Imagine going into a clothing store to look at that shirt that caught your eye.

Immediately after entering the store, however, the salesperson asks if you’ll pay with cash or credit card. You haven’t even tried the shirt on. You haven’t even seen your other options. Yet the salesperson keeps on asking you to buy the item.

You’ll probably end up leaving the store.

That’s one of the biggest mistakes businesses make today; they’re trying to sell all the time, and they become pushy, inappropriate, and ineffective.

This strategy obviously doesn’t work in the real world—but it’s easy to forget that the same thing applies in the online world.

The Key to Making Sales: Nurture Your Buyers

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Making a sale is a step-by-step process. You don’t rush it; you have to guide and nurture people before they are ready to make a purchase.

If the salesperson shows you your other options and assists you before you try the shirt on, you’ll probably buy the shirt. In the same way, the key to making sales is in giving the information people need to make a buying decision.

You can do that with the help of an online sales funnel.

What is an Online Sales Funnel?

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This term is thrown around a lot in the digital marketing world, but what does it really mean?

An online sales funnel represents the online buyer journey. The steps are composed of marketing assets, such as email and landing pages, that gently prod people to buy.

The strategy is named so because in diagram form, it looks just like its name. It resembles a funnel because you will lose visitors along the way. That sounds like a bad thing, but it’s not, because it only means the funnel filters out the “bad fits” for you. You don’t waste time chasing down bad leads.

Building a Solid Funnel

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A well-designed and properly executed online sales funnel comprises four stages: awareness, interest, decision, and action. It’s not easy to build one with all these four elements. Fortunately, this post will serve as your step-by-step guide to building one. Read on.

Step 1: Know your target market.

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Some businesses dive right into marketing tactics without creating the foundation first, which is to understand the target market. After all, it’s easier to just dive in to A/B testing instead of doing laborious target market research. This is a huge mistake.

Every sales funnel should be built with the target market in mind. Without an understanding of your audience, you’ll be moving forward with your online marketing efforts – but you’ll be doing so blindly. In addition, those who truly know their target audience can create appropriate content for each stage of the funnel, this, creating a more effective process for their market.

Step 2: Create a great landing page.

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Your landing page is the first thing prospective buyers will see, so take time to make sure that it looks great.

The end goal of this page is to convert visitors to customers, but to do so, you have to demonstrate the value that your product or service offers.

Say your goal is to sell an e-book. You could simply give a link that visitors can click to make a purchase. This might work for a bestselling author with a huge following, but if you’re not in this category, you have to give people more context and details. Often, one of the best ways to provide value is to give them a free sample of what you offer in exchange for their contact details or email address. If they like what you provide, website visitors may be motivated to make a purchase.

Step 3: Get people to your landing page.

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Having the best landing page, however, doesn’t really matter if you can’t get people to look at it.

Market your landing page with digital marketing. Some strategies you may use are search engine optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, and content marketing. SEO and PPC direct users from search engines to your website; with social media, you can promote your landing page on the appropriate platforms. Content marketing, on the other hand, calls for you to post relevant content on your onsite blog, and to promote your landing page in that content.

Step 4: Start a relationship with your new leads.

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Send your leads valuable content, over time, through email. Build a relationship with them, so that you will be the first brand they think of when they’re ready to buy.

Send them content that supplements what they read on your blog, for instance. Say you’re selling ergonomic chairs; an excellent idea would be to educate employers, through a sequence of emails, about how such chairs can increase productivity in the workplace.

Step 5: Direct leads to a sales page.

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You’re now in the home stretch. The conversion from prospect to buyer is complete. At this point, your goal is to close the sale. So, direct those leads to a sales page or to your online store, or request for payment details. Your leads just need to take the final action of making a purchase.

Make sure, however, that completing a purchase is fast and easy. Minimize the number of form fields, provide one-click options for sign-up, and provide fewer steps for completing a purchase.

Don’t fret if not all of your leads turn into sales; that’s just how it goes. There is no such thing as a 100% conversion rate, and people sometimes change their minds at the last minute.

Keep Going

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A conversion is simply one piece of the lead generation puzzle. Converting those leads is not the be-all-end-all of your campaign. It’s an ongoing cycle; the process will always evolve and your conversations with customers will always change. So, keep it going – and constantly refine your process along the way.

Since there are many moving parts to building an online sales funnel, you are going to need help. You need people with experience in email marketing if you want to improve your conversion rates; you also need a content strategist who knows how to craft relevant content. You need an expert in all stages of the funnel, so it’s best to have a professional step in to help.

Aspire Digital Marketing could be your partner. Talk to us, today, for an obligation-free consultation.