An Introduction to Funnels in Marketing and Sales

The funnel concept is an easy way to explain the role of marketing in sales. Find out what you need to know about full funnel marketing here.

An Introduction to Funnels in Marketing and Sales

Consumers spend billions of dollars online every year, and that number is expected to continue to increase over the next few years at least.

For your company to have a piece of that action, you need to have a solid marketing plan in place. That plan should include full funnel marketing.

If you’re not sure what a sales or inbound marketing funnel is, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to give you everything you need to know about sales funnels and show you how to set one up for your business.

Keep reading to find out more.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

Picture a funnel in your head, one that you might use in the kitchen or when adding oil to your car. It’s wider at the top and gets narrower at the bottom. This concept is where a sales funnel gets its name.

A sales funnel is the journey a person takes from knowing nothing about your business to becoming a customer. Your goal should be to get as many people through the entire funnel as possible.

Full Funnel Marketing Tour

Let’s look at how a sales funnel works by taking a tour of the main steps along the way.

Top of the Funnel

At the top of the funnel, you have strangers. These are people that know nothing about you, your business, or your product. They see your website come up, but haven’t visited it yet.

To get people into the top of your funnel, you may use advertisements, social media marketing, or optimize your site for SEO. There are many people that see your website but won’t click, and leave at this early stage of the funnel.

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Middle of the Funnel

There are two steps that people can take in the middle of the funnel. The first is to click a link to visit your site. These people are called visitors. They see your website and may read some blog posts, but haven’t interacted with you yet.

A person needs to take a step to start the interaction with you. This turns them into leads, and is the second step in the middle of the funnel. This action could be signing up for a free trial for a service, putting an item in a shopping cart, or filling out a contact form.

End of the Funnel

At the end of the funnel, you have customers. These are the people that actually buy something from you. As you can imagine, at this point, there are far fewer people than there was even a step before since not everyone becomes a customer.

How to Use Funnels for Your Business

Now that you know what a sales funnel is, you may be wondering what you need to do next. As you’ll see, this takes some work, but if you do it right, it will be more than worth it to start converting more strangers into customers.

1. Identify Your Existing Sales Funnel

The first thing you need to do is look at your existing sales funnel. Consider how you’re leading people through each step and getting them to the end. Here are some questions to help you identify each part of the funnel.

Top of the funnel:

Middle of the funnel:

End of the funnel:

Once you’ve figured out how your funnel currently works, you can move onto the next step.

2. Analyze Current Funnel

Figure out how many people you’re losing at every step of the process. You can do this by having analytic software installed for your website. This will allow you to compare how many people are visiting your site versus buying products.

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One way to analyze your funnel is to ask your current customers. Send out a survey to find out what they like and didn’t like about your company and their buying experience.

You may want to include an incentive for helping you out, like a discount on future purchases. This small investment of time and money will help you more effectively analyze your sales funnel.

3. Find Weak Points

As you analyze your sales funnel, your goal should be to find weak points. For example, if you’re getting thousands of visitors every month but none of them are converting into leads, you may need a better way to turn visitors into leads.

If you’re losing people at the end of the funnel, there may be a problem with the checkout process. Perhaps you don’t accept a certain form of payment or there were unexpected fees that caused people to abandon the process.

4. Make Improvements

Once you figure out where you’re failing, you can start to make improvements. We recommend starting at the bottom of the funnel and then working your way up.

It doesn’t matter how many people enter the funnel if they’re not getting to the end of it. After you have a good percentage of leads converting into customers and visitors into leads, then you can start working on attracting more strangers to your site.

5. Rinse and Repeat

The truth is that you won’t ever stop this process. There will always be improvements to be made on your sales funnel. However, once you get things set up well, the changes you make will be small and less frequent.

You may also need to make changes to your sales funnel as time goes on and certain things that worked before just aren’t working anymore. That’s why you should always keep an eye on it and be ready to make necessary improvements.

Need Help Setting Up a Sales Funnel for Your Business?

Now you have everything you need to set up a sales funnel for your company to start attracting strangers, turning visitors into leads, and making more customers.

If you want help setting up a full funnel marketing plan for your business, let us know. We’d love to help you expand your business.