How to Create an Automated Sales Funnel

What is an Automated Sales Funnel?

To understand the sales funnel, imagine a regular funnel you might use for pouring something into a bottle.

You pour something into the funnel's top; it passes through narrower portions and eventually comes out the narrowest point at the bottom, filling the bottle.

In the sales world, the bottle represents your business, and your goal is to fill your business with loyal customers. Prospects begin at the top of the funnel and trickle through before becoming customers.

With a sales funnel, not everything that enters the top of the funnel is guaranteed to come out the bottom.

An automated sales funnel is just a sales funnel with added automation to help keep things moving smoothly. But to create the automation, you’ll need some type of automation sales funnel software.

There are various types of funnel-building software tools available, but usually, sign-up forms, AutoResponders, and scheduling software will be the most helpful — depending on your business and funnel.

The huge advantage of using automation is that you can generate more revenue with less manual effort from your sales team — while filtering out unqualified leads.

And it makes sense - less time prospecting means more time closing. (64% of e-commerce marketers say that email marketing and marketing automation result in more sales.)

Looking at Stages of the Sales Funnel

A literal funnel pulls things from top to bottom using gravity — sales funnels require a little more work.

There are several stages that prospects go through before becoming customers, and it’s your job to deliver the information they need to make that decision on their terms.

It’s essential to keep the individual in mind through the entire sales funnel.

There’s a unique emotional, and logical mindset users are experiencing at each stage of the funnel. Specific types of information can help guide prospects to the next stage before ultimately making a decision.

Where it All Begins — Awareness

The awareness phase is at the very top of the funnel, where leads begin their journey. It’s also the stage of the funnel that has the most volume.

At this point, they’re not even necessarily aware that they have a problem, let alone one that you can help solve.

In the awareness stage, your objective is to communicate that you understand what your prospects are experiencing and that you’ve got a way to solve it.

On top of that personal communication, you also have to establish your brand’s voice, identify as a leader among your competitors, and get prospects to form a connection to your message.

Yeah, it’s a challenge to get this communication right, and it’s essential to do so. During this stage, prospects react primarily on emotional appeal and gut feeling rather than logic or data.

Consideration

Once your prospects are aware of the pain point you’re trying to solve, they begin looking for ways to solve it.

Your brand is very likely not the only one out there that’s aiming to generate sales in your space.

It’s critical to communicate what differentiates you from the competition and why.

There’s still a degree of emotion involved at this stage, but logic starts entering the picture.

Suppose a brand doesn’t appeal to their needs or meet criteria such as budget, features, or service. That brand gets eliminated from consideration — you don’t want that to be you.

Decision

The decision phase is the last stage before customers pull the trigger and come out of the funnel’s bottom.

They have most of the information they need to pull the trigger and make a purchase but are weighing all of the final logistical details.

At this point, they’re most likely to need the facts and differentiating information that will help them make a logical decision.

Information like discounts, warranty offers, and excellent service are vital to turning leads into customers in the decision phase.

Retention — Where Your Brand is Made

You’ve closed the deal and have a steady stream of customers coming through your funnel’s bottom. Is your work here done?

Far from it.

You don’t just want your customers to make a one-time purchase and leave. You need to retain those customers through regular, engaging content and excellent service.

Your loyal customers serve you in more ways than just recurring revenue. They also help introduce new leads and help you establish your brand as an authority in your industry through customer loyalty.

How Does an Automated Sales Funnel Work? 

An automated sales funnel works by matching users to content that answers their questions throughout the funnel's various stages.

These messages are delivered automatically, through the platforms and technologies that you chose.

Automated funnels can either be time-based or behavior-based.

A time-based funnel delivers messages at set intervals through the sales process.

Users make an initial opt-in action, such as filling out a form or providing an email address.

Then people who sign up get served a series of messages at a set time interval.

A behavior-based funnel starts out the same way as a time-based funnel — an opt-in action happens, then users get served a message. This type of automation takes into account specific behaviors — if someone clicks through on a message, they get moved to a different series of messages than those who didn’t click through.

Behavior-based funnels are known to get better results because they account for a user’s interests at a given moment.

These automated sequences lead traffic down the funnel until, eventually, they make a purchasing decision.

Why Should You Create Automated Sales Funnels?

Since sales can make or break your business, the ability to increase sales is the biggest security you can have.

To focus your energy on your business's growth, you need to free up time. And the best way to free up your time is to automate a system that can bring in more sales on autopilot.

But that's not all. Let's review other benefits of automating your sales funnel:

• Minimize expenses and labor costs: This is kind of a hidden benefit automated sales funnels offer that ultimately improves your ROI. An increased ROI means a higher profit margin for your business in the long run.
• Improve data points: Automating your sales funnel frees up more time to analyze your sales and marketing data, see what's not working. Once you identify weak points of your sales funnel, it's easier to improve it.

Find better leads and increase conversions: Improved your sales funnel will eventually help you find more qualified leads and increase your conversion rate.

How to Create an Automated Sales Funnel

While the funnel itself might be automated, the process of setting it up requires some serious manpower upfront.

