Create an automated sales tunnel and convert your prospects without lifting a finger!

Would you like to know how to create an automated sales tunnel to increase your online sales? If the answer is yes, you've come to the right place. The sales tunnel is a tool that is very much in vogue on the online business market. And with good reason: what web entrepreneur hasn't dreamt of having a system that automatically sells every day?

But transforming your web traffic and creating an environment conducive to buying to generate automatic sales can't be invented! Let's take a look at this marketing process and the steps to follow to create a high-performance sales tunnel 👇.

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What is an automated sales tunnel?

Sales tunnel: definition

The expression " sales tunnel" comes from the English word "Funnel ". It describes the sales process designed to guide your prospects towards the purchase of a single product. In other words, the sales funnel is the path that guides an Internet user towards the purchase of a product or service.

This sales funnel, like a conversion funnel, will take care, step by step, of :

• identify and filter your potential customers ;
• automatically guide them through to purchase (conversion).

👉 This automated sales tunnel logic is based on an anti-distraction sales system. An automated sales machine that replaces sales reps and is used to sell digital products such as :

• training,
• ebooks
• products, etc.

Why automate your sales tunnel?

If you're reading this, it's because you want to create an automated, high-performance sales tunnel that will enable you to sell your products or services. This is the ultimate objective of your sales tunnel. By creating an automated sales pipeline, you can be more productive by reducing the costs and working time involved in marketing your offer, while at the same time increasing your turnover. Ultimately, automating your sales pipeline has a number of benefits, including

• improved customer experience
• sales growth;
• saves you time so that you can concentrate on high added-value tasks.

A sales tunnel can also be used to optimise your offering:

• during a pre-sales A/B testing phase, also known as " split testing" (to validate a product or service);
• or through tracking and retargeting at the end of the chain to extract the best sales and target campaigns.

👉 These elements linked to the implementation of an automated sales tunnel will result in a better return on investment or ROI, and therefore a better profit.

What are the conversion stages of a sales tunnel?

Before a sale can be made, a consumer has to be converted from visitor to prospect to customer.

Creating a sales tunnel involves defining the steps a prospect takes before completing a purchase. This process, known as the marketing conversion tunnel , can be broken down into 4 stages:

• Awareness ,
• Interest ,
• Decision (Desire),
• and Sales (for Action) and is known as the A.I.D.A. method.

The entire conversion tunnel should be based on this AIDA structure:

1- Attracting the potential buyer, which represents the moment when the consumer becomes aware of a product or service.

2- Interest in the product or service.

3- Desire , which marks the purchasing decision stage.

4- Action when the customer buys the service or product.

This classic funnel model has evolved in recent years and it is not uncommon to come across slightly different processes. However, whatever marketing strategy is put in place, the objective of the automated sales funnel has remained the same: to understand, facilitate and improve the customer journey when they make a purchase.

American marketer Russel Brunson breaks down an automated sales tunnel into three stages (rather than 4):

• TOFU (Top of the funnel) the entrance to the tunnel, which is the stage where you need to bring the most traffic to your website;
• MOFU (Middle of the Funnel), which consists of showing your potential customers that you understand their needs and have the solution to meet them.
• BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel), the stage at which prospects (qualified leads) are ready to buy and convert into customers.

How to create an effective sales tunnel: 5 steps

Let's now look in more detail at the different stages of a classic automated sales tunnel model and what you need to do to take your prospects to the next stage. Here we're going to use a five-stage sales funnel.

1 - Attract traffic via several channels

To begin with, you need to make yourself known and attract the attention of your target customers through a content strategy. This is where inbound marketing comes in, as it aims to attract prospects through the regular production of content.

During this stage, the consumer does not know you. So it's all about making yourself visible and "noticed" by your prospect. There are many ways of creating and capturing the prospect's attention:

• Developing your presence on social networks, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter or Facebook , by publishing regularly via a professional account (white papers, infographics, photos, videos, etc.);
• Use partnerships with other brands in the form of an affiliation system, webinars, podcasts, YouTube videos or a guest post, for example;
• Launching an advertising campaign with Google Ads, a paid way of gaining a rapid presence on the search engine;
• Optimise your content on the web using SEO. This enables you to gain positions on Google and appear on the first page of results thanks to relevant articles positioned on specific queries .

