WatchxLearn How To Master The AIDA Sales and Marketing Funnel Technique To Scale Your Business To Monthly 7-Figure Sales

 

The stages of a marketing funnel are similar to the stages water goes through to make a cup of pour-over coffee. 

If you want to be successful in your business and marketing, it’s important to learn about offer funnels so that you can automate the process by which you create awareness, gather leads, and follow up with prospects so that you can seamlessly increase sales. The sales and marketing offer funnel is what you pull people through as they go through the buying cycle. This guide will teach you how to get started planning your sales funnel and offers to get more leads and increase your sales.

Sales funnel stages: the AIDA framework

The AIDA framework, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action, is a funnel model that represents the consumer thought process at each funnel stage. Many ecommerce brands apply this purchasing funnel because it’s effective and easy to comprehend. 

The AIDA framework helps you identify what buyers need at each stage of the funnel and support them until purchase.

Let’s look at the different stages of the sales funnel, with examples of how you can apply them to your online business. 

Awareness

The awareness stage is where you catch a potential customer’s attention. It can be an ad, a YouTube video, an Instagram post, a friend’s recommendation, or any other affiliation with your brand or products. 

In this first phase, focus on three things:

• Making buyers aware of products and services
• Developing a marketing and outreach strategy
• Creating messaging that resonates with target audience

Your goal is to persuade the prospect to return to your side and engage with your brand. People lingering in the top of your funnel aren’t interested in product information right away. They are often casually browsing and stumble upon your brand.

Content is critical here: 95% of buyers choose businesses that provide them with sufficient content, which helps them navigate each step of the buying process. 

You want to create non-promotional lead generation content in this stage, such as:

• Informational videos
• TikTok videos
• Instagram Stories, Reels, and feed posts 
• Google shopping, Instagram, or Facebook ads 
• Podcasts
• Influencer collaborations
• An effective About Us page
• Blog posts 

How business stage impacts your marketing funnel

Your sales marketing funnel will grow and develop over time based on cultural trends, the products you sell, and the stage your business is at. It’s an evolving model. Like a house, you’d never build one and just let it stand—a structure requires maintenance, care, and attention in order to thrive. 

Brand awareness and revenue are the two main factors that differentiate the marketing funnel for an established business versus one that’s just starting out. 

The level of brand awareness your business has determines how easy it is to attract new customers. If you have high brand awareness, you’ll spend less money on the awareness and acquisition leg of the funnel and more on consideration and conversion. Lower brand awareness means you’ll need to drive hype and spread the word earlier on, meaning that your time and resources will go toward getting new eyes on your products.

The amount of money you bring in determines how much you can spend on marketing activities. The more revenue you bring in, the more you have to spend on paid acquisition and acquiring new inventory. If you’re just starting out and have little to spend on marketing, your tactics will look different. Think: more email marketing, organic blog posts, and social media.

If you want an efficient way to increase revenue read on...

Knowing how to create and iterate on a sales and marketing funnel is one of the most profitable concepts an entrepreneur can master. In fact, virtually every business on the planet that has success at scale uses some type of sales funnel. 

Establish average order value and a consideration timeline

Your average order value (AOV) is the average value of your customers’ purchases. For example, if your shop’s revenue is $2,000 and you’ve had 100 orders, your AOV is $20. 

AOV determines how much focus you put on each part of your marketing funnel. If you sell fine jewelry and your AOV is $1,000, the consideration phase of your funnel is going to be much longer than a shop that has an AOV of $20. Chances are a customer is going to think longer about making that large purchase than they would a smaller one.

We can think about how this relates to the marketing funnel in this way: 

• High AOV = Long consideration timeline. You’ll want to spend more energy and money on developing content that nurtures people throughout the consideration phase. 

• Low AOV = Short consideration timeline. You’ll focus more on acquiring new customers and spend your marketing dollars there. 

Turning a consumer into a customer requires a logical series of steps. 

First, a consumer in your target market sees your ad and becomes a prospect. Then, they land on your website and become a lead. Finally, they make a purchase and become a buyer. 

A sales and marketing funnel is a curated series of relationship-building experiences that help turn prospects into buyers. Research also shows that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured prospects.

How sales funnels work

Say you see an Instagram ad for a new pair of running shoes that drives traffic to a landing page. They intrigue you, so you go and check out the shoes on the company’s website. You’re now a prospect. 

On the site you take a quiz, check out a blog post, look at other pairs of shoes, and maybe even sign up for an email marketing or SMS list in exchange for a lead magnet, like a discount. Now you’re a lead.

Eventually you receive an email with a discount off your favorite running shoes. You buy them, maybe even some recommended shorts too, and you’re a happy customer. You’ve come to like the brand’s products, so you promote them online.

This cycle then continues with one of your friends or family members. That’s how sales and marketing funnels work in action. They are pre-planned stages a company brings you through until purchase that also include retention tactics to keep you happy and promoting the brand’s products. 

According to Salesforce, a full 68% of companies have not identified or attempted to measure a sales funnel, and the same survey showed that a whopping 79% of marketing leads are never converted into sales.

The goal is to map the route to conversion and automate sales. A sales funnel shows you what to do to influence potential buyers at a specific stage. It starts the moment they become aware of your brand, and continues until they purchase a product and become an advocate. 

1. What is a sales and marketing funnel? 

   A sales and marketing funnel visually represents the journey a person takes from the moment they have any interaction with your brand—like reading a blog post—to the moment they make a purchase. Sales and marketing funnels include different stages that correspond to different points in that journey. It represents the marketing strategy that turns cold prospects into paying customers by moving them through various stages. The “funnel” involves taking large groups of people and turning them into high-value customers. 

