As an online entrepreneur, webmaster, content creator, or small business owner, you must be familiar with the term “sales funnel.” If it’s not, you need to learn about it immediately. Although it sounds technical, you can build a sales funnel using WordPress in around ten hours, even as a newbie.
Essentially, a sales funnel describes the process of converting a website visitor into a paying customer. It encompasses every step the average user takes to make a purchase from your business. A well-implemented sales funnel generates more sales.
That said, let’s dig deeper into the matter and learn how to build an effective sales funnel.
Sales Funnels At Glance
You must work intensively to persuade people to open their wallets and trust your business. Many alternatives to your products and services are just a click away. Potential customers will leave your website if faced with even a small inconvenience. You must do everything possible to reduce friction during the buying process. The more polished the buyer experience, the more sales your business will generate.
A refined sales funnel is necessary to convert site visitors into a loyal customer base. The sales funnel helps you better understand customers’ behavior and pain points. More or less, you have involuntarily applied a sales funnel to your business, but you have to adopt a professional approach to improve the revenue.
There are many types of sales funnels, but the most frequently used is the AIDA model, developed by St Elmo Lewis back in 1898. As you see, customer behavior hasn’t changed too much in the past century, so it is worth investing your time to learn more about it.
The AIDA model consists of four stages:
- Awareness/Attention. As the name suggests, individuals first become aware of your business.
- Interest. Some of the people who are aware of your business are interested in what you sell. They explore the market, look at alternatives, and are receptive to learning more about your products and services.
- Decision. At this stage, the potential customers are on the brink of buying from you. Sadly, not all of them will, due to various reasons like dissatisfaction with your offering, a better alternative, or a lack of money.
- Action. The lead is ready to buy from you and completes the checkout process.
Main Benefits of a Sales Funnel
You don’t build sales funnels just for the sake of it. Your business will blossom thanks to the following benefits of a well-done sales funnel:
- Improved conversion rate. Thanks to a sales funnel model, you have a better idea about the bottlenecks in the buying process. Once you’ve identified the bottlenecks, you know where to improve the customer experience.
- Sales on steroids. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to build a sales funnel using WordPress. You can automate some tasks by using professional tools aimed to capture leads and boost conversions.
- Enhanced customer experience. With a sales funnel, the customer experience will be improved in a structured manner. In most cases, chaotic changes to the customer experience drive bad results.
- Loyal customers and brand ambassadors. The sales funnel helps you serve and delight the target audience. The sales funnel is the blueprint needed to create and deliver content for customers in each stage. Step by step, you will earn the trust of customers, some of whom will turn into repeat clients. From there, loyal customers may turn into brand ambassadors—people who will speak highly about your brand to their friends and collaborators.
Building a Sales Funnel – The Foundation
Let’s assume that you either run a WordPress website or plan to launch one. To some extent, your website is part of the sales funnel. Therefore, each aspect of it influences the stages of the sales funnel. The website host impacts the uptime, security, and speed. Obviously, prospects can’t move into the awareness stage unless your site is up! The same is true for loading speed—no one will enter the awareness stage if they need to wait for ages for your website to load. The WordPress theme and the layout design are crucial as well. Visitors are more likely to buy from you if your layout is modern and good-looking.
Your website is the foundation of a good sales funnel performance. A poor WordPress site can’t have a high conversion rate. As a result, you should improve your website performance before implementing a solid sales funnel.
How to Make a Sales Funnel in WordPress
Numerous business models exist, but let’s imagine that your online business consists in selling products and services by using the WooCommerce plugin.
Once your online business is running and visitors are able to buy products and services, you must set up a sales funnel. The technical implementation of a sales funnel using WordPress varies due to the different business models and tools available. A pretty standard sales funnel requires the construction of the following:
- A high-converting landing page
- A smooth checkout page and
- An unforgettable “Thank You” page.
High-Converting Landing Page
A landing page is no different than a common web page from a technical perspective. Yet, it has a clear purpose from a marketing sales point: to convert as many people as possible. You have visited countless landing pages but most likely ignored them. For example, you clicked on a Google ad and you were directed to a landing page.
The performance of a landing page heavily relies on the conversion rate — the number of people who clicked on the call-to-action button versus the total number of landing page visitors. Other relevant factors to the success of a performing landing page are its content and design, the loading speed, and the quality of the product/services to sell.
