The sales funnel is an essential part of any discussion of increasing conversions. It is a core concept in digital marketing and has the power to drive exponential growth.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a visualization of stages leading up to a purchase. Like the instrument, it guides people from the top towards the intended destination. To craft an effective sales funnel, you must first understand the four basic stages of the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness: The stage where customers are made aware of your brand. Leads can find you through organic search, paid advertisements, or social media. At this stage, your goal is to encourage more interactions.
- Interest: In this stage, leads have become prospects by confirming their interest in your product or service. While they do research and comparisons, it is your job to provide helpful content while telling your story.
- Decision: This is when customers are ready to buy. They have narrowed their options and are looking for one final push before checking out. Providing customer reviews and testimonials is one of the best ways to secure the sale.
- Action: where committed prospects become paying customers. After a transaction, nurture the customers’ relationship with your brand. Offer loyalty programs, customer support, or express gratitude for their purchase.
Although the concept seems simple, progressing through those four stages involves many intricacies. The sales funnel is a multi-step, multi-modality process that requires optimizing various aspects of your business. It’s all about building brand trust and consumer relations.
Of course, not everyone who enters a sales funnel will make it to the other end. Leaky sales funnels fail to convert up to 79% of marketing leads, which shows how important it is to regularly evaluate and improve your funnel.
10 Ways You Can Effectively Improve Your Sales Funnel
If you’re looking to optimize your sales funnel, consider implementing the following strategies:
1. Start Blogging
Blogging is a great way to show off your expertise and narrate your brand’s story. By producing high-value blogs, you communicate that you are credible and trustworthy to do business with.
Consider your blog page a virtual showroom. People come in to learn about you and what you offer. When done right, blogs become a valuable lead generation tool that helps your brand stay top of mind.
Blogging is also a major component of SEO. Companies with blogs get 97% more links to their websites and have up to 434% more indexed pages.
2. Get on Social Media
In 2019, 90.4% of millennials and 77.5% of Generation X were active social media users. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have dominated our lives and positively changed the marketing landscape.
Social media is a powerful tool for developing brand awareness and loyalty. Maintaining an active presence on different networks humanizes your brand and empowers consumers to interact with you.
More importantly, social media is an excellent avenue for data collection. You can gain valuable insights by analyzing user engagements, shares, followers, hashtags, and more. These insights allow you to make informed decisions about ad crafting and identify influential customers.
3. Invest in Pay-per-Click Campaigns
PPC advertising is a key ingredient in scaling small businesses. It involves having search engines display your ad at the top of organic search listings and paying only for every click.
According to WordStream, 41% of clicks belong to the top three paid ads on the search results page. Moreover, 75% of users said paid ads give quick answers to their queries, compelling them to click. These make PPC advertising integral in boosting exposure and visibility.
PPC ads are cost-efficient because you can set parameters to make campaigns as targeted as possible. You can apply keywords, geo-targeting, and ad scheduling to generate traffic with minimal ad spend.
4. Optimize Your Landing Page
Landing pages are designed specifically to capture leads and convert them to customers. They should load fast, feature quality images, and have a copy that sells.
Providing relevant content is crucial in preventing visitors from bouncing. Customize landing pages according to specific ads and tailor your offers to suit each user’s needs. You want a seamless transition from ads to landing pages to move people further down the sales funnel.
Landing pages also serve as a means of gathering insights and information. You can add forms to request a user’s email and manage multiple landing pages to conduct A/B testing.
5. Keep Forms Simple
Contact forms expand your email list and gather feedback. They also give visitors an easy way to send messages and help secure your website from spammers.
When designing contact forms, keep things simple. The last thing you want to do is overwhelm users with too many fields. A study by HubSpot revealed that reducing the number of fields from four to three improves the conversion rate by 50%.
Make sure your forms are positioned conspicuously and appear at the appropriate time. They should also be responsive and easy to fill out on any device.
6. Add Clear Calls to Action
CTAs tell users what to do next and motivate them to continue down the sales funnel. Over 90% of visitors who read your headline will also look at your CTA. Hence, it must be clear, concise, and compelling.
Besides using a friendly yet authoritative tone, the copy shouldn’t be too long. Instead of saying, “Make sure to sign up for our newsletter,” write “sign up for our newsletter” and place it inside a brightly colored button.
Personalizing CTAs according to users’ location, browser language, and page origin is a good hack. This can improve conversion by up to 202%.
7. Email Marketing
Email marketing is vital in building and maintaining relationships with consumers. Over 80% of SMEs rely on this practice to drive customer retention and acquisition.