   The widest part of the funnel captures the biggest group of people who might be interested in what you sell. As you engage with these folks through marketing activities or direct communication, they move down the funnel until they either drop off or buy your product. 

   A more simplified funnel might include awareness, consideration, and conversion. A more segmented funnel might include awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. Others add on an inverse funnel that maps loyalty and advocacy. It’s up to you how you segment your marketing funnel: go the simple route with three sections or chop it up into 10, whatever works best for you.

   

   At a high-level view, sales and marketing  funnels consist of three main parts:

2. So for the sake of simplicity, we’re going to focus on three distinct phases: acquire, consider, and convert, as well as post-purchase loyalty. This will cover your Top of the funnel (ToFu): your target audience, Middle of the funnel (MoFu): your potential customers, and the Bottom of the funnel (BoFu): new and existing customers

Sales teams or small business owners can create sales funnels for one product, an entire category, or specific target audiences. If you don’t have as many resources, you can create one for your bestsellers. Regardless, sales funnels work when they’re built correctly and provide relevant content for buyers. 

87% of consumers choose to do business with companies that provide valuable content at all stages of the customer journey.

The sales and marketing funnel helps you know what customers do at each stage of their journey. They allow you to understand which marketing activities work, and which don’t, so you can invest in the right channel and realize a higher return. 

Sales and marketing funnels are roadmaps companies use to plan the journey of how someone becomes a customer.

By building out your own marketing funnel, you can uncover: 

• The stage at which most people drop off
• Which marketing efforts map to each stage a customer is at 
• The marketing tactics to double down on and where to pull back
• How to thoughtfully grow your business 

Sales funnel FAQs

What is a sales funnel system?

A sales funnel is a series of pages that a prospect engages with on their way to becoming a customer. Depending on what kind of funnel you have set up, this could range from one page to many, with retargeting ads and retention schemes. The most common ecommerce sales funnel is actually the onepage funnel.

What are the stages of a sales funnel?

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Why your businesses needs a sales and marketing funnel.

📈 Funnels encourage more meaningful growth. Funnels give you a clearer way to organize marketing tactics and make it easier to understand which tactics work for each stage of the funnel. For example, you might learn that TikTok videos work wonders to increase awareness about your business, but they do little to drive actual conversions. This allows for more strategic growth: you’ll double down on what works and pull back on what doesn’t. 

❤️ Develop better customer relationships. Who are you marketing to? What do they like? What types of marketing do they respond well to? Establishing a funnel helps you better understand your target audience and what they need to feel excited about making a purchase from you. 

💵 Master your purchase cycle. How long inventory takes to sell depends on your average order value. If you sell heirloom quality diamond necklaces for $15,000 a pop, they’ll take longer to sell than a piece of costume jewelry that retails for $39. But how many weeks does it actually take, on average, for the costly and affordable items to sell? Once you have those numbers, the marketing funnel gives you insight into where to put your money (and when) in order to get those products to sell within the average timeline. 

Your job is to create the right information and content to lead your audience from awareness to purchase. A great way to do that is through creating an offer funnel. You’ll match each stage of your audience’s buying cycle to the content that helps them become a paying customer or to move through your funnel, buying more expensive products or services.

First Thing First... Get to know your target audience 

The first step, Amanda says, is to understand who your customer and target audience is. If you haven’t yet established a target audience, she recommends doing a customer persona analysis. 

You can gather the quantitative data for an analysis like that via Google Analytics or through a third-party data platform. You’ll want to look for data points like geography and demographics that better pinpoint who your customers are. 

Gathering qualitative data as well will give you a richer insight into your target audience. You’ll get this information by having one-on-one conversations with the people who have already purchased your product. 

Then, you’ll start to make inferences from that data. What you learn will inform the channels and style of marketing you’ll use. For example, if you sell primarily to teenage girls between the ages of 15 to 20, chances are you're not going to have to do LinkedIn ads. 

Hopefully, this exploration will help you understand what your audience’s buying process looks like and the platforms they most often frequent. 

Here’s a list of the different activities you can do to uncover your target audience: 

• Look at cumulative purchase history across all customers. 
• Use digital analytics tools to gather quantitative information.
• Run an online survey through a tool like SurveyMonkey.
• Conduct one-on-one interviews with past customers.
• Do industry research to explore consumer trends and behavior. 
• Complete a competitive analysis by looking at competitors’ audiences.

From this information, create buyer personas that detail the common characteristics of the main types of customers that frequent your shop. 

The Easiest Way To Plan Your Sales and Marketing Funnel 

If you want to be successful in your business and marketing, it’s important to learn about offer funnels so that you can automate the process by which you create awareness, gather leads, and follow up with prospects so that you can seamlessly increase sales. The offer funnel is what you pull people through as they go through the buying cycle.

It works like this: You give away a lot of content given away freely such as blog posts, social media updates and so forth, which will lead people to sign up for a free or low-cost product which requires the customer to opt-in providing their email address.

Once the potential customer signs up, then your email messages will lead them through the funnel until they get to your highest cost products and programs such as continuity programs and high-level one-on-one services.

Parts of the Sales Offer Funnel

Let’s take a closer look at the offer funnel. But first, you need to understand your audience’s buying-cycle, which your offer funnel should closely match. The general buying cycle goes right along with the offer funnel. The customer first needs to realize they have a problem, start searching for information about the problem, and then they’ll identify some solutions and then choose between them.

