless contacts.
They need to name and define their problem and look into all available solutions like products and services.
Questions within the Middle of the funnel are not any longer generic. Rather than asking ‘why’ questions, they dive into various opportunities to remedy their struggle.
At the Middle of the sales funnel, your lead is diving deeper into the specifics of the matter.
They understand what’s bothering them and need to understand the possible solutions.
At this stage, they could not necessarily be evaluating solution providers like specific companies and their products.
Instead, they’re trying to find the types of solutions available.
For example, they need to decide if they will buy a software solution for in-house support teams or outsource support altogether.
Another example: they are not sure if they only need a mattress topper or if they ought to buy a replacement mattress.
The Content that serves your leads best during this stage includes in-depth guides, comparison-style checklists, pros versus cons lists, and other insightful pieces.
During this stage, your Leads become Qualified as you get to speak to them and ask them questions that assist you in deciding whether your offer is the right fit for their problem.
3. Bottom of the sales funnel: Making An Informed Purchase Decision:
Finally, the bottom of your funnel is when your leads know everything about their problem, possibly the best solution, and can select the provider from which to get this solution.
The best Content for the bottom of the funnel is
1. Frequently-asked- questions pages,
2. Videos about product features,
3. Live demos
4. Side-to-side competitive feature analysis.
These reinforce their confidence in your offer as they keep seeing it fit their specific problem. This is often when your Qualified leads undergo the Proposal and Negotiation phases, after which you ideally win their business.
Now that you have understood what a sales funnel is and are convinced to make one of your own let’s see the steps required to create a sales funnel to sell Digital Products.
Steps to Create a Sales Funnel:
Step 1: Start with the End:
Find the Botton of the funnel and decision factors.
The primary step of making a sales funnel is to spot your end goal.
Where does one want your customers to finish at the Bottom of the funnel?
It’s going to seem counterintuitive to start creating a sales funnel right at the finishing line, but it isn’t.
Trust me. You’ve got to understand where you’re headed before you’ll find out the steps to urge there, right? Of course, right?
So first, write your “offer” down.
Let’s say, for instance, that you are an ex-math teacher and created a math curriculum targeted at homeschoolers.
You would like to sell this for $497.
Next, identify the most benefits of your offer.
For example, what problem does your online course solve? (Our program teaches math to your children so you, the parent, do not have to believe your terrible math skills.)
What results will your customers get from your online course? (You’ll feel confident that your home-schooled child is learning all the standardized mathematical concepts taught in public school.)
What are the unique features of your course?
Why should they buy from you? (Unlike other math curriculums, which supported boring textbooks, our course comes with videos, interactive online exercises, group coaching calls, and manipulatives that help your child to visualize and comprehend the fabric .)
Finally, brainstorm all of the explanations why someone might object to purchasing your offer.
For instance: Money-it’s costlier than a textbook-based math curriculum.
- Does it work? I do not want to buy something that may not be proven successful.
- Time- can it be used independently, or will my child need me to be by them every step of the way?
- How long does it fancy get through the course?
- Is the material engaging, or will it be too dull for my child to stay engaged?
Step 2: Work Backwards:
Write down Your Email Sequence, and if you want to reach out through other channels like FB and WhatsApp, write those Content as well; in our marketing terminology, we call it a multichannel engagement technique.
Especially if you’ve got a high-end online course, the likelihood is that you are not getting to sell it just by your blog posts is very low.
You’ve got to build trust, and one of the simplest ways to accomplish that’s through nurturing subscribers on your email list.
Here’s the kicker: you cannot just write emails for the sake of writing emails.
If you are going to undertake and convince someone to shop for your online course, you would like to form sure you tackle significant objections.
It is a good thing we already highlighted their significant objections in the first step.
In your “pitch” emails, you’ll get to address their objections and conquer them.
For example, if a severe objection to purchasing your product is price, one of your emails can introduce the payment plan structure, so those strapped for cash may feel better.
Remember, plan your emails out strategically to deal with every potential concern so that by the Top of the sequence, your leads are 100% convinced they have your product.
How many emails do you have to include in your sales funnel?
Well, that depends on your particular product.
Use as many emails as you would like to thoroughly explain your program’s advantages and overcome those objections we outlined earlier.
I have seen 5 and 50 email sequences; what matters is the quality and value the mail provides.
Step 3: Brainstorm Your Lead Magnet(s):
Lead magnets (also referred to as freebies) are something you offer for free in exchange for an email address.
Online course creators use lead magnets to “capture targeted leads”-the people that are the most straightforward candidates for your product.
If you’re selling a math home-school curriculum, your lead magnet might be an easy PDF like “12 Fun Home-school Exercises for the kid Who Hates Math”.
Or it might be another simple resource like “10 Free Home-school Math Printable”.
You can even conduct a webinar, such as: “12 Steps to Home-school Your Child in Math once you Hate Math”.
The purpose of your lead magnet is to draw in an equivalent kind of people that would want to shop for your course.
Just brainstorm some ideas for now. We’ll mention the way to get your website visitors to download your lead magnet within the next step.
Step 4: Identify Potential Entry Points:
Now that you’ve identified your outcome (your Product transformation), outlined your email sequence(s), and pinpointed your lead magnet.
You would like to do the foremost essential step: plan the various entry points for your lead magnet.
You would like to spotlight where and how people can check in for your lead magnet.
This is where most creators trip up-you can’t simply “build it and say that they will come.”
However, if you find different avenues for people to check in, you will have people browsing your funnel, guaranteed.
So do yourself a favor and confirm that you identify the various entry points for your lead magnet and set those up.
Step 5: Visually map Your Sales Funnel:
Writing things down and mapping them out visually are often potent tools for you as a creator and online business owner.
Here’s why: Mapping out your sales funnel helps you to ascertain the large picture it is easy to urge trapped within the nitty-gritty of your business.
You’ll spend countless hours performing on small, minute details that you simply easily forget the large picture of the customer journey.
Mapping out your sales funnel on a whiteboard, a bit of paper, or a sales funnel template on your computer forces you to zoom out and look at the large picture before diving into the specifics and details of it all.
Trust me, and it is less overwhelming that way.
Finally, we have come to an endpoint. The process may look hectic and tricky, but you will improve with time. Check out more of our articles to know more. All the best!
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Thanks,
Ritesh Osta
I Help SaaS & B2B Scale Fast using Sales Funnel Strategies.
