Building your first sales funnel can be intimidating, especially if you have no idea where to start.
There are so many things you need to keep in mind when creating a powerful sales funnel that increases your revenue, and missing one step can derail your efforts completely.
We decided to lay out all of the steps you need to take to build your first sales funnel and all of its essential components.
Let’s get started!
How To Start Building Your First Sales Funnel
Start with the end in mind
It may seem counterintuitive to start with the end in mind, but to start building your first sales funnel, you need to determine where you’re going before you can choose the path you’ll take. Make sense?
Okay good.
You’ll first want to consider your current business goals.
Increase your revenue by 20%?
Increase your amount of coaching clients?
Launch a brand new product?
Once that’s determined, what is it that you are actually selling? List out the products or services you are specifically trying to promote. My advice would be to start with 1 product or service to get started.
The whole purpose of doing this exercise is to hone in on exactly what product or service you are creating the sales funnel and landing page for so you can create an effective sales funnel.
Map out the customer journey
Still working backwards, the next step in building your first sales funnel is to map out the journey the customer takes right before purchasing.
Say you’re a business coach and you want to increase the amount of coaching clients you have.
A great way to get people into a sales funnel would be to create a landing page offering a free download (ebook, checklist, workbook, etc) helping people get their business priorities in order.
Once people opt-in to the free download, they are then put into a sales funnel showing them why they need a business coach and why they need you as their business coach.
Logically, the people that signed up for the free download are interested in the services you offer, so they would make great candidates for being one of your coaching clients!
Mapping out this journey (we like doing it on paper first!) helps you become crystal clear in what you’re offering and how to attract relevant traffic.
Related post: Sales Funnels: What They Are & Why Your Business Needs Them Now
How will you attract traffic?
Continuing in our journey to building your first sales funnel, now we need to think about how we will attract relevant traffic to your landing page.
There are a lot of ways you can drive traffic to your landing page.
- Writing blog posts
- Social media
- Guest blogging
- Paid advertising
- Press mentions
These are just a handful of ideas to get you started.
What’s important to remember is you need to do what works for you and your business. If Twitter doesn’t work for your business, don’t use it!
If you don’t know what yet works for your business, you’ll need to do a little testing to find out.
Everything you need to know to start building your first #salesfunnel from @bluchic!Click To Tweet
Things you need for your first sales funnel
Now that you got your first sales funnel mapped out, here are some things you’ll need to have to complete your sales funnel:
- Free opt-in/lead magnet: Like we mentioned above, you’ll need an opt-in to get people into your sales funnel. A great place to start is offering a free opt-in of some sort (online class, worksheet, checklist, workbook, free chapter, webinar…the options are endless!)
- Landing page: An essential aspect for your funnel! A well-designed landing page is a key to attracting people to sign up for your opt-in, whether it be a free download or a webinar sign-up. Not a designer? No worries, we’ll discuss options down below.
- Thank you page: An effective thank you page not only makes someone feel good about what they just signed up for, it also can be a way for you to ask if they would share your resource with their friends. Word-of-mouth marketing never goes out of style!
- Point of payment: People need a way to purchase your product, right?! You’ll need to use some program to accept payment. We use SendOwl for delivering our WordPress themes and processing payment.
- ClickFunnels: Pro: Very sophisticated tool for experienced business owners, Con: Pricey monthly cost, large learning curve.
- Leadpages: Pro: Great for capturing leads and split testing, Con: Pricey monthly cost, little customization.
- Thrive Landing Pages: Pro: No monthly fees, drag and drop feature, Con: The large learning curve.
Related post: Our #1 Referral To Our Website & How You Can Get More Traffic
Test out landing page services
Building compelling landing pages for your first sales funnel can be hard to do on your own when you aren’t a web designer or developer. There are several services out there that provide easy to make landing page that are already optimized for effectiveness. Here are a few options:
As you can see, each of these programs has their pros and cons, but one of the biggest cons is that they can be pricey and/or hard to learn how to use.
We’re working on creating a set of landing page templates you can buy and easily implement within your WordPress site (no tech knowledge required!).
We’ll be announcing more details in the coming weeks, but we’re confident you’re going to go crazy for these templates!
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you have a much clearer idea of how you can start building your first sales funnel.
Like we mentioned, we’re working on creating a set of landing pages you can use directly on your website to capture more leads, increase your subscribers, and boost your revenue. Can’t wait to tell you more!
