What Is A Sales Funnel? A Quick & Easy To Understand Overview

The term ‘sales funnel’ has become popularized over the last few years but many may have been left wondering jut what is a sales funnel?

In this overview article we will not only answer this question but also provide you with some tips as to how you can leverage the power of sales funnels in your business.

Sound good?

Alright let’s go!

What Is A Sales Funnel?

Put simply, a sales funnel is a defined process that you lead potential customers through to learn more about both you and your product/service so that they can decide whether or not they are going to opt-in to what it is that you are offering.

By putting prospects through a sales funnel you can work to convert them with your copy into either a lead or better still – a paying customer.

This makes funnels an extremely powerful marketing tool for a number of different desired objectives such as:

Purchasing a digital or physical product
Signing up for a newsletter
Joining a membership site
Registering to attend an upcoming webinar
And much more!

While sales funnels naturally exist in the offline world, with the fast paced meteoric rise of digital marketing its no wonder than companies such as ClickFunnels have been so successful in popularizing the concept of online sales funnels.

How Are Funnels Different To A Website?

Funnels are fundamentally very different to a traditional website for a couple of reasons.

First of all on a website visitors arriving on the site have complete freedom to decide how they wish to navigate around your site.

For example they can click on your logo to go back to your homepage.

Or go and browse all of the items in your website menu and choose which page to go to next.

About us, contact us, a product page…

The list goes on!

By contrast – funnels are proven to generate significantly higher conversion rates due to their distraction free nature.

A visitor to a funnel may ONLY go through the path you have determined or leave the page.

That is it.

Better yet, as you are controlling the visitors journey steps you also have a number of opportunities to introduce new offers through things like order bumps, OTOs and 1-click upsells while the prospect is in a buying mood.

This allows you to strike while the iron is hot as the saying goes.

Now don’t worry if you don’t yet know what all of those terms mean, if you spend just a little time in the world of sales funnels you certainly soon will 🙂

How Does A Sales Funnel Work?

While each sales funnel is of course customized to the specific objectives the marketer is looking to achieve such as generate an opt-in or make a sale, broadly speaking there are 4 key phases of every sales funnel.

These are more easily remembered through the acronym ‘AIDA’.

Stage 1 – Awareness

Without getting someone’s attention you cannot have any impact. So the first step is to generate awareness that you/your brand exists in the first place.

This is often done through advertising (think Facebook Ads or Google Keywords) or through organic reach with Facebook posts, Google SEO etc.

Stage 2 – Interest

Now that we have captured the prospect’s attention we have to make sure we also capture their interest.

You must inform the prospect of the BENEFITS of using your product and not just sell them on features. You want to solicit an emotional response and get them to believe that your product or service is the solution to their current problem.

Stage 3 – Decision

During the funnel process you will be presenting your prospect with an offer. This could be as simple as offering them to provide you with their email address in return for a lead magnet (sometimes referred to as an ethical bribe) all the way up to asking them to purchase a product or sign-up for your recurring monthly program.

Your offer has to be irresistible and stacked with value to make it seem like a no-brainer.

Stage 4 – Action

If your funnel is optimized then a number of prospects are going to turn into leads and/or customers as they will have been successfully converted.

This does not however mark the end of the transaction as by reaching the thank you page your customer can now be transitioned into your auto-responder sequence, members area or follow up funnel.

By continuing to nurture your customer you can in turn increase retention or even make additional sales through affiliate offers or redirection to a new buying opportunity.

Why You Need A Sales Funnel?

Having a sales funnel is like having the best sales person on Planet Earth work for you 24/7 without sick days or taking time off.

It means your offer is presented consistently every single time and you can even split test to find out which version of your offer converts the best.

It is a disciplined sales process and can quickly become an efficient and automated sales machine.

This then allows you to focus on pouring in traffic through the top of the funnel and letting the funnel itself handle the rest of the sales process.

