Maximizing Efficiency – Automate Your Sales Funnel

Turning leads into sales takes time. But it takes more time if you do everything manually.

Having your own business can be remarkably time-consuming and challenging. The daily grind of routine tasks leaves you with no time to focus on some of the most critical aspects of your business, such as your business’s sales funnel.

A sales funnel is a core part of any organization’s long-term growth. To get the most out of it, you need to find ways to automate different aspects of it. In this article, we will discuss how you can successfully apply automation to your sales funnel and maximize efficiency.

Let’s start from the top.

What is an Automated Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a process that involves multiple steps to turn prospective buyers into buyers. It is a marketing term for the journey a business’s prospective customers go through until they make a purchase.

An automated sales funnel is just a sales funnel that uses automated systems and software to help simplify things and keep them moving smoothly.

To implement automation in your sales funnel, you would need some type of automation software. Think: Autoresponders, scheduling software, sign-up forms, and much more – depending on your business.

One of the biggest advantages that automation brings with it is increased efficiency. Once an automated operation has been put into place, it pretty much performs its job to the tee, without messing up the instructions provided.

Moreover, automation allows you to generate greater profits with less manual effort involved from you and your team.

In the broader sense, an automated sales funnel reduces prospecting time which means more time is spent on closing leads. In fact, 64 percent of marketers agree that marketing automation has resulted in more sales for their business, proving its efficacy in benefitting an organization’s sales funnel.

How to Automate Your Sales Funnel While Still Retaining a Human Touch

1. Research Your Market 

No matter what your business is, you need to start by understanding your audience. This means performing extensive market research and seeing where your customers need help the most.

Ask your customers about their needs. Have them give you valuable feedback on what they like and dislike about your services/products. Gathering this information is a valuable first step in understanding what pushes people to engage with your brand.

Additionally, create ideal buyer personas. This can help you segmentize your marketing efforts based on specific customer needs and answer any queries they may have throughout their sales journey.

To conduct effective market research, it’s not enough to stop with your own customers. You should go beyond your audience and see what others are doing - specifically your competitors.

Perform a competitive analysis of other companies playing in the same niche as yours. Look at how they position themselves and the brand personality they create to attract more customers. Realize how you can set yourself apart from them. Find a position that is unique to your brand.

2. Develop Content Around Customer Concerns

Once you have researched your market, it is time to create content that addresses your customers’ pain points and shows them how you can help. With whatever you choose to create, make sure it speaks to the needs of your audience. Ensure to use a variety of content to highlight your services.

If there is a need, hire a freelancer or two for this purpose.

3. Invest in a Good CRM Software

Nurturing high-quality relationships with your customers is an important part of any successful sales funnel. However, the process of maintaining meaningful client relationships is not the easiest thing in the world to do.

This is where a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software comes in. CRM tools help you optimize the way your business interacts with its audience. They automate and simplify business operations, allowing managers and team leaders to offer their customers the best possible service, all while managing their business.

Investing in a good CRM system can help you in various ways:

• Improve customer relationships and services

• Boost productivity to result in business growth

• Streamline the sales process

• Provide a wide range of automated tools

• Provide eye-opening data for improved reporting

Using an effective CRM tool enables your business to reach new heights with its ability to increase customer satisfaction and retention. Nowadays, there is no shortage of good CRM solutions in the market. Our top choices include HubSpot, Keap, Zendesk, and Insightly.

4. Develop Drip Campaigns for the Entire Lifecycle

A drip campaign is a sequence of emails that are scheduled in advance to be sent into a customer's inbox at a given time. These emails can be segmentized to make them more personalized to the customer.

Drip campaigns are a powerful approach towards creating an effective inbound sales and marketing strategy. They work to nurture the relationship between the buyer and the seller with the use of automation.

As part of a sales funnel, they provide a ripe opportunity to retain new prospects' attention and lead them towards conversion. 

5. Utilize a Mix of Email and Text Messages

Along with automated emails, your automated sales funnel should include using text messages to engage your customers.

While emails are a tried-and-true method of customer engagement, using SMS can provide that extra boost. It allows you to send concise, seamless, and timely messages to your buyers.

Utilizing both email and text messages can create a customer experience that is both reliable and impactful.

6. Craft a Compelling Message

To make customers take notice of your business, you need to craft a compelling message. A strong marketing message should always consist of the following three elements:

• The value and benefit it provides to the customer (what)

• What differentiates it from its competitors (why)

• A call-to-action (how)

Compelling messages can make a real impact on how people interact with your business or whether they even choose to interact with it, in the first place. 

7. Make Your Messaging Personal – Use Merge Fields

In the process of applying automation to your sales funnel, you should always remember to still preserve a human touch throughout the entire process.

