Increase your sales with this easy-to-use sales funnel template (available in Word, Google Docs and as a PDF). This free template will help you get traffic, build trust with prospective customers, and sell more of your product or service.

Why Use a Sales Funnel Template?

Most people don’t buy a product or service the first time that they hear about it. They need to learn more about it first. To see its value. And to trust the company that’s selling it.

A good sales funnel takes people through that process. It starts with first-time visitors and cold leads. Then turns them into eager buyers.

Sales funnels are SUPER important. But they’re often overlooked. In fact, most businesses don’t have one.

(Maybe that’s partly why most businesses fail.)

Here’s a basic outline of Backlinko’s main sales funnel:

First is the top of our funnel.

Backlinko’s blog posts are at the top of our funnel. And most of their traffic comes from Google.

We don’t try to make money from our blog posts directly. Instead, we use them to get people to sign up to our email newsletter.

Our email newsletter forms the middle of our funnel.

When someone first signs up to the Backlinko email list, we send them new content and blog posts for several weeks. Then when we launch a training course, our emails shift focus.

That’s when we send a sales sequence: several emails that introduce subscribers to the new course. The emails explain what the course offers and who should be interested in it. And the final emails in the sequence send people to the course sales page.

(By the way, here’s the email newsletter template we use.)

Last is the bottom of our funnel. Which is made up of our course sales pages and Facebook ads.

Our course sales pages do most of the actual SALES work in our funnel. For that reason, our sales pages don’t have links to blog posts or anything else on them. They focus 100% on selling.

While our Facebook ads retarget people who visited the course sales page but didn’t buy. They help bring in some extra sales that would slip through the cracks otherwise.

That’s only a brief outline of our funnel.

We also have a YouTube channel. We get traffic from our press coverage, too. And we offer lead magnets to boost email subscriptions. Plus we get repeat sales from existing customers.

In fact, there are endless ways to set up a sales funnel. So we made this template to help you through the process.

What’s Included

Here’s what’s included in this sales funnel template:

1. The 3 critical parts of every successful sales funnel. And the goal of each part.
2. Specific ideas for creating your conversion points. And where to get traffic at each stage.
3. A guided, fill-in-the-blanks blueprint for creating your sales funnel.

How to Use This Template

1. Read my recommendations below to help you get started
2. Download the free Sales Funnel Template on this page
3. Fill in the boxes in each section of the template to plan your sales funnel
4. Build your funnel based on the plan you made

How to Create an Effective Sales Funnel

The basic concept of a sales funnel is simple enough. But nailing every step is a LOT harder. It requires you to understand your customers. To know how to pitch them properly. And to balance the right amount of “warm-up” with actual selling.

Here are some tips to help you create a high-converting sales funnel.

• Don’t try to sell too soon. They may be called sales funnels, but the sale only happens at the end. Pitch too soon and you’ll turn off potential customers. Here’s a good rule of thumb: the more expensive your product is, the more steps your sales funnel should have. (At Backlinko, our training courses cost thousands of dollars. So it takes the average reader MONTHS to buy one.)
• Fix leaks in your sales funnel. Use the Funnel Visualization report in Google Analytics (Conversions ➡ Goals ➡ Funnel Visualization) to see performance at each level of your funnel. And make tweaks at each level to boost your conversion rates.
• Think about the entire journey—not just the individual steps. In other words, make sure all the steps in your funnel make sense together. For example: if someone signs up to your email list from a blog post about dog training, your lead nurturing emails to them should be about dog training. Not cat toys.
• Don’t forget about the people who make it through your whole funnel. One of the cheapest ways to get new leads is from existing customers. You can set up a post-purchase referral system to refill your funnel with each sale.
• To help flesh out your funnel, see our Blog Post Template, Landing Page Template, Email Newsletter Template and Facebook Ad Template.