A sales funnel is each stage a person goes through to become your customer. Each of the funnel stages affects consumer behavior significantly, so you need to understand them intimately.
Understanding each step affords you the opportunity to strategically exploit them to size up the number of people that eventually turn customers. This can have a great impact on your business.
For instance, say you double the number of people at 2 stages of your funnel. You double the percentage of closed customers and you double leads. That gives you 4 times the number of customers every month.
Determining and managing your sales funnel is one of the most important concepts in business.
The Four Stages of a Sales Funnel
Awareness
This is the moment you grab a consumer’s attention for the first time. It might be through a Facebook post, a Google search, a tweet, or something else entirely. Your prospect becomes familiar with your business and what you offer.
The awareness stage is where you’re trying to attract the prospect into returning to your site and interacting more with your business. If the timing is right, the consumer sometimes buys from you immediately.
Interest
When consumers get to the interest stage in the sales funnel, they’re doing comparison shopping, research, and weighing their options. This is the time to descend on them with incredible content that assists them but doesn’t sell to them.
If you’re pushing your service or product from the beginning, it might serve as a turn-off to your prospects and you’ll end up chasing them away. The objective here is to define your expertise, help the consumers make logical decisions, and offer to assist them in any way you can.
Decision
This is the stage where the customer is ready to buy. Such customers might be contemplating two or three options – hopefully, this includes you.
Now is the moment to pitch your best offer. It could be discount codes, free shipping, or a bonus product. Whatever you decide, it should be so compelling that your lead can’t wait to benefit from it.
Action
The last stage of the sales funnel is when the customer acts. He or she purchases your service or product and comes to be a part of your business’s ecosystem. However, because a consumer has bought from you doesn’t mean your work is done. Action is for the marketer and consumer. You want to ensure one purchase turns to 10, and 10 to countless purchases.
Put simply, you’re putting all your focus on the retention of your customer. Show gratitude for the purchase, avail yourself of tech support, ask for feedback from your customer, and so on.