How to Use Sales Funnels to Boost Your Online Sales

Arthur MasonUpdated on August 21, 2025

Reading Time: 4 min

If you’re looking to boost your online sales, look no further than a well-designed sales funnel. This marketing system guides potential customers through the buyer’s journey from start to finish, without you ever having to lift a finger. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Awareness

The first step in a sales funnel is awareness. Your prospective customers are on the lookout for products or services that address their specific needs, so it’s important to capture their attention early on. To do so, create content that educates your audience about your business and its offerings, while establishing emotional connections with them. This type of content is often found in blog posts, videos, and ebooks.

Step 2: Interest

Once a prospective customer has become aware of your business and its offerings, they move on to the next stage in the funnel—interest. At this point, they’ve decided that your product or service may be the right fit for their needs and are interested in learning more about it. To increase engagement at this stage, you’ll need to provide your prospects with educational content that demonstrates the value of your products or services while addressing their common pain points. This is typically done through videos and blogs, but can also include webinars, downloadable resources, and product listings on your website.

Step 3: Consideration

If your content is compelling enough, your prospective customer will move on to the consideration stage. Here, they’ll evaluate your business and its offerings based on their unique circumstances, preferences, and buying authority. To make the process easy for them, you’ll want to provide them with detailed information about your product or service, including its benefits, how it was developed, and how it can be used. You’ll also want to include testimonials, case studies, and videos from your existing customers to further bolster their confidence in your brand.

Step 4: Decision-Making

Ultimately, the decision-making stage is the most challenging part of the sales funnel. Here, prospective customers will compare your offerings with those of your competitors and decide which one is best suited to their individual needs and budgets. To give your prospects an edge, you’ll want to offer a variety of pricing options, introductory offers, inline bump offers, and core products.

Step 5: Conversion (The Purchase)

Once a prospect has decided on your product or service, they’ll move on to the conversion stage—buying from you. To facilitate this, you’ll need to set up a lead magnet landing page that includes an opt-in form for your email list and a payment gateway. You’ll also need to track conversion rates, which is the percentage of visitors who fill out the opt-in form or buy your products.

While many businesses have a sales funnel in place, most weren’t designed intentionally—they “just happened”. To maximize your sales and profits, you need to be intentional about your sales funnel. With a consistent process in place, you can improve your forecasts, discover roadblocks in the sales cycle, and ultimately optimize your funnel to 2x or even 10x your conversion rates.