What superpower would you wish for in your professional life? It seems likely that for most marketers, it would be the ability to mindread. Imagine being able to see what your different customers think of your products, service, and brand!
You’d definitely spend less time trying to understand buyer psychology, and your offering and messaging would be so on point that sales would become effortless!
As most of us marketers are mere mortals, we use the sales funnel structure to guide ideal customers – all the way from the initial introduction to our company through to the checkout.
Simplify the overwhelming buyer’s choice for customers with sales funnels
From the client’s perspective, their journey is more like a ‘choose your own adventure’ story.
Put yourself in their boots:
- You’re the chosen one, off on a quest to prevent disaster: There’s a work problem
you’re in charge of solving.
- You arrive in a foreign environment through one of a number of different portals: There’s a tonne of information about this industry in real world and digital locations, so you could end up starting with anything: blog, social post, video, ad…
- You must solve obstructive puzzles to collect magical objects to help you: You learn about the variety of solutions and providers during your research – figuring out the sources’ authenticity to ensure trustworthiness.
- You must slay several enemies: Any hurdles need to be overcome and niggles reassured to get to the final checkout.
- You arrive at the end of your quest: Purchase made!
- You go back to the start and try another route to adventure: The next time you need a similar or adjacent product or service, you’re now in a familiar world, but not necessarily following the same path to purchase.
The excellent news is that good sales funnels put you in control of their story. Your buyers aren’t on a linear journey and, by understanding that, you can capture their full attention at every stage. You’re the guide, with signposts at every key decision, pointing directly to your product or service as the best option
Here are 10 things you need to do to create successful sales funnels, with ScoreApp as your secret weapon of wisdom.
Understand your audience in detail with ScoreApp
The first step is getting into the hearts and minds of your different audience segments. What are their pain points? What do they need? How will your product or service make them look better? How does your company’s offering help them meet their aspirations?
ScoreApp helps you find out what your ideal customers really care about. So you can tailor your campaigns accordingly.
Go beyond, ‘this feature does this thing’. You need to tap into how they really feel about the situation they’re looking to resolve. ScoreApp quizzes are perfect for this deep level of market research. Just start by defining exactly what you want to know and if there are any theories you want to test. The questions are entirely up to you, so you can collect data based on everything from psychographics to demographics.
Each audience segment can have its own personalised quiz, based on a ScoreApp template, making full participation much more likely. You can add a smaller number of these market research questions to other communications, like ScoreApp waitlists. It not only does its lead generation job but it also gets you additional user data.
To make things even easier for you, ScoreApp can automate organising your leads by segment, so you can prioritise those that are pre-qualified.
Be super clear on your value proposition
Now you’ve really got the inside scoop on your different audience segments, you need to use this information to articulate the reason why your product or service is the best one for your prospect. It’s your promise to your customers and, ideally, shows them that you’re unique.
On landing pages, your value proposition needs to be clear and concise – this isn’t the place for long descriptions or industry jargon. Your focus needs to be on:
- The problem you’re fixing
- The main benefit to the customer
- An emotional connection
ScoreApp’s landing page templates are created to make the placement of key value proposition statements easy for you. Example text scaffolds your thinking as you distil your amazing product or service down into the essence of its value.
Design a streamlined sales process
All those options from our ‘choose your own adventure story’ must be eliminated. You need to clear a straight road that gets your prospects through the funnel stages without any complications or distractions. You don’t want any potential leads wandering off into the woods in search of pretty flowers (competitor’s products), when they should be sticking to the path (to your checkout).
Everything needs to be focused on the one offering that this particular funnel is channelling ideal customers towards. It’s one of several common sales funnel mistakes to overcomplicate landing pages, in particular. This is where you can lose leads by giving them the option to see a menu, annoy them with pop-ups, or give them links to click. Your landing page focus must be on one offering, with one option for the visitor.
This is just one element, but you can streamline your whole sales process, right down to the ease of checkout, to make sure your funnel strategy is as focused as possible.
Develop a multi-stage content strategy
Your prospects are going to meet you in a variety of digital locations: on social media, blog articles, webinars, websites, ads, and videos…the list continues to expand with the tech.
And they’ll be at all different stages of their buying journey when they find you. So you need to be in the right place, at the right time, with whatever they need in your content.
Awareness Stage
You’ve done the market research, you know what your ideal customers really want. At this awareness stage, they’re just finding out you exist. But because you already know quite a bit about them, you can improve this stage with:
- Online ads
- Cold emails and calls
- Content marketing that answers their inquiry questions: Like a quiz that gives them a personalised report into their current problem.