Awareness

At the top of the funnel is awareness. Your leads will come in via the free content you put out online. You’ll work on branding efforts through blogging, social media, advertisements, organic search, and SEO to attract potential leads to your website. These things will bring your audience to you. All you have to do is describe their problems, educate them about them, and yourself, and the solutions you can provide to them while maintaining a consistent brand using different types of content.

Leads

At some point during the awareness phase of buying your audience will potentially take some of your offers that will get them on your list. These people are considered leads. At this point, you can offer checklists, eBooks, short reports, and helpful solutions that solve one problem for the audience member. This may occur with opt-in offers and sales pages. You will start sending information to your leads to get them to become prospects. The types of content you might use to get people on your list are webinars, checklists, and anything that your audience will use and trade their email address for.

Prospects

A prospect is someone who has already proven to want what you have to offer because they signed up for your opt-in above. Now, depending on what opt-in they signed up for because you may have many entry points, you’ll send them email follow-ups and higher tier offerings including upsells, down sells, and cross-sells. You’ll send content to them that nurtures the prospect so that they become a paying customer. Content that can nurture prospects and encourage sales includes small reports, case studies, how-to articles, videos, and webinars. This is where segmentation comes in. You’ll need to send the right content to them at the right time.

Sales

Eventually, a percentage of your prospects will move all the way through your offer funnel buying your continuity plan, higher priced products and services and more. The content you provide to your audience needs to be designed to encourage them to buy more of what you offer due to the solutions you provide. This content will make your customers feel loyal, part of the group, and special.

As you see, an offer funnel is a very powerful way to weed out unqualified leads, get the attention of your ideal audience, and gently encourage your prospects to become customers. It doesn’t need to be pushy, or even sales like. You can simply use content, and solutions, to help your audience achieve their goals.

Planning an Info Product

One of the best ways to get people to sign up for your list and get into your funnel is by creating an information product. The best way to plan any information product is to figure out at least one problem that you can easily solve for your audience. The information product can be a longer report, a short report, a checklist, or something else that is useful for your audience.

Everything starts with knowing who your audience is, where they hang out, what they do, and what they want or need. You could start with a small item as a freebie opt-in, building up to the most expensive products and services. However, there is an even better way to create your entire offer funnel fast. 

Once you have done the research about your audience, you know who they are, what their pain points are, and how you can solve their problems then you can actually build your offer funnel backward. Instead of starting with the smallest thing first, start with the biggest most outrageous expensive product or service that you can offer then tiered down to the least expensive item or freebie after the fact.

Identify Your Most Expensive Product First

Depending on your niche, start by writing down what your most expensive product or service will be. It will help to write it all down as if you’re going to create a sales page. Choose what the price point will be for this most expensive product or service and all the benefits of it to your audience.

If you already have a super expensive product or service such as a long-term, one-on-one coaching package, start with that. Because everything you do is designed to get more of your audience into your one-on-one flagship product or service. When you start from there you can easily create the less expensive products and opt-ins that will most fit with this audience.

Identify Lower Priced Products that Work with Your Most Expensive Product

Now look at any lower priced products that you have that fit in with your flagship product or service. If you don’t have any, you’ll need to create them as they fit in with the buying cycle of your audience. For example, your flagship product is a $10,000 dollar a year group coaching with one-on-one coaching options mastermind. What can you find or create that will appeal to and help your coaching clients? Items like checklists, Facebook Groups, webinars, courses, training, information products and more can all fit in here as long as they make the audience curious about the flagship product.

Identify Free Content/Gifts That Leads to Increasingly Higher Priced Items

Finally, you can fit in freebies that attract people to your flagship product or your lower-priced products too. These might be free webinars, blog posts, infographics, eBooks, small reports, case studies, interviews, and more. As long as it’s of interest to those who would want your main product you can use it. For example, keep in mind you want people to join your flagship coaching program mentioned above, you might offer content that explains why coaching can work using case studies to prove your point.

Forms & Formats of Products& Services

Let’s look at some potential formats of different levels of products and or services to help get your creative juices flowing. Your most expensive product has a format, as do your other offerings. Some products include a combination of formats. This is just a potential example for you to use as a guide.

Most Expensive (flagship) Product

Offer: Group coaching, with one-on-one coaching possibilities, as well as a membership website that offers a lot of materials and lessons. Your price is $10,000 a year and includes all the bells and whistles. Your exclusive clients get access to all your checklists, mind maps, infographics, lessons, courses, information products, group chat, group discussion board, weekly webinars, weekly Q & A, a one hour one-on-one call each week and daily email access and discounts on live events and other products that might be of interest to the audience.

Mid-Range Product

Now that you have your product, you can easily identify mid-range products that will solve a problem or two for your audience, while also make them want more. A great mid-range item is an information product that solves one of your audience’s problems. For example, if you’re a business coach, you might offer a course on branding, content planning, or social media marketing. Essentially, you can take one small part of your cornerstone product and make it one of the mid-range products you offer. Say that one of the things you help your clients do is choose a business name. You might offer a short course on naming your business.

Intro Product

When you figure which items you’ll offer in the midrange area, then you can identify the intro products to offer your audience. Intro products can be low priced or free products. Anything that requires an email address to opt-in will work great here. Webinars, teleseminars, podcasts, social media posts, Facebook live, YouTube videos, free eBooks or reports, checklists, and so forth all make great intro level products and services as long as they offer a taste of what’s in the flagship or mid-range product or service offerings. Let’s say you have a mid-range product that is a six-week course on branding. You can offer a free branding checklist to collect email addresses and market that mid-range product and the flagship product to the people who signed up.

