What is an Ecommerce sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a pre-set series of pages that help guide your customers through the buying process…
While at the same time maximizing conversions and increasing average order value.
In essence it’s a salesperson for your products that is working 24/7 to serve your customers at the highest level…
And provide them the most value as possible.
Unlike most ecommerce stores, an ecommerce sales funnel doesn’t have any navigation that can lead a visitor to other pages in a website…
This singular focus is part of the reason that sales funnel can convert so much higher than a traditional ecom store.
Another reason is that a visitor is only seeing one product at a time…
And they don’t only see the product and a couple of features…
A good sales funnel has sales copy that actually SELLS the product to the customer, usually using stories, testimonials and more.
All of this works to get the visitor down a single thought path…
Does this product solve a problem for me or not?
That’s it.
Nothing else matters in the sales funnel.
There isn’t anything about branding (except what applies to the story that sells your product)
No about us page
No contact pages
Nothing.
Just things that will sell your product.
What helps make sales funnels even more effective is upsells (or cross sells).
An upsell is just an additional product that compliments your original product that you can offer visitors…
The key with sales funnels is you can offer it to visitors AFTER they’ve already purchased the first product.
When you do this, all they have to do is click one button and it orders the upsell.
Upsells like this are often referred to as One Click Upsells.
Ecommerce sales funnel vs ecommerce marketing funnel
One thing that continues to confuse people who are new to the sales funnel world is how the term sales funnel gets used.
If you do a search for what a sales funnel is, the answers will usually fall into one of two categories.
One category is a sales funnel as I described it…
A single sales process that focuses a customer’s attention on making a buying decision in a single visit…
The other category is what I like to refer to as a marketing funnel.
This is more focused on a customer’s entire lifecycle with your business…
From the first time that they are aware of your business…
Through gaining some interest…
Building into desire…
And finally ending with action.
Another reason it gets confusing is because a well crafted sales funnel can move a visitor straight through all the steps of a marketing funnel in one visit…
Which essentially makes it both a sales funnel and a marketing funnel!
The easiest way to keep the two straight is to think of a sales funnel as something that happens in a single visit…
While a marketing funnel is a multi-step process.
Often a marketing funnel has many different sales funnels in it.
(Related: 3 Best Sales Funnels To Quickly Generate More Leads)
Do you need a sales funnel for your online store?
This question comes up a lot with newer entrepreneurs and business owners that are entering the ecommerce space…
Because they’re looking to get up and running as quickly as possible…
And building a high converting ecommerce sales funnel can take more time than throwing together an ecommerce store.
So here’s the answer…
Technically speaking, you don’t NEED a sales funnel for your online store…
If you’re perfectly okay settling for lower conversion rates.
That’s the AVERAGE which means half of all ecommerce stores convert a lower percentage than that!
Ecommerce stores tend to have lower profit margins than most other online businesses…
So you simply cannot afford to have that low of conversion rate.
So what’s the solution?
Take a guess…
Yup.
Sales funnels are one of the best ways for you to increase your sales…
Especially if you use something to get them to opt-in before your sales page!
But that’s not the only way sales funnels can help your ecom business…
One of the staple features of a good sales funnel is the upsell…
Where you offer your customer another product to go along with the first one they bought.
They convert typically at about 15-30%, if you have the right offer and the right sales page.
That number will vary greatly based on how well the upsell actually fits with the original product…
But those are good benchmark numbers to aim for.
To recap, with a good ecommerce sales funnel you can convert a higher percentage of customers AND sell them more on each visit…
So you tell me, do you think you need a sales funnel?
What is a dropshipping funnel?
This is just a quick offshoot from an ecommerce sales funnel.
Dropshipping is a form of ecommerce where you sell someone the product, usually not your own…
Then a third party, often the manufacturer, preps it and ships it to your customer.
It can seem very similar to affiliate marketing…
But the main difference is that the product you are selling with dropshipping isn’t branded…
And you control the entire checkout process.
Dropshipping became popular as a way to sell products without having to go through the hassle of holding inventory.
While it can work wonderfully, usually dropshipping causes more problems than solutions.
But if you’re interested in a dropshipping sales funnel, it really just is an ecommerce sales funnel…
The only difference is that you don’t have to ship any of the products.
Can you make an eCommerce funnel in Shopify?
Finally, the big question you’ve been waiting for…
Can you make an ecommerce sales funnel inside of shopify?!
