What is a sales funnel and why should your ICO use it?

ICOs often struggle with finding the most effective marketing technique that will generate them more leads.

As a result, ICOs often lose focus and a lot of potential investors for their ICO, a direct consequence is that they might not reach their soft cap.

Convincing a visitor from the initial point of contact to actually investing is a process. That means that it’s unlikely these visitors will be ready to buy your tokens right away. In traditional industries, only 2% of first time visitors actually convert into customers, it takes multiple touch points to convince them to do so.

Instead of trying to come up with a certain technique that will get you more leads, you should focus on combining your marketing and sales efforts. Putting your possible investors on the right track should be your number one goal. By having a sales funnel in place you can achieve this!

Let’s dive deeper in what a sales funnel is and why it’s important for your ICO to have one in place.

What is a sales funnel

A sales funnel illustrates the ideal journey a prospect goes through on their way to investing in your ICO.

While you market your token sales to hundreds of thousands of people, only a small percentage of them will provide you with their contact information and become one of your leads. Only a fraction of those will actually invest in your ICO.

The customer’s buying cycle

A sales funnel thus is the process of narrowing, sorting, analyzing and following up with sales leads. The process of going through these different stages is called the customer’s buying cycle.

The different stages of a sales funnel and the buying cycle include awareness, interest, trust and purchase.

Awareness

During the awareness stage, a customer either becomes aware of your product for the first time, or they become aware of a need that they want to see fulfilled or a problem that they need to solve.

An eye-catching website that your customers will enjoy and will be able to navigate easily, already raises a lot of attention to your ICO. However, there are a number of ways to drive more traffic to your website.

Most common methods include:

• Lead Magnets;
• Blogs;
• White Papers;
• Seminars (or Webinars);
• Targeted Ads.

Understanding and utilizing content marketing strategies to create valuable content that your prospects will find useful and interesting goes a long way.

The goal is to get people to engage with whatever you create so that you can raise more awareness and drive even more traffic to your web pages.

It’s possible to expand your reach by using PR campaigns and ICO advertising campaigns to target prospects who will find your content interesting.

The more a potential investor interacts with you, the further they move down the funnel.

Interest

Your prospect is still considering and evaluating solutions to match their needs. But somehow your web pages caught their attention. Those who are interested in your services are in the second part of the funnel and will seek out more information on your website.

Once a prospect is interested, present more defined ways you can help them with. Interested prospects will realize you are an expert at what you do, on this notion you need to build trust by.

Your goal is to get them there by continuing the indoctrination process and adding in information on your products and services.

Content to consider at this stage includes:

• Webinars;
• Case studies;
• Testimonials;
• User-generated content;
• Awards;
• Demo videos.

This is also where you can start scoring leads and identify actions that hasten their move to the next stage of the sales funnel.

Trust

Your prospect has decided to make a purchase, however, they are now determining which company to purchase from.

You need to convince your prospect to invest in your ICO by offering them the following content:

• Product or service special offers;
• Free corporate merchandising or stickers;
• Other benefits they get while purchasing tokens;
• Call-to-action.

Purchase

The prospect is now ready to invest in your ICO and once they do, you will want to support that sale with content. Your goal is to maintain that positive feeling your investor had before the sale, so that they can either refer you to their friends and other colleagues.

Content to consider during this stage includes:

• Welcome emails;
• Implementation documents;
• Guidelines for success.

Why ICOs should have a sales funnel in place

If you did not have a sales funnel before, converting new investors might seem like shooting in the dark.

Having a sales funnel in place gives you the visibility and consistent process necessary to get the best results out of your sales leads, and it helps you measure your progress at each stage of the sales process.

Sales funnels are important for another reason though. If visitors are attracted to your website, but then drop after viewing one or two pages, something must be wrong.

Without having a sales funnel and web site tracking, you will not be able to find out what the problem is and where you are missing out on opportunities to efficiently and effectively change your strategy to see more conversions.

What KPIs should you focus on?

Identifying possible leaks in your funnel is equally important as having it in place. This will help you optimize your website and content strategy to increase your revenue.

The following content KPIs that can be tracked and measured on each piece of content based on its placement in the sales funnel should be kept an eye on:

• Outreach;
• Traffic;
• Bounce rate at each stage;
• Conversions;
• Retention.

Focus on loyalty

Your content marketing ICO strategy should not only focus on acquiring new investors to your ICO. The majority of investments will come from your most loyal community members.

With that in mind, you can easily create a remarketing strategy to increase investments:

• Dynamic targeting, aka retargeting;
• Follow-up emails with special promotions;
• User polls and surveys on ways to improve your ICO;
• Rewards programs for referrals or multiple purchases.

Final Thoughts

When you are thinking next about what the best marketing technique is to implement in your ICO strategy, think about the sales funnel.

This complex and intricate concept in business can literally take your ICO from the complete unknown to a booming business where tokens sell like hot cakes.

By having a sales funnel in place you have a focus, you know where to lead your prospect to, from initial contact to purchase and you will have contact accompanying him/her at each stage of the funnel.

This will ensure that the most loyal followers will stick around, perhaps invest even more tokens and will definitely make use of your product post-ICO.

If you are interesting in more marketing tips. We wrote this article how to cut ICO marketing costs by using messenger marketing. Read the article here.