Sales Funnels: What’s that and Why should I use it for my dating site?

In a few of our latest articles, we’ve touched upon the term ‘sales funnel’ and some of you contacted me, asking to tell more about this funnel thing. So here we go, today, we’ll look into: what’s a sales funnel? What are the funnel stages? Example of dating sales funnel. And how to work with sales funnels.

What is ‘sales funnel’?

The sales funnel is the process that a customer goes through starting from getting to know your business and ending in making a purchase.

The funnel is divided into several stages depending on the actions and motivation of the user. The product and business specifics will influence what actions the user takes inside the funnel. Let’s see what stages the sales funnel is made of.

Stages of the sales funnel

We’ll refer to the classic AIDA model. This model helps to understand and organize the behavior of the buyer at each stage of the funnel and facilitate in getting more customers.

AIDA is suitable for any type of business, but depending on its specificity, the funnel stages may differ.

So, the AIDA sales funnel consists of four stages:

• awareness;
• interest;
• desire;
• action

At the first stage of the funnel, the user finds out that your company exists. For example, he sees an advertisement in the social network or a link in search results (awareness).

Further, the user is interested in the offer: looks at the offer, examines the prices, payment methods and other details (interest).

Then the user adds the product to the cart and wants to buy it (desire).

At the last stage, the user performs an action: places an order, subscribes to the newsletter, calls the contact number, and so on (action).

This model looks like a funnel because the number of people is reduced at each stage.

12545 people visited the site. If each of them went further, you would be fabulously rich, and the sales funnel would cease to be a funnel, but, usually, it does not happen.

As you can see, only half of the users are interested in the offer. Perhaps the rest did not like the design of the site or did not want to waste time viewing it.

Of all the curious, 3921 people wanted to buy something, the rest can live without you.

In the end, 468 of them became customers. Perhaps, those who left did not want it or did not find an opportunity to place an order.

It is very important that as many people as possible go from one stage to another. If one of the stages of the funnel loses too many visitors, you need to check whether everything is okay. The clients may refuse to order due to a suspicious payment system or stopped checking the search page because they did not find suitable filters and etc

Example of datings site sales funnel 

Awareness: Peter decides to find a girlfriend. He searches for a dating site with singles from his city.

Interest: Peter creates a profile on the site, tries the trial and starts looking for a girl. He liked the search fields and different option to attract a girl’s attention.

Desire: Peter has found several candidates and he wants to continue to use this service.

Action: Peter pays for the full membership when the trial ends.

How to work with sales funnel

It is important to work with each funnel stage so that as many users as possible convert to the next.

To do this, collect data on user behavior at each stage and draw up a customer journey map (CJM), adapt the marketing strategy to the user’s behavior, try different options and monitor their effectiveness.

Different customer scenarios will depend on what stage of the funnel, the customer is at the moment.

At the first stage, it is important to collect the contact information of the user to work with him further, at the second – to provide the most personalized offer, at the third- to push the user to the order page and finally make him into a regular customer.

However. you can also lose a client if you scare him with an offer he is not ready for yet. For example, a pop-up with a discount for the first order will not work if it appears immediately after the visitor opens your site. The user did not have enough time to get acquainted with your site and what it offers.

A little about working with users at different stages of the sales funnel:

• Lead generation. The first step of the sales funnel is to collect potential customers’ contact details. These can be emails or phone numbers.
• Warming customers up. Now, these leads need to be worked through, otherwise, they will go to competitors, when they are ready to buy, or won’t buy at all.
• Sale. Discounts, gifts or special offers will help the client to decide on a purchase.
• Customer retention. When a customer has made a purchase (and you have already drunk champagne celebrating it), there is no time to relax. Continue to work with this lead: it is much easier to earn on repeat sales than on new ones. Such a client can be pleased with loyalty bonuses, selling related products or discounts on repeat sales.

The main thing is to increase the conversion at each step of the funnel. Simply put, the wider each stage of the funnel and the more people move to the next, the better it works.

Summary

Sales funnels help you understand how users behave in order to find a key to their hearts and wallets. With the help of this article, you now learned a little bit more about the users, how to warm them up, how to conquer them and how not make fatal mistakes.

Feel free to share your experience or thoughts on this article.

tl;dr – If you don’t want to read the whole article, you can check this video

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