Use a Sales Funnel to Grow Your Business

Sales funnel – what do those words even mean? If you don’t know it’s okay because most don’t and even some that think they do – well….they don’t.

So what is it? Depending on who you ask you can get a very simple answer or a very complicated one. I’m a huge fan of keeping things simple.

The proper definition of a sales funnel is a marketing system or process. It’s the “ideal” process you intend your customers to experience as they go from Prospect to Lead to Customer to Repeat Buyer.

Your entry point is the first interaction you will have with a lead and what happens in the transaction depends on how you’re driving traffic to your offer and of course what the objective is.

If you really want great success with sales funnels one of the major tools that should be in your arsenal as a traffic driver is Facebook ads. Click here to check out a great article on the many benefits of Facebook ads and how they can grow your business.

Sales Funnel Step 1: Decide on target & objective

The idea is to attract someone to your funnel by offering them something of value. If they decide to sign up for it or purchase it, guess what?

They enter your sales funnel!

There are two types of actions to choose from when you create a sales funnel: To generate a lead, or make a sale.

1. To generate a lead: Your target is attracted to a specific piece of information or other free offer you have, once they sign up for it they have become a sales lead.
2. To make a sale: They are attracted to a specific sale, discount or promotion. Once they purchase, they are now your new customer.

There are also two types of leads you’ll be attracting into your funnel, cold or warm.

1. Cold lead: If they are unfamiliar with your business at first interaction this is considered a cold lead.
2. Warm lead: The second interaction meaning they have already visited your website or know of your business. This is considered a “warm” lead. For example, if you’re using Facebook custom audiences you’re targeting warm leads.

Unless you have what I call a shiny-babble business (clothing, cosmetics, electronics etc…) it’s difficult to make sales with cold leads. It’s not impossible, but you’re much more likely to have success if your lead is warm.

If your objective is to generate a lead you’ll offer your target market something valuable to them like an eBook, a gift certificate, or free invite to an event etc. in exchange for their email address.

Once you have their email address they have become a part of  your audience and over time you will market to them in hopes they’ll eventually become a customer.

Based on all the various types of businesses and Facebook ad objections a sales funnel could have a ton of different scenarios.

It would also be IMPOSSIBLE for me to outline all of them!

Instead, I’m going to create a hard example for you to get the hang of it. Hopefully, my example will give you ideas on how to create your own.

Business Example: Fredrickson Dental PC of Seattle WA

Note: The business example used in this sales funnel is purely fictional and for educational purposes only.

Target: Males and Females, age 42-65, residing in high income areas

Objective: Grow new patient base and expand profit margin in cosmetic procedures category

The sales funnel will be designed to target middle-aged, high income individuals interested in cosmetic procedures.

Sales Funnel Step 2: Do the research

We’ve determined our target and objective, now it’s time to figure out what our offer is going to be. Once we decide the offer then we can decide how to structure our funnel.

Here is the place where most business owners go wrong. They are focused on what they want to sell.

The real focus should be – what do people want to buy?

Here are points of consideration:

1. What are your highest purchased products in this category?
2. What cosmetic services do patients inquire about the most?
3. When you make offers using email marketing which ones get the most opens, clicks and calls for appointments?
4. Do a Google search and see how other dentists are positioning their offers for that particular product.

I can go on and on here basically you just need to make sure your offer decision is based on solid evidence.

We use a great tool called BuzzSumo , it tells us types of articles on a specific topic and how many shares it got which lets us know what is popular. We use this data to generate ideas.

Note: I need to mention this tool isn’t free, it has a monthly fee.

Below is a Teeth Whitening Kit Offer that received over 15,000 shares! They used Click Funnels and the majority of the shares are from Facebook which tells me this was a sales funnel which is GOLD to find!

Just because this offer was popular in the UK does this mean ours will be too?

NO. It doesn’t mean that.

