Recurring revenue is one of the most crucial aspects of marketing for keeping a business alive. This requires businesses to develop a clearly outlined strategy to guide their prospects throughout their customer journey.

One effective way to do this is by building a lead generation sales funnel. Read on to learn the secret to developing an effective sales funnel that nurtures leads into sales and loyal customers.

Why Do You Need a Lead Generation Sales Funnel?

According to Hexospark, lead generation is one of the challenges that 62% of marketers face. This results in the growing demand for a more advanced and effective strategy that can acquire quality leads and guide them toward their end goal – conversion. 

But why is a lead generation sales funnel so important for many businesses today?

Before we run down its benefits, it’s important for you to understand its key stages. Understanding this will help you to better grasp why they are essential for all sorts of businesses. 

Here are the key stages of the lead generation sales funnel:

• Awareness: Attract potential customers by making them aware of your brand or product.
• Interest: Engage prospects by providing information that piques their curiosity.
• Desire: Build desire by highlighting how your offering meets their needs or solves their problems.
• Action: Encourage prospects to take a specific action, like making a purchase or signing up.
• Confirmation: Reinforce the decision with a follow-up to ensure satisfaction and build loyalty.

Looking at the sales funnel’s flow, it basically aims to systematically guide customers towards making a purchase. Take note that each stage of the pipeline requires separate strategies that flow together to convert leads. Let’s discuss how you can do it in the next section.

How to Build a Lead Generation Funnel

Building a lead generation sales funnel is actually quite simple. It only involves 4 simple steps that any beginner can follow. The only thing they need is to execute it properly and continuously refine the funnel to optimise its conversion rate.

Determine Your Target Audience

As always, you need to identify your target audience. This step is crucial to clearly plot your strategies and ensure that the incoming stages of the funnel are relevant to them. 

For this, you may want to conduct market and competitor analysis, and build buyer personas based on their needs, pain points, preferences, and purchasing behaviours.

Develop High-Quality Content

You will need to have quality content to draw your target audiences into your business. In this part, you may want to pull out your market research and buyer persona. Doing so will help you create unique content that resonates well with your target audience.

Below are some popular content ideas you can use as lead magnets:

• Blog posts
• Social media content
• Videos

• Ebooks and guides
• Newsletters
• Case studies

• Product demos
• Testimonials

Add Call to Actions (CTAs)

Once you have the content laid out, don’t forget to add CTAs to it before making them live. CTAs are crucial for convincing your audience to click or creating a sense of urgency.

You can try these tips to create click-worthy CTAs:

1. Use straightforward language that directly states the action
2. Add phrases like “Limited Time” or “Act Now” to prompt immediate action
3. Start with strong verbs like “Download,” “Subscribe,” or “Get”
4. Ensure the CTA button stands out with contrasting colors
5. Clearly highlight what the user gains by clicking, such as “Free Guide” or “Exclusive Deal”

Engage with your Generated Leads

Now that you have acquired leads, you will have to nurture them into actual paying customers. There are many ways you can do this, but the most popular is through email marketing.

Unlike other marketing strategies, sending emails is one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience on a more personal level. Instead of waiting for them to see your social media post, you can immediately hit their inbox to keep them engaged and grow their interest in your product or service.

Tips to Maximise Your Lead Generation Efforts

Aside from the steps mentioned, there are other ways to boost the results of your lead generation sales funnel. Some of them are the following:

• Conduct A/B tests to refine your landing pages, forms, and CTAs to improve performance
• Optimize your website and content for search engines to attract organic traffic
• Offer real-time support and answers to questions from potential leads through live chat
• Use ConversionCow to monitor lead generation performance and adjust strategies accordingly
• Partner with industry influencers to expand your reach and credibility
• Engage with your audience directly through webinars or live events to generate leads
• Ensure your website and forms are mobile-friendly to capture leads from all devices
• Encourage existing customers to refer new leads by offering incentives

How ConversionCow Can Help?

ConversionCow is a platform designed to optimize marketing strategies by improving the clarity of your website’s messaging. Using this tool can reduce marketing wastage by ensuring that every visitor to your site is guided toward conversion.

It comes with features like customizable popouts, A/B testing, and real-time analytics that allow you to tweak and refine your campaigns for optimal performance. This tool not only aids in lead generation but also enhances the entire customer journey. In turn, this gives your sales funnel a boost, guaranteeing that leads will turn into loyal customers in no time.

Curious about how our tool works? Sign up for our 14-day free trial now!