Free Products

While some of your intro products may be free, there are things that you may not consider free products. Blog posts, social media posts, guest posts, images, and other things can be also being thought of as products. But, if you have a good grasp of what you can do and what is possible, it’s going to be a lot easier to figure out what you need to offer your audience in terms of tools and free information. 

Your product generally will be a combination of all of these types of content and services. One way to figure out what you can offer in every step of your funnel is to conduct a content audit. When you find out what you have, and what you need, you can fill in the gaps.

Conducting a Content Audit

A content audit can help you fill in the gaps. Start by writing down your flagship product in the center of a piece of paper, and then circle it. Now draw lines out from the circle and add in the mid-range products you have, and then add another line out from the mid-range products to add to the lower cost product and information and finally add in the freebies that you create. It’s important to ensure that each item builds on the next and fits your ideal audience’s needs to a T.

Identify Gaps

You may realize as you are creating your content audit that there are gaps in the content that you can offer. You may be able to do a better job creating relevant blog posts that have a compelling call to action, for example. Perhaps you realize you have some blog posts that would make great podcasts and videos and vice versa.

Types Of Content

There are many types of content. You may not even think of adding some items into a product package, if it’s not one of the standard items needed. However, often the little odd things draw the most attention. Here are some different items you may want to consider using.

Blogs– You can put blog posts on your website, as guest blog posts on complementary influencer’s sites, and even LinkedIn. Make sure that each post is unique, relates to the audience, and has a call to action such as sign up for a newsletter, sign up for a free course; download a checklist, sign up for a free webinar and so forth.

Podcasts — These recordings you can list on your website, iTunes and in other places that inform your audience. For example, let’s say you’re a parenting coach. You may want to do a regular podcast about parenting issues in order to show your expertise. Again, always include a call to action so that listeners are reminded about the newest podcast and informed about your products and services.

Video — People really do love video and today there are tons of ways to offer video to your audience. You can appear in webinars, use Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and other means to create a video for your audience. Even if you don’t want to appear on the video, you can record short how-to videos using a screen recorder like Camtasia to show your audience how to do something that they need to learn that helps solve their problems. Include a call to action to share, subscribe, and sign up for your email list by offering a free checklist based on the video.

Interviews– A great way to create content that attracts your audience is to interview not only clients but also interview movers and shakers in the field. Think of who your audience would like to see you interview and try to get them. You can use a service like HARO, Help a Reporter Out to find people to interview or approach people directly using their contact information on their website. Most people are excited and happy to do interviews if you make it easy for them to do.

Newsletter — A newsletter can be email or even print. You can create one right on your website too. A newsletter usually goes out on a regular basis at a regular time each week or month depending on how you set it up. Also, a newsletter usually includes the same sections each time, for example, a case study, a cool article, a recommendation for a product or service, and of course a CTA for your flagship product. Often, the newsletter provides a way to link to the content you’ve put up since the last newsletter thus bringing readers back to your website.

Email Lists — Each entry point to your list is usually associated with a freebie or product. Choosing that item puts the customer on a specific path and email list according to the item he or she chooses. But the products, paths, and lists should change, somewhat, with each decision made.

For example, if a woman and a man choose the same freebie, each chooses it for a slightly different reason or motivation. If with the next choice, the man picks the “Dad” item and the woman chooses the “Mom” item, the list can be segmented or divided into two additional paths — one for mom and one for dad. This makes it easier for you to market to moms’ needs as well as to dads’ because each is added to a different list, specifically to meet that groups needs.

Mind maps — You can create mind maps that are helpful to your audience and offer them as freebies or even in a package for a small price. For example, any mind map you create for yourself might also be of use to your audience, or you can create some especially for the different things your audience needs to do.

Keywords — You may not consider keywords as part of your content but they are. It’s very important to do keyword research in order to help you come up with additional content ideas. Keyword research is imperative to help you come up with the most relevant content for your audience. Keywords help you align your business with your goals so that you can reach out to your customers in the most effective way.

Reports — One type of content that you’re likely familiar with are reports. Reports can be long, short, and even turn into books. A report typically covers one topic in depth or it can be an overview of an entire niche. It’s up to you, but creating reports is a great way to distribute information to your audience both free and for sale.

Surveys — This type of content is a great way to ensure that you get feedback from your audience. Plus, when you deliver the survey, your audience will consider your offerings, if you word the survey correctly and include a CTA at the end.

Trends — One way to attract your audience is to find out what’s trending and then create or curate content around that trend. Google trends along with Google alerts can be set up to help you follow trends and stay ahead of your competition.

Competition — Speaking of competition, they’re a great resource for content. If you notice your competition running long-term ads around any topic of interest to your audience, then you can be assured that they’re also making a profit. If you can identify gaps in their offering, you can one-up them and make it even better.

Social Media– This is probably one of your most useful forms of content right now outside of blog posts on your own website. Social media engagement helps build trust with your audience. You should always post a link to any content or information that is helpful to your audience along with a blurb on your social media networks. The idea is to lead them back to your website or sales pages.

Webinars — Another very useful type of content today is webinars. Webinars are honestly the “it” thing today and if you want to be successful online, build trust, build a loyal and engaged audience, find a way to do webinars. There are many software choices are available from Facebook Live, YouTube live, and places like Zoom.com to help you.

This list isn’t comprehensive. There may other kinds of content such as apps for your audience to help you connect, engage, build trust, and more. The important part is that the content is planned with your cornerstone product in mind so that you lead the right audience through your offer funnel. As you fill in gaps, you’ll create more content in different forms. These help acknowledge your audience’s different learning styles. They will also help promote your products and services with the idea of leading them to your pilot product.