💡In a world going digital, it's vital to take care of this stage. This is not about selling directly, but about creating and developing a brand identity and talking about it! Your personal branding or professional branding must be an integral part of your digital marketing strategy. Prospects need to know you and remember you or your brand.

👉 Identify your marketing personae, in other words your target customer profiles. Bear in mind that your solution must respond to the problems they encounter.

💡 Are you a SaaS software publisher looking to generate more leads? Just the thing, at Appvizer, this is our speciality!

2 - Creating an engagement sequence to convince the prospect

Once the consumer knows about you, you enter the consideration phase. In other words, you now need to arouse their interest so that they continue to be interested (without going to the competition).

As such, you need to convince the visitor to commit. The aim is to convert them into qualified prospects or leads, likely to become customers quickly. To do this, you can adopt a two-pronged strategy:

1- Position yourself as an expert in your field through blog articles on your site, tutorials or publications in which you demonstrate your expertise and the effectiveness of your services.

2- Ensure an optimal user experience (UX) on your site by taking care to structure the navigation of your website, visitors must quickly find the answers to what they are looking for.

👉 At this stage of the automated sales tunnel, don't forget to think about lead nurturing. Thanks to this content, prospects are guided step by step along a fluid path during which they obtain the information and answers they need to lead them to a purchase. Lead nurturing consists of offering appropriate content and maintaining contact with the prospect in order to :

• respond to their needs
• give them accurate information
• establish a climate of trust.

You should also make sure that you offer visitors a way of staying in touch with you, so that you can win them over gently and without commercial pressure afterwards. The best way to do this is by email. For example, you could offer a discount or a free service in exchange for subscribing to a newsletter that requires the visitor's email address. This is an excellent way of maintaining the link with your prospects and taking them to the next stage.

💡Use an automated marketing or marketing automation solution which, combined with an emailing solution, allows you to target and direct your messages to your customer base.

💡Use lead scoring to assess the maturity of each prospect. This technique for scoring prospects, or leads, is generally established using a marketing automation tool. The higher the score, the more advanced and mature the lead is in the buying cycle. It's these qualified leads that you should focus your sales and marketing efforts on first.

3 - Support for decision support

At this stage, the Internet user is now ready to buy: he knows your brand, trusts your offer, is aware of your expertise and is considering placing an order. They may even have already placed a few products in their basket 😉. All that's left is to encourage this hot prospect to take the plunge and become a customer!

The best way to remove any remaining doubts is to take them by the hand. At this stage, they may still be wondering things like:

• "Do I really need this product?
• "Is this product going to be cheaper later?

So it's important to reassure them and convince them that now is the right time to buy this solution or product. Email marketing is a good way of doing this:

• offer an exceptional discount to make the product seem more accessible, so that the prospect sees real added value in their purchase;
• Give relevant, personalised tips and advice;
• offer a free returns policy to reassure prospects.

👉 This is also the time to use testimonials and customer reviews. The prospect is more confident to see that other consumers are satisfied and recommend your offer.

4 - Encourage the decision to buy

Now your prospect knows he wants to buy and is about to finalise his order. They've reached the bottom of the sales funnel. And yet there are still a number of measures you can take to help them confirm their purchase:

• Simplify the purchasing process by ensuring that the interface of your ordering system is simple and accessible (reduce the number of clicks);
• Suggest a final element that will motivate your prospects to go ahead with the purchase - for example, free delivery, scarcity ("there's not much room", "there are only a few items left in stock", etc.), urgency ("special offer", etc.).) or urgency ("limited offer", "valid only until").

To do this, we use CTAs (call to action) or a call to action button that facilitates the act of buying and must be judiciously placed during the customer journey. CTAs can be integrated :

• in your posts on social networks
• in your blog articles
• in your emails, etc.

