The Ultimate Guide to the eCommerce Funnel

Are you struggling to optimize your online marketing efforts and drive desired sales? An eCommerce funnel is available to help you improve the situation and boost the conversion rate.

Without a shade of doubt, an eCommerce sales funnel effectively sends the right message to the right audience at the right time! What is precisely an eCommerce funnel? How to create a great one? All the secrets are in store in our article, so keep following!

What Is An Ecommerce Sales Funnel?

In marketing terms, an eCommerce funnel (eCommerce sales funnel or eCommerce conversion funnel) describes a potential customer’s journey from being a visitor to a buyer. In this funnel, any customer will enter from the top and move down to another four steps until they become repeat ones.

There are four main stages in an eCommerce marketing funnel: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Like most other funnels, users are aware that your online shop can offer a potential solution for their problem in the first stage.

Thus, this first stage requires you to persuade them to choose your brand to meet their needs. You can draw numerous users at once through a Google search, a referral, or social media.

Given that you have successfully talked potential customers into choosing you as a top priority, in Stage 2, they are scrolling down the list and considering some products. Your goal now is to make them add your product to their wishlist or cart.

Therefore, make it easy for them to decide, instead of overwhelming them with a wide range of choices. Stage 3 involves adding social proof, the best method to convince potential leads about your store’s credibility and high quality. 

After realizing that your product is quality enough and meets their desires, potential customers will move down to the last stage. In this Action stage, they will finish the purchasing step and become your customers.

Each stage in an eCommerce conversion funnel requires special plans and detailed strategies for the highest conversion rate.

Why Do You Need To Have An eCommerce Conversion Funnel

A conversion funnel for the eCommerce site is the key to minimizing bounce rates and boosting sales. 

In the short run, this wise tactic offers a world of marketing opportunities. Undoubtedly, not two visitors to your online store have the same desires and demands, so proper customer segmentation is crucial to approach as many visitors as possible before turning them into customers.

An eCommerce conversion funnel can be accomplished via social media with irresistible offers like promotions or discounts in the Awareness stage.

Using the funnel also lets you identify and build an effective content strategy. In a highly competitive digital marketing platform, you need to make appealing content and deliver proper posts to your target customers.

In each stage of an eCommerce sales funnel, optimizing users’ experience is vital to drawing more visitors and extending their attention span. All those efforts will contribute to the overall SEO score and high rankings.

Thanks to the increased conversion rates in an eCommerce funnel, you will likely have more significant revenue growth and a loyal customer base.

How To Build A Sales Funnel For Ecommerce?

1. Identify Your Customer Journey

If you fail to identify your customer journey, you cannot determine their needs and offer the right content. However, don’t worry; there are various tools available to let you map this data easily. 

Google Analytics is the most optimal and commonly used tool you should not miss out on. This tool is designed to follow the customer journey and give a user flow report. 

In this way, you can calculate which domains attract the highest traffic rate and the number of user touchpoints needed before purchase. Knowing this information will help you replan your strategy and provide better knowledge and offers to the target market.

Besides, don’t forget to listen to your customers or potential leads. Once you acknowledge their problems and desires, you will likely satisfy your target market and make the best sales results. 

Following competitors’ websites or social media platforms to read their customers’ negative feedback is a great method to better target your customers.

2. Map Your Funnel Stages To Conversion Triggers

As mentioned above, an eCommerce funnel comes with four main stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, and retention. Moving down the funnel, potential customers expect different kinds of information.

In the first stage, they are looking for potential solutions for their problem, while the second stage is where they want the best suggestion instead of aimlessly scrolling down without any result. 

To get them reaching the Purchase phase, you should add some social proof or real-time customer feedback to convince the prospects about your product’s credibility and great applications.

The eCommerce funnel is not all about convincing purchases; it also involves repeat business. That means the more your customers come back and buy your products again, the more revenue you will get. 

In the last Retention stage, you will need to encourage them to subscribe to your website and offer further discounts or coupons for your next purchase.