Examples of Awesome Offer Funnels

The best way to build a funnel is to start with your flagship product and build your funnel out with that big offering in mind. Then, you’ll actually build smaller funnels for each product or service that you plan to promote. What is going to work best is a funnel that keeps in mind the goal of the promotion, along with where your customers are in the buying cycle. These offer funnels are great examples of offer funnels that work.

Digital Marketer.com — Every blog post that they have offers a way to get on their list. They have a huge lead generation strategy that offers their audience free and paid products. Their offer funnel is very deep and multifaceted, but it all leads to their best products in hopes that customers develop long-term relationships.

Campaignmonitor.com — This is a great way to get people into your funnel by offering audience members, who clicked through, to try out your product free of cost. The free trial gets them on your email list. The way in which they attract people to their site is by using their help desk content for SEO purposes rather than just random blog posts. So, offering a lot of “how to” articles brings the people to the site, and the free trial gets people interested and on their list.

Socialfresh.com — When you initially look at their site, you don’t realize it but there are several entry points into their offer funnel. Click on any blog post and you’ll see an offer to reserve your seat for any upcoming events, and within the blog post, you’ll see several links for information that require an opt-in to go further while the blog posts give the promised information.

KimraLuna.com — Kimra uses her popular Facebook Group to generate traffic for her offer funnel with the free group being the trigger that starts the process. She is very active in the group and often mentions her website, courses, or other offerings so that her audience will click through and end up signing up for her list either via a mini- course, memoir, and other freebies all being delivered via email marketing. The ultimate goal is to get you to sign up for her most expensive coaching program or attend her events and for her audience, it is very effective. A common type of freebie are done-for-you PLR ebooks. You can purchase a done-for-you product, rebrand it, insert links to your sales funnel or affiliate offers, and use it as a lead magnet to grow your list while helping them learn.

Notice a trend? Each of these examples offers multiple entry points into the offer funnel. Some people will end up signing up for your list via your groups, blog posts, your website, a webinar, or something else. It all depends on your audience. What they need most?What is more lucrative or interesting to them? That’s why it’s imperative to know who your audience is.

Take Digest by Great Jones, for example. The brand Great Jones makes cookware for home chefs. It’s mission is to empower people on their culinary journey. 

The shop offers Dutch ovens in bright colors, retro-inspired baking dishes, and ceramic-coating frying pans. It’s blog, called Digest, is one of four main categories in its ecommerce store’s navigation. Digest is home to delicious recipes, interviews with different chefs, and the Great Jones items you can use to make the dish. 

The blog creates a sense of community for readers, making it feel like they’re in a home kitchen versus reading a blog. They can learn about different cultures, recipes, or stories, and get inspiration for their next big dish. It’s a great top-of-funnel asset for Great Jones that attracts the right customers, builds trust, and subtly kicks off the sales process.

Interest

In the interest stage, prospects are doing reach and comparing your products to other brands. You’ll want to begin forming a relationship with them and learning about their problems and goals. 

Areas to focus on when building this stage are:

• How to gain prospects’ interest
• Creating a content strategy that supports prospects
• Showing social proof and testimonials
• Making information easy to find and read through text and video

Your goal here is to help shoppers make informed decisions, offer help, and establish yourself as experts in the field. The content you create here should be more in-depth. Why? Because you’re proving that you are the better solution for customers. 

Businesses that nurture leads produce 50% more sales at 33% lower costs.

Some lead magnet style content you can provide are:

• Interactive content like quizzes and calculators 
• Educational videos
• Downloadables like checklists or ebooks
• Customer case studies
• Webinars or live streaming events on social media
• Comparison pages

Beardbrand does an excellent job of sparking interest through its interactive quiz. Right on its homepage, website visitors can find out what types of beardsmen they are. 

The quiz asks a series of questions related to the visitor’s lifestyle and needs, such as “Which activity do you prefer to do the most?” and “What style of facial hair do you want?” To receive your quiz results, Beardbrand asks the customer for their email address, which also signs you up for its marketing emails.

Once your email address is in, you’re guided to a landing page where you’ll find a description of your Beardsman style with relevant products to match it. 

Desire

People are ready to buy in this third stage of the funnel. They know there’s a problem that needs solving and are actively looking for the best solution. 

Ask yourself the following questions when planning this stage:

1. What makes my product desirable? 
2. How will I follow up with qualified leads?
3. How can I build an emotional connection with prospects (website chat, email, SMS, tips and advice)?

Here’s where you promote your best offers, be it free shipping, discount codes, or free gifts. Your goal is to make your products so desirable that leads cannot turn them down. 

Action

The final stage is where a prospect decides whether or not to purchase your product. Consider where your calls to action are and where to place them on your product pages. Make it easy for potential customers to get in touch with you if they have any hesitations or questions.

Whether you’re in ecommerce or B2B sales, the sales pipeline is something we all have to build. It doesn’t stop here though. Once a customer acts, you’ll need to focus on retaining them (i.e., keeping them happy and engaged) so they return to buy again and again. 

Meeting the Needs of Your Customers

When you put your customers’ needs before everything else, you’ll be able to create a flagship product and all the products or services in between. When you develop an offer funnel, start with the most expensive product or service. You’ll easily see what you should create for your audience that will lead them to the most helpful and expensive product or service.

After all, it’s a lot easier to provide people with something they already want, than to convince them that they need something you already created without studying your audience. A deep offer funnel will make most of this almost seem automatic once it’s set up. Identifying where your audience is in the buying cycle and delivering content, products, and services to them right when they need them will make it seem like child’s play. Of course, it does take some work to get started.