Luckily, there are a few key steps to take every time you map out an automated campaign that keeps the process simple while maximizing the results.

We’ll also be going over ways you can build a sales funnel from scratch.

Conduct Some Market Research

To develop an automated marketing funnel for your business, you need to start by understanding your audience.

Ask your current customers, top sales performers, and key brand stakeholders about your audience’s needs. This information is super valuable to understand what pushes people to work with your brand.

Consider developing buyer personas, which help you understand each of your ideal market segments based on specific needs, demographic information, common pain points they experience, and any questions buyers might have as they journey through the funnel.

But there’s more to market research than that. It’s not enough to stop with your own audience.

You’ll also want to conduct some competitive analysis of other businesses playing in the same space. Look not only at their products and pricing but also how they position themselves.

If you look at their brand’s voice and what they’re claiming makes them different, you’ll be able to identify a unique position for yourself. Once you decide what makes you unique, play up those qualities in your content.

Select an Automation Software

To automate your funnel, you’ll need a really solid CRM.

More than just a contact database, a good CRM will help keep track of lead behaviors, track engagement, and create segmented lists of users with similar characteristics.

You’ll also need a marketing automation tool that lets you create automated sales funnels. The goal is to send a series of messages, typically via email, automatically to users in your database.

In the case of all-in-one CRMs, like VipeCloud, many of these will handle both of these tasks in a single system.

Every tool talks about these a little differently — you might see “drips,” “workflows,” or other similar words floating around. For our purposes, these mean roughly the same thing, as long as you can create a series of messages that can be sent without manual input.

In an ideal world, your CRM and your email marketing tool will work together seamlessly, or (even better) exist in the same ecosystem. It’s more cost-effective that way, and improves the way you conduct your campaigns.

Choosing the right CRM and marketing automation tool will also offer reporting functionality, so you can monitor progress toward goals, better understand lead behavior, and build each campaign to be a little bit stronger than the last one.

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Develop a Content Strategy

Automating your sales funnel is all about building a connection with your audience. In the current age, the best way to do that is with highly-relevant, valuable content.

You’ll also want supporting content developed for each stage of the funnel. Develop a range of content in the form of blogs, videos, and emails that address user questions, address pain points.

The idea is to help users take the next step on the path to purchase.

Your content strategy shouldn’t just be developed with a specific campaign in mind. You don’t want prospects to get burned out on a message or set of messages.

If your automated funnel is successful, it’ll bring people to your website, where they’ll read content and learn more about what you have to offer.

In an ideal situation, they’ll continue to click around, aiming to find more valuable information.

But the main goal of your content strategy?

You want to meet their needs.

A great content strategy will help increase your overall digital presence and enhance your overall digital footprint.

Your content strategy should include regular blogs, videos, publications, and website updates that keep audiences interested and provide them all the answers they need to make an informed purchase decision.

Make a Tempting Lead Generation Magnet — Some Ideas That Work

If you want to automate a campaign, you’ll need a solid piece of anchor content that prompts users to opt into your automated campaign.

If the content is gated (meaning they’ll need to opt-in for your special content), you’ll be able to capture lead information in exchange for this valuable information. Just make sure that it’s tempting enough that a user is willing to give you their information.

Most brands go with a downloadable piece of premium written content, like an eBook, buyers guide, or whitepaper. It might also be a scripted video that offers users a detailed glimpse into a solution for some problem they’re experiencing.

This route takes a lot of upfront research and production, but you only have to do the work once.

You might also consider kicking off your campaign with something a little more interactive. A webinar directly engages audiences and requires an RSVP. You might develop a quiz that encourages users to build a solution or learn something new about themselves or their business, and the results are only accessible via email.

Regardless of what you choose, you want your lead magnet to be super (super) value-packed.

Think of something in your industry that users absolutely cannot say “no” to.

Build a Campaign

Once you’ve got the anchor content that helps you generate the leads for your campaign, you’re ready to build an automated campaign!

Thanks to your handy content strategy, you’ve got supporting content mapped to specific user needs and pain points, which helps fill the remainder of the funnel.

Now it’s time to put those two together in an order that anticipates users’ needs and feelings, and build toward a compelling final call to action.

Your ultimate CTA might not be making a direct purchase. Scheduling a conversation, requesting a demo, or comparing solutions can be equally compelling CTAs that drive conversions.

The CTA will depend on your business and industry.

Especially if your product is pricey or more high-consideration, the automated funnel might work best until it’s brought the lead in for a sales call. It’ll be up to you to decide.

If you’re going with a time-based funnel automation or email drip campaign, make sure that each message in the sequence tells the next part of the story, before ultimately resulting in the final call to action.

For more complex behavior-based automation with branching logic and unique journeys based on user behavior, create the CTA at the end of each branch.

There are two ways to handle this — depending on the type of user:

1. If a lead doesn’t engage on any message, it’s safe to consider them “cold” and add them to a list segment that receives fewer messages in the long term.
2. But if a lead engages on multiple messages early in their journey, get them to that end CTA sooner rather than later.

