What do businesses want? They want profits which means that they want sales. The process of selling products and services is not as easy as it seems but is rather a complex and critical exercise. To gain profits and make sales possible, you need a perfect sales funnel!
A sale funnel essentially simplifies the process of converting prospects into customers by dividing the action into phases. Traditionally a perfect sales funnel was denoted by AIDA – awareness, interest, decision and action. But with changing time, marketing techniques and business needs, the sales funnel has evolved and become complex. This guide will let you know how to create a perfect sales funnel, but before that let’s understand AIDA.
Stage 1: Awareness
Here the goal is to be aware of your prospects and make them aware of your business. This stage is all about promoting your products and services to prospects. Market your business as much as possible so that people know you. But you need to know where to market your business, this is when you need to know your prospects.
Stage 2: Interest
This stage is all about presenting your products and services to your prospects in a way that they start taking interest in them. Here, you need to know your prospect’s interest to target it in the best way possible. The perfect idea is to make an offer.
To make an offer means to offer your prospects something that matches their interest and they cannot resist to accept it- buy it.
Stage 3: Decision
At this stage, you have offered your prospects with something that is of their interest but to manipulate their decisions you need to offer them something more. This more is all about backing up your offer. Add reviews of previous customers to encourage the new prospects, similarly give them reasons to analyse why this offer is the best one for them.
Stage 4: Action
This stage as its name suggests calls for action. Here you need to facilitate your prospects convert leads to now become customers. The goal is to make their actions easy by providing them with the best experience and the ease to purchase. In other words, this stage demands call to action, which means that the customers must have an accessible purchase channel to make sales possible.
A Perfect Sales Funnel for Digital Marketing
With digital marketing, the traditional AIDA has evolved, the stages remain the same but have been transformed complexly. A perfect sales funnel for digital marketing is all about deriving sales by actions taken digitally. The digital sales funnel is divided into three main parts; Awareness, Execution and Conversion. To further break it down, the stages involve:
Awareness
Stage 1: Identifying Goals
To digitally run a campaign for bringing in sales, you need to identify your goals. What products or services do you want to sell or what sales do you want to boost? Answers to these questions help you create the right awareness among the right prospects.
Stage 2: Awareness
Once that the goals are set, know your prospects and create awareness. Digital marketing allows you to filter out the audience for your campaigns. Thus, by knowing your audience you can easily create awareness among them.
Execution
Stage 3: Interest
Identify your prospect’s interests and preferences before engaging with them or offering them something. Digital platforms and multiple tools help you analyse the prospect’s behaviours and preferences. By knowing their interests, you can offer them something that they might not be able to refuse.
Stage 4: Offer
Plan an offer keeping in mind your prospects and their behaviours. The goal is to offer them something irresistible that matches their interest. The offer is to be catchy and captivating to make the best out of it.
Conversion
Stage 5: Content Plan
After planning out an offer, you now need to plan the content that works for your business digitally. The content should make your offer look good and well-planned. By using manipulative language and growing excitement you can acquire customers.
Creating content is an ongoing process that needs to be done at every stage.
Stage 6: Action
Provide your customers with call to actions – CTAs to facilitate their action of purchasing online. This is the most important stage; easy purchase methods and great user experience mean ease to purchase.
Stage 7: Sustaining and Growing Customers
The Sales funnel does not just end at acquiring customers and increasing sales, the goal in the contemporary era is to maintain a sustainable relationship with customers to increase return over investment. By maintaining relationships, you can create advocators for your business which can eventually direct them to the execution stage.
The Perfect Sales Funnel helps you understand your potential customers and their interests to grab their attention and provide them with offers that they cannot refuse to purchase. The contemporary sales funnel allows you to do the same but with aspects of digital marketing. The rules are simple just refer to the AIDA stages to start your sales loop and generate revenue.