Overall, through your eCommerce sales funnels, it would be best to list content for each stage and strictly follow the strategy to test the effectiveness and make needed changes for the best results.

3. Define The Point At Which A Visitor Turns Into A Lead

It is not always difficult to determine when a visitor tends to become a lead. You can identify this point when your website visitors hand out their contact information, sometimes email addresses. 

Those email addresses can be used for account registering or information receiving. It is also possible to announce upcoming discounts, services, or products.

After confirming that information, you need to take the lead nurturing strategy to bring them to the final purchasing step.

However, that should not be the end of a customer’s journey. In an eCommerce funnel, it is vital to generate repeat business for optimal sales results. This is also related to customer loyalty. To do this, after converting customers, you need to take them back to the sales funnel’s top.

This eCommerce stage concentrates on existing customers by engaging them and making them loyal customers. There are various methods to make this step work well, including email marketing.

Send customers some emails to give them some new and personalized recommendations. Moreover, it would help to make a drip campaign depending on their previous engagement to promote products and sales.

Product reviews are another great strategy to attract one-time shoppers. Those can help you bring customers back to the site, convince them to share content with their friends and family, and follow you on social media.

Ecommerce Sales Funnel Template

1. Tripwire Funnel

If your website focuses on distributing a specific genre of products or services to the target market, the tripwire funnel is the best choice available among all e-commerce sales funnel examples. This template is designed to directly send potential leads to a sales page with the most suitable option for their desire.

The so-called Two-Step Sales Page effectively leads the prospects towards the first two most crucial stages of a purchasing process: filling in shipping and billing information.

Thanks to this operating method, your website visitors don’t have to waste much time browsing aimlessly in the product category and save your advertising dollars on this type of traffic. 

Most of the time, this eCommerce funnel template often comes with an irresistible offer like a discounted product on the One Time Offer page. Entering shipping and billing information there means that they are halfway making a purchase!

Besides boosting your sales, tripwire funnels are a cost-effective marketing tactic. With only one low-ticket purchase, your site can cover campaign creation tools’ costs for an entire month. 

Increased email lists are another benefit of our recommended strategy. Compared to other social media, email is a superior platform that allows you to control conversations with customers.

That’s why email service providers tend to be more long-lasting and popular with your audience. Once your prospects make initial low-ticket offers in tripwire sales funnels, there will be new leads for the automated email series.

2. Daily Deal Funnel

Everyone wants to get a real bargain on their chosen products when shopping; that’s why the Daily Deal funnel is designed. This best daily product promotion tactic can greatly increase sales and overall revenue. 

The template involves discounts or promotions for specific products in a limited period, often from 24 hours to 36 hours. This limited discount effectively boosts conversions and sales as not all users can resist this offer.

The offers often come in a coupon code or a special discount, which is placed on the Two-step Order Form page. The headline, explanation, and offer on this page should be transparent and direct enough to compel buyers, while all the ordering steps should be clear and not require redundant information.

The Thank You Page also enables customers to share the content with their friends or family members. In this way, you will likely reach a wider range of visitors. 

In this promotional marketing stage, you can also incorporate additional sales or coupons for a product upsell and cross-sell so that customers can purchase their related items if needed.

Overall, a good daily deal funnel should offer true expiration dates and a real discount to confirm customers’ trust. Some marketing funnels announce a 90% discount rate, but this is not the case when customers purchase. 

That tactic only works to improve revenue in the short run, but you will risk losing your eCommerce business later. Credibility is the key for long-term business. 

3. Video Sales Letter Funnel

The video sales letter funnel has almost the same features as the tripwire template mentioned above. The only difference lies in the content on the sales page. Instead of including sales copy with some appealing writing, this template tends to show more video content.

The videos may illustrate the product’s specifications, its unique selling points, or some social proof. Therefore, if you are more into recording videos than creating writing, this template will prove the versatility and great performance.

Nowadays, most of us are more into watching TV or Youtube than reading books, so it is comprehensive that visual impact is superior to a written one. That’s why it is more straightforward to demonstrate and promote your items to various customers in a more enjoyable way.