With the power of the internet and the tracking capabilities it provides, a sales funnel will also allow you to break down the funnel into stages and understand which part of the process can be improved.

It is therefore far more formulaic in nature than in an offline environment.

How To Create A Sales Funnel

Creating an online sales funnel used to be a huge task that involved an entire team of designers and developers to make it happen.

It would be a nightmare to build each step of the funnel and try to use custom coding to link the funnel to all of the third party integrations that you would need to ensure a smooth process.

Luckily for us this is now a thing of the past thanks to some very powerful new software solutions that have entered the market.

The most noticeable of which is ClickFunnels.

In fact it was Russell Brunson, the co-founder of ClickFunnels, who has really successfully popularized the notion of online sales funnels and why they are so much better than a website.

As a result, ClickFunnels has grown at a truly astonishing pace.

In fact, at the time of writing, ClickFunnels is now the trusted go-to marketing platform for over 100,000 paying monthly members and counts over 200,000 fans in its Facebook community.

When it comes to creating a sales funnel ClickFunnels is the only product you will need and it can literally have you up and running with an online sales funnel in minutes.

What Can ClickFunnels Do?

ClickFunnels is used by marketers from all over the world to create professional high converting landing pages and sales funnels in no time at all.

In fact there are people:

Using ClickFunnels for ecommerce
Using ClickFunnels for dropshipping
Using ClickFunnels for affiliate marketing
Using ClickFunnels for real estate
Using ClickFunnels with Clickbank
Using ClickFunnels for network marketing
Using ClickFunnels for their website
Using ClickFunnels for their webinar
Using ClickFunnels for leads
Using ClickFunnels for clients (agency model)
And many more!

One of the reason ClickFunnels has become just so popular is because it features a very user-friendly drag-and-drop page editor.

The ClickFunnels page editor allows you to instantly add ‘elements’ to your funnel pages. Elements include things like videos, images, text boxes etc and they can easily be dragged into your precise desired position on the page all without you needing to know any coding whatsoever!

Just drag-and-drop.

So with just a few clicks you can quickly create custom pages that allow you to instantly start collecting leads and making sales.

How amazing is that?

ClickFunnels Pricing

ClickFunnels pricing plans keep things simple as there are only 2 different plans to choose from:

ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels Platinum (also referred to as ClickFunnels unlimited)

The standard ClickFunnels plan gives you up to 20 funnels, 100 pages, 20,000 visitors and 3 custom domains and it costs $97 a month.

The ClickFunnels Platinum plan costs $297 per month and comes with some cool features such as unrestricted access to ClickFunnels FunnelFlix and neat features like Follow Up Funnels that allow you to follow up with your customers in a very personalized manner through email and text messages.

For more detail on the new ClickFunnels pricing plans announced in September 2019 click here.

ClickFunnels Free Trial

One of the BEST things about ClickFunnels is that you can get an absolutely risk-free FREE 14 day trial to try all of the features for yourself before committing to buy.

Just click on the blue button below to find out more:

ClickFunnels Integrations

ClickFunnels also integrates with many of your favorite marketing and email automation tools such as GetResponse or payment processors such as Stripe or PayPal.

For a complete list of ClickFunnels integrations go here

Where Can I Find Out More Information About ClickFunnels?

You will find A LOT of information about ClickFunnels throughout FunnelBeginner as ClickFunnels remains our #1 go-to software solution for building amazing landing pages and sales funnels.

You may however also find some of the following articles helpful as well:

And most importantly, don’t forget you can also grab your completely FREE ClickFunnels Trial by simply clicking the button below:

Conclusion – What Is A Sales Funnel?

In closing a sales funnel is a must have asset in your marketing arsenal and is absolutely key to successfully generating leads or making sales online.

If you are interested in building sales funnels online then ClickFunnels is your must have tool.

For email marketing and automation we also highly recommend GetResponse.

Thanks for reading!