If you want to run a successful online business, sales funnels are important. In fact, you might have seen or heard them mentioned from time to time. And you might be wondering: what is a sales funnel and how does it work?
In this article, I will go over what a sales funnel is and how it works, why it’s important to any online business, and how you can start building your own sales funnel. With that being said, let’s start explaining the sales funnel to you.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
In a nutshell, a sales funnel is the process where content visitors are converted to buying customers. The sales funnel uses persuasion to push people psychologically to buy the product being sold. It is composed of various landing pages that funnel the prospect toward a sale.
So, essentially, it is the one secret weapon that any successful online business owner uses to make sales. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re the seller or just an affiliate marketer. Every online business, no matter what, needs a sales funnel to succeed!
Imagine trying to sell a product without any good reasons for the customer to buy. Do you really expect to sell that product anyway? Of course not! The sales funnel gives the customer reasons to push them to buy. It’s psychology.
Think of your sales funnel as an online salesman. It’s like the auto salesman trying to condition yourself on good-looking autos you could be driving home from the lot. It’s like the jewelry man getting you to see that his necklaces are genuine pearl and his rings are pure diamond.
The sales funnel does this primary task for you and in the digital world that we call the Internet. I hope this explained what a sales funnel can do for you, your customers, and your online business as a whole.
How Does A Sales Funnel Work?
Now that you know what a sales funnel is, it’s time to learn the mechanics of it. As I see it, every sales funnel takes a person through three different pages in an attempt to finalize a sale: the opt-in page, the bridge page, and the product page.
1. The Opt-In Page
Lead Generation
A sales funnel always starts with lead generation. This is where you get content viewers to become your leads, a fancy business name for your followers.
How are leads generated and collected? You should know the answer to this: email marketing. But, if you don’t know what email marketing is or how it works, it’s about time you learn about it. Check out my email marketing guide for beginners for more information on this topic.
How Email Marketing Brings Leads
Basically, from your content, you get your viewers to go to your funnel and become your lead by using what’s called a call-to-action (CTA). You get them to take that next step! You usually do this by telling them to “click the link below this article” or “click the link in the description” of your YouTube video.
Instead of the link being an affiliate link, you make it a link to the first page of your sales funnel, and that is an opt-in page. There, the viewer is told to put in their email address, usually to get a freebie that you’ll be offering them, called a lead magnet. Once you collect the email, the sales funnel starts kicking in.
2. The Bridge Page
Now that you got a new email lead and you won a follower, the next step in your sales funnel is to build trust with your new leads and persuade them to rely on you. So how do you win their trust? By sharing a lot of insights with them. Inside a sales funnel, the bridge page serves that very purpose.
Providing the “Bridge”
So why do we call it a bridge page? Because this page acts as the “bridge” between you and your followers. As your followers cross the “bridge”, suddenly, you turn from a stranger in the fog to an up-close-and-personal friend.
On the bridge page, you need to create a ton of content that is related to the product you are about to sell your followers. Remember, though, that you need to use your manners and act friendly. Don’t act like a robot on your bridge page. The goal here is to appear genuine so your followers can connect with you and trust you more.
The Power of a Bridge Page
Once your followers discover that you deliver so much value to them on your bridge page, they become your prospect. This is your golden nugget inside your online business. Now that they are your prospect and put their trust in you, they are actually open to pulling their wallet out and using it because of you.
Keep one thing in mind. You’re not doing this just for the money. You’re doing this because you want to genuinely help your followers.
3. The Product Page
How They Will See Your Product
Yep, this is it. You’ve won your follower’s trust, so now you can send them to the product you are selling or promoting. Because you prepared them with what to expect, they were willing to accept your message. So, now that they are exposed to the product, they have a higher tendency to actually buy from you.
They are now shown the product page that typically contains a long sales letter and a long sales video. The sales letter or sales video is simply content that goes all-in on the prospect’s biggest problems that the product is able to solve once and for all. They resonate with the problems being mentioned in the sales letter and feel inclined to have them solved.
The Final Push
When they discover that the product is able to solve them and how exactly it can solve them, this is when they question whether to make the purchase or not.
See how the bridge page can help push them toward that purchase? By building trust with your followers, you are establishing a strong friendship with them that is so great that they instantly think of you when they see the product. Because they know you recommend it to them, they make that final push to buy.
Now the sales funnel has done its job. The prospect becomes a paying customer and you just made money from making a sale with your sales funnel.
And this is how the three pages of a sales funnel work together to sell a product to your followers.
How Can I Build a Sales Funnel?
If building your own sales funnel sounds exciting for you and your online business, the good news is there are several programs that make it easy for you to build your own sales funnel.
However, it will take a somewhat pricey investment. Remember that I mentioned earlier that a sales funnel can dramatically change how your followers see you and thus feel more inclined to make more sales, earning you more money. So a sales funnel is definitely an investment worth paying for!
With that in mind, here are three good websites where you can start investing in building a sales funnel.
Leadpages
It’s simple, it’s drag and drop, and it’s quick and easy. Leadpages can create striking landing pages for your sales funnels with minimal effort. It does come with a 14-day free trial and you don’t need your card to get the trial started!
Again, you can create the appropriate pages for your sales funnel. Once you do, you have nice, clean, and speedy pages that all your leads will really enjoy going through.
What’s cool about Leadpages is that, as a beginner, they are offering you to start out small with one website at only $15 a month! They do have bigger pricing plans that offer more features that can help with your online business as well.
Leadpages is definitely a great choice to make sales funnels for beginners.
Builderall
Builderall is an online entrepreneur’s toolbox! In addition to allowing you to build simply amazing sales funnels, you can also do email marketing and create membership areas using this powerful all-in-one software.
Like ClickFunnels, you’re able to easily put together the pages for your sales funnel and you’re also able to plug those pages together to create an attractive sales funnel. Then you also have Builderall’s range of tools and services that you can add on to your sales funnel and boost your online business even further.
You can start a 14-day free trial of Builderall without needing your card! After the trial, it’s only $20 a month to gain access to all these epic tools that can help you create the awesome sales funnel your online business truly needs.
ClickFunnels
This is undoubtedly the first website that comes to mind when it comes to investing in an online business. ClickFunnels was started by someone who believed that building simple webpages should be done as simply and easily as possible.
ClickFunnels uses a drag-and-drop editor that allows you to drag elements from the screen and drop them onto one of your funnel’s pages. You can also easily set up ClickFunnels so that each page of your funnel goes together as well as connect one of your email marketing services to ClickFunnels.
However, as simple and awesome as it is, ClickFunnels is very, very, very pricey. You can start using ClickFunnels for as low as $99 a month. They do offer a 14-day free trial, but you will need to plug in your card in order to do so.
Final Words
This concludes this article on everything you need to know about the sales funnel. I do hope all this information gave you a better idea of how you can succeed quicker in your own online business.
There are other tips I do have on how you can get your online business going in the right direction. Or, if you already have an online business, how you can improve your chances of success. An online brand is important to your online business, so if you haven’t built an online brand, you might want to check out my tips on building an online brand.
Reading is also important for you as an online entrepreneur, and there are six books I recommend you read that you might be interested in.
But that’s going to do it for this article. I hope this gave you a lot of inspiration and insights on how a sales funnel can improve your online business. Now’s the time to get started with building your own sales funnel, and remember that the more value you give to your followers, the more people will trust you and buy whatever you have to sell.