In today’s online world, getting new customers to stick around is hard. But it’s very important if you want your business to do well. Many businesses get lots of people to look at their website, but not many of these people buy anything. Often, this is because they don’t have a good plan to turn lookers into buyers.
In this article, I’ll show you how to make a good plan (we call it a “sales funnel”) to turn new customers into loyal fans.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is like a path that leads people from first hearing about your business to becoming regular customers. It has four main parts:
- Awareness: This is when people first learn about your business. It’s like seeing a new store for the first time.
- Interest: Now people want to know more about what you sell. It’s like walking into the store to look around.
- Decision: At this point, people are thinking about buying from you. It’s like picking up an item in the store and looking at the price tag.
- Action: This is when people decide to buy. It’s like going to the checkout counter to pay.
Each part of the funnel helps move people closer to buying from you. It’s important to have something for each part.
Here’s a simple example:
Let’s say you sell homemade soap.
- For Awareness, you might post pictures of your soap on social media.
- For Interest, you could write a blog post about why your soap is good for skin.
- For Decision, you might offer a small free sample.
- For Action, you could have an easy-to-use online shop.
Finding Problems in Your Funnel
To make your funnel better, look for these common issues:
- Many people leave your website quickly without doing anything.
- People don’t spend much time looking at your content.
- Not many people end up buying your product.
Ways to Make Your Funnel Better
- Make your website look good: Your website is often the first thing people see. Make sure it looks nice, loads fast, and clearly shows why people should buy from you.
- Create helpful content: Make blog posts, videos, or podcasts that your audience will find useful. This keeps people interested in what you offer.
- Use email: Send friendly emails to people who showed interest. This helps build a relationship with them.
- Show that others like your product: Share reviews and stories from happy customers. This helps new customers trust you.
- Remind people about your product: Use ads to reach out to people who showed interest but didn’t buy. This gives them another chance to buy.
- Offer something free: Give away useful information or tools in exchange for people’s contact details. This helps you stay in touch with them.
- Keep improving: Regularly check how well your funnel is working and try new things to make it better.
Real-Life Example: FitLife.tv
Let’s look at a real example of how a good sales funnel can help a business. This story comes from a book called “DotCom Secrets” by Russell Brunson.
FitLife.tv is a website that helps people get fit and healthy. They had a big problem: they had lots of followers on Facebook, but not many people were visiting their website or buying their products. In fact, the number of people coming to their site dropped by 90%! They were struggling to turn their popularity into actual sales.
Brunson helped them fix their sales funnel. Here’s what they would have did:
- They created a quiz that helped people learn about their health. This quiz was interesting and made people want to give their email address to get the results.
- After the quiz, they offered a free video that taught people something useful about health. This video also showed how FitLife.tv’s products could help.
- They then offered a low-cost product. This let people try out FitLife.tv without spending too much money.
- Finally, they offered their main, more expensive products to people who bought the cheaper one.
This new funnel worked much better. It guided people step by step from just being interested to becoming paying customers. Because of this, FitLife.tv could spend more money on ads to get new customers, knowing that many of them would end up buying something.
The result? FitLife.tv started making more money and helping more people get healthy.
