How to Create Your First Sales Funnel
I remember when I was younger going to the carnival and watching the stand where you had to throw a ping pong ball into a fish bowl. If you made it in, you got a goldfish.
There was something about it that always attracted me to spot it out at every carnival I would attend. I would watch others as they would pay to try and fail. When the booth got a little slow, the person manning the both would throw a few and show you how easy it was.
All of a sudden people would flock to the booth and give them money to try their hands at it.
Your website is a lot like that. Your most important job as a marketer is to get your website in front of people. When you get them to your website, you need to make sure you are teasing them so they want to give you money.
You have two types of people that you can segment on your website. Leads and prospects. Leads and prospects are those who are interested in your services, and they’re known as potential members. You should know that the first phase of the membership sales funnel of any business is leveraging your free membership product. It not only allows you to turn the potential members into real ones, but it also builds the trust factor and loyal customers that you want.
Every stage of the sales funnel impacts the customers’ behavior and learning that is imperative for any successful business. If you know the trends and reactions of the members, then you can quickly adapt the tactics to improve your real customers. That’s why a membership sales funnel is essential, and it can even generate four times the number of customers each month.
But the real challenge is to create and manage an efficient membership sales funnel. In this article, we’ll discuss a detailed methodology to generate membership sales funnel for your business to make an impactful and powerful difference.
Let’s jump in!
What’s a Sales Funnel?
You might be wondering, what actually is a sales funnel?
In the most straightforward words, it’s the ladder or steps that a person takes to become a member. In other words, it’s a step by step process in which a business successfully sells its products.
Typically, there are multiple steps involved in this process, and they can vary according to each business model that a company follows. But the most common division of the sales funnel is divided into the following steps:
Brand Awareness
It’s the very first step that each startup needs to take, and it’s also by far the most important one. In this step, using multiple techniques, such as paid advertisements, social media, and other marketing techniques can help your customer segment become aware of the services, solutions, or the products that your business offers.
Prospects’ Interest
The customers or prospects demonstrate their interest in your services, solutions, or products. And this is the point where they’re doing their research to evaluate your offering against others and determine whether it meets their needs.
Evaluation
After an interested prospect has gathered information. They’ll begin to evaluate which provider helps meet their needs and is a good fit across multiple criteria. One important part here is the power of testimonials that can help one brand give themselves a strong advantage against others.
Decision
Based on the unique requirements and needs, the interested prospect at this point finalizes and decides to choose a single brand from multiple available options.
Purchase
Finally, after customers make a final decision, they purchase the required product or solution.
Reevaluation
It’s a widespread practice, especially in B2B sales, that before the customers or companies go for their second purchase, they reevaluate the product. It depends upon many factors such as their new requirements (if any), last experience, better options, etcetera.
Repurchase
If the reevaluation process goes fine, and it fills all the corners, the customers or companies go for their second purchase and so on.
Why is the Sales Funnel Important?
With an excellent membership sales funnel, it is possible for businesses to allow their customers to successfully complete all of these steps without any hesitation. It illustrates the path that your customers take, and it helps you to fill all the gaps where your leads or prospects drop out and never become real customers.
You need to understand your sales funnel thoroughly. With better knowledge and understanding regarding the behaviors of your members, you can easily optimize your sales funnel.
How to Create Your Own Membership Sales Funnel?
If you already have an audience of following, then you easily have a head start with your membership sales funnel. You can provide your audience with a little survey in which you can learn much about their behaviors and requirements. You can use platforms like Typeform for that.
This approach will help you to promote and spread awareness regarding your upcoming membership sales funnel website. It also prepares them mentally to buy it, and because of the input of your customers, the probability of more customers enrolling is highly likely. Once it’s done, you can get into creating your own membership sales funnel right away.
The Process to Create Membership Sales Funnel!
Many people think that creating a membership sales funnel is a very daunting and cumbersome process, but the reality is that it’s comparatively straightforward. There are several essential steps that you need to follow.
Analysis of Audience
The more you know about the behaviors and trends of your customers, the better for your business. It makes your sales funnel more effective because your product and awareness will be targeting people with particular interests. You don’t need to analyze and market everyone but the ones who are the perfect fit for the service or the products that you offer.