Here’s the thing about marketing, we don’t know how things are going to go until we work at it. We use these tools just to get ideas and to make a decision based on a consensus which as a result can increase the chances of success.

Bottom line, we have to do something to grow our businesses which means we have to take chances. So it’s better to lean on some type of research than just to pull an idea out of a hat.

I also checked with some other tools and learned the words teeth whitening have a very high search value in general. (Tons of people conduct an Internet search for this.)

Basically, we’ve proven this could be a great idea for us to use in our sales funnel.

Research Finding: Teeth whitening is a highly sought out service that proves to be high value to the patient.

We’re targeting a middle-aged, high income person and if you look at demographics people who are wealthy also tend to be more health conscious. A wealthy person will be interested in looking younger, being more attractive, and they can afford higher end cosmetic procedures.

The next question is what will be our offer?

Sales Funnel Step 3: Decide on the offer 

We’ve decided teeth whitening is going to be our focus for this particular sales funnel, now it’s just a matter of specifics.

What is a specific offer that would be valuable enough to attract a new patient?

We decided to offer a $400 new patient gift certificate that would apply to a Venus White Max Teeth Whitening System.

Research has proven to me there is a higher perceived value when you use the words “gift certificate” versus a percentage off, discount, or promotion.

We now have decided our offer! Now it’s time to create the point of entry. 

When I am doing this with a client I will write out everything on paper first, sort of how an architect designs a house before it’s built.

I will even go as far as to draw the ads on a sheet of paper and decide what the edit is going to be before I even start the process of building an ad. It really helps to make the process go much smoother and faster.

Sales Funnel Step 4: What is the process?

Let’s review what we have so far in building our sales funnel.

FIRST: We decided on our target and objective.

Target: Males and Females, age 42-65, residing in high income areas

Objective: Grow new patient base and expand profit margin in cosmetic procedures category

The sales funnel will be designed to target middle-aged, high income individuals interested in cosmetic procedures.

SECOND: We did the research to decide what our offer would be.

Research Finding: Teeth whitening is a highly sought out service that proves to be high value to the patient.

THIRD: Based on all the information we’ve gathered so far we decided our special offer.

Special Offer: A $400 new patient gift certificate that would apply to a Venus White Max Teeth Whitening System.

Now what is the process?

Here are the considerations:

1. What will be the point of entry for the funnel?
2. What will we use for a lead magnet?
3. Will we drive them straight to the offer OR to an informational point first, thus making them a warm lead versus a cold BEFORE we make our offer?

As I said before this is a learning process and NOT a guaranteed one.

We have to experiment and test before we hit something that works well. Which means we make a decision to present the offer in a specific way and we just see how it goes from there. If it doesn’t go well after a two week period or so we’ll change it up and try something else.

I hate to confuse matters but occasionally we will even do a split campaign which means we set up the funnel two different ways to see which one performs best. But for now for the sake of education let’s just keep it simple.

The process will be:

1. Traffic Driver: Using a Facebook ad we will drive traffic to a blog post we have written about teeth whitening, the title will be; Whiten Your Teeth to Look Younger. This will be a very educational blog post for the reader and not salesy. At the end of the article there will be a link for the reader to inquire about our whitening system, it will be very subtle. It’s not our intention to catch them here but maybe some will enter our funnel early, we will experiment to find out.
2. Retarget Warm Leads: After a time we’ve determined we will retarget everyone that clicked through the first ad and went to our website with an additional ad containing our offer. (Using the Facebook Pixel we can retarget everyone that visited our website from the first ad we ran.) When they click through to the offer they will come to a form whereas they can either enter in their email address (which we really want) or they can just call to set up an appointment. Note: The offer has an expiration date.
3. Follow Up: Over a time period hopefully our funnel will generate email addresses we can add to our list. Eventually we will republish the blog post we wrote in an email newsletter and reactivate the offer to see if it brings in any additional appointments. In using email marketing to follow up with the sales leads you create from your ads you expand the investment you made in Facebook ads which is a critical consideration.

