.jpg)
A prospect that drops out of the funnel without buying hurts. Understanding a customer's behavior helps you determine how you will interact with them and lead them to make a purchase. That's how you avoid prospects dropping.
In short, define your sales funnel and stick to it. It guarantees better results. Sales funnel refers to all the steps a prospect/lead goes through to reach the time of purchasing and becoming a customer.
At the top of your funnel are prospects and potential customers who have come across your business. Some may decide to walk into your store and actually check out what you are selling. This is the next step in the funnel. When they go beyond checking out to selecting and purchasing, they have completed the funnel.
Prospects/leads may or may not purchase your product on the very first day of visiting your website or store. To reach the extent of purchasing your product, you and they must have gone through a process to build confidence, trustworthiness, demonstrations of the product, several meetings, and appointments.
Understanding your sales funnel is important because it helps you recognize your weaknesses, the stages through which prospects drop out, and why they drop out. It can also help you improve the number of people who go up to the sales funnel's last step.
Stages Of A Sales Funnel
It’s easy to remember the four sales funnel stages by the acronym AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action.
(a) Awareness
This is the first stage. Here, the prospect gets to know about the existence of the services or the products you offer. This could be through social media adverts, over the radios and TVs, from friends, word of mouth, from your SEO, direct emails, online ads, videos, whitepapers and e-books, and newsletters and signups, plus other various ways.
The prospect will move further depending on why and how you market or sell your product or service. This is the courtship stage. All the avenues you use to make them aware of your business must be enticing them to get them intrigued.
(b) Interest
Because the prospect is aware of their problem and is looking for a solution, they are trying to see how perfect a fitting you two will be. All options are on the table, and they making comparisons and contrasts. This is the time to swoop in with incredible content that helps them but doesn’t sell to them. Give helpful advice to lead them to make informed decisions.
(c) Decision
This is where you get to judge if your information in the "interest" stage paid off. The prospect has a few options to choose from, and hopefully, your business is part of the last options standing. Make sure to incentivize this stage. Include incentives like free shipping, a bonus product/service, promotion, free delivery, a discount.
(d) Action
This is the final stage of the sales funnel, where a prospect decides to buy and become a part of your business ecosystem and family.
This is not the last of this stage. You want to maximize it into multiple purchases. In other words, you’re focusing on customer retention. Express gratitude for the purchase, invite your customer to reach out with feedback, and make yourself available for tech support, if applicable. the customer or
How to build a sales funnel for your business
Your messages and actions must be right and appropriate for a particular stage.
1. Build a sounding website and a landing page
There are so many ways prospects learn about a company. One way could be through online ads. When a prospect sees an ad and clicks on it, they should be able to e redirected to your landing page. The landing page's main aim is to drive conversion and traffic to a site and get people to take action while on the page.
Read More: The Best Landing Page Software
Your website should be good enough to impress a prospect and show them that your product could probably be the best solution to address their concern.
2. Give valuable offers to your prospects
Prospects and customers relate with businesses where they feel loved. So, to make their decision to purchase from you or stick with you easier, throw in some incentives. Incentives like free shipping, a bonus product/service, promotion, free delivery, a discount.
3. Start making promotions to the lead/prospect
When their interest has been peaked and contact information shared, you can go ahead to send them more information about how your product is the best fit for them.
4. Boost/recommend or persuade a prospect to buy a product and more.
You could offer free samples for use to push the action, demonstrate how a product works, assure them of a well-packaged product, and amazing product discounts upon making a heavy purchase.
5. Continue to follow up
After the action is taken, do some follow-up. Find out their experience from using it, and subtly share other products with them. Then, go ahead and ask for those referrals too.
Finally, sales funnel can be a hero to your business if you embrace it and its management; I recommend startups to look up to this if they want to grow their businesses fast and in a short while.
Here is what your startup needs - MonkeyPesa; From conducting market research to writing and executing your business plan, from determining the company name to registration, from business structure to legalities, sign up and follow MonkeyPesa for all your information.