Some dropshipping entrepreneurs enter the business without ever having sold anything in their lives. Others come into it with a little bit of background sales knowledge, and still others come from corporate sales backgrounds. The one thing that all three of these groups of people have in common? They don’t know how to apply sales funnels to dropshipping. That’s why so many people turn to the team of experts at Why Unified for all of their sales funnel needs.
Here’s everything every dropshipping entrepreneur needs to know about dropshipping sales funnels, including what they are, how to build them, and how to maintain them.
What is a Sales Funnel?
In its broadest sense, a sales funnel can be thought of as a customer journey, from the very moment a consumer discovers your unique brand until they make their final purchase. Sales funnels tend to operate in stages, and while these stages can vary a great deal, there are four major phases that virtually every consumer will move through in their interactions with your brand.
- Awareness: The awareness phase occurs when a consumer learns of your brand for the first time. This could be a family member telling them about your brand, or it could be a social media add they discovered as they scrolled through Facebook.
- Interest: At some point during the process, it’s hoped that a consumer will show some sort of genuine interest in buying your product. This may occur when the consumer clicks your ad or visits your website to browse your products.
- Desire: The lines between interest and desire are often blurred, but desire can be defined as the phase of the sales funnel when the consumer clearly recognizes that your product fills a specific want or need in their life.
- Action: Finally, the consumer takes action when they choose to purchase the product from you.
Some of the steps in this process can be repeated by the same consumer over and over again. For example, a consumer who has already completed the action phase may enter the interest phase again after stumbling upon an advertisement for a different product in their social media feed.
How Do You Build a Dropshipping Sales Funnel?
There are countless tried-and-true tactics you can use to build an incredible dropshipping sales funnel, but many of them require expert knowledge, time, effort, and, of course, money.
- Search Engine Optimization – Search engine optimization, or SEO, is important for sending organic traffic to your store for the long term. This means ensuring that you are adding dynamic content to your website regularly, that your product descriptions contain searchable keywords, and that the overall user experience your store provides is optimal.
- Social Media – Social media is one of the most powerful tools available for building a healthy dropshipping sales funnel. When you post on your brand’s social media page, you are opening the door for communication and feedback – things that can forever change the way your store is received by the public. Don’t be afraid to interact with your audience, and don’t be afraid to ask for their feedback. Make sure you encourage engagement by engaging with your followers’ comments and shares, too.
- Paid Advertising – In terms of dropshipping, paid advertising is one of the very best ways to build a sales funnel. No matter how saturated your niche or industry, paid advertising ensures that people will see your store. It’s up to you to decide how to go about advertising; you can put together your own campaigns or hire a professional to do it for you.
- Email Campaigns – Email campaigns allow you to reach out to your audience in a segregated manner. For example, you can send one email out to people who haven’t yet made a purchase, and you can send a completely different email to those who have purchased from you in the past. Perhaps you can offer both a small incentive to come back and buy from you, as well.
How to Manage Your Sales Funnel
Now that you’ve worked to build your sales funnel, it’s up to you to maintain it. There’s one main strategy for this: monitor lead changes in your sales funnel and adjust your strategies as necessary. This involves collecting a lot of data – preferably in real time – and adjusting things like promotions, email and marketing campaigns, and more to ensure that you are reaching the right people at the right time.
Chances are good that you’ll never have a completely optimized sales funnel. The best sales funnels are the ones that consistently change from one day or even one hour to the next. You can use contact management tools, sales forecasting tools, and customer relationship management systems to your advantage for this, or you can hire a company to help you manage every aspect of your sales funnels.
Many people find that building and managing a sales funnel takes time and resources they just don’t have, so they opt to outsource it to a third party. There are certainly many options available, but Why Unified was developed with the unique needs of dropshippers in mind, and their Funnels plan addresses all the most common challenges.
