The sales funnel consists of several important stages leading to sales. Why is it worth creating sales funnels and what are the benefits?
Simply put, the sales funnel is a sales process divided into several stages. It allows for systematising sales and identifying customers interested in the offer. When building the sales funnel, it is crucial to understand customers’ behaviour and their decision-making processes. How to lead a potential customer down the sales funnel using push notifications?
Sales funnel stages
The sales funnel, both in the case of B2B and B2C, has been created to increase sales in online stores. The number of stages depends on specific nature of the business and needs; however, we can distinguish four basic stages to guide our leads through.
Building awareness (ToFu – Top of the Funnel) boils down to all marketing activities that are intended to make a recipient interested. This is the most important stage, because on it depends whether the brand will appear in the minds of potential customers. It is possible to redirect a recipient to an online store using social media posts, articles, guides, e-books, and reports. ToFu allows you to build brand awareness, encouraging a recipient to contact you. The process requires building scoring, i.e. assigning a point value based on customer behaviour and information collected.
At the ToFu stage, we can use push notifications. After entering a website, a window containing a short message will pop up – at this point a user may agree to join the subscriber base.
Building interest (MoFu – Middle of the Funnel) is a stage that is often overlooked by marketers who go straight to selection of leads. At the stage of making recipients interested, it is very important to convince them to familiarise with the offer and to analyse further behaviour. MoFu is a complicated stage due to diversity of recipients’ interests. The message should be tailored to the specific target group (targeted content).
Segmentation of recipients and personalisation of the message are crucial at the MoFu stage. Thanks to push notifications, we can engage recipients by providing valuable content for them, and then analyse the results obtained. In this case, it is equally important to collect scoring, enabling subsequent use at the selection stage.
Lead selection (BoFu – Bottom of the Funnel) comes down to recognising leads and selecting potential customers interested in the offer from the previous stage. The attractive lead is transferred to the sales department, where the transaction should be completed. At the BoFu stage, we can offer discount codes to potential customers or use purely promotional content. The concept of targeted content is equally important – the content must be personalised and tailored to the segment. At the BoFu stage, it is worth encouraging a customer to buy, e.g. offering free delivery or a discount for subsequent purchases.
Sales is the last stage of the sales funnel, as well as another element that is included in the scoring process. However, in addition to the contract conclusion, you also need to ensure after-sales activities. Push notifications allow for building customer loyalty. After concluding the transaction, it is worth providing recipients with interesting advisory content or informing them about a new collection.
Customer experience management vs push notifications
Customer experience management is the entire experience of a potential customer at every stage of contact with the brand, which affects recipients’ buying decisions. Targeted sales messages (targeted content) delivered via push notifications are one of the components of customer experience management. A potential customer must feel well cared for at every stage of the shopping funnel – it is worth providing them with both guidance content, encouraging purchases with additional benefits, and reminding about a new offer. Simply speaking – taking care of constant contact with the customer.
