Once we have created our e-commerce, the next step is to start selling, however it is not as easy as it seems. It is not simply about creating the website and putting it out to the public. To achieve greater scalability of our online store, we must focus on defining a series of sales strategies.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel or conversion funnel is the process in which for an online store, a travel route is designed that we want the user to follow from when they know the brand or the product until they convert or buy what is being offered to them. offering. Therefore, designing a sales funnel will visually provide what the purchase process that a potential client will follow is going to be like and all the different phases that they go through.
Having this sales funnel defined is going to be crucial for an e-commerce store since it will be possible to extract information on what practices are working so that the user can go through the different stages of the funnel or where they are losing interest in continuing. In this way we can detect possible inefficiencies as well as opportunities for improvement and growth.
Thus, it can be said that detecting and defining this process for an online store is one of the first pillars needed to start developing a commercial process in the most effective way possible. After all, in an e-commerce, the ultimate goal is to achieve a greater number of sales and be able to scale in the market, so investing in developing a good sales funnel can make a difference for an e-commerce.
The importance of a sales funnel
The importance that a sales funnel can have for your business is that it will be in charge of guiding the customer in their purchase process. In general, the purchase processes that potential customers have are divided into 3: Need, search for information and purchase to cover that need.
- Need. It is the phase in which a user has a need, either obtained spontaneously by his account or induced by an advertisement. A problem can give rise to a need just as an advertisement on the internet can give rise to that same feeling. In any of the cases, the user already has that concern that he needs something to cover that need.
- Search for information. Once a need has been awakened in the client, he will go to the next phase, which consists of looking for different alternatives to satisfy that need. There is no general rule or specific time for how long a potential client can take in this phase, since it will depend a lot on both the client's personality and the quantity and quality of the information they are receiving.
- Buy. Finally, the purchase will be made with the option that has provided the best quality of information and more confidence.
Based on this customer buying process, a sales funnel can be developed where it covers each of these phases with strategies and actions. In fact, for each of these phases there are different branches of marketing that will focus on optimizing funnel strategies so that the user ends up with the final goal, which is conversion.
How to improve a Sales Funnel
This section is useful whether you already have a sales funnel applied to your e-commerce or if you are yet to start. We show you a description of what we must take into account in each phase and the applications of the different branches of marketing that we have to take into account for the optimization of the process.
Each company or business that exists in the market is totally different, even if they belong to the same sector. Each business has its own way of carrying out its activity, so each sales funnel will be different. However, there are different models that can be applied for the development of the sales funnel that would be according to the business and factors to take into account.
To begin with, the most important thing is to know that we do not have to make this conversion funnel to our liking or how we want it to work. This part is very important since there are many entrepreneurs and business owners who are in love with their product or service and think that everyone will like it and why would someone not buy it? It is for this reason that the most important thing before starting with the funnel is to know your audience. Who is going to buy from you? Why is he going to buy from you and not from your competition? To answer these questions, we must start by developing our buyer persona and a customer journey. In this way we will try to know everything we can about our potential clients and thus optimize our sales funnel to the maximum.
Developing a buyer persona about the potential customers who visited our e-commerce will be very important since it will be thanks to this report that we will begin to develop the expected sales.
A customer journey will be the way in which the purchase process that our potential customers have in their interaction with the brand or products is understood. This analysis will be made of the process from when the need arises until it culminates in the purchase. It may seem similar to the sales funnel, however, a funnel allows us to also see those stages of the process but focused on the product, since in each phase of the funnel, it narrows.
Once the potential clients have been rigorously analyzed, the funnel can be elaborated with well-defined bases and with a clear understanding of what we want to achieve and how we want to achieve it. The TOFU-MOFU-BOFU model is the most used model.
TOFU -Top Of the FUnnel
This stage is aimed at getting as many potential customers as possible. This stage corresponds to the stage of user need and their search for information. The goal is to draw their attention and get them to land on our website and start getting to know us. For this we must develop different recruitment strategies.
At this stage, it is not convenient to show the intention to sell, since the user may not even have the intention to buy. That is why the main objective is to offer value in an informational way. At this stage, SEO, content marketing and social media in which the online store is present become very important.
Let's start at the beginning, the basics. In order to appear in the results of both Google and any other search engine, a web page has to meet minimum requirements to be eligible for positioning. These are that the web page is indexable, that it allows bots to be tracked, that the page is navigable by showing the appropriate follow attributes, that it has the https security protocol and then technical aspects that serve to facilitate reading by google bots and know how the web page is structured, such as the different canonical tags, hreflang in case it has different versions in different languages, alternate tag, existence of redirections or 404 pages that harm the user's navigability, among others. many other aspects.
Once we have the online store optimized in terms of technical aspects, it is time to optimize it in terms of content and user search intentions. We must be able to analyze how you search for our products. Their searches are informational, they are transactional. What search volumes we find of the different intentions. Once we have been able to detect the way in which a potential client searches on the internet, we can start designing our strategies and shaping the funnel.
