Expert Knowledge

What is a sales funnel template?

A sales funnel template is a design of a consumer’s journey to becoming a customer and what happens after they do.

A sales funnel helps salespeople guide potential customers through their buying journey and provides key insights into customer behaviors. A sales funnel is a visual representation of that customer journey.

People do not just buy whatever they see or like, they buy because of feeling or connection or according to their need.

Before people can bring out their credit card to pay or before starting the checkout process online, there is a process to follow or pass through. Deciding to buy can be immediate, days, weeks, or even months.

We cannot point to one particular reason why this happens, but we are 100 percent sure that the decision-making process exit and is a reality. So, as smart and wise entrepreneurs or marketers all we have to do is to understand how the decision-making process works.

Understanding the decision-making process will enable us to meet our audience at different stages of their decision-making process with the right product, marketing message, and offer.

With the understanding of this process, a sales funnel template can help us draw or map out the most probable path our audience will pass or go through before becoming paying customers.

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Sales Funnel as a Journey

A sales funnel template is a design of a consumer’s journey to becoming a customer and what happens after they do.

Let's think of it as a whiteboard where we strategically map out, in drawing, our potential customer’s journey. We simulate this process from when they are thinking something they need to the point where they eventually find our business or offer.

Our customer journey could look something like this:

First, our prospect identifies a need – “I need a pair of shoes”
They go on to Instagram or Pinterest to search for inspiration
They search for the item
After browsing through different shoes and designs, they find something interesting
Eventually, they find something promising and visit the vendor’s website
They add their new favorite product to the shopping cart and check out

The customer journey is sometimes more complex than what we have highlighted above, but the illustration shows the basics of the customer journey process.

Our sales funnel template helps our business show up at every stage or step of the customer’s journey leading up to when they finally make a purchase.

With the explanation we have given above, we now know what exactly a sales funnel template is, let's take our learning further by moving on to the seven-step sales funnel we can use for our business.

Before we move on, the sales funnel template is universal, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling digital products like e-books or online courses. Or you’re a professional doing online consulting and coaching. Even if you’re selling a service that’s delivered offline, like self-defense classes.

This sales funnel template will help you generate more leads and sales for your business.

Expert Knowledge: enjoy free tools and tips for developing your sales funnel template, check out the ClickFunnels: Enabling People To Grow Their Companies Through Sales Funnels

The universal 7-step sales funnel template.

Generate targeted traffic
Send the traffic to a landing page
Convert visitors into subscribers and leads
Get them to love your free tool or content
Get them to become customers
If they abandoned cart, bring them back
Get paid

No matter the nature of our business, the prospective customer will usually go through these seven (or similar) steps before they become paying customer:

The image above shows the seven steps sales funnel template.

Using the sales funnel highlighted above can single-handedly take our business to whatever level of growth we want it. But let's first understand how the seven steps sales funnel works.

Generate targeted traffic.

What is targeted traffic?

Targeted traffic is site visitors who are most likely interested in our product or service and would be interested in buying it.

The number of traffic we get determines the number of sales we get. But the hardest and most funny part of this get traffic has sales is it’s not that simple because we may generate a lot of traffic to our site or online store and struggle to convert any of them into customers. This is what I called untargeted traffic, we don’t need them because they never convert to sales.

To get targeted visitors, we need to know where our customers converge every seconds and minutes. Their convergence like online communities, social media, online or social media groups they belong to, search engines they use and the keyword they search with, and the influences they follow.

As a business that needs targeted visitors, we go to those places and give them a good reason to visit our site or online store. Good reason to visit means we will need to show them free valuable resources (e.g. e-book, software, video content, and so on) they can get on our site or online store. This is called a lead magnet.

What is a lead magnet?

An incentive our target audience is ready to trade their email address for.

Once our targeted visitors land on our site or online store, our sales funnel is already in motion. And this is where step two comes in.

Send traffic to a SPECIFIC high-converting landing page

What is a landing page?

It is a page that we specifically designed to convert visitors into leads or customers.

One costly mistake that ruins our sales at this point is sending our visitors to a generic web page like our homepage or some other “non-landing page.”

Our site homepage or any other non-landing page is simply not designed to be part of the customer journey process. They are not designed to send visitors to the next stage of their buying journey.