Moving down the funnel, your traffic will first be directed to the Sales Letter page to enter their billing and shipping information to get a free product sample. After that, they will reach the One Time Offer page and add the offer to the wishlist or cart to enter their payment info.

In this eCommerce template, you can add cross-sells and upsells to get the initial transaction and build a strong relationship with shoppers.

4. The Knowledge-based Funnel

The knowledge-based funnel has some distinctive features from other mentioned templates. The differences are in traffic fuel segmentation, which is based on a product’s health value.

For example, if your customers are ignorant about the benefits of daily zinc dosage, they will be redirected to a downloadable opt-in page about this supplement. After having enough knowledge about the product, they are ready for purchasing steps.

This template also features a dedicated page where you can add upselling. For example, the page can be integrated with the zinc supplement to persuade customers to subscribe to your monthly shipments.

Tips To Make Your Ecommerce Sales Funnel Convert Like Crazy

Analyze And Optimize Your Main Pages

For any eCommerce site, it is undeniable that main pages are worth the most attention and care to offer a superior user experience. They include the homepage, product, and category pages. Due to the distinctive range of products, each website has a different layout and content arrangement.

For example, if you have hundreds of products on sale, you need to have more main pages than concentrating on a few flagship ones. An optimized main page will rank your website in higher search results and attract more visitors. 

Moreover, besides more traffic, such main pages will likely have a better user experience, as they find your content comprehensive and attractive. This is surely the key to converting leads, driving sales, and making repeat business.

The pages should be simple and easy to navigate to offer visitors a clear purchasing path. Don’t discourage shoppers from choosing your online website because your main pages are too complicated or show overwhelming information.

It is vital to convince your prospects that your items are the best choices for their needs and put them in their carts with product pages. 

It would be best to remove doubts and solve frequently asked questions about the products by your page copy. It would be better to start with keyword research to see which your buyer persona is looking for. 

You can use this information as effective insights and use your products as a prime answer for those issues. Plus, let’s try to optimize your product pages with some short product descriptions, calls to action, or delivery and return information.

No matter how perfect your pages are, testing them frequently to add needed changes is vital. A small modification in fonts, colors, and hiding elements can make a big difference, so use A/B testing to check them.

Analyze And Optimize Your Forms

Among the most crucial factors boosting conversion rates, lead-capture forms are worth your investment. If visitors don’t want to enter your forms’ personal information like email addresses, shipping, and billing info, you risk losing those leads.

In eCommerce marketing, shorter forms with basic information are much preferable to longer ones. This is because friction can decrease dramatically if there are minimal form fields. 

Few prospects are willing to waste time on dozens of form fields if they need a lead magnet, product, and some discounts. Therefore, never fail to step into your target market’s shoes.

Optimize your forms to only include the most basic information for purchase to offer visitors a time-saving and pleasant experience.

Analyze And Optimize Your Checkout Pages

Unsurprisingly, more than half of customers tend to abandon their carts due to hidden prices like shipping fees or time-consuming and complicated checkout processes. 

Multiple payment options and a sense of insecurity are other two common reasons for abandoning rates. Your marketing effort and budget on driving traffic will be down the drain at this stage. Failing to encourage leads to become a customer will make you lose out a lot of money.

Analyze your checkout pages to see which domains are the reasons discouraging people from taking purchasing steps. We highly recommend you offer better payment options to suit all prospects’ purchasing methods from detailed research. 

Two-page checkouts are also advisable so that customers don’t feel overwhelmed with too much-required information. Your checkout pages should come with progress bars to let consumers feel more secure with each step.

To ensure their security and privacy about personal information and product delivery, trust badges are necessary too.

Targeting Your Audience Better

Identifying your target audience is of utmost importance, as failing to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time will lead to unwanted sales loss. 

Different groups of customers require distinctive marketing campaigns. The young will look for fashionable and versatile items and be more towards social media ads. On the other hand, the older ones concentrate on useful and foolproof products and prefer ads on Google search.

