How to use an online sales funnel to convert casual browsers into paying customers

An online sales funnel gives you a structure to turn strangers into paying customers.

Mastering it is one of the most important concepts for a creator selling digital products because it helps drive revenue for your business.

In this article, we show you how to create a sales funnel, explain the four key stages a customer goes through before purchasing a product, and share real-world examples of creators using online sales funnels to grow their business.

What is an online sales funnel?

An online sales funnel describes the journey a customer goes through after discovering your product or service to making a purchase and becoming a customer.

It’s called a funnel because it starts wide at the top, with a large number of potential customers, and narrows down to those who actually make a purchase.

Think of a sales funnel as building relationships with people who already know you to show them why your creator business is the best fit for them.

To enter an online sales funnel, your potential customers need to be aware of your brand, which is where the marketing funnel comes into play.

Think of it like this:

1. Your target audience becomes aware of your creator business
2. They click on your website and become a prospect
3. They download a free lead magnet and become a lead
4. They make a purchase and become a customer

Marketing funnel vs. sales funnel: what’s the difference?

Marketing funnel and sales funnel are similar concepts with a few differences.

• Marketing funnel: helps you find the right customers and attract them to your brand.
• Sales funnel: helps you build relationships with people already aware of your business to show them why your brand is right for them.

The goal is to align these two funnels together so you can convert more customers from your target audience, increase your sales, and grow your business.

For example, you create a brand awareness campaign and run ads across your social media channels to attract people to your business. This is part of the marketing funnel.

Then, the sales funnel takes over and turns that lead into someone ready to make a purchase.

Funnel marketing takes place across various touch points on the customer journey. For example, social media campaigns, email marketing, landing pages, or a webinar.

The customer journey within a digital sales funnel

When a customer enters an online sales funnel, they need to be nurtured into becoming a customer and understand why your product or service helps solve their problem or provides a solution to what they need.

Husband-wife creator team Nick and Hanna True at Mapped Out Money use an email marketing sales funnel to turn their YouTube fan base into paying customers.

Here’s what their online sales funnel looks like:

• Target: Nick posts a YouTube video related to personal finance. A target sees this post either by searching for keywords related to the topic on Google or YouTube or through YouTube’s algorithm.
• Prospect: Instead of a traditional call to action (CTA) on each video, True directs people to subscribe to his channel or watch related videos to keep them interested in what he has to say.
• Lead: In one YouTube video, Nick offers a free downloadable asset, often called a lead magnet, which requires prospects to sign up to their email list, turning them into a lead.
• Customer: Once a lead downloads the asset and subscribes to Nick’s emails, he uses an automated welcome flow through Kit to introduce them to their paid offerings and then drops them into a nurture sequence.
• Repeat Customer: Once a customer makes a purchase, Nick uses email tags to put them into a separate nurture flow where he drops new course offerings or paid digital products to encourage them to purchase again.

I’m all about helping people better manage their money and actually use it to do more of what matters to them. – Nick True

AIDA: The four stages of every online sales funnel

The stages of an online sales funnel are the states of mind people go through as you nurture them into becoming paying customers.

The four stages are described with the acronym AIDA:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Decision
• Action

Stage #1: Awareness

The first stage is when your customer becomes aware of a problem they have that your service or product solves. Without this awareness, the customer cannot enter into the sales funnel.

Awareness of your creator business typically takes place during marketing funnel activities. For example, a YouTube video, a TikTok post, an affiliate link, or a Google ad.

At the top of the funnel, you want to target people most likely to be interested in your business. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to direct your customers further into the sales funnel because they won’t have a need for your product.

Your goal at this stage is to persuade your target audience to become more involved in your brand.

Awareness stage example: Ryan Holiday from the Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday brought back stoicism into popular culture with his 2014 book The Obstacle Is the Way — a modern-day primer for how to thrive under pressure. Since the runaway success of his book, he launched his own website and newsletter.

Every day, Ryan Holiday writes a 500-word post talking through a different philosophical concept. Very few of his blogs or social posts contain information about his books, courses, or other paid promotions.

