The Perfect Funnel Blueprint

One of the most important things to understand about building the perfect sales funnel is that there really is no “one size fits all” approach to what you’re talking about. Every business – and every offer – is unique unto itself, so you need to create a specialized experience that will guide someone through this journey at their own precise pace.

Having said that, if you are about to begin building the perfect sales funnel for your own business, there are a few key things that you’ll definitely want to keep in mind. 

Building the Perfect Funnel: An Overview

The first stage of your perfect funnel will also be, for many organizations, among the most important. This is when you’re strictly concerned with gathering information about your prospects as opposed to straight selling.

Your home page, sales pages and landing pages will be invaluable to that end. Here, you’re focused on educating your prospects. You need them to get a better sense of who you are, what you do and why it all matters so much. At that point, you can have them fill out an order form to continue the relationship you’re in the process of building.

But again, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re devoting your attention to selling your products and services. That comes later. Your order form can simply get them to request more information, or provide their contact information in exchange for another piece of high value content like an eBook or white paper.

Once that is completed, you can then move onto the “Convert” stage of the funnel. As the name suggests, this is where you’re moving them one step closer towards making that eventual purchase or taking whatever action you desire. 

Throughout all of these stages, the most critical thing to focus on is getting your prospect to click and convert on the order form. Even though they’re not quite through to the opposite end of the sales funnel yet, the additional offer certainly won’t hurt your front-end conversions. Likewise, you’re still connecting initial data that you need to get even more specific and personal with your interactions later on. This also all plays directly into the “commitment and consistency” persuasion principle. You’re essentially training someone to expect certain things out of your relationship with you and the more effectively you’re able to do that, the higher your chances are at turning them into a paying customer down the road. 

All of this also has the added benefit of building out multiple steps to create a return path. By getting people to become almost hyper-focused on a single action, you’re re-instating what they’re buying and how much they’ll be spending. During this process, you’re also capitalizing on certain trust factors and other locks that don’t just get them to enter into a relationship with you, but that will also keep them there indefinitely.

At that point, you can move onto the part of the process where you work to increase the value that you’re bringing to people as much as possible. Again, you’ll want to use multiple offers but you’ll also be able to leverage this as an opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell additional items based on what you already know about someone. From your perspective, it’s a chance to drive additional revenue. From the perspective of your lead, you’re helping someone get even more value out of this experience – thus creating a “win-win” situation for everyone involved.

Finally, you can move onto the “validate and offer” stage. Here, you’re focused on closing the deal. Someone has gladly participated in the journey you’ve asked them to go on up to this point. This is where you come right out and try to sell them on your products, your services and (ultimately) your brand. 

The Three Tricks to Supercharge Front-End Pages

To take full advantage of this process, there are a few key things you’ll want to keep in mind. Chief among them is the “one question to rule them all” – that is, asking someone a single question that sort of contextualizes your offer in a way that also gets them eager to learn more.

Having a single “yes” or “no” question on your sales or landing pages will absolutely not hurt your front-end conversions in any way. It’s also a great way to really stand out to the particular audience you’re speaking to. Answering the question, from the perspective of your lead, is so easy that it’s almost a reflex. Likewise, it will be easy to anticipate a response for your campaigns and your CRM (customer relationship management) as well.

Along the same lines, you’ll also need to learn when and what to pop – that is, when to use targeted pop-ups at strategic points of your interactions to your advantage. Pop-ups are the perfect chance to both capture the attention fo people who are already invested in the content on your page, or even those who may already be on their way out. Coupons can certainly work in this situation, but they’re not really advisable because they’re fairly lazy. 

Instead, you’ll want to use this as an opportunity to push content or new promotions that you think people may be interested in based on the data you’ve already collected. Really, this technique is all about targeting – and if you play your cards right, you’ll enjoy a tremendous amount of success because of it.

Finally, you’ll want to gain a better understanding of the concept of order bumps. Yet again, you’re putting out an additional offer that will not hurt your front-end conversions in any way. This is also a proven method to help boost the average value of each order, provided that your new offer plays directly to the interests that people have already shown by visiting your page in the first place.

For the absolute best results, you’ll want to keep this order as simple as possible. You also need to test, test and test some more to make sure that you’re getting the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time.

In the end, the perfect sales funnel is something that will change depending on the organization – and it may even vary depending on the product or service you’re selling. But if you work hard to create that ideal funnel, you have so much more than just a proven sales process. You have an opportunity to take someone from potential lead to paying customer to loyal brand advocate -which may very well be the most important benefit of all. 

Subscribe to the T&C Newsletter

Proven, actionable marketing tactics delivered straight to your inbox. Get instant access to the latest tools and tactics (including case studies, toolkits, checklists, swipe files, how-to-blueprints) so that you can generate MORE traffic.... and convert that traffic into sales.

T&C newsletter

Tracey Daniel

Sign Up

Be the first to know

Click the button below to sign up to be the first to know about new speakers, special discounts and special networking and social events for Traffic & Conversion Summit 2024