Don’t try to cast a too-wide net, as you cannot serve all visitors with satisfying service and experiences. A small-sized yet easy-to-access target market will make creating appealing content and offers much more straightforward.

Besides, intense promotion and hard-selling are not recommended because they can scare customers away and lose your store’s credibility. 

It’s time to analyze your statistics on your website to check bounce rate, conversion rate and decide which domains need modifications. As mentioned above, it is impossible to satisfy all visitors; however, if the statistics show worse situations, let’s segment the audience again and offer compatible experiences.

Add Social Proof

Social proof is always one of the most effective tactics for any marketer and becomes an expected part for most customers. As buyers, we will more likely pick a product with good reviews, feedback, and real-life experiences.

Therefore, adding social proof can boost your products’ trust and confirm customers’ credibility in your store. Social proof may be anything from previous buyers, as their thoughts and uses about a specific item.

As those testimonials can be used at any stage of an eCommerce funnel, it is advisable to use them down the funnel and across different channels to convince buyers.

There are three types of social proof that you can include in your website. The very first place you should create some user testimonials is undoubtedly your online store. 

Those on-site social proof should be showcased on homepages and product pages to draw visitors’ attention and win their hearts quickly.

Another recommendation is email marketing social proof. Despite the fast and furious development of other marketing channels like social media, email is always one of the key ones to engage your prospects.

A thoughtful and impressive email with some social proof is a perfect combination for your efforts to encourage visitors to move to the next step. 

Include social proof in your email subject lines with your reviews’ direct quotes or positive feedback implications. Your leads will feel curious and rush to find your products.

Don’t miss out on social proof to powerfully confirm and optimize your ad copy for those running ads throughout the conversion funnel. You can include it in social media ads and retargeting campaigns to target customers at the consideration stage.  

Deal With Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is when customers put your products in their shopping cart, but instead of purchasing, they leave your website store without checking out. 

Higher cart abandonment rates indicate some products with the transaction processor unexpected costs like taxes and shipping, discouraging customers from the payment.

This problem more commonly happens when your customers are living far away from your physical stores or overseas. However, this is not the only reason for abandoning shopping carts. The contributing factors extend beyond the Purchase step.

It’s about time to reconsider your eCommerce funnel and assess its effectiveness. From the funnel, let’s compare your sales and traffic flow to locate where the problem is. 

Your website may struggle to attract customers in the Awareness step, cannot keep them interested and meet their demands in the Desire stage or offer a smooth checkout process.

After identifying the problem, act accordingly to ensure the best user experience. One of the highly recommended strategies is to send notification emails.

The emails should announce their cart abandonment activities to remind and invite them back with a discount code to reclaim such potential lost sales.  

Always Add Upselling

Adding upselling is a great marketing tactic, but some marketers often neglect its effectiveness. Upselling is when a customer adds a product to their shopping cart, he will be presented with other great recommendations.

Multiple upsell options enable the prospects to get everything they need without scrolling down for hours on end. For example, if your customers add a printer to the cart, the website will recommend some printing paper or printing ink.

Once again visitors will know more about your wide range of products and will consider next-time purchases. Those recommendations will continue until visitors choose “decline,” so there is no unwanted interference.

Upsell strategy can work best in Black Friday events, national sales days, or some holiday seasons. The combination of sales funnel eCommerce, upsells, and suitable offering times will help increase order sizes and make the best purchases.

One effective upsell strategy is to allow one-click upsells when customers have finished the checkout steps. This tactic often promises high conversion rates, enabling customers to continue purchasing without filling out the payment information again.

Conclusion

Long story short, we bet that after looking through our detailed article about the eCommerce funnel, you have gained the necessary information about this excellent marketing tactic. This marketing strategy will surely boost sales and increase your revenue.

Without a doubt, creating a great eCommerce conversion tunnel requires an in-depth understanding of each stage with careful preparation and plans. However, we are sure that our tips and guidelines will help you solve all the puzzles!