Okay now we have our process down! Once we have written our blog post it’s time to create the first Facebook ad!

Sales Funnel Step 5: Create blog post & ad for point of entry

We’ve created the blog post and below is the ad also created. When people click on the ad they will go straight to our blog post. Once they get to the bottom of the blog post there will be a small caption that asks if they are interested in a $400 new patient gift certificate that would apply to a Venus White Max Teeth Whitening System. They can call to schedule an appointment or schedule online if they are.

Here is what our point of entry Facebook ad will look like:

Note: Take note of the image used in this ad. The people in this photo are middle-aged. That is because for this particular funnel this is the age group I am trying to attract. The reason is they meet the financial demographic I am looking for, they are interested in and can afford cosmetic dentistry and usually have children as well which is a bonus.

It’s very important to think your ads all the way through if you want to attract your target market properly and seamlessly.

Sales Funnel Step 6: Retarget with offer

Everyone that clicked the ad and visited our blog post will be tracked with a Facebook pixel (a piece of code) that is placed on the website.

As I said before after the time frame determined, everyone that clicked on the first ad will be retargeted with an additional ad.

They are already familiar with the dental practice at this point, so this makes them a warm lead.

The retargeting ad will look something like this:

Anyone interested in the offer will click over to a form and at that point they can either call to schedule an appointment or put in their email address for someone to contact them.

This Facebook funnel campaign is small and simple – but very powerful. It’s also just one example of the many ways a sales funnel can be set up.

Additional Retargeting: I want to mention a very important point here about a retargeting ad. Often people will click through to the offer ad but for whatever reason don’t follow through. This happens more than people know. It baffles business owners and it’s a process carefully studied and tracked. Why didn’t the consumer buy? There is no simple answer to this question. Maybe the baby started crying, or they realized they’re late for work, or maybe they just decided they weren’t interested after all? It’s not a perfect science, again as I said it’s a learned one. As a result we will sometimes retarget the people we retargeted. 🙂 I know it’s confusing! (This is why you should hire someone like me to do it for you.) 🙂

This type of marketing is extremely effective and affordable however it takes constant measuring, testing and monitoring.

We monitor all of our client sales funnels daily!

We also like to launch multiple ads at once and see which images and copy gets more conversions so it’s definitely not a set-it-and-forget-it type thing. But as mentioned, the reward can be high.

Review, Monitor and Recreate Your Sales Funnels

If you want to use sales funnels to create a profitable business it will be an ongoing process.

It’s an experimental and follow through process. This is what stumps many – again people want a set-it-and-forget-it option which just doesn’t exist.

Otherwise, you can use the sit and pray method or just continue posting stuff on Facebook no one will ever see.

I also need to mention once again based on the business model the purpose and function of a sales funnel can look VERY different! There are too many variables to cover in one blog post.

Email Marketing Holds Hands with Your Sales Funnel

I can talk about how powerful email marketing is for hours and hours!

I can’t say enough about it! I am so shocked more business owners don’t use it.

As your sales funnel progresses you can enhance the investment you made in Facebook ads to grow your list by staying in touch with your audience via email.

If you grow your list – you grow your business!

When you send out a newsletter wait a few days and go back and read your reporting. You can see how many of your subscribers opened your newsletter, who read it multiple times, and who clicked through to your website or some other place they can further connect with your business.

Over time you’ll start to identify trends with your readers and see which topics they respond to the most.

This is marketing research at it’s finest! Priceless!

If you’re wondering what platform to use we use MailChimp for our client’s newsletters and love it. It’s very user friendly and free up to 2,000 email addresses. It’s a great value and they have tons of training resources to teach you how to use it. I recommend it whole-heartedly!

I hope you enjoyed reading about sales funnels! I hope you will put one into place for your business! Trust me, it will grow most businesses faster than any other marketing method I know!

Click here to contact me if you want help creating yours.