Sales Funnels – How To Leverage Their Power

A sales funnel is a visual metaphor for the major stages of the buyer journey your prospects will undertake to become customers. Its purpose is to help you identify and deliver the information your prospective buyers are actively looking for at each stage of their journey.

Each business is unique, and therefore individual sales funnels will differ from business to business. However, most businesses and consumers will progress through four distinct stages. These four stages are often referred to as AIDA.

1. Awareness – Prospective buyers are aware they are experiencing pain and are looking to identify why this is happening.
2. Interest – Having identified the root cause of their problem, prospective buyers are now interested in information that will help them solve it.
3. Desire – Prospective buyers desire a solution and begin evaluating the various alternatives they discovered during the Interest Stage.
4. Action – Prospective buyers are now ready to make the final purchase decision.

The funnel metaphor illustrates that while there may be a high level of initial interest in a business’s product or service, the number of individuals who eventually make a purchase is much smaller. Potential buyers initially attracted to a product or service in the Awareness Stage may opt for alternate solutions during the Interest and Decision Stages. For most businesses, only a relatively small percentage of their prospects will eventually progress to the final Action Stage.

AIDA Stages Of A Sales Funnel

By understanding the mindset of your potential buyers at each of these four stages, you’ll better anticipate the type of content to make available to them as they move through their evaluation and decision-making process. In this digital era, timing is crucial. Information provided too soon will be ignored or forgotten, and information provided too late will result in lost sales.

The better you optimize each stage of your funnel, the higher the percentage of prospects who eventually become customers.

Let’s now look at each of the AIDA stages more closely.

Awareness Stage

In the Awareness Stage, your prospect comes across your company, product or service for the first time while looking for information about a problem or challenge they’re trying to resolve. At this stage, they most likely do not understand the full scope of their problem or challenge, only that its symptoms are causing them pain. As a result, they’re on a fact-finding mission to learn more about the issue(s) they’re grappling with to figure out the most appropriate solution.

Your goal in the Awareness Stage is to provide educational information that explains the reason prospects are experiencing their painful symptoms. Therefore, you’ll want to anticipate the types of problems potential buyers might be experiencing and the related questions they could be asking, and provide answers to their questions on your website, blog or social platforms.

For example, if you’re a personal nutritionist, potential clients might be asking themselves why they gain back more weight than they lose each time they diet. Your educational content could explain the dangers of overly restrictive diets and discuss the need for a more long-term solution that includes specific lifestyle changes.

If you sell an anti-snore device, your potential clients might ask themselves how to avoid being woken up in the middle of the night by their partner’s snoring. Your educational content could explain the various reasons for snoring and how anti-snore devices reduce or eliminate snoring.

If your solution is relatively straightforward and inexpensive, your prospect may decide to buy on the spot. However, more often than not, they’ll want to investigate other options before making their purchase decision. So don’t waste time and energy pitching a sale at this point because prospects will not be interested. Pushing for the sale before they’re ready to buy may alienate them so that you risk losing them to your competition.

Instead, recognize when prospects move into the Interest Stage of your sales funnel and nurture them along their buyer journey by providing content that supports their needs while in that stage.

Interest Stage

Once your prospect better understands their problem and realizes your business may be able to help them, their awareness of your product or service evolves into interest.

During this stage, prospective buyers will want to learn more about your solution to determine whether it will fully meet their needs. They will also be evaluating alternative solutions, so you will need to provide a persuasive argument for why your product or service is the best available solution. Your content at the Interest Stage should establish your expertise and provide information that enables your prospect to make an informed decision.

For our personal nutritionist example, content at this stage can explain how your customized nutrition program facilitates permanent lifestyle changes and why potential clients should choose your services over alternative solutions.

Similarly, a business selling anti-snore devices would explain how their anti-snore device will solve the prospective buyer’s snoring problem and why their device is better than competing products.

Desire Stage

During the Interest Stage, your prospect researched and learned about their various options. Now they desire a solution and so begin evaluating their alternatives.

The Desire Stage is the time to deliver a compelling offer that differentiates you from the competition. This could be a product discount, special payment terms, free delivery or installation, complimentary training, or a similar value-added feature or bonus.

Ideally, you would put a time limit on any discount or feature you’re offering to create a sense of urgency triggered by FOMO (fear of missing out).

