What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a step-by-step process that guides potential customers through their journey from discovering your business to making a purchase. Imagine it as an inverted pyramid, where the wide top represents all your potential customers and the narrow bottom represents those who actually make a purchase.

Why is a Sales Funnel Important?

Sales funnels are crucial because they help you understand and optimize the customer journey. By breaking down the process into stages, you can identify where customers drop off and implement strategies to keep them moving forward. This not only increases your chances of making sales but also helps build a loyal customer base.

What are the Stages of a Sales Funnel?

It is highly unusual for someone to move from not knowing a product exists to purchasing that product in one step. Typically, a buyer will move through predictable stages prior to making a purchase.

Awareness: This is the stage where potential customers first learn about your business. They might come across your website, see your social media posts, or hear about you through word-of-mouth.

Interest: At this stage, the potential customer is interested in what you have to offer. They may sign up for your email list, follow you on social media, or start reading your blog posts.

Consideration: Here, the potential customer is considering making a purchase. They might compare your products with those of your competitors, read reviews, or look for discounts.

Intent: At some point, your potential customer decides to become a customer. She decides to buy. Remaining questions - when? And from whom?

Action: You have a customer with intent before you. Provide her with a compelling reason to take action, to buy now, to buy from you.

Sales Funnel: the Big Picture

A sales funnel systematically moves potential customers from brand awareness to action. For example, you might use social media ads to increase awareness, provide valuable content through emails to build interest, offer special deals to help them make a decision, and finally, make the purchase process as smooth as possible to encourage action.

Consider an example: Imagine you sell online courses. You might start by posting on social media (Awareness), then offer a free webinar to those who click on a link in the description (Interest). After the webinar, you send follow-up emails. They read your messages, filled with testimonials (Consideration). They decide they want the course (Intent) and click on your order button. You direct them to a simple checkout page to complete the purchase (Action).

A Systeme.io Sales Funnel

Any chance you are slightly confused? You thought a sales funnel was something you build on a platform such as systeme.io?

You thought that because - it is!

A sales funnel within systeme.io addressed all of the sales stages above apart from awareness. As in the example, the seller will need to build awareness, typically through social media, and generate traffic to the top of your systeme.io funnel. From there, you build separate funnel steps to guide a potential customer from interest to a sale.

Typical Systeme.io Funnel Steps

Squeeze Page

Have you ever clicked on a post to collect a free offer only to be asked for your email address? Of course you have. When you move from awareness to interest, you are presented with a “squeeze page.” Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? The squeeze page simply facilitates a trade-off. The potential customer will receive your free offer, and in return you will add her to your email list.

Thought email was dead? Hardly. Its a big topic, actually. The most important thing to note today is that your potential customer may be willing to learn more today (get that freebie) but may not be willing to purchase. As long as you have that email, your fledgling relationship does not have to end today. You can rekindle that interest, fan the flames, and, hopefully, move your new pal from a person with interest to a person purchasing your product through your email campaign. But, as I said, that’s a topic for another day.

Sales Page

The job of the sales page is to capitalize on your potential customer’s interest and move them to intent. A sales page will highlight benefits, testimonials, and reasons to buy now. If successful, your potential customer will opt to ORDER NOW.

Order Page

She has cleared Intent and taken Action! Fantastic! Let’s not quash momentum. The next funnel step is the Order Form, the simpler the better. Ask for too much information, demand too many clicks, and you may scare off your freshly motivated buyer.

Thank You Page

Not an official part of the theoretical Sales Funnel, but an essential step in your digital sales funnel: the Thank You page. Thank your buyer, direct her to her receipt, if separate, and deliver the goods. Typically this will be a link or an attachment.

Funnels on the Systeme.io Free Plan

We love systeme.io. For so so many reasons.

You are able to build 15 funnel steps with the free plan.

Note that this does not mean 15 funnels. Every funnel will have three steps (sales, order, thank you), most will have four (squeeze page, sales, order, thank you). You may also create additional pages within a sales funnel for information such as terms & conditions. Therefore, the free plan is more than enough to build out your first few sales funnels, but you will need to upgrade if you intend to build funnels for a well-stocked store.

Wrapping Up

If you are in sales, you will be building sales funnels.

We use and recommend systeme.io, but there are other (more expensive!) options.

Are you already working with sales funnels? Do you recommend any other tools? We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for joining us on the Prosperity Porch!

XO, Eileen

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Jane Doe

Eileen Dame

Eileen is one of Prosperity Porch gals. She does a lot of the writing here, so when you spot an oops - it was her! When she is not waxing poetic about The Roadmap and Systeme.io, you'll find Eileen walking her Ragdoll, Gus.

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