An efficient way to achieve that is by personalizing your email templates using merge fields. Merge fields allow you to leverage customer information stored in your database to create content that feels more personalized to the client. They display customer-centric information, such as their name, birthdate, preferences, and so on, which you can then use to send emails that feel handcrafted and personal.

For example, if you want to send your clients an email wishing them well on their birthday, you would create a custom merge field for their birthdate and fill it with the relevant information. Then, you will set up an email campaign that gets triggered every time a customer’s birthdate arrives and sends a personalized birthday email to them.

This is a great way to make your customers feel appreciated and remembered, which can then translate to better sales. 

8. Encourage Your Customers to Engage on Social Media

The digital world has become more powerful than ever which has made social media an integral part of any business.

Always encourage your customers to engage with your brand on social media by liking, commenting, and following your content. The more likes, share, and follows you get on social media, the more newcomers to your page will your trust your brand.

Social media engagement also has a big impact on a business's Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a correlation between search performance and social media. This means that the more people engage with your brand on social platforms, the more likely it is for your brand content to rank well on Google.

This would then translate to more traffic being sourced to your business’s online channels, resulting in increased potential customers.

9. Inspect Your Systems Regularly to Maximize Efficiency

An essential part of creating an effective automated sales funnel is making sure that you are constantly inspecting your systems and reworking your funnel to maximize efficiency.

Fortunately, automation can help you with this as well.

You don’t have to spend every single day analyzing every small element of your sales funnel to make sure it is working the way it optimally should.

You can, instead, set up split tests. These tests randomly use different pop-ups for random customers. For instance, you can have one pop-up that offers a customer a free e-book and another pop-up that offers another customer 15 percent off on their first order.

The condition for customers to avail each offer would be to enter their email address so they can get access to the e-book or discount code while joining your newsletter, at the same time.

You can try these tests out for a week and see what the results represent and which one performs better. If the coupon did better than the e-book, you can replace the e-book with another strategy to see what works better.

You can apply similar thought processes to different stages of your sales funnel to maximize conversions and make the most out of your efforts.

Why You Should Automate Your Sales Funnel

Sales are what is going to make or break your business. They are the security your business needs to survive and thrive amongst the competition. And whether it is the need to generate new sales or build on existing ones, every organization needs to continue to grow, in one way or another.

Many times, businesses are not able to focus on building meaningful relationships with their customers that would allow them to make sales because they are too busy doing the little things that take up most of their day.

Automation helps with minimizing the effort needed for mundane tasks that require little to no interaction and freeing up your time to do what is more important for your business.

It results in:

• Increased efficiency. Through automation, you are able to create processes that can operate independently, with minimal or zero interference by you. Those processes perform effectively, every single time, based on the information provided to them. This creates efficiency in operations throughout the sales funnel with necessary modifications made whenever needed.

• Freeing up time and useful resources. Making automation an integral part of your sales funnel can free up a lot of time and effort for you and your colleagues. It essentially allows you to "set it and forget it", which means you can focus your attention on aspects of your business that are much more crucial such as sales, marketing, and customer service.

• Improving Your Data Points. Automating your sales funnel also frees up more time for you to analyze your most critical data and see what is working. This helps redesign your marketing and sales efforts to generate more revenue.

• Decreasing Overall Expenses. You can lower your business's overhead costs on labor as well as time-consuming business processes with the use of automation. This improves your return on investment (ROI) and consequently, lets your business hit higher profit margins.

Keep in mind that even with an automated system in place, you would have to make regular improvements to your existing system to maximize efficiency and get the best out of it. You need to analyze and see what is and isn't effective to make your automated processes better and more effective. However, with the benefits that automation can provide, it is a small price to pay.

Be Patient – It Takes Time

Being a team leader or business owner is a busy job. You have got a team to manage and a business to look after. You have to spend hours upon hours each day doing repetitive work by sifting through countless emails, talking to your employees, and figuring out which route to take to maximize profits.

These small – yet essential – tasks can eat up a considerable chunk of your day. This leaves no time for you to set up an automated sales funnel and you may even feel discouraged to put one in place. However, being patient is key for you to drive success for your business.

For your automated sales funnel to work to its maximum potential, you have to show your audience that there is a human being behind every communication or interaction that takes place in your sales funnel.

Here are a few important things to keep in mind:

• Your content should be tailored to the right audience and used wherever it is relevant instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

• Bring a personal element to your drip campaign. Remind your customers of your product or services by incorporating emotions in your drip emails.

• Always ask for feedback from customers to see where your sales funnel can be improved upon.

• Ensure to analyze data to see what works and what doesn’t.

While building an automated sales funnel might take up a lot of time and energy on your part, it is key to any organization’s sustainability and growth. Once in effect, an automated sales funnel can put you at ease and simplify a lot of the day-to-day jobs for you and your organization.