If your awesome product or service is not making any sales despite your best marketing efforts, the reason is likely an inefficient sales funnel.
Understanding the sales funnel and the customer's purchase path is essential in modern digital commerce.
In a digital environment where competition is fierce and customers are more demanding than ever, it is critical to create an effective sales process that helps you stand out from your competitors and increases sales.
By carefully designing your sales funnel, you can effectively target marketing efforts to different target groups and stages of the customer's purchase path. When you know exactly what to do at different stages of the funnel, you can close the deal and achieve your goals better.
Using the sales funnel effectively helps to monitor and measure customer behavior throughout the purchase process. This helps develop an effective marketing strategy and helps to find bottlenecks in the sales process, fix them and optimize the conversion rate.
This blog post explains the most important aspects of building a high-converting sales funnel. You will also find tips on how HubSpot can help you build and improve your sales funnel.
A sales funnel is a marketing and sales process that describes the customer's journey from an unknown visitor to a satisfied customer. The process is described as a pipeline that narrows from top to bottom, hence the name "funnel".
An optimized sales funnel (sales pipeline) increases conversions, improves sales, and increases brand awareness.
When building a sales funnel, make sure that the content of each stage solves problems and answers questions of your potential customer. This way, your funnel works efficiently right from the start.
A modern sales funnel is often divided into four parts according to the letter combination AIDA:
The first stage of the buying path is to attract the attention of potential customers. This step is critical because a potential customer will never find your business without it.
The goal is to give a positive and interesting impression of your brand.
A potential customer can be reached with, for example, an advertisement, social media publications, or a search engine-optimized blog post.
In the second stage of the sales pipeline, the customer is aware of your brand, starts to get interested in your product and service, and searches for information about them.
It is not recommended to try to squeeze a purchase decision from the customer yet, but to arouse interest, you should offer additional information that meets the needs of your potential customers. Engaging content can be, for example, learning material on the website, a webinar, or a product demo video.
After you have aroused the interest of a potential customer, you still have to convince him of the necessity of your product or service.
In other words: Show or tell why the customer must have your product to solve their problem.
This can be done with, for example, an introductory video, customer testimonials, or a free trial period. Also, try to stand out from your competitors with, for example, a higher quality product, a lower price, or a better service.
In the last step, the potential customer is directed to make a purchase or contact. This step includes, for example, sending an offer or displaying a buy button.
The sales funnel ends at this stage, but the customer relationship does not: After the customer has made a purchase, continue to invest in creating a long-term customer relationship because one long-term customer is more valuable than several one-time buyers.
A sales funnel built with HubSpot helps identify potential customers and guide them through the different stages of the funnel until they are ready to buy.
HubSpot's sales funnel is specifically designed to track the progress of leads at each stage of the funnel so you can identify bottlenecks and successes.
Once you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your sales funnel, you can optimize it to achieve the best conversion rate.
👉 Read more: What is conversion rate optimization
A landing page is your company's first opportunity to influence potential customers. Potential customers who click on your brand's ads or social media links are directed to this page.
HubSpot's Landing pages feature helps you create landing pages optimized for the best conversion rate.
The landing page should be clear, informative, and convincing. It has to inform about the unique advantages of your product or service and collect information about your potential customers. This helps guide visitors through the sales funnel and entices them to take action.
Your landing page should have a lead collection form, which you can use to collect information about potential customers and thus send them messages in the future. Make the form easy to fill out and avoid overly complex questions.
With HubSpot's forms, you can easily collect the contact information of your landing page visitors.
After getting a potential customer's contact information, they need something useful in return. Examples of providing value for the customer are, for example, free e-books, discount codes, informative videos, etc.
Providing value for the customer guides them forward in the sales pipeline and conveys additional information about your product or service. Keep in touch with the potential customer regularly, but make sure your messages are relevant to them and the problem they wish to solve.
You can generate value with, for example, personalized emails, social media content, videos, or blog articles. All of these are good ways to increase the customer's interest.
HubSpot also offers excellent tools for providing value. HubSpot's email marketing tools make sending automated and personalized emails to your potential customers easy.
When the customer has been added to the contact list via the landing page, and you have gained their interest by providing valuable content, it is time to close the deal.
This is the stage where you make an offer that can't be refused. For example, you can offer a product demonstration, a free trial, or a tempting discount.
If you close the deal: Continue building the customer relationship by offering excellent service and communicating regularly with your customer.
If there's no deal: Continue to communicate by email and take advantage of various email marketing campaigns to close the sale in the future.
HubSpot's tools help automate the sales process and improve the efficiency of closing sales. This helps save time and resources without compromising on personal and targeted service.
Even if you have created an effective sales funnel, it will only work effectively if you constantly test and improve it.
This means that you need to measure and analyze every interaction a customer has with your business (such as your website, email, and social media accounts) and ensure that each interaction is optimized for the customer's needs and wants.
For example, if you notice that many potential customers leave their shopping carts empty, you can think about how you could make the purchase process easier and more intuitive. All parts of the sales funnel matter and optimizing them can help you improve the customer experience and increase sales.
HubSpot's CRM tools help track customer behavior and provide information on where they are in the funnel according to the AIDA model described at the beginning of this blog.
HubSpot also offers analytics tools that allow you to track and analyze the results of your sales funnel. This way, you can optimize and improve the conversion rate.
Investing in a high-quality sales pipeline will improve conversion rate and sales.
Understanding the sales funnel and the customer's purchase path is essential in modern digital commerce.
By carefully planning the sales funnel stages, you can effectively target your marketing communication to different target groups and stages of the customer's purchase path.
When you know what to do at different stages of the buying path, you have a better chance of closing the deal and achieving your goals.
Advantages of an optimized sales funnel:
Better conversion rate
Increased sales
Increase in brand awareness
A modern sales funnel is often divided into four parts according to the letter combination AIDA:
After closing the sale, invest in creating a long-term customer relationship, because one long-term customer is more valuable than several one-time buyers.
🛠 Building a high-converting sales funnel in HubSpot:
👉 Start building a high-converting sales funnel: book a free appointment with our SuccessGuide
Pictures: Giphy, Unsplash
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