According to Salesforce, more than 68% of companies have not identified or attempted to measure a sales funnel (or don’t even have sales funnels in the first place). With that being said, a whopping 79% of marketing leads are never converted into sales.
That’s no coincidence.
It’s virtually impossible to bring in sustainable and dependable sales figures without a sales funnel in place. If you run paid advertising ads (and hence spend advertising dollars), you’ll need a custom ad funnel strategy in place (maybe with various ad funnels, depending on the campaigns you run) to turn your eCommerce business into a profit-generating asset.
No funnels; no marketing.
You don’t ask, you don’t get.
If you don’t lead, your potential customers won’t know where to go.
For these reasons alone, you need a robust and well-executed marketing strategy along with a well-crafted sequence of funnels all the way from front-facing ads or calls to action all the way to intermediary landing pages and email marketing sequences.
eCommerce marketing success depends on the right sales funnel strategy. If you don’t get it right, you’ll still have a sale here and there (if you are lucky), but it’s going to be far from sustainable.
A sustainable, ever-flowing revenue stream (which is growing consistently) is what you need for your business. Learning how to build the right ad funnel strategy or sales funnels for eCommerce is what you need to make that happen.
For the right ad funnels, you’ll need a plan. You won’t get to an ad funnel until you think about a few things first.
It all starts with a few fundamental questions about your business, your brand, and your products.
Then, think about the following:
These questions, essentially, will form the basis of the ad funnels you build to grow your eCommerce business.
This is where you get into the nitty-gritty of the art of creating sales funnels or ad funnels for your eCommerce business. There are three broad levels of campaigns you can run.
Here’s what is common for all the campaigns below:
If you are raring to go, here are a few basic campaigns (sometimes you’d have to run these simultaneously to maximize your gains) you can run:
The Traffic Campaign
Goal: Drive Traffic (and trailing sales, if any)
Run an evergreen campaign to push your products continuously by sending relevant traffic to your eCommerce site. Regardless of the advertising platform you use, use a much broader audience base to maximize reach (and hence more relevant traffic) to your eCommerce site.
For the traffic campaign, refrain from pushing your products directly. Instead, entice potential visitors to read blog posts, watch videos, and consume content of some sort.
Parallel Direct Campaign
Goal: sales
Enable direct sales on your eCommerce store (similar to the traffic campaign above) but focusing on products themselves by using formats unique to eCommerce such as Google Shopping ads, Facebook Dynamic ads, Instagram shopping ads, and so on.
Retargeting follow-up Offer Campaign
Goal: Bring back previous visitors (resulting in trailing sales, if any)
By focusing the campaign only on actual visitors (from the previous campaign) -- and after excluding audiences who already signed up as customers -- to sign up for some sort of an offer (such as a discount coupon).
Running ad campaigns in layers (as shown above) helps warm up audiences (allows them to familiarize themselves with your brand), eases the transition from mere visitors to customers, and sets up the pace for sustainable sales.
For all of the types of campaigns above, you’ll need a way to
This is where email marketing campaigns kick in. By partly driving automated email campaigns and partly sending in broadcast messages on the go, your email marketing messages help with:
Of course, you’ll also use emails for various other purposes related to eCommerce such as transactional emails (order notifications, shipping notifications, subscription reminders, and more).
Additionally, email marketing can also be used for retargeting campaigns (above) by getting granular and selective about the audiences you target to drive sales.
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