Of course this just couldn’t have a straightforward answer, what fun would that be?
So the answer really is yes and no.
Shopify isn’t built to naturally have a sales funnel in it…
It’s set up to be a traditional ecommerce store front.
BUUUTT with all the different apps and plugins in the shopify app store…
You can stitch together a lot of the features of a sales funnel.
The biggest hurdle is getting all the different apps to play nice with each other…
Which may need some coding.
For the most shopify store owners, it becomes overwhelming trying to get all it to work and ultimately they give up.
From a simplicity perspective…
It’s usually easier to use a dedicated sales funnel builder that integrates with your shopify store.
4 tips to optimize your ecommerce funnel
Leverage social proof
Social proof is evidence that your customers like your products.
This can be as simple as having a star rating based on reviews…
Or it can be as complicated as having people send in video testimonials of their experience.
Using social proof helps to build up trust with your potential customers…
By improving the likelihood that they will get their desired result by using your product…
Because so many other people already got that result!
Whatever way you decide to gather social proof…
Make sure to use it in many different places throughout your sales funnel.
If you can, use pictures or videos from the customers themselves (with their consent) to supercharge your social proof.
Use retargeting
Retargeting is where you run different ads to people who already did something on your website or in your funnel.
For this to work you have to be using ‘cookies’ on your website…
With a tracking pixel from whatever ad platform you’re using.
I won’t dig into the technical details here, but if you want to know more about that side of it…
Let me know in the comments and I can give you an explanation.
What you’re able to do with a retargeting sequence is show people different ads once they’ve seen your site.
This lets you adapt the messaging to the actions they took on your site.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you have a Free Plus Shipping offer you’re running.
If a person visited the sales page at the top of your funnel, but then didn’t take advantage of the offer…
You can run an ad to them that says something like:
‘Hey, you visited our site but didn’t take advantage of your free gift, hurry back and claim it before they run out!’
That ad will have a higher chance of converting than showing them same ad they already clicked on and didn’t buy from.
ONE BIG DISCLAIMER online privacy rules are constantly changing, so make sure you read them and are compliant with whatever rules and laws there are where you live, when you’re reading this.
Use an Abandoned Cart Sequence
This is basically a variation on retargeting.
All you’re doing is sending a consumer an email…
Reminding them that they started buying your product but never finished.
For this to work you have to have already collected the consumer’s email address.
In a traditional e-commerce scenario…
This would be if someone added a product to cart and typed their name & email into the check out section before leaving.
In an e-commerce sales funnel, this would get used in a Free Plus Shipping funnel with a 2-step order form or a Self Liquidating Offer funnel.
The 2-step order form is specifically used for this purpose…
It splits up the section where the visitor types in their contact info…
From the section where they enter their payment info.
So if for whatever reason, they don’t finish submitting their payment info, you can send them a reminder.
In a Self Liquidating Offer scenario, the first thing a visitor sees is a landing page for a freebie…
Then once they submit that, they see the sales page.
Because they submit their email to get the freebie…
You have the contact info you need to remind them about the amazing offer you made them!
No matter what scenario you end up using the Abandoned Cart Sequence in…
You’re bound to pick up extra sales from customers who just didn’t get their order submitted because something came up.
As far as a length for the sequence…
I’ve seen sending a single email work and I’ve also seen people have success with up to 5+ emails.
A good starting point for most businesses is 2-3 emails, spaced out a day apart.
(Need Help Writing Your Email Subject Lines? Grab Your FREE Copy Of Our Subject Line Swipe File!)
TEST, TEST, TEST
This point can’t get stressed enough!
It doesn’t matter how much marketing experience you have…
You can never know 100% for certain what is going to get people to pull their wallet out and buy from you.
So testing your different ideas, one at a time, is the only way to truly figure out what works!
The best way is to run a split test (aka A/B Test).
What happens is you send a certain percentage of your traffic to version A of your sales page…
And the rest of your traffic to version B of your sales page.
In the beginning, you usually split the traffic 50/50.
The key is to only have 1 variable be different between the 2 versions of the page (like the headline).
Once you figure out which page performs better, then you can send more traffic to that page…
Get rid of the losing version, and make a version C with a different variable.
At this point you can send 75%-95% of your traffic to the winner of the first split..
And then version C only gets 5%-25% of the traffic until you determine the next winner.
This is the only way to know, for a fact, what sales page will work best.
From there, you can even keep testing pretty much forever.
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