Wait, aren’t sales funnels and landing pages the same thing? Most people confuse one with the other, but in reality, there are fundamental differences between the two marketing tools. Yes, funnels and landing pages are essential elements for generating leads; However, they serve a different purpose at different stages of a customer’s sales experience. If we are going to differentiate the two, it would be best to define each of the marketing tools separately.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is simply a stand-alone web page created specifically to receive traffic sent by online advertising campaigns, including email marketing and social media initiatives. Suppose a customer clicks on an advertising link on Facebook, then they will be redirected to a landing page.
This landing page is used to
1) obtain valuable information from the customer that can be used to market to them in the future
2) encourage the customer to buy something now. We can explain this better by identifying the different elements of a landing page.
What’s on a landing page?
The first element of a product-focused page is “Buy Now” buttons or other similar call-to-action (CTA) buttons. The link must be accessible and visible at first glance to make the sale an easy proposition.
A landing page can also have a “for more information” field that is used to record customer contact details. In cases where customers have queries, this is a great tool to communicate with them and calm them of any other potential concerns. This is also an opportunity to expand the sales conversation.
An effective landing page should be the final interface a customer should encounter. As such, you may not use any links or CTAs that would redirect them away from this page. This also means that it is no longer possible to sell other products or services.
What is a sales funnel?
While a landing page is a single web page with a single specific CTA, a sales funnel, on the other hand, is made up of many web pages that direct (or funnel) a customer toward their final sales decision. Each page of a funnel is an opportunity to sell additional products or services (upsell options). That means a funnel will have multiple CTAs for different purposes.
There are several processes in a funnel, and we can use a simple weight loss program as a real-life marketing case. Let’s assume that for this specific program, the marketer’s ultimate goal is to have customers sign up for a weight loss consultation service. However, we have other complementary weight loss products that we can sell in addition to our consultation services. This can be done by adding other funnels in addition to the single landing page used to sign up for the service.
To better illustrate how this is done, we can list the possible steps a customer could take in a funnel. First, the customer clicks on the weight loss program ad found on social media, email, or other web pages. This redirects you to a sales page that, in addition to signing up for the consultation service, also offers additional weight loss products including a “Buy Now” CTA button. Second, clicking that CTA button will direct the customer to a new page offering another set of new products (upsell phase). If the customer decides not to purchase the additional products and clicks “No”, they will be redirected to the subscription page where they entered their information when registering for the consultation services.
The upsell process in a funnel is repeated across a series of web pages as long as the customer continues to click the call-to-action button (and chooses to purchase the complementary products or services). This continues until the customer decides to stop purchasing add-ons and go to the final checkout page. A customer can choose this option at any stage of the funnel.
Obviously, the more pages you have in a sales funnel, the more chances you have of extracting valuable customer information and completing your sales funnel. Not to mention the increased sales you can make with more pages available to you. It’s really up to you how to design your sales funnel. You can make it as simple with a few pages or as complex with many more pages in the funnel. One thing to keep in mind is that upsells must be relevant to the main item you are offering, otherwise people will leave your funnel quickly.