If you’ve got a product ready to launch, you will no doubt be researching every aspect of digital marketing. You’ve got quality content for every social media platform, you’ve been researching your SEO, and crunching numbers and now you’re ready to launch.
Well, hold on there. Have you thought about your sales funnel? A sales funnel is a term for the journey a customer will take on the way to purchase your product and is the way to avoid missing a sale. By studying your sales funnel, you can understand what your customers are thinking and doing at each stage of their journey and react to what isn’t working.
There are four stages to the sales funnel: awareness, interest, decision, and action. You have to hit all of them to make the sale. Awareness is when your customers first become aware of your product from advertising, social media, word of mouth, etc. If something grabs them, they will move onto Interest and do more research into your product. With the knowledge that your product is something they want or need; they will move into Decision and lift their wallet to complete Action.
The following guide will help you create a path for your customer to follow, leading them to a sale.
1. Build a landing page
You must first understand who your customers are and what makes them candidates for a successful sale. When you have that, you can start to focus on your landing page. A landing page is where your customer will be directed to when they click on a link or advertisement. It will likely be the first thing they see about your product or company so it should clearly and simply tell your customer who you are and what your product’s benefits are.
To make sure you keep in touch, give the landing page a place for potential customers to enter their information so that you can send follow up emails, newsletters, etc.
2. Offer something of value
However, potential customers won’t give up their information unless they have something to gain from it. Offer a hook, or a “lead magnet” like an eBook or whitepaper. These are documents with more information available on your company or product, written to entice potential customers. It should be a persuasive, authoritative, in-depth report on the problem your solution, in the form of a product or service, can solve.
3. Be nurturing
Your customers should now be moving from Awareness and into Interest, and you will have to nurture that interest. You can use their email addresses from the landing page to send them educational content about your offering and share an email nurture series. You can send automated emails to your customers with updates to your product and its success. Inform them of the most important aspects of your product first then move onto secondary aspects and so on. Keep them coming in the beginning so that your customers don’t forget who you are but ease off and make them wait for updates as time goes on.
Create a relevant story and give your customers a behind the scenes look, address frequently asked questions, or share pieces of publicity. You can interview experts and link to your livestreams and other media content.
4. Upsell
As your potential customers become very likely customers and move into the decision stage, you can offer them anything for a final push into action. Offer them things like a product demonstration, an extended free trial, or a special discount.
Product demonstrations can be equally as informative for you. Gain feedback on your product and look at how you can fix it in the future. If the ability to fix it before launch is there, then go for it.
5. Keep talking
At the Action phase, you will either be celebrating a sale, or you will be hearing about why potential customers didn’t buy. If your communication is entirely online, make sure to give your customers this option with a survey or review board.
Either way, make sure you keep the communication going. Focus on education on your product, engagement from customers and the continued use of your product. Consider getting in touch with your potential customers with a new nurture series to ask why they didn’t make a purchase and to check in with them every few months. Maybe you will update your product and whatever issue those customers had with it will be fixed.
6. Look out for leaks
Take a look at your sales funnel and ask yourself where the leaks are. Where are the bottlenecks in the process? For example, is the website crashing with traffic? Where do you lose potential customers? What are the positive trigger points? What caused customers to click most? The beauty of online marketing is that all of this will have been recorded for you in the process.
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