Every great sales funnel is going to walk a prospect through a series of phases in order to help them move deeper into the sales process.
There are multiple formulas in many different theories as to what these phases are… This post is designed to help you cut through all the noise and quickly understand the basics.
We will approach the question of sales funnel stages from two directions.
First there is the site content…
Specifically what pages are required on your website to reflect the different stages of your sales funnel.
Second we will talk about the psychology of the stages of your sales funnel.
Ready? Let’s get started…
At minimum you must have a landing page, a sales page, and a thank you page.
You’ll probably have free level content outside of your sales funnel as well in the form of blog posts for about us pages.
You may also have up sells, down cells and product delivery pages…
It really is that simple!
Next, let’s talk about the psychology of each step from the point of view of your visitors.
The psychology framework that best represents the sales funnel stages is the AIDA stages.
This is an acronym that stands for attention,interest, desire, action.
Before your potential customers have ever heard of you, you do not have their attention. They simply don’t know who you are yet.
This is where your blog posts and social media content plus your advertisements go to work for you.
Their job is to capture the attention of your potential customer.
Once your potential customers have heard of you the next sales funnel stage is interest.
The most powerful way to tap into the interest of your target market is to offer them something for free in exchange for their email address. This is your landing page often referred to as a squeeze page or opt in page.
This will pique their interest by offering them a valuable training that allows them to solve their problem and get experience with your teaching.
Users who give you their email address have expressed their interest in more of what you want and have become a lead at the exact same time.
On the next page you are able to offer them a product in what we call a “one time offer”
This is a sales page that is displayed after they opt in that offers them a valuable product at a significant discount if they take action today.
Best presented with a video sales letter that goes deeper with the teaching based on what they opted in for and eventually transitioning to a paid product offer.
This video and sales page is the desire stage in your sales funnel.
The video needs to build the desire in your prospect to solve their problem and help them realize that you are the perfect person to assist them in solving this problem.
The end of the video sales letter is a call to action where you make the clear offer for your product a discounted price and you let them know to click on the buy button below to get access to this one-time special offer today.
This takes them to the checkout page when they complete check out, they are redirected to the download page so they can access what they purchased.
The AIDA sales funnel stages are incredibly simple and only take a few key pages and key pieces of content to fully build out.
There is no expensive funnel hacking software required! Everything can be done on open-source platforms with mild customization of pre-built templates.
When paired with super simple DIY sales funnel it can be an in incredibly low cost yet high leverage sales and marketing tool for your business.
If you would like help building your own sales funnel, be sure to check out our free do-it-yourself sales funnel training which you can access by clicking here.