This is what would happen when we send our visitors to a non-landing page, they will land on the page and keep looking around because a non-landing page is not focused on a SPECIFIC TOPIC OR CONTENT. It is most case link to several pages like about, contact us, product/service, blog and so on.

An example of a non-landing page is shown below.

Non-landing page.

Labeling the home page as non-landing page does not mean it is not necessary, you can’t have a good site without a home page. The homepage is not designed to help us convert as many visitors as a SPECIFIC LANDING PAGE into leads.

A landing page, focuses on a single topic and its goal is to speak to our visitors and persuade them to accept a SPECIFIC OFFER; so it looks something like this:

A Landing Page

When we send visitors to a landing page like this, they know what it’s for and the page helps their minds to focus on thinking about one thing only: our offer.

Visitors have only two option when they get to a landing page:

Sign up for our offer and give us their email or
Exit our squeeze page.

And this is exactly what you want to do in your lead generation strategy.

Convert visitors into subscribers & leads

It's one thing to send visitors to a landing page. It's another thing entirely to convert those visitors into subscribers and leads.

When people get on our page, they're immediately thinking…

• "Is this offer worth my time?"

• "Should I sign up because I really need this stuff?"

• "Or should I just leave?"

They'll do one of these and you can influence (and speed up) their decision by what you have on the squeeze page – especially:

· Your headline – The headline must immediately grab attention

· body copy – Must promise to solve a challenge or add value to the visitors

· and calls to action (CTAs) – Must be clear and straight to the point.

You need to make sure these three landing page elements convey strong reasons why they need to sign up for your offer.

Make your leads and subscribers true fans

To make your leads or subscribers true fans, you need to deliver on the promise you made to convince them to become leads.

So, for example, if you promised them a marketing ROI calculator and they signed up for it, make sure the calculator works so well that they want to tell everyone they know about it. Or if you promised them a course on affiliate blogging, you need to make sure that they get so much value from it that they'll be rushing to share it with their friends and connections.

If we deliver on our promise to our subscribers, chances are they'll begin to trust us and become raving fans.

Expert Knowledge: The thank-you page that our leads see after they've signed up can be a great place to start building that true loyalty. Use it strategically to reinforce the positive emotions you've already managed to build and delight them even more, check out the ClickFunnels: Enabling People To Grow Their Companies Through Sales Funnels

Get fans to become customers

Our main goal with any sales funnel template is to make money.

After we have drawn visitors to our site and converted them into subscribers/fans, we need to convert them into customers. A simple strategy we can use to sell is to create a sales page.

What is a sales page?

It's a page that will be squarely focused on convincing our subscribers to buy what we are selling.

We need four main elements on our sales page:

1. Who we are selling to

2. What we are selling

3. Testimonials from our past or current customers

4. Our "Buy now" button or CTA

Here's an example of a good sales page from YouTube — with the four elements above in action:

The sales page headline reads, "YouTube Advertising Strategies Course"

So it's clearly targeted at people who want to learn how to run ads on YouTube.

The benefits their students get from their course

Testimonials from their current/past students

And then their "subscribe now" CTA

With these four elements, you can easily convert subscribers (and even visitors who aren't subscribers) into customers.

Bring them back if they abandon their cart

For most businesses, people start to have doubts when it's time to draw out their wallets.

Several questions and thoughts start to race their minds:

• "I hope I am right about this service."

• "If I make the wrong decision, it'll cost me a lot!"

• "Wait a minute, shouldn't I be checking other alternatives to this product?"

You have one goal: to reassure them. We need to reassure potential customers who abandon our services or checkout page that our business is worth their money.

We can retarget our visitors who abandon our cart and checkout in two ways –

· retarget your audience using paid ads

· emails

The visitor's e-mail we collected in step 2 allows us to know where they are in their buying journey, so when they're on our checkout or service page but leave without buying, we can follow up with them, persuading them to make a purchase decision.

Close the sale!

Our end goal with any sales funnel template is to make money.

So now that we have the template, it's all ours! We should use it and increase our sales.

We need to know how to create a high-converting sales page and write persuasively and convince our subscriber and cart abandoners that our business is absolutely worth their money, check out the ClickFunnels: Enabling People To Grow Their Companies Through Sales Funnels