Luckily, WordPress has plenty of solutions for designing top-class landing pages. If you want to build a landing page from scratch, you can use Gutenberg directly from your WordPress dashboard. Add blocks to the layout, customize them, and test the design against best practices, and your landing page is ready to shine. Alternatively, you have no restrictions to using your favorite page builders, like Elementor or Beaver Builder. Finally, you can purchase dedicated plugins for landing page creation.
Smooth Checkout Page
WooCommerce is the most used ecommerce plugin and it comes by default with a checkout page. Other ecommerce plugins do the same, while another dozen plugins help you improve the checkout process. The checkout pages generated by these plugins are well-designed but aren’t adapted to your buyers’ profiles. It’s your duty to customize them and streamline the customer journey. No one has the recipe for the ideal checkout page for your site, there are only general ideas and previous experiences of the webmasters. Therefore, you have to constantly test different schemas and keep only the positive implementations. Don’t forget, developing a high-converting sales funnel takes time and resources!
Unforgettable “Thank You” Page
Ignoring your customers after their first purchase is a huge no-no! While the sales funnel is complete once they ordered a product or a service from you, customer retention is crucial. It’s cheaper to retain clients than acquire new customers. An unforgettable “Thank You” page is the first step in nurturing the relationship with paying customers. Let them know that you value their trust and you will do everything possible to satisfy their expectations.
Tools to Create Landing Pages
Gutenberg is powerful enough for designing great pages, but it takes time to build a sales funnel using WordPress. Even experienced webmasters don’t want to invest the time and energy needed to create funnels from scratch. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to create a sales funnel, developed by teams of coders, designers, and marketers. These products ensure a good conversion rate and are visually appealing. Here are a few suggestions you should use to create a sales funnel using WordPress.
Cartflows
Webmasters, content creators, marketers, professional reviewers, and regular users all speak highly about Cartflows. The tagline on the Cartflows webpage—“an all-in-one WordPress funnel builder plugin”—isn’t an exaggeration. The templates cover a large selection of purposes, so you will find one for your project. If you have a favorite page builder you can’t live without, you can filter the templates based on compatibility with most page builders.
Head to the WordPress repository and download the free version of the plugin. Install, activate, and test its potential. Upgrade to the premium version if you need extended functionality. Cartflows has a user-friendly interface, and creating a sales funnel is intuitive. Professionals and amateurs alike appreciate this plugin. In addition to the standard sale funnel, Carflows does the following:
- A/B split testing
- Lead generation
- Upsell and cross-sell
- One-click order bumps
- Accurate insights about buyers’ behavior – much needed for your marketing campaigns.
Elementor
This plugin doesn’t need an introduction; it’s the leading WordPress page builder plugin. It works for literally any job, including building product pages and effective sales funnels. Some templates are specially designed to work as landing, thank you, and sales pages. Besides, Elementor creates pop-ups that are excellent at collecting email addresses and displaying the latest discounts on your website. In spite of its complexity, Elementor is a great choice even for aspiring WordPress users.
FunnelKit
FunnelKit is a 360-degree marketing plugin, much needed for online businesses. You can easily create a sales funnel without writing a single line of code. The templates are great and filterable based on the number of pages included. For instance, look in the library for a 2-step template if you want to improve the checkout and thank page. Others include an upsell page and a landing page template. Like Cartflows, this plugin packages useful features to enhance the sales funnels.
An outstanding FunnelKit feature is the number and usefulness of the automated tasks performed. You can automate numerous things, including
- abandoned cart reminders
- discounts for the next purchases
- first purchase anniversary
- follow-up email series
These automated tasks save you time and impress customers, increasing your customer retention rate. Besides, FunnelKit streamlines the sales process which is mandatory for any online store.
SeedProd
Want a tool to build your website and the sales funnel? Are you interested in using a page builder that offers you nearly unlimited powers to build key pages quickly? SeedProd is a page builder centered on the needs of both webmasters and marketers. The plugin can create solid sales funnels, as well as collect email addresses, integrate with email service providers, and enable Google Analytics tracking. The cherry on the cake is that you don’t need coding skills to use SeedProd, the drag-and-drop editor is enough to create sales funnels.
Over to You
Now, you have a better understanding of how to build a sales funnel for your WordPress website. Unfortunately, there is no perfect sales funnel because, in marketing, everything is perfectible and there is always room for improvement. Sometimes, a small tweak boosts your sales unexpectedly. Implement a sales funnel on your site, and constantly try to improve it. Don’t be upset when you fail! It’s just a part of finding out what will work for your sales funnel. Good luck in your quest of delighting your paying customers!