The most pertinent advantage of email marketing is that it facilitates targeted messaging and personal conversations. An average of $42 is expected to return for every dollar spent on email marketing.
You can leverage this strategy by sending promotions and newsletters, and reminding users of their abandoned carts.
8. Incentivize Referrals
Customers acquired through referrals are 37% more likely to support your brand and are inclined to spend more money on your products or services. To spread the word quickly, incentivize customers who help you gain followers.
A common practice is the direct referral program, in which customers are explicitly rewarded for referring more clients. You can also offer tangible referrals, such as sending a gift certificate that the customer can share with a loved one.
Referral programs don’t need to be expensive. They can be the most cost-effective strategy for customer acquisition. Set goals and identify incentives early to keep things realistic and within your budget.
9. Improve User Experience
Good user experience (UX) is at the heart of a frictionless sales funnel. Customers who get frustrated while engaging with a brand abandon their carts and never come back, resulting in an annual loss of $62 billion.
The solution is simple: make customers’ lives easy. Stick to uncomplicated web designs and ensure users can effortlessly navigate your web pages.
The smooth interplay of content, code, and design can create an effective user experience. If you lack the technical skills to build your website, it’s best to outsource web development and work with a team of professionals.
10. Track Your Progress
The success you’ll achieve from rolling out these enhancements will not be sustainable if you don’t monitor your progress. Use data analytics tools and split tests to make the best decisions moving forward.
The Role of UX Design in Converting Users
Of the 10 strategies we’ve discussed, improving your site’s user experience (UX) design has the most impact on your sales funnel.
Recent studies indicate that 70% of users leave websites due to poor user experience. This statistic underscores the critical role of UX design in converting casual visitors into paying customers.
UX design ensures that every interaction a user has with your website feels effortless and intuitive, from when they land on your site to when they finally reach the check-out page.
The process for UX design varies depending on the design project at hand, but it typically involves the following steps:
- User Research: Thorough research is the key to user-centered design. If you want to improve your site’s user experience, you must take time to understand your users’ needs and wants. UX designers typically use different research methods, such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups, to gather insights directly from their audience.
- Analysis & Planning: Once you’ve gathered enough insights from your users, analyze the data to identify pain points and common challenges they experience with your site’s design. Then, develop a clear strategy for solving these issues.
- Design: Now that you have a goal, start creating wireframes for your UX design. Wireframes are simple visual layouts outlining your site’s structure. Use the data you’ve gathered during your research to improve your site’s information architecture, navigation, layout, and copy.
- Prototyping: Prototyping brings your ideas to life and allows you to test their usability and accessibility. This step will give you accurate feedback on what’s working and needs improvement.
- Testing: After you develop your UX design, you must test it on real users and refine it accordingly.
That said, you don’t have to rehaul your site to improve user engagement. Here are a few small but impactful changes you can make to enhance your UX:
Optimize your site’s page speed.
Page speed matters to thousands of users. Section.io says an extra five seconds of loading time can increase a site’s bounce rate by over 20%.
To prevent this, you must optimize your page speed. Google has a free service you can use to test your site’s page speed. It will give you tips on how to improve your load time on mobile and desktop, like:
- Compressing images before uploading them.
- Enabling browser caching.
- Removing unnecessary codes.
- Implementing content delivery networks (CDNs).
Break down important information into bullet points.
Findability is another factor that affects user engagement. You want to ensure your visitors can quickly access the information they need.
One excellent way to do this is to break down crucial insights into bullet points. Bullet points present information in a clear, scannable format, which can improve your visitor’s overall experience
Ensure your site is responsive.
Now that more and more people are surfing the internet using their mobile phones, your website must be mobile-friendly. Users should be able to navigate your site easily, regardless of their device.
More importantly, Google penalizes sites that aren’t mobile-friendly. According to them, responsiveness is a major SEO ranking factor, meaning your site will rank lower if it’s not mobile-friendly.
If you’re unsure whether your site is mobile-responsive, try using Google’s Mobile-friendly Test or Browser Stack.
Test your site for accessibility.
Accessibility is an important yet overlooked aspect of UX. You should ensure your site is accessible to people with visual and hearing impairments
To do this, you must test your site’s design using tools like WAVE and ensure it complies with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The WCAG is an international standard that ensures websites are accessible to all users. Although no law explicitly requires all sites to follow WCAG, the guidelines have become the benchmark for web accessibility.
Conclusion
Whatever tactics you end up implementing, remember that seeing results takes time. Prospects don’t become loyal customers overnight. But through consistency and constant testing, you’ll gain a massive following and establish yourself as a household name.
Ready to upscale your business? Let DevWerkz help you optimize your sales funnel and landing pages. Contact us today.