Every business needs to generate leads and conversions. To do this effectively, they need to develop a sales funnel. You may already have a well-defined sales funnel for your business. However, there’s always a scope for improvement to make it more efficient and increase your conversion rate.
But before we get into how we can improve the sales funnel, let’s quickly understand what exactly is a sales funnel.
What Is A Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a tool that visualizes and charts out the entire buying journey of a customer. It’s wide at the top and as you go deeper into it, it narrows down. It begins with creating awareness about the brand and ends with the loyalty of the customers for it.
This funnel makes it easier for you to figure out the mindset of the customers at each stage. Through this, you can create content that can be tailored to their exact requirements. The size of the audience reduces with each level but the group does become more engaged too.
Now that you have an idea of what the sales funnel is all about, let’s see how you can optimize it for conversions.
1. Blogging
Blogging is an extremely important way through which you can increase your sales funnel conversions. A blog that is related to your industry or product can help your website rank higher in the search results because of the many keywords that will be contained in each blog post. You can search for keywords relevant to your blog with tools like KWFinder and Google Keyword Planner.
The blog will not only fetch you more traffic but will also educate the readers about your brand and help you spread brand awareness. For writing quality blog posts, you must first research the problems that your audience faces and then give them solutions through the posts. A well-written blog post can catch the attention of the readers and can help tremendously with your conversion rates.
2. PPC Campaigns
Paid-Per-Click advertising is a form of advertising where you have to pay for every click that you get on your ad. You could start off a PPC campaign with Google AdWords and display your ad for relevant keywords. This shall show up at the top of the search results.
You can put up the link to your landing page in the advertisement where you can convert visitors into leads by asking them to provide their email addresses.
3. Landing Pages
Landing page serves as the page where you can capture the contact information of your prospects. It usually addresses a single problem and has call-to-action that the prospects can click and give their information to you.
A landing page should ideally be well-designed and the content in it should be of high-quality. You must also make sure that the call-to-action is visible easily so that the prospects can find it and enter their contact information. The landing page is critical to get leads and can help your website get higher sales funnel conversion rates.
4. Call to Action
You need to assess your visitors and figure out what you want them to do when they come to your website. You may want them to watch a video. Or maybe fill up a contact form? Whatever the case, you need to figure this out so that you can come up with an appropriate call-to-action.
 This call-to-action or CTA must be put up multiple times on the landing page so that the visitors can easily find it. Additionally, it should have contrasting colors and should be attractive so that it pops right out.
Placing the CTA buttons at the right spots can help you optimize your sales funnel conversion rates. CodeInWP, for instance, used content upgrades to lure customers. This helped increase their conversion rate by 1600%!
5. Emails
Once your leads have reached the purchase stage, you need to give them a slight push to make them buy from you. For this, emails serve as a great tool. With simple emails, you can educate the leads about your brand and send them emails through automated sequences.
These emails should contain information regarding your brand and products that can help the leads. For instance, you could add frequently asked questions in the emails. This can clear the doubts which some of the leads may have and can pave the path for them to purchase the products from you.
You could also go for Drip emails which are basically a set of emails that are sent across to the prospects or customers over a certain time period. They could even be emails that inform them about a certain new blog post that you may have published.
For instance, Zapier sends out user onboarding emails that can help their subscribers get started. They list things that the users can do once they have activated their accounts.
6. Product Promotion
You may want your products to be purchased by your customers. However, if you don’t show them the products, they may not be able to find them at all. Don’t expect them to find your products all by themselves.
You must make the process of finding a product simple for them. The entire process, from adding the product to checking out, should be simple and easy to navigate. You must also try to add a live chat option that can help the customers resolve their queries right there. In fact, an eMarketer study found that 63% of customers were more likely to return to your website if it had a live chat option.
To inform your prospects and customers about your latest products, you should consider sending out emails to them. These emails could contain your festival special products or simply the latest ones on your website. You could further tailor the emails and the products based on the buyer personas of your customers. These personas can be developed by looking at the locations, demographics, and interests of the customers.
Make sure that the emails have a call-to-action that makes it easy for the customers to just click and reach the product page. Through this method, you can easily improve your sales funnel conversion rate.
7. Referrals
Asking your existing customers to refer those in their circles is a great way of getting more customers. There are higher chances of them purchasing from you as it will be a personal recommendation for them.
To sweeten up the offer for your customers, you can offer a discount or a freebie. This can motivate them to refer more people. Dropbox, for instance, gives 500MB for each referral to a basic account holder. For plus and professional account holders, this figure is 1GB per referral! This strategy has worked tremendously in its favor and has grown its customer base over time.
8. Reminders
Your job doesn’t end when your customer purchases from you. You need to ensure that they become repeat customers and purchase from you regularly. For this, you can set up reminders. >
Set up a time period post which you can send out a reminder email to them to buy the product from you again. These emails may just give your customers the nudge to purchase your products again.
Final Thoughts
Setting up a sales funnel is a must for any e-commerce business. You must ensure that the customers get exactly what they need at each stage of the funnel. Blog posts work extremely well for generating brand awareness. Landing pages with well-placed CTA buttons can help you generate leads in a better manner.
Emails and product promotions can push the prospects to make the purchase from you. Lastly, having a referral program and sending reminders can help you retain these customers well. Implementing these efficiently can help you improve your sales funnel conversion rates.
What is the most important factor affecting the sales funnel conversion rates? Let us know in the comments section below.