A sales funnel is, by definition, just a tool for illustrating the stage at which potential customers are in the purchasing process. Prospects with varying degrees of engagement enter a sales funnel, which is broad at the top because the most engaged prospects are eventually sent to the bottom where they will become repeat customers and sales.

Occasionally, examining a real sales funnel chart might help you better understand the funnel’s stages.

The following chart is typical of most sales funnel presentations, but we believe it’s actually easier to understand the sales funnel without the buzz terms associated with each stage.

Using the ring technique, where prospects go from the outside of the circle to the inside of the circle as they gain more familiarity with your firm, is a better way to visualize a sales funnel. Prospects in the outer rings of the sales funnel stages will be more numerous than those in the center. The closer you go to a transaction, the fewer true prospects there are in your funnel. It makes sense.

Your conversion goals also change as the prospect moves through the sales funnel stages.

1. Attract the community that is unfamiliar with your business.
2. Engage those who now know you exist.
3. Educate those committed to making a purchase.
4. Convert customers who are ready to buy.
5. 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. Understand your audience

When setting up a sales funnel for your business, ensure that you map out the shopping journey of your target personas. Identify where your buyers start and plot a perfect route that links with your end goal.

A buyer’s journey dictates what kind of funnel you will create. Determine the best way to improve your prospect’s existing journey to find the best funnel and consequently acquire more leads and conversions.

2. Create informative content

Prospects are 131% more likely to buy from you if your content is educational. On your landing page, show your prospects a reason why they should care about your product or service.

Address their problems and provide insights on how your product will offer the solution they need. If you talk more about your products rather than their issues, you are likely to lose many prospects along your funnel.

In the first stage of your sales funnel, create awareness with captivating content. Educational content positions you as an established brand and earns you trust from potential clients. Educational content also lets you catch the main keywords that internet users type into search engines, therefore improving the chances that your website will rank higher.

3. Use engaging media

After grabbing the attention of your prospects, it is crucial to maintain them throughout your sales funnel by engaging them with appealing media products.

Besides setting you apart from competitor businesses, great media helps prospects to understand more about your product or service. High-quality product photos, bespoke videos, and animations go a long way in keeping potential clients interested.

4. Use positive reviews and customer testimonials

In a sales funnel, earning customer’s trust is crucial. Remember you are building a rapport with your clients that will last even after they buy.

Therefore, you need to inject social proof and testimonials from previous clients. This not only influences prospects to make a positive purchasing decision but also earns your brand a good reputation.

In addition, displaying previous awards and success stories makes you stand out against rival brands. Research your competitors and evaluate the effectiveness of customer reviews and testimonials.

If bigger brands can benefit from them, there’s a good chance that they will help your brand grow too.

5. Use powerful Call-To-Actions (CTAs)

Your main goal is to convert a lead into a conversion. CTAs are very short lines you use to trigger prospects to buy your product or service. After they learn about their problem and identify ways of solving them, you need to prompt them to consider the solution you are offering. In that regard, your CTA should be strong, catchy, clearly visible and highly compelling.

It should also be direct, and urgent and encourages the potential client to take the next action – making the purchase. Emphasize why your product or service is the best solution, and why they must act now.

Read Also: How do You Fill Out a Sales Pipeline?

More importantly, you must position your CTA in a prominent and easily noticeable position. This can be at the top of your page, the bottom of a guidepost or even as a pop-up message. Your CTA button should be quick to notice by using a color that contrasts the background page of your website.

6. Use simple forms and checkouts

Long and complex forms reduce customer friction even when they are ready to buy. Use a simple form to collect the most important credentials only – email address or phone number. Ensure you have built enough trust before requesting the card details of prospects. With Vonza’s amazing tools, you can create simple forms that prospects will find it easy to fill.

7. Use various payment options

Give your prospects various payment options to choose from. Besides giving them convenience, different payment options allow customers from different locations to shop for your products and services.

It is important to conduct a scrutinous study of your sales funnel to determine where most prospects drop. Thereafter, find solutions to the challenge.

8.  Be readily on-hand to offer support

Most customers need answers to their insecurities before deciding to buy. In the action stage of your sales funnel, you should offer instant answers to their queries. Stand out against your competitor businesses by providing a simple way for prospects to get in touch with you and receive instantaneous responses.

You will be able to close more deals if you can be more available to clients. With numerous irrelevant or too simple questions being thrown your way, chatbots make the communication process easier.

9. Mend holes in your sales funnel

Where do you lose the most prospects in your sales funnel? Of course, not all prospects who enter the top of the tour funnel eventually convert into paying customers. For instance, if your page visitors get pissed off by the design of your website, you will need to upgrade or redesign it.

Rebrand your company if your business needs an entirely new look. Build your sales funnel the easy way with Vonza funnel builder which allows you to create a converting sales funnel.

10.  Retain your customers

60% of customers decline offers four times before finally making a buy. After leads turn to conversions, it should not just end there; follow up with your customers. Businesses thrive with strong relationships.

Therefore, about three weeks after they purchase your offering, reach out to your previous customers. Show them that you care about them and not just your business. And follow up with prospects who did not convert.

Drastically Improve Your Funnel Conversion Rates

“Increasing the funnel conversion rate is a common goal of every business. Sometimes, they do everything, be it chalking out a proven strategy, holistic approach, use of call to action, white space, or others. But, they don’t get expected outcomes,” says Venkatesh C.R. of Dot Com Infoway.

