Eureka! It finally hits you. You’ve been thinking about starting your own business for a while and now you know exactly what you need: a funnel building for Shopify success! Well, that was easy!
Aaaaand You're Done
Well, not exactly. Sure, creating an online store is no problem these days. For example, you've got WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. Creating a website is therefore the least of your problems. Creating an online storefront? Heck, that's what Shopify is for! However, what about after that? Starting a new business feels a lot like throwing darts (while blindfolded and standing on one leg) and hoping they stick.
During this time you’re making phone calls, sending emails, posting to social media, canvasing your neighborhood, and releasing carrier pigeons – literally anything to get the word out and attract potential customers. As a result, people know about you!
In addition, you're talking things up. Getting your name out there. You're figuring things out and therefore you're on the road to… well, what exactly?
The good news is that some of those things actually work, especially in the beginning. Though not the carrier pigeons. At least… we don't think. The bad news? A lot of the above is a lot of hard work. In addition, the methods you find which do work can fade over time.
There’s nothing wrong with drumming up interest, directing traffic to your store, and raising brand awareness. The problem comes later when you realize you’re not making as many sales as you could or should be making.
People are opening your emails but they’re not clicking through to your store. People are landing on a product page, but they’re leaving before tapping ‘add to cart.’ Some are even making it all the way to the checkout page, but abandon their cart at the last minute.
It sounds like you need a sales funnel for Shopify success! With this in mind, we're here to help.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnels is a marketing strategy designed to outline the customer journey and the milestones they should hit along the way. Shoppers exist in your sales funnel from their initial awareness of your business until they become a paying customer.
A sales funnel can be described in four steps: awareness, interest, decision, and action. Awareness is at the top of the funnel and action at the bottom. When a sales funnel works successfully, prospects move down the funnel, increasing trust and engagement until they become a paying customer.
These milestones include tactics that drive prospects further down your funnel and towards a purchasing decision. Examples of these tactics from the top of the funnel and down include: landing pages, product pages, remarketing ads, email campaigns, upsells, coupons, and more!
It’s shaped like a funnel because more people will be at the top, or in the awareness phase, than at any other point. While peoples’ engagement and interest in your brand increases further down the funnel, there will inherently be fewer and fewer shoppers that actually become customers.
For example, let's say your recent Facebook ad reached 10,000 people. Those are all prospects at the top of your sales funnel. However, only 200 of them continued to show interest after seeing the ad. These 200 prospects are more valuable and more likely to become paying customers. But at the very end, only 75 of those prospects made a purchase in your store and 10 of them made a repeat purchase.
Why do I need a sales funnel?
The rise of e-commerce and digital content marketing has led to the need for effective sales funnels. There are so many channels to reach and engage with prospects, but how do you ultimately guide them to the ‘buy now’ button? This why you need a sales funnel.
Take control of the sales process
Sales funnels are designed to help you see where your marketing efforts fail to convert. At what point in the buying process do prospects bail? Example include instances such as at the cart, at the checkout process, the product page, etc.Finding these holes and fixing them helps you as a business owner regain control of your sales process and thus, increase your conversions.
You can use A/B Testing on sales funnels to try out various marketing tactics or page elements and see what increases conversions. Split test things like landing page designs, offers, copy, and even complete sales funnels. As a result, you'll find out which of your approaches is working best!
Create lasting relationships with your customers
Did you know a Shopify conversion rate between 0.6% to 3.1% is considered average? With a low percentage like that, it’s therefore easy to see why building a strong relationship with customers and earning their repeat business is important.
Sales funnels can help you reengage customers via emails, remarketing, recurring subscription services, post purchase upsells and downsells, and more. As for the prospects still stuck in awareness through decision steps, you can use sales funnels to keep engaging with them in many of the same ways.
Get more leads and covert more customers
At the end of the day, sales funnels exist so you can sell more products. On top of the engagement tactics mentioned above, sales funnel builders can help you take your Shopify store to the next level.
When your standard Shopify pages just aren’t converting, you can build custom landing page built to perform right on your Shopify domain. You can also increase sales by adding pre-purchase upsells and checkout bumps that you customer may be interested in. You can even build custom checkouts that get customers from ‘buy now’ to bought, faster.
How to build a Shopify sales funnel
You’ve learned what a sales funnel is and why it’s so important to your growing business. Now, it’s time to understand the process of building and managing a sales funnel on your store.
1. Do your research
As a new business owner, you may have a good idea of who your customers are, but if you’ve never taken the time to do some market research, you may be missing out on who your customer could be.
Market research can identify your target audiences, where to find them, the type of content they respond to, which offers work, and they types of products they like. This will help you create a funnel that will draw in your ideal customer and push them further along the process.
