Do you know most eCommerce shop without sales funnel is not making enough money to cover their customer acquisition cost? Had you ever thought of how to use sales funnel with your Shopify eCommerce store?
It’s because these stores are not designed to sell or sell more items. And of course, their conversion rate is bad.
Why?
An eCommerce store is designed to serve as a storefront to showcase the business and all the product catalogues and make a purchase. This includes, the homepage, product page, about us page, contact us page, blog, product catalogue and so on.
This can work well with existing customers that already bought from you. And is looking to buy more. But’s definitely terrible for new customer acquisition.
It’s too broad and didn’t give people a reason to buy from you.
So what should you do instead?
Build a sales funnel for your Shopify eCommerce business. And this is what exactly we are going to share today. How to build sales funnel for your Shopify eCommerce business.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
First of all, if this is the first time you heard about a sales funnel.
A sales funnel is an optimized sales process to convert potential customers into leads, and next from leads into paying customers. And finally, subscribers for recurring sales.
In short, a sales funnel will have three stages:
- Top of the funnel: Target audience.
- Middle of the funnel: Potential customers.
- Bottom of the funnel: Existing customers.
These three stages a customer will go through in every sales process. It’s the process to turn someone from a visitor to a customer by providing value and building trust in every stage and moving them down the sales funnel as fast as possible to make more money.
And today, our focus will be building a series of pages to achieve the goal.
But before we start, we will first design the value ladder for the sales funnel.
A typical sales funnel will have these four stages :
- Bait (Top of Funnel). You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend(Middle of Funnel). You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
- Middle(Middle of Funnel). You offer the customer a more expensive and valuable product or service.
- Backend(Bottom of Funnel). You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.
However, depending on your product offering, it can be more or less a step in the funnel.
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What Is the Value Ladder Sales Funnel?
And to brainstorm on how what product to put in each stage of the sales funnel, we use something we called the value ladder.
Why we call this a value ladder, is when moving across the different sales funnels stages, we will offer a higher value product with a higher price point.
And in the frontend and middle stages, you can test for your market, to add downsells, upsells and cross-sells to maximize your revenue in your business.
And ideally, at the end of the funnel, after offering your most expensive or premium product/service, you can offer a continuity program. A continuity program is a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it follows the buying emotion. By understanding human buying behaviour, it does:
- Start the relationship by offering free value. – Give before you sell
- Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via a follow-up email. – follow up and trust
- Build trust by providing more paid value progressively. – Build subscriber
Depending on your sales funnel goal, you can add or remove some steps in the sales funnel to suit your business.
It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
To understand more about sales funnel in-depth, may check out the best-selling book by Russell Brunson, the co-founder of ClickFunnels and the creator of the value ladder sales funnel concept, about how to use sales funnel to grow and scale your online business.
You can get it for FREE – all you need to do is to cover the shipping!
Which Sales Funnel Should You Use for Your Shopify E-commerce Store?
We recommend building a cart funnel for your Shopify eCommerce business.
The cart funnel will consist of four pages:
- Sales page.
- Upsell.
- Cross-sell.
- Thank you page.
How To Build a Sales Funnel for Your Shopify Store
To start, I recommend that you use ClickFunnels to build your cart funnel. In ClickFunnels, you can start building with a ready-built template and start building from there. Also, you can integrate your Shopify store into the cart funnel instantly with the one-click integration.
Now, let’s take a look at how each page in depth.
Page #1: Sales Page
The first page of the cart funnel, it’s also the entry point of your sales funnel. And, this is the page that you will be driving traffic to with paid or organic traffic sources.
Choose The Product To Promote
Now, take a look at your eCommerce store and see which product sells best. That’s the product that you want to promote on your sales page.
Why do you want to promote the best-selling product?
It’s a proven-to-sell product among your existing user group. Never try promoting your latest product, your favourite or your most expensive product.
What’s your favourite may not be the most important here.
Your best-selling product is. Data talks.
Craft an Irresistible Offer Out Of Your Best Seller Product
You see if you are selling the same product with the same offer. The only difference will be the sales page only. What else?
Nothing different.
Hence, you want to turn it into an offer. This is because, when you sell an offer instead of a product, you are now selling the bundle value of your product instead of a standalone product.
When selling a product, you are presenting it as a commodity. And, you are competing with other competitors in the market. Usually, end up being a price war.
But when you are selling the value of your product in a bundle, you are providing a different value compared to your competitors.
To do this, you should start to think a create a bundle of value or offer that your potential customers couldn’t get anywhere else.
Ideally, the value should be at least 10x the price paid. And for this, we recommend bundling it with a digital product.
Why?
A digital product is free to reproduce and easy to distribute via links online.