Instead, he shows up for his community every single day, focusing on the writing and building his community. From there, the funnel takes over.

Stage #2: Interest

During this stage, the customer’s interest in your business is developed further as you share helpful content related to solving or explaining their problem.

Your goal is to be as helpful as possible via free content to get people interested and invested in your brand.

Remember: you’re not selling at this stage of the funnel. The idea is to position yourself as a helpful, reliable expert to continue persuading your potential customers that you’re the best fit for them.

This means creating more high-commitment, high-reward content. For example, a lead magnet, like a webinar, personalized quiz, or white paper, or ebook that digs deeper into the topic.

Interest stage example: Ellie Diop from Ellie Talks Money

Personal finance influencer Ellie Diop teaches women how to get funding and build their own businesses.

When she builds interest from her prospects, she turns to several different lead magnets, including free workbooks attached to her YouTube videos, product giveaways, and teaser webinars.

Her most successful tactic is the webinar.

These free webinars vary on topics based on what my followers want to know more about. Last week, we did a free webinar on business credit with 4,000 registrants. Some of those are already on the email list, but about 50% of them are brand new. I run these webinars every week, alternating live and recorded versions. – Ellie Diop

The topics of her webinar vary, but she focuses on keeping the timing consistent and aligned directly to her course offerings. She also makes sure that each webinar contains real insights that women can take back to their businesses, rather than making it a pitch.

Once someone registers for a webinar, they’re dropped into a special automated welcome flow that encourages them to join the course that best matches the webinar they attended.

Stage #3: Decision

At this point, the customer has to make a yes or no decision to buy from you. This stage of the digital sales funnel is where you go from providing valuable, free content to actively selling.

If you’ve done the right kind of foundational work in your marketing and sales funnel, then your audience will trust you enough to know that you’re the right person to purchase from.

Your job is to make the “yes” decision as irresistible as possible. Consider offering a coupon, discount, or bonus, or simply punch up the urgency of your offer with limited-time messaging.

You want your leads to understand that you’re offering something high value that is only available for a limited time, so it’s time to make a purchase.

Decision stage example: Danny Gregory from Sketchbook Skool

Bestselling author and artist Danny Gregory spent years building his fan base as a creator, connecting with other would-be artists and guiding them toward a creative career. But it wasn’t until he started a paid newsletter that he found the online marketing funnel worked for him.

I have been blogging, writing, and creating content all these years for free. I never even thought about selling it. I still offer a free newsletter, but I switched to Kit in October 2021 with the intention to start a paid newsletter. Since then, I’ve made $45,000. – Danny Gregory

His current free newsletter list tops off at 20,000 subscribers, and so far, only 600 of them signed up for his paid newsletter. But that’s the power of the funnel—not everyone needs to make the decision for it to matter.

To encourage more people to sign up, he adds a dedicated CTA block to every free newsletter as a postscript and footer. He also occasionally gives his free list previews of the paid content to encourage FOMO.

Stage #4: Action

The final stage in the funnel: The customer says yes and buys from you. In practice, this stage might take the form of a checkout page, invoice payment, or signing of a contract.

You want to make sure the “yes” feels good for your customer all the way through the purchase flow to prevent buyer’s remorse. The more you can remove friction from this final stage, the more likely you’ll find word-of-mouth accelerating, restarting the funnel process.

Action stage example: Stacey Langford from Coghlan Cottage

Farmer Stacey Langford doesn’t have time to waste chasing after leads and hoping they turn into customers. That’s why when it gets time for her leads to take action, she uses email to humanize the process.

People crave real connection. Relationships, not transactions. I am inviting my folks into my week on the farm, the things that brought me joy or broke me open. All of my retail business comes from this channel. This one email generates between $800 and $2,500 in sales each week. – Stacey Langford

Her weekly newsletter, Farm Family, leads with a story about her week on the farm and concludes with any new products landing in her digital shop, notes about upcoming courses, and of course, what’s on tap at the farm.

Her focus on high-touch, human connection in her communications, even when they’re automated emails, makes it feel like she’s ringing you up at the farmstand, instead of an online transaction.