Putting it All Together

Create your offer funnel by knowing your audiences’ needs, motivations, and buying cycle. This will enable you to create your flagship product or service, and then all your other offerings will stem out from there. Based on your products and services you’ll need to create landing pages for each offering, plus an email list for each as well.

Create the flagship product and then a couple mid-range products along with freebies or entry-level products each with an email marketing series. Remember, you can reuse and repurpose content for each list as long as it makes sense. So, for example, let’s say you have 10 short mini-courses loosely based on your flagship product of a 52-week course with one-on-one coaching.

Each of these 10 courses offers an entry point into a new list. Each list needs to be separate so that you can ensure the messages make sense but the message is to get the next product down the funnel until they approach your flagship product. 

Segmentation is important because you don’t want to confuse your audience.

You don’t want to tell people who just signed up for mini-course 1 to sign up for it again, instead, you want to promote mini-course 2 or you might want to promote your webinars that promote your flagship product or service. But, you can re-word the messages to fit with each list accordingly. 

You can find ready made email courses that is done-for-you, so you don’t have to worry about hiring expensive copywriters to create it. PLR works like that, you can buy a license to use the content as your own.

If you use your autoresponder software to its full potential you can actually set it up so it automatically moves someone from one list to the next based on whether they answer your calls to action or not. 

Tip: Good software to consider using is Convertkit.com, Aweber.com,and GetDrip.com. These all offer you the ability to segment lists in a way that works for your business and needs.

Once you have created these products that offer new entry points into your offer funnel, using your website as the hub for all your products, services, and in-depth information, you can use social media as a way to push it out to others, to build relationships, and get attention. Once it’s set up, it’ll be practically automatic and all you’ll have to do is curate and add new content occasionally based on the season, the trends, and the issues of the day. And, with each new product you create, you make it easier for your audience to find you and learn about your flagship offering as long as you’re staying on brand and on message.

Getting Started

Now it’s your turn. What is your flagship product? Don’t worry if it’s not even created yet. You can create it as you go. Consider that a 52-week course only needs to be created one week at a time. But, you can still make the sales page now, and then use that information as a jumping off point for the rest of your mid-range, low price and entry point products and services. As you build it out, you’ll soon realize that your sales funnel has and will continue to explode your business in ways that you never thought of before. To learn more about using PLR to maximize your earnings and sales funnels, click here.

How to develop a sales funnel 

Together, we’ll build the sales funnel that makes the most sense for your business. We dive into the tactics for acquisition and awareness, consideration, conversion, and the inverse side of the funnel—loyalty.

Brands drive traffic from advertisements and emails directly to their product offer pages as the core way of generating sales. Some brands also include collection pages, pre-sell articles and other stops along the way. But the almighty funnel that rules them all is the one-page funnel. 

For that reason, if the goal is to build a dangerously effective sales funnel, it all starts with optimizing the product offer page.

You’re about to learn an effective 10-step process you can follow to design an ecommerce product page that engages and converts.

1. Decide on a layout

The first step in designing an ecommerce product page that converts and engages is to decide what the overall layout of your page will be. You have three basic layouts to choose from:

• Traditional ecommerce product page
• Long-form ecommerce product page
• Product mini-site

This step is fairly straightforward. And if you don’t already know which layout you want, there’s a simple litmus test you can use to figure it out. Ask yourself: Is there a lot to say about this product?

If the answer is no, there isn’t much to say, then you’ll probably want to go with a traditional product page. This is the case for a lot of products that are easily understood or very visual, like clothes or sunglasses, such as the Hawkers example below. 

But if the answer is yes, and there’s a lot to say about this product, then you’ll want to use a long-form product page or a mini-site. This is usually the case when you have stories to tell, technology to explain, benefits to reveal, objections to overcome, and so on.

For example, Boosted Boards clearly has a lot to say about its product in this long-form ecommerce product page:

The only real difference between a long-form page and a mini-site is how the content is laid out.

With the long-form layout, everything goes on one long page. With a mini-site, that same content is presented over several smaller pages. Both layouts can be highly effective, so you really can’t go wrong.

ACTION ITEM: Decide on a layout for your ecommerce product page design.

2. Style your header

Your header is an incredibly important element of any ecommerce product page design. So while we’re on the topic of your navigation links, let’s chat about it for a minute.

Photo courtesy of: Unsplash

The header is simply the top part of your website. It’s where you typically have your logo, your menu, your shopping cart, and any other important links or information that you want to have present on every page. When you’re styling your website’s header, here are a few tips to help improve your conversion rate optimization:

1. Keep it slender

While your header is important, it should never overwhelm the content on the page. You should try to keep your header as small as possible to allow for the biggest viewing area.

On your desktop site, try to make sure your header takes up no more than 20% of the website’s height. Like Harry’s does here:

And on mobile, because screen space is even more limited, try to make sure your header takes up no more than 10% of the height. Again, Harry’s does a great job of this:

2. Always have a link to the shopping cart

Every ecommerce store that has a shopping cart page should link to it in its header—always. This applies to desktop and mobile. People are used to it. They expect it. And if you don’t include this in your header, there’s a chance they might get frustrated trying to find their shopping cart and leave without completing their purchase.

If you want to add a nice touch, give a notification when there’s a product in the cart, like M.Gemi does here:

3. Include your logo

The header is a prime place to display your brand logo. Anytime someone lands on your website, you want them to see that logo and instantly know they’re in the right place.

You’ll want this on your mobile site, too:

4. Include your brand’s tagline on desktop

A good tagline can really help reinforce your brand identity. So if you have one, go ahead and put it in your desktop header. Here’s an example from BOOM! by Cindy Joseph:

But on mobile, you’re better off skipping the tagline. The screen space is too limited and valuable.

