Creating Sales Funnels

A sales funnel is any method that leads your potential customers to your site or place of business and turns them into paying customers. If you have not already, check out our last section on creating a professional website so that you have somewhere to funnel your customers to and gain their business. A website is almost always the end point of your sales funnel so you should set one up before continuing with this section along with a checkout page for your product or service, which we also went over in the last section.

Now that you have a site setup and a checkout page for your product or service, you will want to come up with either an offer, waitlist, free informational file, a webinar event or a promise to send them valuable information by joining your email list. It can be anything that will help you get emails and phone numbers from prospective customers in your industry. If you build websites for example, you can create a pdf with tips on ranking on Google, a coupon for creating a site or you can set up a webinar teaching people about the importance of an online presence. No matter what kind of offer you create make sure it is something that your leads will be excited about. If you have ever seen a company giving away free information when you enter your email, this is exactly what they are doing. Try to find some sales funnel offers online that relate to your industry by searching up something like free guide for ___. This will give you some good ideas for a funnel if you can’t think of one.

After you have created an offer for your potential customers, it is time to find some ways to get this offer in front of people who need your product or service. You will need to set up an offer page on your site with a form they can fill out to access your offer and give you their email address to begin your funnel. Go back to our last section if you need to learn how to add a form to your site that can be used for this purpose as well. Once you have your form set up you will make one page you will link to your submit button on that form. It will give them the free information file they were looking for or show them confirmation that they have been added to your waitlist or webinar. We will also go over how to add a form that will fully automate your email campaigns later on in this section.

Once your offer page is all set up you will want to create a text script that will advertise your offer. For example, if you are offering a free resource file, you can write something like, This free guide to SEO actually helped me get ranked for pool services in my area, if you are struggling to get ranked for your keywords definitely check it out here (insert your offer form link). You can post this text that you wrote on YouTube videos related to your industry, Facebook groups in your industry, or Instagram comments. You can also follow big brands in your industry on different social media platforms and begin running dm bots to send these offers to the followers of those competitors. If you do this, you can even add text that shows how our business is better or cheaper than the competitor to peak their interest. You can also create a YouTube channel and create videos that reference your offer to collect emails from there. If you wish to go this route you can check out our section on marketing with YouTube as well as our section on becoming a YouTuber. You should use a combination of these tactics and perform them every day in order to get as many eyes on your offer as possible.

The next thing you will need to do once you have gathered a list of emails to start your sales funnel is create an email campaign with a service like mailchimp.com. The first thing you need to do on MailChimp is add your list of email contacts to your audience tab so that you have people to send your campaigns to. You should integrate MailChimp with your site so that you can automate your sales funnel to perform on its own like we mentioned earlier. To do this, go to the audience tab in MailChimp and click the manage audience drop down on the right and click signup forms. Select the embedded forms option and it will bring you to some different form options to choose from. Find the form that works best for your business and copy the HTML text at the bottom of the page. Now head over to your Wix account or whatever platform you used to build your site and embed the form. On Wix go to the editor and navigate to your offer page that you created earlier. Then click on the plus button and select embed. Then click the embed widget option and paste the code that you copied from MailChimp by clicking enter code on your embed element. Now when someone fills out this embedded form it will add their email and info to your MailChimp audience.

After setting up your MailChimp form you will want to go back to MailChimp and click on the campaigns tab. Create a new campaign and start by attaching it to your audience list that is being filled by your form. If it is your only list, then it should auto populate for you. Start by creating a welcome email with your offer inside and a short introduction to your brand and services. Keep this email concise and make sure that it gives some value to your prospective customer. Once you set up your first email in the campaign, set the trigger to the sign-up form and then you can create the second email in your funnel. The email marketing itself should always provide some value to your customers. Try to make the next few emails provide new free offers or coupons for your business and be creative with the design and content. You can send articles that you write about new tech or news in your industry, or you can send an invite to a free webinar on Zoom or an event if you are a local business targeting local customers. Your next few emails in your email chain should have triggers set based on time since the first email was delivered. You can send 3 emails per week to get more exposure yet still respect the inboxes of your potential customers. Always include links to your site and social media if applicable to keep them connected to your brand. No matter what content or offers you are sending, be sure that it provides value and does not overwhelm your email recipients. Every email that they receive should be a step closer to making them a customer and visiting your site to make a purchase so be sure to include the link to your check out pages for specific products and services relating to each email.

Congratulations! You have now officially set up your first sales funnel. Just like every other form of marketing we have gone over the key is volume and consistency. Keep posting your offers around the web frequently and creating new valuable emails for your audiences. If you keep providing value to them, they will be sure to become customers down the line.