What is an eCommerce marketing funnel?

If you’re looking to learn everything about eCommerce marketing funnels, then this is the article for you. We’ll start with the basics of what it is and why it’s important, and then dive into how to set up your first funnel.

In the world of marketing, a funnel is an image that helps visualize how many people start out at the top of your marketing campaign, and how many people make it all the way to the bottom and become customers. It’s called a “funnel” because you can think of it as narrowing down from the wide end (where everybody starts) to the narrow end where only a handful of people make it through.

The eCommerce marketing funnel is a way of measuring the customer acquisition process. It tracks and quantifies behavior over time—from initial awareness to eventual conversion to long-term retention (and beyond).

Many initiatives, from content marketing to social media engagement to paid search, can be measured in terms of the funnel. The key is knowing which stages you’re targeting with each specific tactic, and how that tactic helps users advance from one stage to another.

Ecommerce Marketing Funnel ToC

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Why eCommerce funnel is important?

The eCommerce funnel helps you to drive more sales, understand your customers better and increase your customer lifetime value. We’ve put together these six steps for you so that you can make sure all your customers are making it through your eCommerce sales funnel and into the checkout.

There are three main benefits of optimizing the eCommerce sales funnel:

To find new customers
Increase the number of repeat customers
Increase their spending too.

4 Stages of an Ecommerce Sales Funnel

Awareness

The awareness stage is where you create brand visibility and build credibility with your target audience. In general, if they don’t know who you are, or what you offer, they won’t buy from you. So it’s important to start building relationships early on.

There are three main metrics used to measure awareness: reach, impressions, and frequency.

Reach measures the number of unique people who have seen your ad at least once during a set period of time (e.g., within the last month).
Impressions count how many times your ad has been viewed by everyone in that audience over that same time period (e.g., within the last month).
Frequency calculates how many times an average person in that group has seen your ad during a given time period (e.g., within the last 30 days).

Consideration

Consideration is the stage where customers become aware of your business and products. It’s also the ideal time to start a relationship with your customer by capturing their email address.

You want to reach out to potential customers at this stage when they are researching solutions to solve a problem. You can do this by blogging about topics related to your brand or product, sharing educational resources via email, or through paid advertising on social media.

Conversion

Engage with people who have expressed interest in your product. At this stage, you’re talking to customers who have shown an interest in what you sell, whether they’ve visited your website or seen a piece of content that piqued their curiosity. The goal is to show them why you are the best option for them by describing your product and the benefits it offers.
Think about customer needs instead of selling them. You don’t want to play hardball with these potential buyers; instead, you need to convince them that buying your product will improve their lives or solve a problem they have. That’s where data can help — use heat maps and website analytics tools to see if there is one particular product they’re interested in, or if they’re looking for something more general like “laptop cases.” Then use marketing tools like email campaigns and personalized landing pages to reach out to people whose needs match up with what your company can offer.

Loyalty and Advocacy

Once you’ve achieved a base of satisfied customers, it’s time to work on loyalty and advocacy. This is an important step of the sales funnel because your customers are now brand ambassadors, and can help you grow your business through repeat purchases and referrals. In this stage, you should communicate with your customers to keep them feeling engaged with your product/service.

Repeat purchases require after-sales communication like follow-up emails or texts that include links to other products or services they may enjoy based on their previous purchases. Sending out newsletters that feature new content from your blog or links to recent press about your company are also great retention strategies because they show you value engaging with existing customers as much as attracting new ones. By incorporating automated messaging into these communications, you aren’t wasting time manually reaching out every time there’s news from your company—you’re simply keeping people in the loop so they’ll continue purchasing from you!

Best practices For your eCommerce Sales Funnel

Ecommerce marketing is a combination of all the different strategies you can use to drive traffic to your site and make sales. Your eCommerce marketing funnel will depend on your specific business, but there are some general concepts that apply to all eCommerce businesses.

Use your homepage to drive traffic.

Use your homepage to drive traffic to your website.

Have an attractive, intuitive website built on a solid platform? This is the first opportunity to make an impression on your customer, so you don’t want it to be their last. Make sure your site loads quickly and looks polished. If you aren’t a web designer or developer, use an eCommerce platform like Shopify or BigCommerce and plug in one of their themes.
Ensure that you have a strong call to action on your home page. Make sure it is clear and concise and tells the visitor how they can benefit from clicking on it.
Use CTAs that speak directly to what the visitor wants, for example: “New Arrivals” or “Free Shipping” or “30-day guarantee.”
Include relevant keywords in your CTAs so Google knows you’re talking about their product category when targeting search terms such as “women’s swimsuits” or “children’s toys”.
Offer good customer service and support. Don’t leave customers alone after they make a purchase; try to entice them with email newsletters and follow-up customer service surveys. Use [your CRM] to collect this data so you have it all in one place

Make your site easy to navigate.