You can use online tools to analyze the behavior of your targeted audience, such as CrazyEgg. It maps everything that any user will do on your website and allows you to understand deeply how users are engaging with your website. It also tells you about the time spent by each user on each page. All of these statistics and data points will allow you to filter the personas of your buyers.
Grab the Attention of Your Audience
If you want your sales to funnel to work at its best and highest potential, then you must lure your audience into it. It essentially means that your content is reaching in front of the right audience. You can use the paid route or organic route to reach this target audience.
In the case of the organic route, you’ll have to create your content consistently and upload it to all of your online platforms and social media. The use of infographics, videos, animations, and visual effects is always recommended to engage and attract more people.
For example, if your business is offering B2B services, then there’s no better platform available other than LinkedIn for that purpose. You should always place the link to redirect people to your landing page from your content or to any value proposition your offering (e.g. a free eBook lead magnet).
Create a Website or a Landing Page (Lead Magnet)
As discussed in the previous step, the content of a lead magnet page will redirect your targeted audience to the main page (Landing Page) of your website.
You have to make it very attractive, and with a deal that the redirected people just cannot refuse. As these people are not your old customers, and they’re new to your platform, you should mainly focus on attracting and capturing them. The sale pushing is not advisable at this stage as the main page of your website should steer the users to proceed to the next step.
That’s why you need a compelling call to action for your visitors on this page that simply informs them precisely about their next step. It attracts your potential customers, and at this page, they provide you with their emails, and you provide them with a free e-book, mini videos, or even a PDF guide.
There are multiple tools and services available to create it, such as BuilderAll, ClickFunnels, Ontraport, etc. Once the download process is complete, your lead magnet page should automatically redirect your users to the confirmation page.
Here you’ll provide them with a little “thank you” message and also some content where they can proceed to your other pages. For example, you can just write “Check out my membership plan,” and clicking on it will redirect the users to your sales pages.
Email Campaign
The emails that you collect from your lead magnet should be used very wisely. You can send them the invitations to your services regularly, but keep in mind that it must not be persistent.
It’s recommended that emails you send out are done once or twice a week because you can educate people by sending them all the essential information that they need before signing up for your program. You’ll have to overcome all the obstacles and hiccups via your emails that customers might come across while using your services.
After you educate your potential customers, in the end, you need to make an incredible and inarguable offer. Try to inspire people and give them the reasons that stand you out from the competition and why they should purchase your plans.
You can also use email marketing automation software, which will work like an autoresponder. This is a more efficient and time-effective technique that allows you to spend most of your time on the most important tasks related to your membership sales funnel.
Stay Connected
Although at this point your membership sales funnel is made, you need to continuously work on it. Because marketing is an ongoing process, and you have to keep in touch with your confirmed customers.
First, thank and welcome them onboard. Ask them twice or once a week for their feedback and offer your assistance. Just continue reaching out to all of them and sharing value.
Review the Whole Membership Sales Funnel
No business stays the same, and over the course of time, things change. That is why reviewing your membership sales funnel is very important. If there’s any change in your business or you’re going to add a new and parallel short-term goal, then you must change your membership sales funnel accordingly.
It’s also possible that the behavior and trends of customers change due to any significant change in the market. For that matter, your membership sales funnel always requires tweaks.
The most significant way to review and measure your sales funnel is to check the pattern of your conversion rate. The comparison of your conversion rate of last month and the current month is important and should be tracked.
Moreover, you should also check through which channels most customers are reaching and converting. You can find out such insights by using tools such as Google Analytics.
Optimize the Membership Sales Funnel
The truth is that you cannot force any customer to purchase what you’re offering. You just forward them the offer according to your analysis and study of customers’ behaviors and trends.
That’s why, according to the findings of your review, you need to continually optimize your membership sales funnel to target more specific people.
Wrapping Up
It takes a little time to create an efficient and impactful membership sales funnel. But it’s one of the most advantageous ways to compete with the market. The reality is that businesses cannot survive without their digital presence, and to compete, a membership sales funnel imperative.
We hope this guide will help you to create one for your business and take your time before the creating process to find out what your audience wants.