Sales funnels are crucial for guiding potential customers through the buying process. While they’re each unique, they all have one aim: get the lead closer to making a purchase. It’s not an easy task, but there are many ways to approach your goal. Here are eight tried-and-tested methods for building sales funnels that convert customers and generate cash.

Optimized Landing Pages

A website landing page may be the first contact a potential customer has with your business. These are the entry points to your sales funnel. You’ll want to make a good first impression by optimizing your landing pages. As the old saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” That’s true for web businesses as much as any other. Make sure your landing page is professionally designed and optimized with the next step in mind. What’s the next step? It could be anything from getting clicks on customized tables to collecting email addresses – that’s for whoever designs the sales funnel to decide. In any case, a great-looking, highly optimized landing page is essential.

Lead Magnets

One of the crucial parts of an effective sales funnel is getting a potential customer’s information. For example, many sites collect email addresses and mobile phone numbers so that visitors can be sold to at a later date or sold to repeatedly. Lead magnets are a useful tool for getting visitors to give you their information. eBooks, webinars, and free trials are all things you can offer in exchange for information. Lead magnets also provide value and showcase what a potential customer can expect from your premium product. After all, if the free version is good, the paid version must be even better, right?

Automated Email Marketing

Potential customers have to be taken on a journey through the buying process. Few will visit a website they don’t know or trust and buy the first time. Automated email marketing campaigns engage leads over time and nudge them along the buying process.The aim of any automated email marketing campaign should be to build trust by providing value and helping leads solve their problems. Slowly but surely, they will begin to see you or your brand as an expert or authority, greatly increasing the chance of a sale. Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs out of all the different digital marketing channels. The ability to personalize them makes them highly effective. Of course, you need to invest and deliver a compelling copy to succeed.

Retargeting Ads

Ever wondered what those cookie consent popups are really all about? Website owners know you might not buy right away, but if they drop cookies on your device, they can retarget you with ads on Facebook, X, Instagram, and elsewhere. Retargeting is effective because leads will have had previous exposure to your brand, so they’re more likely to trust it. It keeps your brand fresh in their minds, and seeing an effective ad at a later date could be just the nudge they need to buy. Summing it up, retargeting keeps your brand top of the customer’s mind, increases brand exposure, and gives you a second or even third chance to convert a lead. It should be part of any website sales funnel.

Exclusive Incentives

Everybody loves a freebie, and we all like to feel that we’re privy to something others aren’t. Exclusive offers and incentives trigger these emotions and make us want to grab the offer with both hands. For example, the no deposit bonuses offered by many gambling sites offer a risk-free way for users to try a site and see what it has to offer. Other examples are free perfume samples and discounts on high-end products. Add in a time-limited element, and conversions will increase even more. Exclusive incentives are a general concept, so they can be offered at any point of your sales funnel, but they’re most effective at the early stages, e.g., as a lead magnet.

Limited Time Offers

This one has already been touched upon above, but it’s worth mentioning in and of itself. Most people fear loss more than they desire gain, and limited-time offers have a strange way of making people think they’re going to lose an opportunity to score a bargain. Why do you think businesses have sales? Because they work! Most people love the idea of getting value cheaper than they could have otherwise, and all sales have one thing in common: they won’t last. Putting a deadline on an offer can dramatically increase conversions. This also works at any point of your funnel, from collecting contact details to generating real-money sales.

A/B Testing Ads

In the legendary book Scientific Advertising, Claude C. Hopkins shares all sorts of tips on advertising, detailing how small tweaks can get massively different results. You’ll want to A/B test different versions of all the elements in your sales funnel. Landing pages, buttons, calls to action – all of it should be A/B tested with at least two versions. You should then use the versions that convert best and split-test everything each time you have a new idea. A/B testing takes the guesswork out of your sales funnels – it allows you to make data-driven decisions. Once you know what resonates with your audience, you can tweak your campaigns to maximize conversions.

Social Proof

Social proof will help conversion at any/every step of your sales funnel. Testimonials, real customer reviews, and social media mentions by trusted influencers will get the cash register ringing. As with most of the other website sales funnel tips on this page, the point here is to build trust and credibility. Humans are social creatures, so when we see that others are satisfied with a product or service, we’re more likely to try it, too. Think those late-night TV infomercials about weight loss that feature real stories don’t work? Think again – those testimonials help build trust in potential buyers, and there’s a reason people buy the advertising space – it gets sales. Naturally, you want to incentivize real customers to share their stories, not lie to potential new users by fabricating stuff.

Tripwire Offers

In the early days of the internet, Amazon.com discovered that customers who have bought once are more likely to buy again. In his book The Everything Store, Brad Stone outlines how Amazon made the decision to sell some products like one of the Harry Potter novels at a loss because it knew subsequent sales would cover it and then some.Tripwire offers are designed to get customers comfortable with buying from you. The first sale is often the most difficult, especially when it involves entering payment details on an unfamiliar website. By getting the customer to make a small purchase now, they’re more likely to make repeat or big ones later.mOnline sales are all about removing psychological barriers, and the Tripwire offer is a perfect example of this. Once a customer buys and realizes the product was delivered as promised and nothing bad comes of sharing their payment details, their trust increases, and bigger sales will often follow. Tripwire offers have an additional benefit – by making the first purchase, customers usually have to give their contact details, such as their email address. This makes it easier to make subsequent offers in the future.

Upselling and Cross-Selling

To put it simply, upselling and cross-selling is the act of offering additional products and services that might benefit a customer. After all, if someone bought a course on learning SEO, they might be interested in a consultancy with the now-established expert teacher. The idea here is to increase the lifetime value of the customer, making the most out of every conversion. Upselling and cross-selling works well because customers have already bought something from you, so the most difficult psychological barrier has already been overcome. Imagine having an email marketing list with 10,000 subscribers who have all bought a $10 product from you. You then release a $100 product, email them, and 10% of them (1,000) buy it. That’s the potential power of upselling and cross-selling.

Summary: Website Sales Funnels are Designed to Convert

Every website sales funnel will be unique, but they’re all designed with the same principles in mind: build trust with your leads, nudge them towards a sale, and maximize the return on investment by retargeting, upselling, and cross-selling. Designing effective website sales funnels isn’t rocket science, and anyone can learn how to do it. Using the tips and ideas above, you can create a website sales funnel that increases conversations. Of course, you should consider the specifics of your business and the needs of your customers, but the main principles remain the same.