What is a Sales Funnel? How to Build One in 7 Steps

A sales funnel is an intentional series of interactions a brand uses to lead potential customers toward a buying decision. While the concept is simple, sales funnels themselves can be complex systems. Today, most sales funnels are digital – combining tactics like email marketing and social media advertising to create a holistic customer journey.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to build an effective sales funnel, how to measure its success, and what tools you need to make it happen!

How does funnel building work?

Funnel building is broken down into three basic stages: awareness, interest, and decision. These stages represent the three main steps in a customer journey, as prospects discover your brand (awareness), understand how your product or service would benefit them (interest), and decide to buy from you (decision).

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

The purpose of breaking down your marketing strategy into different stages is to meet the needs of the customer during each step of their 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.

How to Build a Sales Funnel in 7 Steps

There are parts of the sales funnel process that only you can do – such as figuring out what your brand uniquely offers and how to best connect with your target audience. Your customer base isn’t one-size-fits-all, and neither are sales funnels! 

However, there is a fundamental process to use as you build funnels for your audience. Follow these steps to build an effective sales funnel that drives conversions:

1. Create bottom-of-funnel assets first 

The most common mistake brands make when building 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 lead magnets, sales pages, and testimonials — before anything else. These are arguably the most important assets you will create, so make sure every element, from the offer to the call to action, has a consistent message. Every element needs to work together to promote your brand! 

2. Educate your audience to grow brand awareness

One way or another, every brand starts its marketing efforts in the awareness stage of the sales funnel. Your top-of-funnel audience might not be aware of your brand or even fully realize the problems that you solve. The goal in marketing to this audience is education that “creates an itch.” This requires a lot of content – and we mean a lot. 

You’ll need to deeply understand buyer personas to show up in their online spaces, craft messaging that hits their pain points, and offer them impactful and expert information. There are a wide variety of tactics that work in this stage, including:

• Website articles 
• Social media ads
• YouTube channel 
• Creating a podcast or making guest appearances
• Building a brand presence on relevant social media channels

While it’s tempting to jump straight into a sales pitch, educational content is crucial for earning trust and giving your audience a quality customer experience in the early stages of building awareness.

3. Set up landing pages (with sign-up forms) 

It’s common for influencers or businesses to amass thousands of followers online but fail to convert that traffic into profitable customers. Social media or blogging can be legitimate revenue sources, but they often bring short-lived profits. They’re vastly outpaced by the revenue opportunities from building a long-term brand with a loyal customer base.

Top-of-funnel marketing only 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. To drive up conversion rates, incorporate social proof on your website – such as testimonials or reviews – as well as clear pricing and user-friendly forms.

4. Offer a compelling lead magnet 

Lead magnets are necessary for building an email list you can use to promote your products or services. These offers move your new leads further into the sales funnel, building more trust in your brand and laying the foundation for future email campaigns. Lead magnet examples include:

• Ebooks
• Webinars 
• Free courses
• White papers
• Product demos
• Free consultations
• Discounts or coupons

5. Nurture leads with email campaigns 

Email marketing plays a huge role in the interest stage of the buying process. It gives you the chance to speak one-on-one with your audience and nurture qualified leads 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 appeal to past website visitors, and search engine optimization (SEO) drives traffic through content that middle-of-funnel audiences need to consume to make a purchase decision.

6. Close the sale with a direct pitch

Once your audience has been given all the information they need to move into the decision stage, they’ll need to be prompted to make their first purchase. Depending on the product or service you offer – and at what price point – you may want to start by encouraging a low-cost, low-commitment option such as:

• Ordering a product sample 
• Purchasing a discounted item
• Signing up for a free trial or free consultation 
• Subscribing to the most affordable membership tier

To craft the most persuasive sales pitch possible, personalize your bottom-of-funnel emails and other marketing campaigns as much as you can. Different people buy for different reasons, and you can’t rely on the same message to convince everyone equally! Identify the main audience segments in your funnel, and develop content that speaks directly to their values and pain points. 

Remember that in this stage, the prospective customer is comparing your brand with others to see what makes you stand above the rest. Remove any doubt in their mind by addressing possible objections and establishing trust through FAQs, testimonials, case studies, and reviews.

7. Keep customers engaged with your brand

Purchase decisions aren’t the end of the buyer journey. You can keep paying customers engaged with your brand through post-purchase email sequences such as:

• Thank-you emails
• Review or testimonial requests 
• Referral program opportunities
• Upsell or cross-sell campaigns 
• Follow-up emails with additional resources

These touchpoints reassure new customers they made the right choice when they purchased from you, driving referral traffic and encouraging long-term customer retention.

How to Measure the Success of Your Sales Funnel

In each stage, you will track unique performance metrics to gauge whether your sales strategy is successful. At the awareness stage, you want to track the 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 interact 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 funnel-tracking software or platforms like Google Analytics.

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!

Why Sales Funnel Software is a Must-Have

It’s possible to build a funnel manually by combining miscellaneous digital tools like web page builders and email software. However, manually connecting and updating a maze of automated sequences creates many opportunities for error. Just think about how many elements go into a successful sales funnel: 

• Professional landing pages 
• User-friendly sign-up forms 
• Automated email sequences 
• Checkout software 
• Lead management software 
• Detailed analytics 

An all in one sales funnel tool makes the funnel-building process far more efficient and effective through automation and integration. With the right sales funnel software, you can quickly build automated sequences, map out the sales process, and understand how to optimize the customer journey for conversions. And if you’re concerned about starting from scratch, you can work from professional sales funnel templates! 

Business owners find that high-quality funnel-building software significantly simplifies the process of moving customers through a sales pipeline. And with detailed analytics for each step, you can adjust and improve the customer journey at any time.