However, what is described above is part of the organic uptake. But this stage of the Funnel focused on gross traffic acquisition, so we will also take paid acquisition into account. This will be achieved with the help of professionals in this field. Even so, we have to be clear that a user who arrives at your store through an ad does not have to end up buying. Once they land on the web, different strategies must be developed to convert that visit into a lead and potential client. To do this, the page must be optimized for the user experience and at the same time have incorporated the micro- and macro-conversions that we want to be fulfilled.
More and more steps are being added and this is how the sales funnel is being structured.
MOFU - Middle Of the FUnnel
In the MOFU stage, the objective is going to be to convert those visits into leads and those leads into qualified leads. This is the stage that requires the most effort since it is where it will be defined which users who have landed on your website will become customers or not. It is because of her that this part of the funnel becomes narrower.
The strategies that they incorporate in this part of the funnel must be based on the buyer persona, since it will be the model to define what type of clients we are looking for.
The client has been interested in us, we are one of the options that he contemplates to satisfy his need. It is for this reason that the content of the web becomes important here. If in the previous phase we had the content in mind to optimize the way in which we wanted the user to find us. Now, we have to tell a story with which he feels identified, or that he finds a differential value in us that he does not find in the competition. The objective will be to have the contact of that visit, either by registering with a profile for the store or the newsletter. What is intended is to achieve that means of contact where we can continue to have an impact and continue advancing in that purchase process or conversion funnel.
As we have mentioned, it will be important to optimize the content of the web with the aim of converting and attracting qualified leads. For them, the disciplines that will have a greater degree of involvement in this part will be:
- The CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization As its name indicates, its objective is to analyze the web and apply all its efforts to improvements in order to improve the conversion rate, it will be largely supported by UX and web analytics.
- UX or User Experience. It focuses on optimizing the user experience when browsing the website. The optimization of your experience results in a higher purchase volume, which is why it is closely linked to the CRO. Its operation is largely based on trial and error, the well-known A/B tests in which it measures the degree of acceptance that a specific change can have on the web, whether it be in the design, CTAs, copy, forms, banners...
- Web Analytics. It is responsible for observing what is happening on the web. The behavior of the user, the performance of the campaigns... It collects real data that allows decisions to be made quickly or opportunities to be detected. It is very important for the sales funnel since it gives a vision of it and it is possible to analyze which parts of the funnel work best and thus be able to correct unforeseen deviations.
- email marketing. Very important once we have obtained the client's data. Its objective is to impact the user to get him to convert, however it is not as easy as it seems. Getting a contact email is just the beginning. It is to start over, since we have to create strategies to start dealing with the user, to convert, to analyze what type of communication they prefer to be able to adapt to. There are different tools that can help automate and create these user impact strategies, such as Mailchimp and Klaviyo. You want to know more about Klaviyo, the tool that is beginning to compete very strongly with Mailchimp, in this post we will tell you everything .
BOFU - Bottom Of the FUnnel
It is the final part, where the funnel closes. Users who have chosen us as an option arrive at this phase because they are interested in the products we offer. This is the narrowest phase of the funnel.
In this stage, the objective is to convert that qualified lead, who feels that interest in trying our product, into a final customer. Here, we will try to offer a more personalized treatment or content even in the products or services that we want to sell. Free demos can also be offered to finish convincing, or welcome discounts to make our option even more attractive.
For this final stage, we will rely on personalized social ad campaigns or those aimed at that public that already knows us and has already had some interaction with us. As well as working on the part of the reputation that we have generated in the clients, the comments that they leave us, the reviews, if we have created a community around our brand, products or services. All this positively influences the user's final decision.
Sales funnel with Shopify
Shopify is a specialized platform for ecommerce. It is very intuitive and allows you to customize it so that it can be applied to the funnel that we have developed, starting with the template that we have chosen for the design of the store. In this post we show you a series of free templates offered by Shopify for your online store.
One of the most important parts of the funnel in an online store is the checkout part, since many users tend to leave the cart abandoned. Similarly, this is one of the parts where Shopify does not allow changes unless you have a Plus version, but even with this version the changes it allows are few. In this phase, as we mentioned before about abandoned carts, Shopify allows you to configure notifications for abandoned carts and has put a lot of effort into optimizing this phase of checkout very well.
Even so, we can provide our store with a wide variety of applications. Depending on the type of business we have and the funnel strategy we want to carry out, Shopify has a wide variety of applications that can be incorporated into our online store. You can find different applications that fit the needs of each business.
One of the tools that can be found on Shopify and that allows you to attack the purchase funnel is Klaviyo. This tool allows impacting users who fall through the funnel as well as those who leave the cart abandoned, but the only requirement is that the user's email is available. In this way, this tool can be configured to impact it in a personalized way depending on the moment in which it falls.
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