A sales funnel is, by definition, just a tool for visualizing where your prospects are in the decision-making process. A sales funnel has a large opening at the top where prospects of all engagement levels enter. Eventually, the most engaged prospects are sent to the funnel’s bottom where they can be converted to sales and repeat customers.
Looking at a real sales funnel chart can sometimes help you better understand the funnel stages. There are many charts typical of sales funnel presentations, but we believe it’s simpler to comprehend the sales funnel without using trendy terms for each stage. Using the ring technique, where prospects go from the outside of the circle to the inside of the circle as they become more familiar with your firm, is a better way to visualize a sales funnel.
In the outer stages of the sales funnel, there will be more prospects than in the center. As a sale approaches, the actual quantity of prospects in your funnel will continue to decline. That is normal.
Your conversion goals also change as the prospect moves through the sales funnel stages.
- Attract the community that is unfamiliar with your business.
- Engage those who now know you exist.
- Educate those committed to making a purchase.
- Convert customers who are ready to buy.
- Re-engage your core fans who have already made a purchase.
Too often, businesses try to convert a prospect into a sale right away. Instead, think of moving your customers through your funnel with a series of small conversions. This will ultimately result in a sale.
1. Blogging
Blogging is a fantastic way to attract prospects that are in the Awareness stage. You can attract new audiences and engage with them through interesting, informative, and helpful content. Think outside of the box. For a store that sells fitness equipment: you can create content on different types of workout plans, tips, and tricks to boost metabolism or diet plans.
Blogging also helps in ranking higher on search engine result pages.
Billions of people enter their queries in the search bar of Google.com. Create and optimize helpful content with the right keywords. It can rank your content higher and make it easier for your audience to find you.
2. Social media marketing
Create a business account and engage actively with your audience to increase brand awareness and attract potential customers to your company. Did you know that there are around 3.78 billion users on social networking sites?
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
These are the kings of the social media market, and they have millions of active users. Your prospects visit these sites daily and expect businesses to be present. Therefore, if you haven’t created your social profile (or aren’t using it actively), we strongly suggest you work on it.
Frequently post engaging visual content to entertain your followers and reach your potential audience. When your viewers love your content, watch how your brand awareness blossoms.
3. Encourage sign up
So your prospects are familiar with your brand and move into the Interest stage. Now it’s time to capture their email addresses. It helps to keep them in the loop and promote your products.
Read Also: Types of Sales Funnel
You can target your new website visitors with a stunning popup to collect those emails. But keep in mind that a new visitor may not share their email address with a brand they don’t know. So, try offering something valuable in return.
Tempting lead magnets will make it easier for you to gather their email addresses. You can offer them free downloadable materials such as eBooks or even a small discount.
4. Keep sign-up forms short
So you’ve offered a fantastic lead magnet that visitors are interested in. Don’t lose them because of a long and never-ending form. Long forms with unnecessary information fields prevent potential customers from filling out the entire form. Keep your forms short and only ask for the necessary information. Asking for a name and email address is usually enough.
5. Add testimonials and logos
Customer reviews are all the rage. Use this valuable resource to attract a large audience, win their trust, and convert them into buyers. Share your positive customer reviews with your visitors to let them know that your business is trustworthy and credible.
According to a study:
- adding customer testimonials can generate up to 62% more revenue for a company
- 92% of shoppers read online reviews before purchasing
- 88% of online buyers trust online reviews like personal recommendations from friends and family.
If you want visitors to choose your brand, place your customer testimonials strategically on your website. Moreover, if you’re serving some famous brands, add their logos to your homepage. Logos of big companies show social proof, and visitors won’t hesitate to trust your brand.
6. Remove unnecessary elements
If your landing page has too many distractions, your visitors will have a hard time focusing on your product and the purpose of a landing page will be lost. Keep your landing page simple and straightforward.
It should focus on one product or action that you want the visitor to take. Like getting them to sign up for your newsletter. Ideally, a landing page should have the following items:
- Headline and subheadings
- Benefits and features of a product
- Customer Testimonials
- Visually appealing images or video
7. Provide a smooth checkout system
All of your efforts go down the drain when a customer leaves your website after adding goods to their cart. According to different studies, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.80%. Aim to make your checkout stage smooth and easy for your visitors.
Do not give them any reason to get irritated at this stage. It might result in cart abandonment. Offer multiple payment channels and make it easy for customers to select the payment option they prefer.
8. Add third-party sign-up service
Did you know that 24% of customers abandon their carts if a website asks them to create an account when making a purchase? Your prospects will do the same. Allow prospects to sign up through third parties with the option to log in via Gmail or Facebook.
9. Strengthen your CTAs
A Call-to-Action (CTA) plays an integral role in getting your customer to perform the desired outcome. Using a generic CTA copy will neither grab the attention of your visitors nor persuade them toward your goal. Get creative with your CTA copies and designs. Avoid using boring text like, “Buy Now,” “Read more.” Your visitors have already seen these copies a million times.
For example:
- Replace “Get Discounts” with ”I want my discount.”
- Instead of “Sale”, get their attention with “FLASH Sale.”
Also, pay attention to the layout of your CTA. Do you have…
- contrasting colors for the background?
