How To Create an Effective Sales Funnel For Your Shopify Store

How can you create a practical sales structure that will improve your average order value? What measures do you take to convert your store visitors to repeat and loyal customers? 

Create an effective sales funnel!

For your brand to succeed, you need a well-structured plan that guides your store visitors from the first point of interaction with your store to the final purchase. This sales structure is commonly known as the Sales Funnel. It helps you to boost revenue, increase your customer base and build a trusted brand.  

In this guide, we’ll talk about how to create a compelling Shopify sales funnel. Firstly, let’s begin with understanding the sales funnel.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a theoretical framework used in marketing and sales to show the journey of a potential customer from the point of product awareness to eventual purchase. 

It’s depicted as a funnel because of the downward decrease at every stage of the process. This is due to the rapid decrease in the number of potential customers towards the final purchase decision. 

Sales funnels vary with different industries. An ideal sales funnel is shaped by your customer’s journey – from having a need to ending with a purchase.

With that in mind, we’ll talk about the basic marketing funnel that forms the basis of your sales funnel:

• Top of the funnel – This stage comprises prospects who have indicated their initial interest and are starting their buying journey.  It records the highest number of people. 
• Middle of the funnel – This set of people already have an interest in your product and are your potential customers. There are fewer people in this stage.
• Bottom of the funnel – This stage comprises those who are ready to buy or may have bought from you. It records the fewest number of people in the funnel.

This structure will make it easy for you to create a compelling sales funnel to boost your Shopify store’s  AOV and sales. 

Creating a Shopify Sales Funnel

There is a structured path for a customer journey, going from a visitor to a customer whose patronage increases sales and conversion.

The stages along this path include:

1. Awareness Stage

This is the initial step and a top-of-the-funnel stage. Here, you create awareness about your product and brands for your target audience. You strive to keep your products in their faces and on their minds through advertising, content marketing, social media pages and word-of-mouth. This is also a good phase to generate leads for your next line of action.  

It is important to start right at this stage because this is where you record the highest number of interested people.  

Primary Tools: Social media ads, Google ads, blogs, paid ads, SEO/SEM

2. Consideration Stage

In this stage, potential customers express a deeper interest in your offerings. They begin research on your product features and prices, visiting your Shopify store to learn more about your brand.

Additionally, they compare product prices and features to those of your competitors and check reviews to get a broader perception of your product. Prospects who are genuinely interested at this point will consider buying from you and will want to engage with you on social media. You should set up your social media pages, newsletters and other medium of communication with your customers. Use Shopify apps to create smart email popups for your Shopify stores.

Primary Tools: Landing pages, Ebooks, Newsletters, Free tools, Case studies etc

3. Conversion Stage

This stage is where every Shopify store owner wants their potential customers to get; unfortunately only a portion of customers arrive here. Prospects at this stage at the point of purchase, persuaded by the value of your product or service.

Once the customer orders and pays for your product, that prospect converts to your customers. The conversion marks the success of your sales funnel. Bear in mind that this stage records the fewest number of people in the sales funnel, so every conversion at this point is a worthy addition to your Shopify store.

4. Loyalty Stage

Your sales funnel shouldn’t end at the conversion stage. The customer journey goes beyond the buying phase. In this stage, you focus on making them your repeat customers. Focus on excellent customer service, encourage repeat purchases and retain customers. Get them to become loyal to your brands. Communicate with them through email marketing, newsletters, etc. Create personalized offers targeted at them and offer irresistible discounts to retain them.

5. Advocacy

In this stage, your customers are happy with your product, support services and brand that they leave positive reviews on your product. They become loyal brand ambassadors and advocate for your products through word of mouth.

Create surveys to gather customer opinions regarding your products. Send tokens such as thank-you notes and exclusive discounts to convey brand gratitude. Build strong relationships with them and let them know you care about them.

Strategies For Boosting Sales on Shopify with a Sales Funnel

Cross-Selling

The ultimate sales funnel goal is to get customers to purchase products from your store. You can implement cross-sell campaigns in your store to increase the possibility of buying more products from your store. How can you use cross-selling to boost sales? 

Cross-selling means suggesting products that relate to or complement already purchased products. Its purpose is to display and recommend other products your customers have no idea you sell. Showcasing these products will increase the possibility to buy more and help increase their trust in the brand. 

If you can make the most out of your cross-sells you can generate more sales and increase your average order value. 

Upselling

Unlike cross-selling which suggests related products, upselling shows an upscaled or premium version of the products selected by your customer. This gives customers the impression that premium products better meet their needs.

