If you’ve dabbled in the field of email marketing, or any other type of digital marketing, you’ve probably heard of “marketing funnels” and “sales funnels”. But if you’re like many people entering the marketing field, the chances are that you don’t have any idea what they are or how they work.
This is because the concept of sales funnels has taken off in recent years. It’s not a complicated topic, but it’s one that’s not always easy to find information about.
In this article, we aim to demystify marketing and sales funnels. We go into detail about what they are, why you should use them, and how to get started with them.
What Is a Marketing Funnel?
In simple terms, a marketing funnel can be thought of as the steps involved or taking a prospective customer and turning them into a conversion. It involves everything from making the said customer aware of your brand and product offerings to closing the sale.
Usually, marketing funnels follow quite a standard process.
- A broad net is cast to gather leads. This can be done through social media marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing, or even something as simple as content marketing.
- These leads are nurtured and guided through a set of steps that are designed to lead to a purchase. By encouraging specific actions, you can significantly reduce the number of leads lost here.
- Conversions are made whenever leads take the targeted actions that you want them to.
The idea of a sales funnel is that a percentage of the initial leads are lost during every step of the process. This leads to much fewer conversions than initial leads.
Why Should I Use a Marketing Funnel?
There are numerous benefits associated with using a marketing funnel. For starters, they enable you to collect information about where you’re losing customers and how you could improve your conversion rate. Other benefits include:
- Increased conversion rates, making your business more profitable overall.
- A clear lead generation and nurturing process, as opposed to disorganized, messy marketing methods.
- Automation, enabling you to spend more time optimizing your ads and taking care of other day-to-day store management actions.
The single main goal of a sales funnel is to generate sales. And when they’re used well, they will do just that.
How Do I Create a Marketing Funnel?
Creating a marketing funnel doesn’t have to be difficult, and there are numerous tools available to help you with the process. However, there are a few clear stages you should keep in mind when creating the different parts of the funnel.
- Attention, which involves drawing customers’ attention to a specific need.
- Interest, generated through ads and interesting content.
- Desire, which is when customers realise that they need a solution, and you need to convince them that your product is the right one.
- Action, which involves the purchasing process.
Bottom Line
The terms “marketing funnel” and “sales funnel” are quite generic. However, the concept of a funnel is one that’s used by marketing professionals across the world every single day. By creating a high-quality funnel, you can ensure that a high percentage of new leads actually end up going through and making a purchase.
There are numerous third-party apps and platforms that you can use for sales funnel automation. If you’re not an experienced marketer, we’d suggest looking into these to find out more about how they could be useful.