Account for User Behavior

There are a lot of annoying things that can happen on the path to purchase.

Very few rank higher than a tone-deaf sales email from a brand you’re barely familiar with.

If you’re using an advanced marketing automation platform, you should be able to map user journeys that take different paths based on actions.

Like we said earlier, behavior-based automation is typically more successful.

Remember reading that “choose your own adventure” book as a kid?

If you’re anything like me, then nothing compares to feeling like you’re in control, and that feeling applies to a marketing automation funnel, too.

Set the Wheels in Motion

Once you’ve mapped everything out, it’s time to get it going!

Publish your content, switch on your funnel, and get the leads rolling in.

It’s important to note that you’ll probably have to do some solid marketing of your lead generation piece in order to get the best results from your automated sales funnel.

And since we want our sales funnel to be as automated as possible, choosing an inbound marketing method will be the most-automated way to go. Youtube channels and blogs are great places to start.

Like all things in sales, there’s no such thing as “if you build it, they will come.” So once your content is published, be sure to promote it through various channels.

Want a Successful Automated Sales Funnel? Follow These 3 Marketing Automation Tips 

You can’t just think like a salesperson or a marketer when working on your funnel.

You need to think analytically about how your campaigns are serving goals, and remain realistic about what these types of campaigns can achieve.

To make the most of your automated funnels, there are a few things you’ll need to keep in mind.

1. Don’t “Set it and Forget it”

Automating your campaign doesn’t mean that you can just let the “robots” do all the work.

You want to check in on your campaign, make sure everything is working properly, and monitor performance.

Creating an automated sales funnel takes time and energy, so you need to keep an eye on it to make sure it’s performing as you intended.

So what if your automated campaign is performing poorly?

Then it’s time for optimization and to make adjustments. It’s okay to make tweaks after the campaign has gone live. And when you’re first starting out, you’ll want to do A/B testing of your email sequences to get max performance.

Keep your content strategy active, timely, and relevant to your current marketing and sales goals. So this means if you’re acquiring leads through SEO, keep on blogging. Or if you get most of your email opt-ins from your Youtube channel, then keep posting videos.

2. Measure, Optimize, Repeat

The best way to make sure that everything is going according to plan?

Measurement.

How could you possibly know if any of your efforts are working unless you gather data?

There are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll want to measure through the course of your automated sales campaign:

• Open rate: Most automated sales funnels are centered on email. You need to know how many users are actually opening those emails to have any sense of whether or not your message is being received at all.
• Click-through rate (CTR): Click-through rates are the easiest way to track engagement on a specific message. Look not only for clicks but also for unique clicks to see how many users are engaging.
• Bounce rate: This measures the number of messages that were returned undeliverable. If you have a high bounce rate, you have work to do cleaning up your database.
• Unsubscribes & spam flags: If a large number of users are opting out of your funnel or flagging your messages as spam, you need to take action to solve it.
• Conversion rate: You’ll calculate this based on the percentage of users who take the desired action at each stage of the funnel and ultimately become closed sales.

As you measure your campaign, you should make tweaks to optimize performance. Keep massaging to make the most of your efforts.

Eventually, your campaign will reach its full potential for lead generation and conversions. At that point, you can use what you’ve learned to build a new campaign that follows a similar structure.

Typically, you’ll want to run a new lead generation and nurture campaign roughly once a quarter, or at least twice a year. That way, you can keep your content, including your lead generation piece, relevant based on industry trends and product updates.

3. Find Ways to Re-Engage Prospects

You can’t win them all.

You’re inevitably going to have prospects who drop off and don’t complete conversions. That doesn’t mean those efforts were wasted, though.

If a prospect goes cold, you should still remain in touch. Add them to a list to receive regular (but less frequent) updates in the form of semi-regular newsletters.

After some time has passed, you can develop a new automated funnel that specifically targets these contacts.

3 Popular Examples of Automated Sales Funnels

1. HubSpot's Content Marketing Strategy

HubSpot uses various forms of content (blogs, eBooks, webinars) to attract visitors, converting them into leads through forms and landing pages, nurturing them with targeted emails, and analyzing user interaction to optimize the funnel.

2. Netflix's Subscription Model

Netflix captures leads through free trials, uses personalized email campaigns and app notifications to encourage sign-ups, and constantly analyzes user data to optimize content recommendations and retain subscribers.

3. Amazon's E-commerce Funnel

Amazon leverages targeted ads to drive traffic, uses personalized product recommendations and reviews to convert visitors, and follows up with emails for feedback and related products to maintain engagement and loyalty.

Choosing the Right Sales Funnel Building Software — It Matters

An automated sales funnel is a powerful lead generation and nurture machine. It can help fuel your sales efforts while freeing up your team from manual efforts earlier in the funnel.

Choosing the right automated sales funnel software can make a night and day difference for your sales and marketing campaign.

Don’t know where to start?VipeCloud is a CRM software rated #1 against its competitors for usability and customer satisfaction. Request a free demo today to see for yourself.

Automated Sales Funnel FAQ