Action Stage

In this final stage of the sales funnel, the buying decision is made, and your prospect either becomes a customer or leaves without making a purchase.

Here is where you want to provide one final call to action and ensure the buying process is as smooth and straightforward as possible.

Once the initial purchase is complete, your focus should turn to customer retention and repeat business. Depending on the nature of your business, you could offer a loyalty program, volume discount or referral bonus.

Prospects who left without making a purchase can be targeted with an email nurturing campaign to keep them interested in your product or service. They may have decided to postpone the purchase, or perhaps they need more time to consider your offer. Either way, a nurturing campaign will keep your prospect warm until they are ready to buy.

Benefits Of A Sales Funnel

The most practical benefit of a sales funnel is the insight it provides about the type of content needed to produce to attract, nurture and convert prospects to paying customers.

Mapping the four funnel stages to a well-developed buyer persona will enable you to deliver more targeted content and thus a better buyer experience than your competitors. It will pinpoint the holes in your content strategy so you can shore up where you’re weak.

A second benefit is the mindset shift it will create for you and your sales team. You’ll be more focused on each prospect’s individual needs, asking them questions and providing information that genuinely serves them instead of pitching the same sales script to everyone. This will build stronger relationships so that a greater percentage of prospects will convert to customers over the long term.

Implementing A Sales Funnel

Sales funnels can range from relatively simple to incredibly complex, depending on a marketing team’s expertise (and budget!). The more sophisticated marketing strategies will incorporate automation sequences that tag prospects as they consume content, use historical data to extrapolate what additional content to serve up and alert sales reps when it’s time to initiate direct contact. In addition, tagging prospects enables marketers to analyze visitor activity, evaluate the overall effectiveness of the sales funnel and continuously optimize their content.

Entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t need that level of complexity to start. But with the trend toward personalized marketing continuing to gain momentum, buyers now expect a high degree of personalization for all their purchase transactions.

This expectation means that if you aren’t yet utilizing marketing automation software to support your marketing efforts, you should consider options for doing so. Automation software will be the most efficient and sustainable way to scale your business, and I will discuss it further in a future blog post.

One of the simplest and arguably most beneficial types of automation software is email automation services offered by companies like MailChimp and Klaviyo. Email marketing, despite its lackluster reputation, is one of the most effective marketing tools available. In addition to delivering high ROI (return on investment), it is easy to measure and analyze its effectiveness on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Both MailChimp and Klaviyo offer free plans to help get you started, and I encourage you to explore these options.

As noted above, your sales funnel doesn’t need to be complex to be effective. For example, you can create a relatively simple sales funnel for nurturing your prospects using a lead magnet and email campaign.

At a high level, here’s how you could do it:

1. Create an educational lead magnet that will attract prospective customers in the Awareness Stage.
2. Develop a series of 4-10 emails that each highlight a benefit of your product or service, focusing on how that benefit will solve a problem or make life easier in some way. (Think Interest Stage content.) The exact number of emails will depend on the nature of your product or service and how many distinct benefits you wish to highlight. Tie this sequence together with a common theme.
3. Create a final email that includes a time-sensitive discount or bonus offer.
4. Promote the lead magnet on a standalone landing page or page on your website. On this page, you will invite your prospects to enter their name and email address into a form to receive the lead magnet.
5. Once you receive the form, send the lead magnet to the prospect via email.
6. Once per week, send them an email from your email series, ending with the final offer.

From a practical perspective, it’s slightly more complex than that. Privacy laws require your prospects to voluntarily opt-in to receive emails from you, so you’ll need to add a checkbox for them to opt-in on your lead magnet form.

In addition, you must give your prospects the option to opt out of your email series, and services like MailChimp or Klaviyo automatically incorporate this functionality for you.

You’ll also need a mechanism to pull prospects from your email series should they become customers before the entire series has been sent to them. If you’re selling online, you can likely automate this process.

Bottom Line

An effective sales funnel strategy that carefully considers the needs of your target audience at each of the AIDA stages will provide insight into the type of content your prospects need and when they will need it.

Optimizing your content at all funnel stages will help you generate more leads and build stronger relationships so that a greater percentage of your prospects will convert to customers.

If you’d like additional information about sales funnels, I invite you to DM me at @dyble.lisa.