- A font style and size that is easy to read and catches the eye?
Take this opportunity to wow your visitor so they fall in love with your brand.
10. Add live chat option
Customers love to shop from brands that are ready to assist them and address their queries instantly. Integrating a live chat feature to your website can drive more conversions.
Your visitors can start asking their questions with a single tap on the chatbox. This saves them the tedious effort of writing an email or calling your office. This also brings visitors one step closer to pushing that: “submit order” button. Once their concerns are covered, they’re free to purchase! It’s a win-win!
Program your chat to immediately answer frequently asked questions for an even faster response.
Here are some popular topics you can include:
- delivery information
- return and exchange policies
- questions related to checking out or payments, etc.
11. Create urgency
Creating a sense of urgency is the best way to get your prospects to take action. You can also tempt your visitors to purchase their favorite products quickly—before they run out of stock.
To make it more effective, add a showstopping countdown timer to let your prospects know that the time is running out and the offer will expire soon.
12. Promote cross-selling and up-selling
Cross-selling and up-selling will help your company skyrocket conversions and boost your average order value. Up-selling refers to recommending an upgraded and pricier version of the item your visitor’s browsing.
On the other hand, cross-selling means recommending items that complement something a customer has put into the cart. For example, let’s say your customer bought a chopping board on your website. Then you can suggest a knife set, peeler, dicer, etc.
When customers are shown what complements the item they intend to buy, it makes them want to convert.
4 Ways to Increase Conversion Rate
The most effective marketers have used these high-performing techniques for their CRO marketing initiatives, even if rate optimization isn’t a precise science and necessitates experimentation to determine what works best for your company.
1. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Planners
While your conversion rate optimization strategy can begin with simple steps, mapping out a complete conversion rate optimization plan for critical landing pages of your digital property can be challenging without the proper tools and guidance.
A Conversion Rate Optimization planner, or CRO planner, is a dedicated tool to help you create a CRO plan and map out your website, app, or digital property’s optimization strategy. A CRO planner acts as a dashboard from which you can create optimization strategy elements, organize them over a timeline, and oversee the plan’s progress.
CRO planners are considered essential tools by marketers and developers in the industry. A commonly used example is HubSpot CRO Planner, which lets you visualize your conversion funnel, conduct audits to analyze your site, use various tools to analyze user behavior and identify all possible optimization avenues. Most planners also come with their ancillary tools, such as A/B testing tools and page performance analyzers.
CRO planners also come with resources to facilitate research and analysis of benchmarks for your site’s sector, such as average conversion rates by device or platform, average conversion rates for competing sites, and other relevant data.
One of the best ways to maximize the effectiveness of your optimization plan is to adopt a CRO planner as early as possible. Besides serving as your central dashboard, choosing the right CRO planner will help you adapt your workflows and use its functions as efficiently as possible.
2. Visitor Behavioral Analysis
While knowing your business objectives is important, it is crucial not to rely on assumptions before testing or making changes to your digital property. Conversion Rate Optimization is almost entirely data-driven, meaning you must have a clear and unambiguous idea of your site, app, or digital property’s performance and fully understand how your visitors behave.
Although your conversion rate is among your most important metrics, there are many other crucial Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you can track to understand your visitors better.
They include the following:
- Number of monthly visitors
- Ad campaign click-through rates and impressions
- Bounce rates
- Average number of pageviews per session
- Average time spent on each webpage
- Average time spent per session
- Traffic sources
- Social media referrals
- Device type and operating system
3. A/B Testing
One of the core elements of a Conversion Rate Optimization campaign is experimentation. Differences in web page layout, style, design, functionality, button placement, and other elements affecting the User Experience (UX) affect the likelihood of a visitor converting.
Consequently, one of the most powerful tools a publisher or marketer can use for their CRO and marketing campaign is a resource that makes testing and experimenting easier and more convenient, such as an A/B testing tool.
A/B testing, also known as split testing, lets you compare the performance of two different web page layouts and determine which is more likely to result in conversions.
Some of the most widely used A/B testing tools include Google Optimize, HubSpot A/B Testing Kit, VWO, Optimizely, AB Tasty, and Omniconvert.
4. User Interaction Tracking
Optimization is about improving your digital property and increasing its usability to entice more customers and sales. However, you can only implement meaningful changes or improvements by first understanding how users and visitors interact with it in the first place. Then, you can provide the data to the sales team.
User interaction tracking is a general term for behavioral analysis tools that lets you see how users navigate your website. Essential functions include recording and replaying mouse movements and displaying the page elements and buttons most likely to receive clicks and interactions. The results Google Analytics data, for example, are displayed using user interaction heatmaps, which show the most common mouse positions and the most commonly clicked areas.
More advanced features included in these tools can also retrace the average user’s journey through your site or app and tell you whether they skip specific elements or if they stop to interact with them, such as deals, offers, polls, or video players.
Examples of commonly utilized user interaction tracking tools include Crazy Egg, Smartlook, UXCam, and FullStory.
Many factors can influence conversion rates, and some specific rates are considered good, increasing the conversion rates. The most significant factor is the sector of your digital property. A good conversion rate in one sector may not be good in another. Research average conversion rates for your own site, blog, or app’s category to determine the best percentages.
