How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel Conversion Rate

Are you looking for ideas to increase conversions at every stage of your sales funnel? In this article, we’ll walk you through the different sales funnel stages and share many ways to improve your conversion rate throughout your sales funnel.

Before we jump into the tips to increase conversions, we must be on the same page about what is a sales funnel and what you’re looking to optimize for in the different sales funnel stages.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is the way or journey taken by a potential customer from the time they become aware of your product or service to when they buy what you have to offer. It’s usually represented by a graphical image that illustrates the key stages of the customer’s / client’s journey and the role each stage plays in increasing engagement and trust. A typical sales funnel is usually visualised like this:

Though the number of stages may vary slightly based on whose sales funnel you’re looking at, the majority of the funnels out there have these four stages:

• Awareness: This is the initial stage where your prospects aware of who you are, what you offer, and how you’re different.
• Interest: At this stage, your prospects are deciding whether or not your product or service would be able to fulfil their needs.
• Decision: In the decision stage, your prospects are paying more attention to what your business has to offer, including different options and pricing, so they can make the final decision to purchase.
• Action: This is where the prospects are ready to become paying customers.

No sales funnel is perfect, but you have a real opportunity to influence prospects and reduce those who drop out and continue to nurture those who are simply not ready to buy. Here are the following ways in which you can optimize your sales funnel to help make it convert better.

1. Know Your Audience

The more you know about your prospects, the better you can market to them and convert them into paying customers. If you are targeting the wrong customer, or have your sales funnel set up to target the wrong personas, you are wasting time and money. It pays to get this right.

First, you need to build the targeted personas, you also need to understand your competitors. You’ll discover which personas the researchers are, and the users of your product, and the decision makers. That information is extremely valuable because it allows marketers to target the right persona at the right time.

2. Create Informative Educational Content

At the very beginning of your sales funnel, prospects become aware of your brand. They realise they need to achieve an objective or address a problem, so they look for solutions. Hence, the key to improving conversions in the awareness stage is to focus on creating educational content that presents your company as an expert in its field.

You can educate buyers with nearly any type of content, like articles, videos, etc by finding the keywords and questions which your target personas are searching for.

3. Using Webinars for lead generation

When it comes to conversions, webinars are one of the most effective forms of content. The process of garnering attendees will automatically provide you with extensive market research and a list of prospective clients who have demonstrated actual, relevant interest in your business, product, or your industry.

To make the most of this, it’s a good idea to make your sign-up form as personalised as possible. However, it’s not enough just to hook those leads in once you have them. For the most utmost, these will be pooled at the very top of the sales funnel. Passing them straight onto your sales team is unlikely to lead to instantaneous conversions.

4. Capture Your Prospect’s Email Address

To nurture a prospect through your sales funnel, you need to develop a relationship and earn trust, and without their email address, you will find this tricky to do. A prospect being willing to share their email address with you is one of the first signs that they are open to building a relationship with your business, and have an interest in your offering.

Rather, offering your best content only once a prospect signs up and enters their email address, using custom landing pages that showcase the quality content you are offering to increase sign-ups. For the best results, make sure your landing page targets and impresses prospects who are interested in your products, it should have an eye-catching design and offer something in exchange for leads.

5. Use Videos for high conversion rate

Video reaches 3x as many people and gets 20% more attention than standard articles.  videos allow you to answer questions and share your expertise with your visitors. While recording video, you can introduce your brand and then jump right into helping your audience solve a specific problem. Hence it turns out, videos have a big impact in the purchase-decision process.

A study found that 77% of consumers say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video. This means, video not only helps people to engage with your brand and learn more about your offerings, but also helps them pull the plug and purchase your products.

6. Reviews, Video Testimonials & Customer Stories to bring more trust

Trust plays a huge role in a successful sales funnel. After all, building any relationship is usually based around trust, and you must be able to put, social proof is showing prospects evidence of your company’s success or popularity through:

• Testimonials
• Customer reviews
• Case studies
• Video testimonials
• Positive reviews
• Industry awards
• Client logos

and for the people exploring your product or service who don’t turn into immediate customers, you need to show that your brand actually lives up to your claims. There are several ways to utilize it through your sales funnel.

When it comes to the Desire stage, try using the these on your landing page to move buyers towards the sale. Smartly used, social proof makes it easier to edge out the competition and proves that you’re worthy of the investment.

7. Use Strong CTAs (call-to-action)

You’ve put in all the work to get your prospects to the last stage of your funnel. Don’t make the mistake of leaving the choice of what to do next up to them. Use a clear CTA that motivates your prospects to buy from your brand.

Because they’re close to making a purchase, use CTA copy that encourages prospects to seal the deal, such as:

• Schedule your appointment
• Book now
• Go premium
• Buy Now
• Start your free trial

The appearance of your CTA needs to be as visually enticing as its copy. One of the best practices is to use a contrasting colour with the background if your CTA is a button. Consider placing the CTA both above and below the fold to appeal first on the visitor’s eye.

8. Add Chat-bots

If your prospect has questions just before they convert and once, they are at the action stage of the funnel, are you on hand to help out?

If you are not, you need to be. Ensure you have got really simple ways in which prospects can get in touch to ask you questions where they will get a quick response. you can use live chat and chat-bots to answer common questions, allowing the platform to take control in the early stages before handing over to a salesperson if more needs answering. Live chat imbibes trust in your prospects.

It makes your website appear more authentic.The more you can be there for your prospects at this stage, the more deals you will finish.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it isn’t just about creating a sales funnel, it’s about optimizing it too. Focus on every step of the conversion path and guide potential customers through your sales funnel stages. With enough time and effort, you should start to see more engagement, more conversions, and ultimately, more sales.

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