5. Include a call to action for an email opt-in or a purchase

Because your header is such a visible part of your site, it’s also a great place to put some kind of offer for a purchase or email opt-in.

In this example, Keeps uses a header bar to call out a special offer:

BOOM! includes an opt-in button in its header:

MVMT has one too—a sticky Add to Cart button along the bottom of the screen on mobile:

Now the downside to what MVMT is doing here is that between a sticky header, another sticky bar calling out free shipping, and a sticky Add to Cart button, it’s taking up quite a bit of space.

Another option is to put your mobile email opt-in inside the flyout menu, like BOOM! does here:

When this brand added a call to action to its header, it saw a 30% increase in email sign-ups. Definitely a worthwhile thing to add to your ecommerce product page design!

6. Make your links easy to read

A 2016 eye-tracking study found fonts sized 18 points or higher to be optimal for online readers. Make sure you use a big font that’s easy to read, in a color that contrasts the background and really stands out.

Pay particular attention to your mobile menu. A lot of companies ignore this part of their site, and as a result they miss out on the opportunity to convey value and make additional calls to action.

Notice how Hawkers has all kinds of wasted space underneath its menu:

Compare that to the company Hims, which does a great job of making its links bigger and including additional links to its social media profiles at the bottom:

Big links are especially important on mobile, where it can be easy to mis-click and end up on the wrong page. Keeping your links big, with space between them, helps to minimize this frustrating experience.

7. Make your header “sticky”

A “sticky” header is one that sticks to the top of the page. So when you scroll down, that header is always right there at the top

Here’s an example from Purple Mattress:

Its mobile page has it, too:

Sticky headers work really well, especially on long product pages (like Purple Mattress’). This is because you can keep a call to action on the screen at all times.

Notice that on Purple Mattress’ sticky header, for example, the only clickable link is Shop Now.

3. Select a feature testimonial

Next up, it’s time to choose a featured testimonial. This is different from your reviews. You still want a Reviews section with lots and lots of people saying how much they love your product.

But what we’re talking about here is a single testimonial you put inside your buy box. This will be a highly visible customer quote, so make sure it’s a good one.

Why do you want to add a featured testimonial to your product? Because it improves your conversions.

BOOM! tested this. It took its original buy box, which looked like this:

And tested it against this version:

The only difference is that one version has the product name at the top, while the other uses a featured testimonial.

Adding the testimonial increased its conversion rate by 5.25% and its average revenue per user by $1.25. BOOM! repeated this test many times over, and the testimonial won every time.

This is a testament to just how important it is to leverage social proof on your product page.

When you’re choosing a featured testimonial, here are three tips:

1. Choose a testimonial that enthusiastically endorses the product

It sounds obvious, but it bears repeating. You want this to be one of the best quotes you can find about your product.

2. Keep it short

Because if it’s too long, people will skip over it. Here’s a great example of a concise and effective testimonial:

3. Choose a testimonial from your biggest customer demographic

If your buyers are 75% female and 25% male, use a testimonial from a woman. You can’t rotate this featured testimonial, so make the most of it by having it represent your most common buyer.

ACTION ITEM: Select your featured testimonial for your ecommerce product page.

4. Select product carousel photos

Now it’s time to add product pictures to your ecommerce landing page design.

Here’s an example of a typical product image carousel:

On an ecommerce site, having a good selection of high-quality product images is very important. Remember, people online aren’t able to pick your product up and inspect it for themselves. They have to rely on your pictures to give them a good idea of what the product is really like.

To put it another way, your images represent your product’s perceived value and quality.

A recent survey revealed that 90% of consumers consider images to be essential when making a purchasing decision online.

So it’s not surprising that product page pictures get a lot of engagement. Here’s a sample heatmap to prove it:

The same thing is true on mobile, even when that button is pushed below the fold:

Because your photos get so much attention, they need to be as good as you can possibly make them.

Generally speaking, there are only two main kinds of product photos:

1. Pure product pictures

This kind of photo just shows the product itself against a pure white background (or a background of another color). For example:

2. In-context/lifestyle images

These photos show your product being used in its intended environment. Basically, they show the product in use. For example:

You need both kinds of images on your product page. You also need multiple photos for shoppers to browse. The minimum is six to eight, but you can always add more.

Here are some tips for creating your product image carousel:

• Quality matters. Your images absolutely need to look as good as possible. This is not to say that you need a $5,000 camera. You can do this on an iPhone if you want.
• Show your product in as many forms and positions as you can.
• If your product opens and closes, show it opened and closed. If it comes with a case, show it in the case and out of the case. If it folds up, show it folded and unfolded.
• The more varied your images, the better people will be able to picture it in their minds.
• Show the product in use.

You want to show people actually using the product. And when you do this, make sure it looks like they’re enjoying it—they should look happy and excited, like they’re having a good time.

Boosted Boards does a great job of that here:

Also show how the product is made and/or what it’s made of. Another effective picture type is one that shows people what your product is made from.

BOOM! does this by highlighting certain ingredients, like this facial scrub that’s made with oats:

Boosted Boards uses animated photography to give you a close-up of some of it products’ most important components:

A third way to do this is to give a visual overview of all the parts that come together to make your product. See how nice this image from Purple Mattress looks?

The last pointer is to optimize images for quick loading. This helps improve your SEO ranking and create a good shopping experience. Yes, you want the best possible images you can get.

But no, you don’t want those images to slow down your website so it loads at a crawl.