On her website, she leads with who she is and why she’s the best person to help solve the problem, and then includes several testimonials from current students, as well as several ways to learn more.

The entire flow stays aligned with her branding, so that her leads can feel good about making the leap and becoming customers (or repeat customers!).

How to build a simple online sales funnel

You can build a simple online sales funnel by mapping out your current customer journey. How do people hear about your business right now? How do they engage with you? Where do they typically drop off your funnel?

You may already be doing all the right things and just require more organization and intention around each stage of the funnel.

Do you need a sales funnel for each product? Probably not. What you do need is content and activities that meet your customers where they are in their journey, offering them valuable resources that go beyond a sales pitch.

Every activity you do is part of the sales funnel, so it’s not just about adding it to your website or email marketing efforts. Creating a funnel is about guiding your audience strategically toward buying from you.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Grab your audience’s attention

The first step in building a sales funnel is to do what you do best: Create.

You need to grab your audience’s attention, ideally through a lead magnet. Examples of lead magnet content are free downloads, free samples, free trials, low-cost mini-courses or low-cost products. But it can be anything that is easy for cold leads to say yes to, that hits on a problem that you can solve.

Then, tell everyone about it, through social media posts, ads, your blog, YouTube channel…you get the idea.

2. Direct those who show interest in your freebie

Once you’ve built your free offer, you need to give prospects a place to go.

A lead generation landing page is the best place to deliver your lead magnet, so you can easily capture their email address and give them the content with as little fuss as possible.

Then, add CTAs to your landing page on social media, within your podcast or video descriptions, or in your blog posts.

The key for this strategy to work is to make sure your freebie matches with the kind of content you’re using to promote it.

3. Leverage email automations to guide decision-making

Now that someone has downloaded your lead magnet, give them more information about who you are and what you do with an automated email nurture sequence.

Tailor your sequence as much as possible to the key problem your freebie addresses, teasing out those pain points over the course of several emails.

Depending on the kind of products you offer, make your welcome email sequence 3-5 emails:

• Email 1: Welcome them to your brand. Introduce yourself and include a link to the freebie so they have it in another spot.
• Email 2: Agitate the problem, reminding the prospect why they signed up in the first place for the freebie.
• Email 3: Pitch your product and include a few testimonials from your current clients.

If someone goes through this entire sequence without making a purchase, drop them into your regular email marketing cadence. This stage is all about generating interest and guiding them toward making the decision to purchase from you.

4. Offer something with clear, actionable steps

By this point in your sales funnel, people should be warmed up for a sales pitch. Now is the time to lead them into the action stage.

How? By offering something.

This can be a coupon for your products, a special rate, a bonus offer, or a simple ask to buy from you (or join a program, book a consultation call—whatever is the equivalent for your business).

Whatever it is, make it as easy as possible for your lead to become a customer. That means no lengthy forms or awkward purchase processes — invest in the technology that makes buying from you as easy as one-click on your sales page.

Do creators need a sales funnel, or is a flywheel a better fit?

A traditional online sales funnel works in a linear way: targets become prospects, prospects become leads, and leads become customers.

But there’s another model creators can use to grow their businesses: The flywheel.

Flywheels are growth loops designed to create value at every customer touchpoint, creating customers that want to purchase from you again and again.

Flywheels work like this:

• The initial push of the flywheel attracts new customers with quality content, similar to the awareness phase of the sales funnel.
• Then, the flywheel turns by engaging prospects with regular, personalized communication (usually via email) until they make a purchase.
• From there, infusing delight into every brand interaction and prioritizing customer needs keeps customers engaged and turns them into brand advocates and repeat purchasers.

A flywheel approach is best for long-term relationship building in your community. If you’re using a community-based subscription model, this is a great choice.

If you’re selling more one-off digital products, then a flywheel can still work well—but you may want to start with a more traditional sales funnel to get things rolling.

Flywheel or funnel, Kit can help

Kit’s features match every stage of the funnel or flywheel, helping creators every step of the way. Build landing pages for your magnets, send automated email sequences, and sell digital products.

With Kit, you can set up the business of your dreams in no time. Sign up today to get started.