Sales funnel copywriting is one of the most critical aspects of your business.
But as the saying goes, your funnel is only as strong as its weakest link.
That means you need to make sure your copywriting is laser sharp at every stage of your funnel. That way, you won’t leave potential leads and sales on the table.
So, in this post, we’ll go over what sales funnels are and how you can improve your writing at each stage of your funnel.
Ready to get started? Let’s dive in.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a marketing concept that helps you pinpoint the exact point where your prospects are most likely to convert.
This can include any number of different stages, depending on how an individual customer interacts with your company. For example, some people will only engage with your website after they’ve found it through organic search engine results or promotional email, while others will never get past the initial landing page.
Regardless of which stage a customer is in when they enter your funnel, there’s always an opportunity to engage with them and improve their experience before they leave or bounce off of you site entirely.
The idea behind this approach is that if you can convince people who are only mildly interested in your company to take the next step, they’ll have a much higher chance of converting.
This is why it’s so important for each stage of your sales funnel to offer compelling copywriting that speaks directly to their needs and concerns at that particular moment.
The more complicated or long-term someone’s decision process (such as purchasing a car), the more time and energy they’ll invest in researching your company.
For this reason, it’s often best to focus on converting prospects at each stage of your funnel who are only mildly interested or have just barely reached the end. These individuals will be much quicker to buy from you because their decision-making process hasn’t been slowed down by research.
Now that we’ve covered what sales funnels are and why they’re so important, let’s look at the different elements of a successful funnel.
What Are the Stage of a Sales Funnel?
You probably know the classic formula for a sales funnel: AIDA.
That stands for:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
And while this model is helpful, we’ll be looking at our sales funnel through a similar lens (though with different labels).
That’s because more descriptive labels will help us narrow down the type of copywriting we’ll need at each phase. So let’s re-label the categories above to the following:
- Pitching your product or service.
- Building the relationship with prospects.
- Convincing them to purchase from you.
- Closing the sale and maintaining that customer for future purchases.
Understanding this process will help you identify where copywriting should be most effective.
Before diving into our phase-by-phase play in sales funnel copywriting, though, let’s get clear on the kinds of copywriting each phase might require.
Types of Content You’ll Need to Write
There are a few types of content that you’ll need to work on to master your copywriting skills.
While there are many more than the ones listed below, these are the staple types of copywriting that you’ll need to produce in one or more phases of your sales funnel:
- Paid advertisements: These are the paid ads that you’ll find on pay-per-click networks like Google, Facebook, and more.
- Press releases: This is a longer-form piece of content about your company, usually released through PRWeb or another similar press release platform.
- Blog posts: Blogs can offer more in-depth explanations than articles, which typically have a word limit to make them easily digestible. While this is more “long-form” writing, there are elements of copywriting that you need to include in each post.
- Social media posts: This is a short statement that you might post on your social media feeds, such as Facebook or Instagram.
- Ebooks and white papers: These are documents offering more in-depth explanations of the subject at hand than an article can provide. It’s usually released for free on your website or through other distribution channels.
- Landing pages: These are the pages used to capture information from prospects and send them through your funnel.
- Pitch Pages: These are typically landing pages with a “sign up” form that helps you get leads.
- Product descriptions: This is what appears on the product page of your store–and it needs to be compelling enough for someone to buy!
- Email series: This is a series of emails that you can use to “nurture” prospects and increase the likelihood that they’ll buy.
- Case studies: These are in-depth explanations about how your product or service solved someone’s problem–usually released as articles, but sometimes available for download on your website.
- Infographics: This is data visualized in an aesthetically pleasing way.
Now that we’ve seen the main types of copywriting you’ll need to produce, let’s look at each stage of our sales funnel and where these types of content fit in.
Sales Funnel Copywriting: Phase-by-Phase
1) Pitching Your Product or Service:
The first stage of your sales funnel is pitching your product or service to potential customers. This might be in the form of discounts, a free trial offer, testimonials from others who have purchased and enjoyed it – anything that will get them interested enough to want more information on your product.
This is the time to focus on benefits and features – how your product will solve their problems, make them more productive, or give them a better quality of life. And you’ll want to present this information in clear language that’s easy for anyone to understand.
In addition, it’s important that you provide an explanation about what they need to do to take advantage of your offer. Are they going to fill out a form? Click an email link?