For example, if you are selling health supplements products, you could bundle your best-selling product with a meal plan, a weight loss guide or a workout guide.
The additional value you provide differs you from your competitors.
Here’s the formula for creating an irresistible offer:
High Value + Low Price = Irresistible Offer
2-Step Order Form
This is one of the issues that happen in most eCommerce stores. The potential customers will need to take five to six steps from the product page to the checkout page.
Seriously? How many people will leave before reaching there?
That’s not efficient at all.
Instead, you can use a 2-step order form directly on your sales page to collect their contact details and complete the sales on the sales page itself.
- Step #1: Shipping information.
- Step #2: Payment details.
The reason to get shipping information to step 1 is to make sure you get their contact information first. So that, even if they didn’t complete the purchase now, you can always follow up with them.
The psychology behind splitting the order form is that the potential customer makes a micro-commitment by providing their shipping information.
This makes them more likely to provide their payment details and finalize the purchase.
Order Bump
Now, they already complete the 2-step order form and are going to make payment. You can add an order bump here.
Imagine your experience in the grocery store. There are a lot of small items in the queue or next to the checkout area. Those are small items typically with a lower value.
They do that because they know that people will be tempted to grab it and throw it in their shopping cart.
An order form bump is the online version of the small items at the checkout. Something inexpensive that the potential customer might add to their cart on an impulse.
The key here is to keep it simple because they don’t need much thinking required before taking action.
Page #2: Upsell
An upsell is an offer that you make after the potential customer bought the first product on your sales page.
At this moment, they already make a purchase from you. They just moved from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel.
And, this shall be an upgrade on top of the original product.
For example, when you are buying a McDonald’s or another F&B shop. They will ask, would you like to get a big one?
You should implement this exact same technique in your sales funnel upsell page. Throwing a better offer or upsize of what they just bought on the first page.
Back to our health supplements example. For example, they had just bought the supplements on the first page for $50 per bottle. Now you are offering them a bundle offer of buying three bottles for $120. Or even a large bottle with a better deal.
Some might not take the upsell, but no harm in offering it to them.
And in some cases, instead of upselling, you should offer a cross-sell.
Page #3: Cross-Sell
A cross-sell is also an offer that you make where the product is complementary to what they just bought.
For example, if you are selling a burger, the complementary product shall be fries or soft drinks.
There should only be one cross-sell per page, so pick a product that complements your main offer the best.
Special Tips: Create a Digital Cross-Sell!
Including a digital product in your sales funnel is always a good idea.
Why?
Digital products is having a very good profit margin compared to physical products. By doing this, you can drastically increase your profits by adding a digital cross-sell in your sales funnel.
Here are some digital product ideas:
- A video course that explains how to make the most out of your best-selling product.
- A video course that teaches the potential customer a skill that they want to learn.
- An ebook that offers information that the potential customer needs.
You may think that most people won’t buy the digital cross-sell. But we are targeting impulse buying here. And we believe that $7 is a great price.
We are not going to price it very high to make them take too long to decide whether to buy. And, we also don’t want to make the price too low to avoid people thinking that it’s a low-quality product. Instead, we want to tell them, it’s not too expensive, and is very valuable.
Now you might think that $7 is not a lot. But that’s pure profit. So, why not.
But this $7 will help you to be ahead of your competitors and get more customers. If you are running ads, you will realise that the ad cost is rising and will only be higher.
So, having this digital cross-sell will give you more bullets to put into your ad budget.
Page #4: Thank You Page
Finally, after you complete all your offers, it’s the thank you page.
Here, you should thank them for buying your product, and provide shipping information and also customer service information.
Things like if they didn’t get the product on time or not satisfy, how can they feedback to your team?
On this page, after you had all the information, you can also display an offer wall.
An offer wall is a collection of your other products available. And, anyone who is interested can click on the product on the sales funnel and they will be directed to your Shopify shop to continue shopping there.
Can You Have More Than Four Pages?
This four-page cart funnel structure is basic. You can always add some other upsell, cross-sell and even downsell in your funnel to increase your revenue.
However, you should always remember this. Don’t include too many upsells as people might be annoyed as you are sending them too many offers.
That means that adding one or two extra pages to your cart funnel is okay but we wouldn’t advise going beyond that.
Build Your Shopify Sales Funnel With ClickFunnels
In short, if you have a Shopify eCommerce business but not having a sales funnel, chances are you might be losing some new customer sales.
If you are struggling to grow your Shopify eCommerce business or are looking for new growth. We recommend trying to use the Cart Funnel together with your Shopify store.
So, if you decided to start today, you can start building the Cart Funnel in ClickFunnels today. And what’s best you can start with a free 14-day trial. You can start by trying it and see if it’s a good fit for you.