💡Create a high-performance landing page. This is the page the prospect arrives at after clicking on a CTA, usually a contact form.

5 - Follow up the sale

Once the order has been placed, your automated sales tunnel has one final stage: tracking the sale. Finally, this stage consists of integrating this new customer into your database and building loyalty. This is perhaps the most important stage in the sales cycle!

To retain the customer and ensure that they come back to you, you can, for example :

• send an email thanking them for their purchase, with a promotional code for next time;
• offer a voucher for the purchase of similar products;
• thank them for sharing their opinion on your social networks or website;
• encourage them to become an ambassador and communicate about your offer, this is often the best advertising.

💡Question your customers using satisfaction forms, every comment is useful and tells you about the quality of your offers, areas for improvement, needs, etc.

💡Also think about social selling via social networks, which allows you to create interaction and maintain the link with your audience. An ideal lever for building customer loyalty and increasing your sales.

Equip yourself with software to automate your sales tunnel

There are several pieces of software available on the market today to help marketers and web entrepreneurs create automated sales tunnels. Most of these are CRM or sales support tools.

🛠️ A few examples:

• Starter is a ready-to-use CRM application from market leader Salesforce. Aimed at small businesses, it automates many of the operations involved in the sales process, saving teams time and increasing efficiency. In particular, Starter handles lead acquisition, with intelligent prospect segmentation and emailing, followed by the management of contacts and sales opportunities via an intuitive pipeline.
  
  
• Sellsyis a complete, turnkey and highly intuitiveCRM suite that enables you to manage all your sales activities effectively. You can create and dynamically monitor your sales tunnels using customised sales pipelines and a host of high-performance prospecting tools, including sales document reading tracking, prospect and quote follow-up, opportunity management, etc.
  

3 examples of high-performance sales tunnels

The Groupon sales tunnel

Groupon is an online classified ad site. Every month, several million users visit the platform , whose audience continues to grow. The Groupon sales tunnel is based on a giant mailing list associated with a website with :

• Step 1: traffic generated from mailing lists, recommendations, advertisements, affiliate links, etc.
• Stage 2: a structured home page or landing page with a pop-up window inviting visitors to give their email address. This stage enables them to navigate the site and take advantage of the services offered by Groupon.

The Mailchimp sales tunnel

MailChimp is free email marketing software. This tool is used to automate and optimise email marketing campaigns. It's a complex service, yet it's accessible on a freemium basis, and that's Mailchimp's secret. By offering its services free of charge, Mailchimp has been able to attract a large number of customers. Here's how the Mailchimp sales tunnel works:

• Stage 1: traffic: this is organic and comes from blogs, recommendations, etc.
• Stage 2: the home page or landing page: their editorial line talks about freedom, expression, identity... all ideas that are highlighted by good copywriting.
• Stage 3: the free offer remains a powerful acquisition strategy: in exchange for registering with an email address and password, the user can use Mailchimp. The number of users even becomes an example of social proof and a formidable lever for conversion.
• Step 4: Once the audience has been acquired and converted , the user becomes part of the Mailchimp community, and by using the product you are also publicising the offer.

The Netflix sales tunnel

Netflix is a relatively popular worldwide video streaming subscription service. Its sales tunnel is based on the consumer , not the product.

• Step 1: the home page emphasises the added value of the service, namely unlimited viewing of content from any medium and the ability to cancel the account at any time.
• Step 2: Netflix focuses on the consumer and his or her satisfaction, with a clear message. At this stage, all you have to do is confirm your interest in the offer by clicking on the next button.
• Stage 3: the pricing page: all that's left to do is convert, the prospect is ready to buy. By default, Netflix selects the premium package (social proof), which is also the most expensive.

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Key points to remember about the automated sales tunnel

The automated sales tunnel is an essential tool for improving the customer experience and increasing your sales. Although easy to implement, it does require precision and rigour to automate a relevant and profitable sales tunnel.

But don't panic, there are plenty of software tools available to help you take appropriate, targeted action and support you effectively in your marketing strategy. Thanks to these tools, you can gain peace of mind with an offer that's a hit on the internet.