The Step-By-Step Action Guide to Building Digital Sales Funnels

If you’re familiar with a sales funnel, you probably know there are three stages: awareness, interest, and action. Terms like landing page, email automation, and upsell may even sound familiar. But what about putting it all together? What are the marketing strategies to use for each stage, and what tools do you need to make them happen?

We’ll run through an entire funnel, from top to bottom, to show how we would create it. You’ll be able to follow this framework for success, no matter the type of funnel you create or the industry you’re in.

The Three Stages of The Sales Funnel

Marketers often refer to these three stages in technical terms as the “top of the funnel,” “middle of the funnel,” and “bottom of the funnel.”

The purpose of breaking down your marketing plan into different stages is to meet the needs of the customer journey. In real life, most people don’t typically see an ad, read a blog, or listen to a podcast one time and decide to make a purchase. We follow a non-linear path of research, awareness, product-interest, more research, and finally a decision—a timeline that winds variably through the busyness and distractions of life.

The goal of a sales funnel is to be omnipresent throughout your ideal customer’s journey, meeting them at each stage through digital content and engagement.

Building Your Funnel in the Awareness Stage

One way or another, every brand starts its marketing efforts here. The top-of-funnel audience might not be aware of your brand or even fully realize the scope of their needs or problems.

The goal in marketing to this audience is through education which “creates an itch.” This requires a lot of content—and we mean a lot. That means you need to deeply understand customer personas in order to show up in their online spaces, craft messaging that hits their pain points, and offer them impactful and expert information.

How to Funnel Cold Traffic Into Leads

Your objective at this top-of-funnel stage is to get your message to the largest possible audience of prospective customers so you can create brand awareness in your market. To do this, you need to use traffic sources across a wide spectrum. Facebook Ads, Instagram, display advertising, podcasts, website articles, and YouTube videos are all excellent digital marketing options to increase visibility.

However, this is where many brands stop. Influencers and businesses alike often amass thousands of followers online, but fail to convert that traffic into profitable customers,

While a legitimate revenue source, social media or blogging profits are often short-lived and vastly out-paced by the revenue opportunities from building a long-term brand with a loyal customer base.

Top-of-funnel marketing becomes a successful conversion tool when you capture your audience’s contact information so you can engage with them at deeper levels in their customer journey. Email marketing is the #1 key to moving traffic from one stage of the funnel to the next. So as your audience and brand awareness grow, it’s critical to point users to a website or landing page that contains an attractive email signup offer. Lead magnets like free courses, white papers, coupons, and free consultations, are key to building an email list you can use to promote your products or services.

Here are some examples:

• You’re an online coach for women, so you seek opportunities to be a guest on women’s health podcasts to discuss your online course
  
  
• You’re an independent financial advisor, so you use social media to drive traffic to a webinar
  
  
• You have an eCommerce store that sells pet goods, so you use Facebook ads promoting a discount code to bring first-time customers to an entry-level product
  
  
• You’re a marketing consultant, so you create a series of free email templates and drive traffic through LinkedIn

In each of these examples, the prospect provides their email because you have sparked their desire to learn more, which then allows you to further demonstrate how you can help in the problem-solving process.

Building Your Funnel in the Interest Stage

Now that your audience has researched their pain points and understands their problem, they are searching for a solution. However, they aren’t completely sold on one brand vs another and need more information before making a decision.

For example, a new mother knows she wants to hire a personal trainer but isn’t sure which one provides the best fit. If your top-of-funnel marketing worked, she knows you exist and that you train postpartum women. Now your job is to help her understand what makes your experience and services tailored to her needs.

How to Funnel Warm Leads Into Qualified Prospects

Email marketing plays a huge role at this stage of the customer journey. It gives you the chance to speak one-on-one with your audience and nurture them down to the final stage of the funnel. Your email campaigns should share more about your brand’s story and your specific products or services, establish credibility, and make a strong push as to why your audience should choose you. Think through what makes your brand stand out from others and identify possible barriers to entry for your prospects, and then be sure to craft your offer to encourage prospects to engage with you.

In addition to email marketing, retargeting ads on Facebook and Google allow you to target your past website visitors, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) drives traffic using content that middle-of-funnel audiences need to consume.

It’s important that your middle-of-funnel efforts are supported by quality sales pages on your website and funnel-tracking software. For the prospect, effective sales pages are essential in the discovery process because they clearly define your offer. On your side of the process, you need to know what’s working and what isn’t. How many people opened your email? How many clicked the link inside? How much time do they spend reading your sales page or watching your videos? Funnel-tracking software enables you to analyze and adjust your strategy.

