Did you know that about 92% of your website visitors are not ready to buy anything on their first visit? To improve your chances of conversion, you must present a strategy to influence their decisions. This is where you need a sales funnel. A sales funnel is a term used in marketing to describe potential customers' journey in making a purchase.
However, building an effective funnel for your sales requires time, precise attention, and resources. When you do this well it delivers a huge payoff down the road. Read on to learn valuable tips to create a strong sales funnel for your online shop.
Why is creating sales funnels essential for your online shop?
Sales funnels are marketing strategies that map out the stages a customer goes through when making any purchase. With sales funnels you can track leads as they progress from prospects to paying customers and optimize your sales and marketing efforts.
Here are more reasons why building a funnel for your sales is essential for your online shop.
- Sales funnels seamlessly generate high-quality leads that convert to paying customers, thereby boosting your business profits, raising sales revenue, and increasing cost efficiency
- You can easily track and monitor your marketing outcomes with these funnels
- Funnels for your sales expose disastrous marketing patterns so that you can make corrections as soon as possible
- Sales funnels streamline all your marketing efforts and reduce unnecessary marketing campaign costs
Tips for creating a powerful sales funnel
The fundamental goal of your sales funnel is to move your prospects and customers through the diverse stages of the sales process until they are set to buy your products. However, their decision to transact business with you depends mainly on how compelling your funnel is. Here are seven tips to help you create a powerful sales funnel for your online shop and drive more sales on your e-commerce website.
1. Use marketing funnel tools
To create powerful sales funnels and achieve more milestones in your e-commerce business plans, try using marketing funnel tools. Marketing funnel tools make it easy to design marketing funnels for your sales and landing pages and optimise lead generation and conversions.
Marketing funnel tools are excellent e-commerce business tools that help you market, sell, and deliver your products online. They allow you to create powerful sales funnels using funnel choices tailored to your business needs in less time.
2. Define your target audience clearly
Your audience is a large part of the success of your e-commerce business, and you must take extra caution when defining your target audience. Your products or services will not be a perfect fit for everyone, and that's okay. That said, you must position your business to attract only a particular group of individuals who are undisputedly interested in purchasing your products and services.
Defining your target audience helps you adjust your funnel to concentrate on the most relevant selling points. This will help you gain information that leads you to modify your product or service to make it better and generate more leads from your website.
The work here is to perform market research and locate your target audience. The more data you gather about your customers, the more convincing your funnel will become. Once you have found your audience, ensure they get eye-catching content from you regularly.
3. Improve your prospect's customer journey experience
A great user experience can turn a website visitor into a customer. If you give your prospect a satisfying experience throughout their journey, they will likely become your customer. There are many tools that help give your potential client a good experience. One of them is Giosg's sales acceleration platform. This platform helps you improve your average order value, reduce the rate of shopping cart abandonment and boost your sales, among other benefits.
4. Use the "Hook, Story, and Offer" format to create your content plan
One of the most challenging and overwhelming aspects of creating a funnel is figuring out what the words should be. What should you say? How are you supposed to start or end?
Group your funnel into these three different parts below. Each part requires its own marketing strategy to ensure prospects keep moving through different stages and you achieve your e-commerce business goals.
👉🏽 Hook: The hook, which is the first part of your content, mainly involves building your e-commerce business and product awareness. You are generating some buzz and encouraging prospects to know more about your brand and how your products or services can benefit them. You grab the person's attention with aesthetically engaging content, like images, videos, or irresistible heading that emphasizes your online store, creates curiosity, and makes them desire to keep reading.
👉🏽Story: At this stage, your main aim is to gain your prospect's trust and show them why they need your product. A prospective customer will likely be in this stage for a long time, so focus on creating well-detailed, valuable information that tells your business story. Write about things that relate to the struggles and difficulties your target audience is going through. This shows them that you can relate to where they're coming from.
👉🏽Offer: In this final stage, you disclose the solution you found (your products and services), thereby giving your prospects a reason to sign up for your service, purchase your product, or follow through with your CTA (calls to action). Further influence their decisions by including promotional strategies like a free ebook, demo videos, free trial, or discounts.
5. Include social proof in your funnel
Social proof is a typical market tactic that strengthens prospective customers' confidence in the quality and credibility of your online shop. No matter how helpful your products or services are to your customers, you still need to back up your claims with real-life proof from your existing customer base. The reason for this is that modern customers trust their peers more than the business.
Social proof can take several forms, such as:
- Testimonials (videos and texts)
- Short endorsements
- Case studies
- Success stories
- User-generated content
- Business stats
- Before and after images
- Pictures and videos posted to social media
- Numerical reviews and ratings
Sales funnels help you nurture leads in your e-commerce business. Therefore, when picking a social proof to include in your funnel, ensure it enthusiastically endorses your product. Also, whatever social proof you decide to use, ensure you select one from your biggest customer demographic. If your buyers are 80% male and 20% female, use social proof from your male customers.
Get creative and include every part of your funnel with social proof, especially if your product or service is one that people may be unsure of. It's far more convincing to hear about your business from people who have used it than from you or your team members.
6. Bombard your sales funnel with upsells, cross-sells, next-sells, and order bumps.
As a fact of marketing, when someone purchases one item, they are more likely to purchase more. Therefore, building a funnel for your sales with upsells, cross-sells, down-sells, next-sells, and order bumps lets you sell more than one item at a time. This is a significant advantage as it enhances your average order value, fullfills your customers' needs, and improves your marketing efforts.
Here's the definition of the terms.
🟣 Upselling involves offering an extra service or product in the middle of your funnel — usually as an exclusive or one-time offer.
🟣 Next-selling involves following up with a customer after purchase and offering them a similar product with an attractive discount.
🟣 Cross-selling involves suggesting similar products your customers might be interested in based on their most recent purchase.
🟣 Order bumps are the products or services that your customers can quickly include in their order at the last minute with one click.
These are great ways to improve your customer communication and increase revenue.
Start creating powerful sales funnels for your online shop
No doubt, creating and optimizing the perfect funnels for your sales can be quite tasking and overwhelming. Nevertheless, taking the time to create a sales funnel that represents your business goals and what your target audience needs is very rewarding. Include social proof in your funnel, define your target audience and keep it simple. These efforts will help you create a powerful sales funnel that improves your business outcome. Here are more tips on how you can increase sales for your e-commerce business.