If you’re looking to improve your conversion and let’s face it we all are, then read on. Experts have provided their 5 best tips for improving funnel conversion rates:

Grow your organic search traffic

Aqsa Mirza, of Simple Fulfillment, explains that they’ve increased funnel conversion rates for Simple Fulfillment by incorporating higher buying-intent keywords in their search strategy. 

“We put more focus on grabbing organic traffic through search engines as it is the most stable and most significant source of traffic. Audiences relying on the conversion phase focus on higher buying-intent keywords. So, our marketing team generates quality content after analyzing the keyword volumes and potential buyers’ intent. Focusing on money keywords could bring conversions; otherwise, informative keywords could only bring traffic to your website,” says Mirza. 

Leverage social proof  

Social proof can be a huge conversion rate booster when done right. 

Why? 

Because as Olusola David, of TorchBankz, explains, “I need to create an awareness that educates my potential customer about my product first. This will help turn them from cold to warm traffic which is very good for conversion.”

Khris Steven, of Khris Digital, also strongly believes in leveraging the power of social proof. 

“One solid approach I’ve used and encountered is implementing social proof elements on my sales funnels. Adding social proof elements like testimonials, reviews, influencer endorsements, ratings and purchase notifications in your funnels are things that can explode your funnel conversion rates dramatically. Social proof has been proven to be the most powerful source of psychological influence in the world of business. It describes a psychological and social phenomenon where people copy the actions of others in an attempt to take up behavior in a given condition.” 

Isaac Hammarburger, of SearchPros, is of the same opinion and says, “A simple way to improve conversion rate is to add testimonials, reviews, and logos. By doing so people will be at ease using your product or service since there were other people who have used it before them.”

Conduct split tests

Test, test, and more tests. 

Alistair Dodds, of Ever Increasing Circles, is a firm believer in the power of testing every part of your funnel. “Use your experience and knowledge to put your best hypotheses forward as far as ad copy, landing pages, lead magnets and so on but then ensure that you split test each element to ensure you’re following what the market responds to and not just basing it on your own hunches and subjective decisions,” Dodds explains.

A\B testing is essential for figuring out what marketing and sales efforts are converting, and which ones are going down the drain.

As Jack Choros, of IronMonk Solutions, explains, “We use traditional A/B testing. We use a Facebook pixel for each step in the funnel so that we can gather information for retargeting purposes and then we can put people into separate email campaigns based on where they end up in the funnel. It’s a long term gain but it’s profitable.”

Split testing also includes testing different versions of your ad copy and other marketing copy. This is where you’re directly connecting with your audience so you need to know what kind of copy resonates best with your audience.

“From headlines to body paragraphs, every word makes a difference. We are heavily invested in testing different headlines for above the fold to ensure that we’re able to maximize the results of our campaigns,” shares Saif Al-Janabi of BlankSpace.

Olivia Tsang, of SuperMoney, also believes split testing is an essential part of your conversion funnel process. 

“Never stop split testing. There’s always one element that can be improved upon on each landing page. Be sure to always run a form of landing page testing in order to improve your visit-to-lead conversion rate,” affirms Tsang.

After split testing different offers, Jacob Landis Eigsti, saw a whopping 75% increase in their cart value. And since then, Eigsti says, “We’re aggressively testing landing page layout and headlines since we’ve found this dramatically impacts the number of people that initiate checkout.” 

And don’t forget, as Adam Connell of Blogging Wizard, says, “Buyer habits can change over time so A/B testing is something that should be continued after initial optimizations are completed.”

Keep your forms and CTAs simple

“After you spend hours with your team crafting some creative call to action, share it with your grandmother so that you can test if it’s simple enough for someone new to understand,” advises Matt Holmes, of Handshaking.

The simpler your form and CTA are, the more leads it’ll generate. No matter how invested your audience is, if they have to jump through a hundred questions, they’ll balk at your form and click the exit button on the top of your page faster than you can say STOP!

“In order to attract the user to register on your form, especially after they’ve made the decision that this is the right offer for them; it’s important to ask a few simple and non-generic questions to get them to the next step,” explains Al-Janabi.

Djordje Milicevic, at Stable WP, also believes the same and says, “Complex conversion flows, too many form fields, redirects, and even slow loading pages can increase friction, potentially diminishing your conversion rate. Use analytics to determine which elements of your opt-in forms can be optimized.

Set up goals, events, and funnel visualization in Google Analytics to observe how users move through your funnel. Pay close attention to any steps with high drop-offs to identify potentially problematic areas. For example, many users might be dropping off after a CTA redirects to a new page. In that case, you can reduce friction and increase conversion rate by allowing users to complete all steps on a single page.”

Create urgency

Investing in scarcity widgets for your website can be a great way to boost your funnel conversion rate and convert warm leads into hot, ready-to-buy ones. 

Samikshas Rawool, of Yummy Tummy Recipes, saw an 11% increase in conversions after she implemented a countdown clock on her landing page. 

As Al-Janabi says, “This method is proven to perform if it’s done authentically and transparently. If you’re selling a program with limited seats, or a product with limited inventory, or simply have a timed offer that actually expires in a given time, these tools/widgets can bring forth increased conversion.”

Now you know more about all of the opportunities for conversion throughout your sales funnel. Focus on making smaller conversions and walking your prospects through your sales funnel stages. You’ll not only increase conversions but will likely create a much more loyal customer base.