Interest and consideration stage
They’ve met you and like what they see. Now customers want to know more of the fine details, so you need to provide:
- Lead magnets that draw them in further and give you more specific data
- Product demonstrations and guides
- Customised email sequences
- Comparison articles that demonstrate your thought leadership – and can generate 67% more leads than your blog-free competitors.
Decision stage
Include social proof, remove final niggles and add some authentic urgency to get them over the line in this final stage of the buying cycle.
Optimise your sales funnel for mobile users
Whatever gorgeous content you create for each stage of your sales funnels, check every element for mobile accessibility. It must look as good and work as well on all mobile devices, as it does on the desktop version.
You can’t afford to not ensure all the elements are user-friendly on mobile devices – check, double check, and then maybe check again for luck! Unless you’re using ScoreApp’s quiz funnel tech – in which case you already know mobile optimisation is part of their design.
Keep testing and improving things
Analysing your quiz data to track the performance of different sales funnel elements keeps you in a constant upward spiral of improvement. There are so many different metrics you can use to refine your funnel strategy, for example:
- A/B test different messaging to tell you which is more resonant with your different audiences – right down to the specifics, like 2 similar versions of the same headline. The 70% of marketers who believe A/B testing is crucial to boosting conversion rates are unlikely to be wrong.
- Quiz completion rates tell you if there’s something wrong with the quiz design itself. If you’re within the average 50-70% completion rate, it’s hitting the right mark. Anything less than that and it’s got structural issues. Maybe the questions are too hard, there are too many of them, or it just doesn’t tickle the fancy of your visitors. Initially disappointing, but this is a great opportunity for improvement.
- How many leads that booked a demo turned into paying customers? Tracking lead generation is crucial to understanding the quality of the customers your lead magnets are attracting.
There are loads of data tools out there that help you share your raw data in a visual way. So when it comes to top-level meetings about marketing budget ROI and investment in the next strategy, you’ve got engaging ways to share your ScoreApp data internally.
Nurture your valuable leads
As soon as prospects have signalled their interest, it’s up to you to foster that connection through targeted communication. This will look different, depending on your industry and business aims, but will likely include retargeting, personalised outreach and email marketing.
Creating the quiz email sequences as part of your sales funnel construction ensures that you think through the different perspectives of your audiences at each stage. That way you don’t lose any warm leads by forgetting to send an email. It’s automatically sent in response to visitors’ choices.
And you don’t want to be sending the same email to everybody. According to the 2023 HubSpot State of Marketing Report, 78% of marketers report that subscriber segmentation is their most effective email campaign strategy. And that segmented emails result in 50% more click-throughs and 30% more opens than generic email sequences.
Plan how you’re going to look after your fledgling leads, right from the start of each quiz funnel campaign.
Make sure you pre-qualify leads effectively
No one wants 10,000 leads that aren’t going to convert – that’s just a big waste of your time and resources. With more sophisticated tools, lead generation moves from being just a demoralising numbers game, towards attracting dream clients that are more likely to convert. A shift to quality over quantity.
ScoreApp is perfect for lead qualification. Because not all leads are created equal, ScoreApp is designed so you can ask pre-qualifying questions as part of your quiz funnel. Your visitor’s quiz results automatically trigger the right follow-up email sequence, depending on where they’re at in their customer journey. So they only arrive with your sales team when they’re totally ready.
Make sure your sales process works with your marketing tools
According to Zippia, 91% of companies with over 10 employees use a CRM system and see a 300% rise in conversion rates. So it’s not surprising that 45% of companies say that using their CRM has increased sales revenue! Customer retention rate also rose for 47% of companies after they started using a CRM.
How many different tools are in your current marketing tech stack? It’s really important for a smooth customer experience and efficient data collection that your sales funnel, CRM system and other marketing tools all work together. ScoreApp integrates seamlessly with a multitude of different CRMs and other platforms. So your customers don’t face any glitches and you don’t lose any valuable data.
Create a customer feedback loop
Taking care of customer relationships post-purchase should also be built into each individual sales funnel. Not just a stream of timely emails to deliver offers on future purchases, but well-placed requests for feedback.
Want to know how they experienced your sales funnel process? Ask. Carefully constructed questions will give you insights to refine each step of your process.
Ace your sales funnels with ScoreApp
In order to maximise the lead generation and sales conversion powers of your sales funnel, you need to implement these best practices. ScoreApp gives you all of these features in one place. It’s designed to map your customers’ adventure from start to finish, and all the return visits!
Create your first full quiz funnel for free!
