At its core, an online marketing funnel is a defined series of steps you design to guide and inform prospective customers as they become familiar with your products or services, and then make a decision whether or not to buy from you.

You focus, or funnel, the attention of your prospects in a very specific way, providing value, building a relationship and eventually presenting an offer.

These 5 key marketing funnel stages are used to get your business from unsuccessful and unprofitable to profitable success.

1. Discovery

The people in your market need to find your website or blog. You achieve this by means of paid advertising and marketing, testimonials and referrals, search engine optimization and a variety of additional marketing methods both online and offline. You are, in essence, filling your funnel at the top.

2. Attention

Now you have some traffic to your website, you need to grab the attention of your website visitor. You do this by offering something of value for free in exchange for signing up to your email list. This could be a report, checklist, eBook or list of resources, or some other piece of information that solves a big problem or answers a big question for your target audience.

3. Build A Relationship

Your online marketing funnel has now guided a large group of people into a smaller group that have joined your email list. Now you begin to build your relationship with them so they come to know, like and trust you. Send out emails, videos, articles, blog posts etc on a regular basis.Provide them with lots of value. Carry on to answering questions and solving problems.

4. Make The Sale

In your email sequence, make an low-cost offer that is too good not to buy. At a later date, after sending a few additional emails that deliver a lot of free value, make a bigger offer. If your subscriber buys either your smaller or larger offer, promptly offer them an upsell, which is a more expensive option.

5. Re-Funnel

Split your subscribers into two lists, buyers and non-buyers. Have one funnel for your buyers so that you don’t unnecessarily make them the same offer they already responded to. For your non-buyers, continue to send them valuable free content in your email sequence, along with offers to purchase your products that they passed on the first time.

The key to online business success is to continuously fill your funnel at the top with traffic from both free and paid sources. As they filter down your online sales funnel you will have a steady steam of prospects and sales.