Here’s how our examples take their funnel to the next stage:

• As an online coach, you’ve used your free course to build your email list. Now you can use email marketing to tell course students about the benefits of hiring a coach  
  
  
• You send your financial planning webinar attendees a series of follow-up emails about your services and offer a free one-on-one consulting call
  
  
• Your eCommerce store develops a product/buyer guide and sends it to your email list to help them find the best-fit product
  
  
• As a marketing consultant, you offer your email list an exclusive, low-cost live video workshop to get buy-in at a low threshold

Building Your Funnel in the Action Stage

In the action stage, also called the decision stage, audiences are actively searching for companies and products that solve their problem. They’ve done their research, set a budget, and are now looking for the best place to make their purchase.

For traffic, it’s all about your sales page and driving the right traffic. You need to make sure it’s completely ready so that when your potential customers visit it, they’re able to convert easily. Marketing elements like testimonials, reviews, clear pricing, and easy-to-use forms are key to increasing your conversion rate.

How to Funnel Qualified Prospects into Customers

Advertising that targets bottom-of-funnel users is key here, and there are several options. Just like the interest stage, email campaigns are huge. If your marketing campaign has nurtured your prospects, your subscribers will be primed to turn into paying customers. At this point, you have an established pool of prospective customers and it’s important to differentiate, or segment, them into more specific categories so that you can market to their specific needs.

It’s also essential to highlight your brand’s key attributes and establish trustworthiness through testimonials and case studies. Keep in mind that the prospect is comparing your brand to see what makes you stand above the rest. In this narrowing process, FAQs are another important way to resolve common concerns and highlight your brand’s strengths.

Here’s how our examples close the sale:

• As an online coach, you share before and after stories with testimonials from women who have seen amazing results with your coaching 
  
  
• You segment a list of email users who did not click on the follow-up offer after your financial planning webinar, and ask them to fill out a quick survey on their top financial concerns, then follow-up with helpful advice 
  
  
• For your eCommerce store, you send tailored emails promoting the specific products readers clicked on from your product guide
  
  
• As a marketing consultant, you offer your email list an exclusive, low-cost live video workshop to get buy-in at a low threshold

Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Sales Funnel

The most common mistake brands make when building out a marketing funnel is starting with top-of-funnel content before building out assets or content for the middle and bottom-of-funnel stages. What often happens is brands end up with tons of traffic and interested leads, but no strategy to nurture them. When this occurs, leads become disinterested and eventually fall out of your funnel.

We recommend you build out your bottom-of-funnel assets, like sales pages and testimonials first. These are arguably the most important assets you will create, therefore, everything on them, from the offer to the call to action, needs to work together to promote your brand.

Once you’ve built out the sales pages and email campaigns, you can focus on the lead magnets and each piece of content you’ll use to generate awareness and drive traffic. Although this approach may seem to take longer, it will pay off in the long run.

How to Measure Success

In each stage, you will track unique performance metrics to gauge if your marketing is successful or not. At the awareness stage, you want to track your volume of traffic and how many people are responding to your lead magnet. If your list and audience don’t grow, you need to readjust your message and examine the lead generation offer.

In the interest stage, look at how people are interacting with your content. How many people open, read, and click on your email newsletters? How long do people watch your videos or stay on your web pages? How many comments and shares do you get on your social media?

At the bottom of the funnel in the action stage, you should track sales and conversions using platforms like Google Analytics and funnel tracking software.

There are even metrics to measure post-sale, like retention and referrals. If you’re doing everything right, your customers should stay with you and they should be telling their friends!

Beginning Your Digital Sales Funnel

Now it’s time for you to create a funnel that moves people from the awareness stage toward interest-based research and finally to action — purchasing your brand! There are parts of this process that only you can do, such as figuring out what your brand uniquely offers and how to best connect with your audience. There are also places where you can implement digital tools to make life easier, and that’s where the right software is essential.

You may be just getting started, or you may already be working with several software tools that require integration. As you embark on building your own digital sales funnel, it’s important to utilize software that will facilitate, not hinder, the process. Kartra offers a seamless all-in-one funnel marketing platform designed with the online business owner in mind. As you evaluate marketing software features, take advantage of our years of experience with this helpful article, The Best Sales Funnel Software Has These 10 Features.