Based on your market research, you can therefore build high-converting awareness, interest, decision, and action stages of your funnel. For example, you can insert more relevant upsells or cross sells at checkout. Or, if you find out that they’re driven by the opinion of others, you can insert Facebook comments for social proof of your product on your landing page.
2. Map out the customer journey
If you don’t know the journey the customer takes to get from awareness to action, then you won’t be able to build a successful sales funnel. This approach will also help you design an optimized funnel.
You will want to map out the customer journey for each stage of the sales funnel. This will show you what prospective customers will experience at every touchpoint. Consider your market research as you do this and it will help you define an optimized funnel that is more likely to convert.
But wait!… Let’s talk about funnel builders
Maybe this should be step three, but consider it more of a public service announcement. Sales funnels are time consuming, can be tricky to get right, and sometimes don’t convert at high percentages. So before you really get started building one, you need to hear this.
You can use the standard funnel building tools that Shopify offers, but remember the staggering statistic from before? An average Shopify conversion rate can be as low as 0.6%. Why not try something that store owners claim boosts conversions 5% – 10%?
Funnel building apps
Stop sending traffic to low-converting Shopify pages. Instead, create a fully custom sales funnels that can double or even triple conversions, sales, and profits. We’re talking custom landing pages, opt-in forms, upsell and downsell widgets, checkout pages and more that are built to integrate with Shopify.
This might sound intimidating, but it’s really not. Sales funnel apps make it easy with a drag and drop editor that’s hassle free. Most importantly, they integrate with your other existing software and service providers for a seamless experience. It also makes it easy to discover what works best for your target audience with split testing capabilities.
3. Define marketing tactics for each funnel stage
After you learn more about your target audience, create the perfect scenario that will turn them into paying customers. Setup your funnel builder app, it’s time to determine the marketing tactics that will move them down the funnel.
Awareness
It is now time to fill up that top level of the funnel. But, how do you get your product in front of a lot of people? Typically, this comes in the form of content marketing. We’re talking about blogging, social media, digital ads, search engine optimization (SEO), and many others.
It’s important to try to target the right people during the awareness phase because that will lead to more conversions. This is where those market research skills really come into play, but it’s also important to setup proper audience targeting in digital ads and use strong keywords in your content.
A Facebook ad is a great example of how you can increase awareness of your business. Most importantly, Facebook Ads Manager allows you to precisely target people you think may be interested in your product. This targeting can be based on location, demographics, behaviors, or even interests. Also, Facebook ads can link back to the custom landing page you made with your funnel builder, so there’s opportunity to move to the next stage right away.
Interest
Once prospects are familiar with your product, the next goal is to keep them engaged. At this point, they’re looking for ways to learn more about your business and your products. Make sure you have plenty of valuable content available. Most importantly, be sure you have ways that they can keep in touch with you.
An example of a tactic you can deploy in the interest phase is email. For example, collecting addresses through a custom opt-in form on a landing page or use calls to actions (CTAs) that encourage prospects to subscribe. Adding micro-commitments like a 2-step opt-in are proven to be more successful at getting prospects to subscribe. As a result, you'll get more qualified prospects in your lists.
If your custom funnel is integrated with an email service provider, it’s easy to manage contacts, lists, and campaigns all associated with the funnel. You should also be tracking people’s actions on your site with the Facebook pixel and Google Analytics so you can remarket to their specific interests.
Decision
Here, your prospects are in the decision-making process but they're not quite ready. They’re asking questions like, “Do I really need that?” or “How do I know it’s of good quality?” You must provide the answers to these questions in order to convert them to a paying customer. You also better believe that they’re checking out what your competitors have to say.
Add social elements like online reviews or Facebook comments to right to your product pages so they can read what others have to say. If they come close to buying but abandon their cart at the last second, use the email capture feature to send a follow up email with a special offer.
Action
It finally happened! A prospect has added a product to their cart and they’re headed for the checkout. But did you think this is where the sales funnel ends? Think again.
Use a funnel builder to inject pre- and post- purchase offers in order to increase the value of the sale. Suggest similar or relevant items with a pre-purchase upsell. Lastly, entice them again with gotta-have-it items that can be added to the cart with just one click.
Already checked out? It’s not too late! Present a special offer on another item they might be interested in which can be purchased without having to re-enter credit card details.
But don’t let this be a one-and-done purchase. Why not build another funnel that targets repeat buyers so you can guarantee their business every time? Good thing there’s an app for that.
Let’s start building
Still here? Get busy creating the most awesome, most effective funnel you can! Once you get the funnel built exactly to your preferences, it essentially works on autopilot therefore you have more time to focus on other tasks!
In conclusion, customization for your e-commerce store isn’t just nice to have. It’s also your best tool for remaining competitive in the marketplace. In short, stop settling for basic Shopify features and start building your ideal sales funnel today.