The most important thing is that you keep it simple and make sure there’s no room for confusion about what you’re asking them to do next at any point in the process.
Types of Copywriting for Pitching Your Product:
- Paid ads
- Blog content
- Social media posts
- Email sequences
- Press releases
- eBooks
- Case studies
2) Building the Relationship:
Even when you’ve gotten customers to enter your sales funnel, it’s important not to stop there. That means continuing to build a relationship with them through educational content and other resources before they’re even ready for the next step in your process. This is because once someone has entered into what we call the “research phase” of your funnel, they’ll be much less likely to convert on impulse.
The most important part here is that you’re building trust with potential customers by sharing educational content and answering their questions. You’ll also want to include content that will help them better understand the problem you’re solving for them, which is vital if they haven’t yet reached the research phase of your sales funnel.
It’s important to give people just a little bit more information before expecting them to make a purchase decision because once someone has been researching an issue and made a decision, it’s much more difficult to convince them otherwise.
In other words, you need to be filling your sales funnel with content that will keep potential customers engaged until they’re ready for the next step in your process – and at this stage of the game, we should focus on educating rather than pitching.
People who are interested in your product should be hearing about the benefits and features that will make them more productive, happier, or healthier.
Types of Copywriting for Building Your Relationships:
- Blog content
- Personalized social media posts
- Email sequences
- Case studies
- Infographics
- eBooks
3) Convincing Your Customers:
Once someone has reached the end of your sales funnel, it’s time for the closing stage. This is where you’ll focus on the reasons why your product or service will meet their needs, and offer sales incentives like discounts to get them off the fence.
Some companies will offer a guarantee, others may make their price more competitive. And some will even provide something like free shipping to get that potential customer across the finish line and into your sales funnel.
But no matter what it is you’re selling, this stage of the process should be about convincing prospects to take action on an impulse purchase.
For example, if you’re selling a product that requires custom work – like a suit or dress for instance – then the end of your sales funnel is all about convincing customers to place their order.
However, when it comes to services where there are less tangible benefits such as web design, copywriting, marketing advice and more–the end of the sales funnel is all about convincing customers to commit to a monthly, quarterly and/or annual payment.
Types of Copywriting for Convincing Your Customers
- Landing pages
- Blog posts
- Email series
- Case studies
- Infographics
- Press releases
- Product descriptions
4) Closing the Sale:
This last part of your funnel isn’t over when someone has purchased from you once! In order for it to be successful, you’ll need to offer customer service and support after the sale, so that you’re building a long-term relationship.
You’ll also want to help those customers get the most out of their purchase, which means providing them with educational content and other resources that will make use of your product even more enjoyable. This is because if you don’t give people continued value after they’ve purchased from you–they’re going to be less likely to refer friends or potential customers to you.
Your sales funnel isn’t just about getting people’s money; it’s about building a relationship with them that will result in repeat business and referrals. Know the psychology of your customer, know what motivates them at each stage of the process–and make sure everything else follows suit!
Types of Copywriting for Closing the Sale:
- Landing pages
- Blog posts
- Email series
- Pitch pages
Example of a Sales Funnel
As you can see, there are lots of ways you can build a sales funnel with effective copywriting.
Here’s an example of what an overly-simplified sales funnel might look like:
- You create an ad on Facebook [your pitch]
- People click to a landing page and sign up for your newsletter
- You send a weekly newsletter via email [building relationships]
- Subscribers click an email link to a blog post [where you convince]
- Users click from the blog post to a highly focused landing page [where you close]
Again, this is a small example that could be modified in an infinite number of ways. The main point is that you need to intentionally build out your sales funnel and focus on the quality of your copywriting at each phase.
You’ll want to track the conversion results at each phase of your funnel so you can identify what is (or more important, what isn’t) working.
Then you can optimize your sales funnel copywriting over time to make sure you’re never leaving and leads or sales on the table.
So, what’s the most important part of your sales funnel copywriting?
The only way it will be successful is if you take a holistic approach to how you’re going about selling your product or service at each stage. You need to do so in ways that are both informative and compelling – especially for those coming from the research phase of your sales funnel.
By creating an intentional sales funnel and mastering some basic copywriting techniques, you’ll be sure to get more conversions, leads, and sales in no time!