Capturing cold prospects and turning them into long-time customers is top of mind for every business owner. And whether you’re aware of it or not, you—as a merchant—are putting them through several stages of what’s called a sales funnel.

💡 What is a Sales Funnel?

In simple terms, a sales funnel represents a buyer’s journey from early-stage brand discovery to final purchase. And if you’re wondering why it’s called a funnel, that’s because it’s depicted as such. It starts wide at the top and narrows down at the bottom. This portrays how merchants begin with a relatively large audience of prospective buyers before they get trimmed down to ones that are more likely to make a purchase.

The sales funnel has various iterations, with some being non-linear and more complex than others. But if we’re to simplify it, a sales funnel can be divided into three parts: the top, middle, and bottom. Each of these stands for a certain stage in a buyer’s journey.

The top of the funnel can be summed up in one word: awareness. Here, merchants should be focused on educating cold prospects on how their product can solve their pain points. Prospects that are no longer unaware of your product move on to the middle of the funnel. This is where customers consider whether it’s in their best interest to purchase a certain product or not. When prospects reach the bottom of the funnel, that means they’re close to conversion and are seriously considering making that purchase decision.

In order to ensure that customers move further down the sales funnel, it’s important that you map out what you hope to accomplish in each stage.

First, ask yourself what it is that you hope to address. Listed below are some questions that you might consider answering as you map out your sales funnel:

• What are your goals at each stage of the funnel?
• Who is your target audience?
• What are your potential customers thinking and doing?
• What content and activities fit best for each stage?

Here at ChatGenie, our goal is to always empower business owners in managing their online business. Selling inside the world’s biggest apps is just the beginning — you can also automate marketing initiatives and make data-driven decisions through our ChatGenie Dashboard. For a more in-depth discussion of each stage of the sales funnel and how ChatGenie can help, feel free to download the document we’ve prepared below:

Sign up for a FREE ChatGenie subscription to start selling inside Facebook Messenger. More perks await when you upgrade to either a STARTER or PREMIUM plan!

‍