Types of Sales Funnels and How to Choose them for your Business Growth?
If you already know what funnel marketing is, then skip to the different types of funnels. If not, let’s learn.
What is a Sales Funnel?
Horses have eyes on their sides. To use it for transportation, they need to be focussing their eyesight on what’s in front of them. That’s how the concept of tying blinders around the horse’s eyes came into practice.
The idea of Horse blinders matches with the ideology behind funnel building. The sole purpose of a funnel is to collect leads and sell a product. Sales funnels are purposely designed to sell. If you master it, you can automate and integrate with your existing sales channels. At the end of this article, we have attached an article to learn how to make funnels. After reading the article, you’ll realize that creating a sales funnel is not complicated as it sounds.
Sales Funnel structure
A simple marketing funnel consists of 3 parts/pages.
1) Landing page/squeeze page
2) Sales page
3) Thank you page
How to use a funnel? When you’re promoting a product, you write an article, create some videos, images, infographics and post it on social media of your preference.
While creating the ad, it is preferred to use the Hook, story, and offer template. ie an attractive headline that hooks the attention of the customer while scrolling down the social media pages, a story that connects with their problem and how your product solves it, and an attractive offer they just can’t neglect.
If you can design your ad in this format, your customers will come to visit your landing page.
The purpose of the landing page/squeeze page is to bring them to the sales page. But before that, we need to collect leads from the customer. By leads, it means their name, phone number, and email address. So that we can contact them in the future.
Would they want to give out their info? No.
We should attract them by giving away something valuable. It is called the lead magnet.
How to use lead magnet?
For example, if your product is about car cleaning and maintenance, give away car cleaning tutorial videos for free, if they submit their info.
We should make it look like, it’s a ‘Beyond fair’ kind of deal.
After they sign up on the landing page, make sure you sent them the lead magnet right away. They come to our sales page. This is where the magic happens. They’ll be bombarded with every information they’ll need, supposed to know to buy your product.
Without the diversion and clutters of a website, they’ll have a straight medium to buy the product.
It gives all the information about the product: features, advantages, and applications. The customers do not have to navigate between multiple pages to land where they want to be. One-click and they are there.
Traffic inside the funnels takes the path you laid. Whereas in a website, the customers have an independent hand and that’s how they deviate. Funnels provide a streamlined traffic experience.
If you want to implement funnels in your business, Groovefunnels offers value for time and money. It is user-friendly, simple to build, and a complete tool with around 20+ features. They have simplified the process of building a sales funnel. To know more about them, check here.
Types of Funnels
Russell Brunson, CEO of Clickfunnels in his book, ‘The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook,’ breaks down funnels into 22 types. Even though there are million other possible ways to design funnels, these 22 can be used for almost any of our purpose.
To understand them easily they are categorized into 4 types.
1) Lead Funnels
The main goal is to get some information from the customer. Most preferably their name, contact number, or email address. We’ll collect the information now and follow-through using their contacts.
2) Buyer Funnels
In buyer funnels, it is specifically designed to sell a product to a customer. Before the customer comes out of the funnel, they would have bought something from us. In order to enhance the buying chances, buyer funnels are equipped with cart facilities, up-sell/down-sell/cross-sell options.
3) Event Funnels
As the name itself says, these are useful if you’re hosting a web-seminar, a large-scale meeting, or an exhibition kind of event.
4) Other Funnels
This category is comprised of funnels that don’t fit the above three categories.
We’ve shortlisted 18 funnels from the list that would cover almost 99% of your business needs and explained it here.
Lead Funnels
1) Squeeze Page Funnel
You must have guessed it by now. Since it falls under the lead funnel system category, the core idea is to attract the customer through an enticing offer. When they give out their information, we give them what we’ve promised on the thank you page.
2) Reverse Squeeze Page Funnels
As the name suggests, it is the reverse of the squeeze page. We don’t collect information in the first step. We give out our information, incite their desire, and get the contact details we need by betting on our information.
Reverse squeeze page funnel would work magic if you’ve got an easy solution to solve your customer’s problems. For example, if your product deals with cleaning kitchen stains, you could show them a video about how easy it is to remove those stains. The customer must be hooked by it. Then you collect their details before show them the solution.
You might get fewer results compared to the squeeze page, but the quality of the leads and the conversion ratio would be better in the reverse squeeze page funnel.
3) Lead Magnet Funnel
In the lead magnet funnel, we give away something to attract customers. You might have seen this trend on Instagram, where people would ask you to name your friends and like the page for some giveaway. The objective is similar.
What are we giving away? Something with a huge value but doesn’t affect our budget. Most funnels use E-books as their lead magnet. Once we prepare our e-book, it is not going to cost us to make copies.
4) Bridge Funnels
Bridge funnel is most useful for people who’re into affiliate marketing. When we promote someone else’s product, they would also have a funnel. We don’t have to build something from scratch. We can use a bridge funnel to convey our message before we connect our customers to the final affiliate funnel.
