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 making it 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 the moment they know the brand or the product until they convert or buy what they are interested in. offering. Therefore, designing a sales funnel will visually provide what the purchasing process that a potential client will follow will be like and all the different phases they will go through.

Having this sales funnel defined will be crucial for an e-commerce store since it will be possible to extract information about 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 will be able to 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 final objective 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 purchasing process. Generally, the purchasing processes that potential clients 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, whether obtained spontaneously on their own 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 case, the user already has the concern that they need something to cover that need.
• Search for information. Once a need has been awakened in the client, they will move on 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 personality of the client and the quantity and quality of the information they are receiving.
• Buys. Finally, the purchase will be made with the option that has provided the best quality of information and more confidence.

Based on this customer purchasing 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 the funnel strategies so that the user ends up with the final objective, 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 must take into account to optimize 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 developing its activity, so each sales funnel will be different. However, there are different models that can be applied to develop the sales funnel that would be consistent with 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 wouldn't someone buy it? It is for this reason that the most important thing before starting the funnel is to know your audience. Who is going to buy from you? Why are they 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 purchasing 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 the moment the need arises until it culminates in the purchase. It may seem similar to the sales funnel, however, a funnel also allows us to 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 developed with well-defined bases and being clear about 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 obtaining the greatest number of potential clients possible. This stage corresponds to the user's need stage and their search for information. The goal is to get their attention and get them to land on our website and start getting to know us. To do this we must develop different recruitment strategies.

At this stage it is not advisable to show sales intention since the user may not even have purchase intention. That is why the main objective is to offer value in an informational way. At this stage, SEO, content marketing and the 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 website must meet certain minimum requirements to be eligible for positioning. These are that the web page is indexable, that it allows bots to be crawled, that the navigability of the page is traceable showing the appropriate follow attributes, that it has the https security protocol and then technical aspects that serve to facilitate reading. Google bots and know how the website is structured, such as the different canonical tags, hreflang in case it has different versions in different languages, alternate tag, existence of redirects 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 for the different intentions. Once we have been able to detect the way in which a potential client searches on the Internet, we can begin to design our strategies and shape the funnel.

However, what was described above is part of the organic uptake. But this stage of the Funnel focused on gross traffic capture, so we will also take paid capture into account. This will be achieved with the help of professionals in this matter. Even so, we have to be clear that a user who comes to your store through an advertisement 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 the micro- and macro-conversions that we want to be fulfilled.

More and more steps are added and this is how the sales funnel is structured.

MOFU - Middle Of the FUNnel

In the MOFU stage the objective will 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 it that this part of the funnel becomes narrower.

The strategies that they incorporate in this part of the funnel have to be based on the buyer personas since it will be the model to define what type of clients we are looking for.

The client has become interested in us, we are one of the options he considers to satisfy his need. It is for this reason that the content that the website has becomes important here. Yes, in the previous phase we took the content into account to optimize the way in which we wanted the user to find us. Now, we have to tell a story with which you feel identified, or that finds a differential value in us that you do not find in the competition. The objective will be to have the contact for 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 making 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 website with the objective of converting and attracting qualified leads. Therefore, the disciplines that will have the greatest degree of involvement in this part will be:

• CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization As its name indicates, its objective is to analyze the website and apply all its efforts to improvements with the aim of improving the conversion rate, it will be largely supported by UX and Web Analytics.
• UX or User Experience. It focuses on optimizing the user's experience when browsing the website. Optimizing your experience results in a greater purchase volume, which is why it is closely linked to CRO. Its operation is based a lot on testing and testing, the well-known A/B tests in which it measures the degree of acceptance that a specific change may have on the website, whether in the design, CTAs, copy, forms, banners...
• Web Analytics. It is responsible for observing what is happening on the web. User behavior, campaign performance... It collects real data that allows you to make quick decisions or detect opportunities. It is very important for the sales funnel since it gives a vision of it and you can 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 them to convert, however it is not as easy as it seems. Getting a contact email is just the beginning. It is starting over, since we have to create strategies to start treating the user, convert them, analyze what type of communication they prefer, and be able to adapt. 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.

At this stage the objective is to convert that qualified lead, who feels interested 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 convince, or welcome discounts to make our option even more attractive.

For this final stage we will rely on personalized social ad campaigns or targeted at that audience that already knows us and has already had some interaction with us. As well as working on the reputation that we have generated among clients, the comments 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 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 that Shopify offers 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 their cart abandoned. Likewise, this is one of the parts in which Shopify does not allow you to make 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 checkout phase 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 in Shopify that allows you to attack the purchase funnel is Klaviyo. This tool allows you to impact users who fall through the funnel as well as those who leave the cart abandoned, but the only requirement is that you have that user's email address. This way you can configure this tool to impact you in a personalized way depending on when it falls.

It may interest you:

• What payment methods Shopify offers
• 5 Dropshipping Apps for Shopify
• 7 recommendations to increase your opening rate with klaviyo