For example, recommending an iPhone 13 to a customer shopping for an iPhone 11. This not only helps your customer to make better shopping decisions, but it also helps to boost sales and improve your average order value.

Product Recommendation

Product recommendation is one of the various strategies to boost sales in your Shopify store. It means suggesting relevant products to customers based on their shopping history or preferences. 

Aside from using product recommendations to improve sales in Shopify, it makes it easier for customers to see your products and decide faster. This cuts bounce rates. Product recommendations can be in two parts; the complementary and supplementary parts

In the complementary recommendations, you suggest products that complement the customer’s desired products in their cart while the supplementary involves recommending product addons. 

Lead Magnets

These are marketing and sales strategies that are created to pull leads. They are crucial for every Shopify business owner who wants to boost conversion. Lead magnets can be added to any part of your marketing plans, websites or social media pages to attract leads to your store. They are free, short or long-term offers and incentives that you promote to your customers in exchange for their contact details.

Want to put up lead magnets? Try out templates, downloadable content, eBooks and white papers. Lead magnets are mostly used for building a solid email database. A good lead magnet should be relevant to your customers, provide value to them and be able to tackle a real problem.

While on it, ensure that your lead magnets are unique to your brand and do not affect your overall brand performance negatively.

Why Is Sales Funnel Important For Shopify Stores?

Shopify stores are created as a catalog to display your products and tell your customers more about your brand. Setting up your Shopify store without marketing or advertising does not guarantee sales. 

A strategic sales funnel lifts you over the no-sale hurdle. Some of benefits of setting up a Shopify sales funnel include:

1. Improved Customer Engagement

Sales funnels facilitate communication between your team and your customers. You can create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns that your customers can engage with.

By tailoring your content and offers to the specific needs and interests of your audience, you can grab their attention and keep them engaged throughout their journey. 

2. Increase in Conversion Rates

The sales funnel’s main objective is to improve sales and increase conversion, which it actually does when properly implemented. By optimizing each stage of the funnel. You can significantly boost your conversion rates and turn more visitors into customers.

3. Enhanced Customer Retention

Your sales funnel doesn’t end at conversion. It also includes the post-purchase stages such as upselling and customer retention. Shopify allows you to integrate email marketing and automation tools to nurture your existing customers.

With this, you encourage repeat purchases and build long-term relationships. This leads to higher customer lifetime value and increases revenue over time.

But…how do you create a winning sales funnel on Shopify? Ask any entry-level entrepreneur, they’d admit that no one gets it on the first try.

However, you don’t have to endure trial and error processes to nail your Shopify sales funnel. Third-party apps such as Adoric and Zipify simplify the process of building your sales funnel.

Best Sales Funnel Apps for Shopify

1. Adoric Upsell and Product Recommendations.

On Adoric, plug into a range of campaigns including home page best sellers, recently viewed, and collection bestsellers.

You can also customize your campaigns to display on your Shopify store’s home page, collection page, product page, or cart page.

With Adoric’s vast features, you offer your customers seamless shopping experiences. You’re not only selling more and boosting your average order value, you’re also helping your shoppers buy faster and better.

With Adoric installed on your Shopify store, you can track sales, impressions, clicks, and CTRs on your campaigns. You can also monitor the drop in bounce rates due to your live campaigns.

To begin, log into the Adoric dashboard and select the features you want to integrate into your Shopify store. In the dashboard panel, you can have access to a range of campaigns including recently viewed and home page best sellers etc.

2. Zipify Landing Page Builder

Zipify is packed with AI-powered features that help you create smarter sales funnel and landing pages for your customers in minutes.

For a speedy process, Zipify comes with pre-built templates, tested and proven to work, and easily customizable to achieve what you want in your Shopify store.

Zipify is also optimized for mobile devices with built-in testing to maximize results.

3. UFE Cross Sell & Upsell Bundles

An all-in-one Shopify app for all your sales funnel features, it is lightweight and produces the best UX design to create highly targeted upsell-cross-sell offers. 

UFE cross-seel helps you to show irresistible product recommendations anywhere on your Shopify page without obstructing the shopping flow. 

UFE is recommended as one of the Shopify apps to boost your AOV and revenue. 

Conclusion

Creating an effective sales funnel for your Shopify store is a continuous process involving constant refinement and adaption. By understanding the different stages of a sales funnel, you can create campaigns that fit each stage.

This way, you’ll consistently provide values and optimize your funnel, setting your Shopify store up for a steady run of massive sales. 

Install Adoric on Shopify