You may wonder why not send them directly to the affiliate’s funnel. If we put a bridge funnel in between them, we can control the narrative. It pre-sells the idea and prepares them for what they’d face on the affiliate page.
Bridge funnels are popularly called content marketing funnel template. It gives opportunity to convey your brand message on the bridge page.
5) Survey Funnel
Any platform that offers an option to the customers to interact with the sellers increases the chance of buying. In that unique way, survey funnels hold an important space in the market. Because we get to interact with the customers and receive valuable feedback from them.
It makes them invest their time in us which increases the sense of belonging.
6) Application Funnel
Application funnel is apt for high-end products where the customers have to apply to join you. If it is coaching or consulting kind of business you’re heading, this funnel comes in handy.
7) Ask Campaign Funnels
Customer’s wishes are subjective. We cannot always predict what they want. That’s why companies launch wide-scale campaigns to study what is the need and how they could address it.
If you are facing such a dilemma, you could launch a campaign and ask your customers. In campaign funnels, we get detailed descriptive results from our customers to focus our prospects on the future.
Buyer Funnels
1) 2 Step Tripwire Funnel
As the name suggests, we use an offer that is very attractive forces the customers to pay attention to our funnel. Then we introduce an up-sell/down-sell or order bump page to sell them more.
Since it is 2 step funnel, follow-up is very important. Some customers would fill the first form giving out their contact details but wouldn’t have gone through our sales funnel. If we use proper follow-up methods, we can entice them to buy our products too.
2) Video Sales Letter Funnels
Videos are the new trends. Not that the other means not effective but videos became the main attraction in the last 2-3 years. You can convey what you want to say to your customers in less than a minute than using a blog post or creating a carousel of images.
In the video sales letter funnel, we use a video pitch to sell our product. Of course, we’d attach it with other supporting supplementary contents, but the video itself should be enough to make the sale.
3) Sales Letter Funnels
The sales letter funnel is similar to the video sales letter funnels. Instead of videos, we would use a lengthy letter script to convey our intention to the customers.
The key here is to hook them throughout the script. If the content lags in-between the customer would lose his interest and move away from the funnel. Hence make sure your script is clean, simple, and engaging.
4) Daily Deal Funnels
If your business offers deals on a regular basis, it is better to have a Daily Deal Funnel in your arsenal. You can quickly customize them according to the offers you’re planning to give. It gives you a stable regular funnel and a Daily Deal Funnel to announce the special information.
Event Funnels
1) Web-Seminar Funnels
It is one of the most common forms of funnels used by almost all businesses. Webinars offer you time to convince your customer about your product. You tell them the idea behind the product, how it evolved and how does it solve the problem facing the customers.
We can collect the customer’s details and use follow-up emails to keep them in the loop.
2) Product Launch Funnels
You would have seen this trend in e-commerce websites nowadays. Before the launch of a smartphone, the brand would start advertising using the smartphone’s features, comparisons, pictures, etc. It increases the anticipation among the customers and keeps the topic afloat till the actual launch of the product.
By introducing a special time offer with a timer, you can attract more customers than usual.
Other Funnels
1) Hero Funnels
Yes, you’ve guessed it. It is completely about you. In marketing, we not only market a product, but we can also market ourselves.
On Instagram, we can promote a post for getting more views on our profile. Likewise, we can use Hero funnels to tell people your stories and if they’re interested they’d follow you.
2) Homepage Funnels
The concept between Hero and Homepage funnels are almost similar, but the focus would be on the product itself. It is usually used in the place of a traditional website homepage.
We can bring in all the essential elements of a website while making it more streamlined to make the product sell like crazy.
3) Cancellation Funnels
Many don’t appreciate the importance of a cancellation funnel. Here, you can make a huge impact on your customer’s psychology.
Whenever they’re requesting a refund or asking for cancellation, make them feel welcome in the funnel and smoothen the process. If they get irritated at this stage, they definitely won’t return to your page.
Place some of your other offers, products on the cancellation funnel. They may not like the one they’re canceling now, but like the one, you’re offering.
4) Storefront Funnels
We all love to window shop. E-commerce makes the process more simple and offers data to make follow-up requests to the customers.
Storefront funnel is a place where you can display all your products, offers, and others to make them appealing to the customers. They can see everything in one place and make a move forward. Storefront funnel is funnel advertising at its best.
5) Live Demo Funnels
People love demonstrations. If you could do it in front of them, that itself is a great selling strategy. Use the live demo funnels to explain your product’s capabilities, features, and other available options.
Conclusion
These funnels are categorized after going through tonnes of market data. They have studied what is working and what is not working to come to this conclusion. The marketing funnel metrics support the findings. It may be so. But these are general frameworks, not the standard formats.
Additional changes can be made to every funnel to boost our prospects. Understand your market and customers, we may well design our own funnel.
If you want to learn how to rank your web pages better using schema markup, glance this article here.
If you’re thinking about how to create a marketing funnel, and funnel ideas, we have an article on Clickfunnels which is a good place to start.
Image reference: Clickfunnels
