The digital era has given consumers more access to information, and most, if not all, are doing online research before making a purchase decision. This has, in turn, raised marketing competition and is now leading businesses to lower prices on products to net more customers.

How do you compete with online pricing wars? Sales funnels! Sales funnels are essential to driving more conversions that let you strategically capture leads and upsell your customers.

According to HubSpot, only 22 percent of businesses are happy with their conversion rate. And 63 percent of businesses find generating leads and traffic the most challenging.

How can you set your business apart from the above statistics? Here are a few essentials that you can use to build a strong sales funnel to exponentially increase profits.

Create Compelling Awareness

The top of the funnel is where your traffic begins. Optimizing the top of your funnel sets up the beginning of the buyer journey for your target audience. You first need to develop quality content that’s optimized for search. Additionally, think through where your site’s visitors are coming from.

Many marketers track ROI in terms of the amount of traffic that they get, but that’s only part of the story. Having more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more conversions. You should look beyond analytical data to identify how many people are engaging with your content.

Focus on areas that are driving conversions, as well as the type of content that is resonating the most with your audience. Creating content that you think appeals to everyone may end up being bland and uninspiring.

To ensure your marketing strategy is working, develop awareness stage content that helps you measure engagement. Examine shares, comments, time on page, and the total number of pages people visit to get a clear picture. This shows that your content is being searched for and digested.

Generate More Conversions

Once you have consumer attention, you’ll need to maintain it. The problem is that an abundance of content gets read and shared, but doesn’t convert. To solve this problem, you need to know the reasons why people choose not to take action. This can be done via these essential elements:

  • Immediate need for the product or service
  • Enough money to make the purchase
  • The issue of not having confidence to buy

The conversion strategy can easily fail if there’s no content that leads consumers on a buying journey. Simple conversion hacks, such as having the next step in place after a customer takes action, how soon they receive the first contact from you using email confirmations, newsletters, or discount codes, or how many of the items remain and so on.

Consider these questions to generate more conversions:

  • How can you build a sense of urgency on your offer to make people take immediate action?
  • How can you build fast rapport with customers?
  • Can you use influencer marketing via third party reviews and testimonials?
  • Is there a convincing guarantee or comparison between your product and your competitors’ products?

If customers are leaving your funnel during the checkout process, they may have convinced themselves that your products or services are too expensive and not worth the investment.

Make Acquisition A Priority

Churning customers down your funnel and simply saying thank you may not be the most effective method. In fact, it is the most critical part of your sales funnel. Making conversions doesn’t mean you can keep customers without further contact.

By setting up a sales funnel that focuses on acquisition with a longer consumer lifecycle in mind should be a priority. Having returning visitors, higher email CTR rates, and additional orders are valuable.

Your website is also an asset. User experience and site navigation is an important aspect of creating a strong sales funnel. One common issue could be your site theme. If you don’t feel your theme is optimized for max conversions, you may need to switch your theme.

“Consider creating a staging site to test out the theme before adding it to your live site,” DreamHost explained. “This is a particularly important step if you’re switching themes on an already established site so you can see exactly how it will look and find out if it causes any compatibility issues or other problems.”

To make this happen, support your other sales funnel efforts by sending case studies, trending news, and suggestions that showcase deals for your customers. Increase those touch points to boost customer retention and ultimately have an impact on your bottom line.

In Conclusion

Setting up a powerful sales funnel is vital to any business. Not only will you set your business apart from your competitors, you can also see an increase in conversions.

Volume, average order size, value, and other issues could be clogging your sales funnel, but you can easily do a bit of funnel house cleaning.

Develop a content marketing strategy that supports your business website sales funnel for maximum results. Be sure to track metrics and tweak your sales funnel to get the best ROI on your marketing efforts.