One of the most important things you can do to boost the effectiveness of your site is to make it easy to navigate. The easier it is for visitors to find what they’re looking for, the more likely they are going to convert.

Your website’s navigation should be clear and simple with no dead ends or “back” buttons leading them away from their intended destination.
Make sure that your call-to-action button is visible on every page of your website (and social media channels). If you are selling a product, try including an image or video that shows off its features in action. This will help engage visitors who may be interested in purchasing but need a little extra convincing before pulling out their wallets or credit cards (you can also consider using exit intent popups).
Keep your search bar visible so people can use it as a resource if they have trouble finding what they’re looking for on any given page of your site—this will ensure that users don’t get lost along their journey through different pages within eCommerce marketing funnel

Make your product pages pop.

You can have a beautiful website and great content, but if your product pages aren’t optimized for conversion, then you won’t see much success. Here are some tips to make sure that your product pages pop:

Use high-quality images of your products so that customers can get a good look at what they’re buying.
Make sure that your product pages are mobile-friendly because 50% of all eCommerce traffic comes from mobile devices.
Use video to show how your product works if it isn’t immediately obvious how it works without instructions. If you sell clothing or other goods like jewelry, food items or electronics where the demonstration isn’t possible (or doesn’t work well), consider using customer reviews instead of video for this purpose. Seeing another person use and enjoy the item will often be more convincing than just reading about it in text form!

A/B test landing pages.

Test different landing pages for effectiveness and optimize your site for conversion (i.e., making people buy!).

After visitors come to your site through ads or social media channels, do they actually buy? If not, what can you change about the page—the messaging or images—to get them over the hump? A/B testing will help you identify which approach works best for certain segments of your audience.

You can also adjust pricing based on data from Google Analytics or from a CRM like HubSpot or SalesforceIQ that uses AI to analyze anonymous data from various sources

Encourage sales with promotions and discounts.

Discounts can be used to encourage sales, repeat sales, and referrals. Use discount codes in your email marketing campaigns to incentivize people to buy from you on their next purchase with you.

You can also use them as a way to entice current customers into returning or sharing your store with friends.

Promoting your product on social media. You can use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest to post about your product and give people an opportunity to buy it.

The key is to post regularly. Don’t just post once a week and then forget about it—keep posting! People who follow your company will expect to see new content from them, so if you don’t, they might get bored and move on.

But what should you post? You can put up links to blog posts or other articles or tutorials related to the product, but one of the most effective things you can do is show off the product in action! If you’re selling a makeup brush set, for example, take pictures of models using it. Show what different looks can be achieved with this brush set by itself or with other products.

You can also encourage people to tag themselves in photos using your products if they try out something new and want feedback from friends and family members who follow them online.

Sending promotional emails

Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use with your eCommerce store. It can help you to maintain relationships with your customers and drive them back to your site, increasing the chances that they will make a purchase.

When it comes to email marketing, it’s important that you maintain a healthy balance between promotional emails and informational emails. Sending too many promotional emails can turn people off from your company and cause them to unsubscribe from your list, but sending too few promotional emails may not help to achieve your sales goals.

You should send out weekly newsletters containing valuable information at a minimum so that you can keep in touch with subscribers and remain top of mind for them when it comes time for them to buy from an online store.

In addition to these informational newsletters, you should also consider sending out promotional emails on occasion as well. These types of emails will remind customers about the products or services available on your online store, hopefully driving more sales for you over time.

Develop a customer retention strategy.

To build a solid, long-lasting business, you’ll want to keep your customers around for the long haul.

A customer retention strategy is one of the most effective ways to do this. In fact, it’s estimated that every dollar spent on customer retention can bring in up to $30 in revenue! This can be achieved through any number of tactics:

Offering incentives or discounts on your products and services
Providing excellent customer service (when done right)
Creating and promoting a sense of community among customers

Reaching out to customers after a sale

This is a great opportunity to drive repeat business as well as get feedback on your product/service. You can send an email, which is the easiest and quickest option. Or you can send a physical card or even gift them with a small item related to their purchase.

This could be something simple like a thank you card, or something more elaborate like some branded swag (like stickers or pins) that they can put on their laptop, fridge or water bottle etc.

You could also go all out and send them a gift basket full of goodies based on what they bought! Just remember that sending something of value will help remind them of how much you care about their satisfaction and how good it felt when they first received your product/service!