The best course of action is to get the best images you can find, and then have your developer optimize them to load as quickly as possible.

ACTION ITEM: Decide on four ideas for showing off your product in its intended context.

5. Create a short-form product demo

Video consumption is the most popular internet activity worldwide. The number of digital video viewers is projected to reach over 3.1 billion by 2023, spending over 100 minutes per day watching videos on their devices.

Photo courtesy of: Unsplash

If you aren’t leveraging video on your ecommerce product page, you’re missing out on one of the most effective conversion assets out there. Now, if you already have a high-quality product video—maybe something with interviews, testimonials, and product shots, and so on—that’s great. Keep it.

But a lot of savvy ecommerce stores are also finding it really useful to have a short-form product demonstration video. This can even come in the form of a GIF.

This is a short and simple video that shows the product in use. It’s a really useful video because you can add it to your product carousel, share it on Facebook and Instagram, use it for video ads, and more.

You should ideally keep your video under 30 seconds. This video doesn’t even have sound—although some short-form videos play catchy music in the background. You’re just looking for a simple, clean, and elegant product demonstration.

ACTION ITEM: Create your short-form product demonstration video or GIF.

6. Add buy box content 

Here’s an example of a buy box from M.Gemi:

The goal of your buy box is to get the visitor to click that Add to Cart button. And to accomplish that, it needs to remind people of the most important reason why they should buy now.

In other words, your buy box needs to quickly summarize the main benefits of your product. Unfortunately, many ecommerce companies miss out on this opportunity by not using any copy. 

As a result, their buy box doesn’t effectively communicate why the visitor should buy. In this example, MVMT does a great job demonstrating social proof by showing its reviews near the top, but it misses out on an opportunity to include some really important ecommerce copywriting.

Compare that to BOOM!, which takes full advantage of the buy box to repeat the product’s main benefit along with additional social proof, upsells, reviews, and more:

If you want to use a framework, your buy box should follow these steps:

1. Open with a featured testimonial.
2. Provide a one-sentence ownership benefit.
3. Add a two- to three-sentence product description.

When you’re thinking about that one-sentence ownership benefit, the trick is to ask yourself questions like:

• What is the primary reason for someone to buy this product?
• What is the main benefit they’ll get from using the product?
• What will they get/have/obtain/become/feel after using the product?
• How will other people perceive the customer or think about the customer differently after using the product?

Put the answer in your buy box in a succinct and compelling sentence. Remember, this is perhaps the most critical part of your ecommerce product page. So take advantage of the opportunity to remind people why they should buy. It could mean the difference between winning a sale or losing one.

ACTION ITEM: Write your buy box content.

7. Choose call-to-action text

Now let’s narrow in on the single most important element within your buy box: The Buy button.

A lot of websites get creative with the CTA text on their buttons. Netflix, for example, uses Get Started.

This may work really well in some situations. But it’s generally not a good idea for ecommerce.

For ecommerce, you should be using one of these common CTAs:

• Buy Now
• Add to Cart
• Checkout Now
• Add to Bag

What’s so magical about these CTAs?

In a word, they’re clear. People have been shopping online for years now, and they’re used to seeing a button that says one of these things. If you break with that tradition and do something different, some people are liable to get confused and wonder if your website works differently.

So, for your own good, don’t try to get too creative here. Most ecommerce stores should just stick with Add to Cart and move on. (Unless you’re in Europe, where Add to Bag seems to be more popular.)

ACTION ITEM: Choose your CTA text.

8. Decide on USPs and create images 

USP stands for a unique selling proposition” In a nutshell, USPs are things that make you different; the things that set you apart from your competition. They’re reasons why people should buy from you instead of somebody else.

Now, it’s always good to mention these USPs in your product page copy. But it’s also a great idea to take your USPs and turn them into USP images. This is a really effective technique that a lot of ecommerce stores are doing. Like Puravida:

Now it’s time for you to figure out your USPs and put them into an image format. If you already know your USPs, great. But if you’re still working on that, here are some ideas for USPs for your business:

• What makes you cool?
• Do you offer guarantees or special financing?
• Do you provide fast and/or free shipping?
• Where do you go above & beyond to make your product special?
• Do you have any relevant certifications?
• Do your products use some special technology?
• Is your product made in the USA, cruelty-free, organic, or 100% natural?
• Is there any other reason people should buy from you instead of your competitors?

These kinds of things make for great USPs. So take some time to think about it, and when you have your USPs ready, put them into an image format. Then stick those images somewhere on your product page.

ACTION ITEM: Decide on your USPs (pick at least three to four) and stick them somewhere on your product page.

9. Decide on guarantees

Guarantees are another thing that can have a major impact on the effectiveness of your ecommerce product page. Think about it: Anytime you buy something online (especially if you’ve never bought from a company before), you’re taking a little bit of a gamble.

You can’t see the product in person, so you don’t really know for sure what it looks like. And while you can read reviews and see testimonials, you can’t always be certain that the product is going to work the way it should.

That’s why a guarantee can be so powerful. It’s just a way of telling your visitors, “If you don’t like this product, you can get your money back.” It reduces that feeling of risk and makes people more likely to click the Buy button.

You can offer all kinds of different guarantees:

• Money-back guarantee
• Satisfaction guarantee
• Lifetime guarantee
• Buy-back guarantee
• Happiness guarantee
• Low-price guarantee

In general, nothing seems to ever beat a money-back guarantee. The most effective guarantee you can provide your shoppers is the promise that you’ll give them a refund if they change their mind.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t have multiple guarantees. You could offer a money-back guarantee and a product-specific guarantee, like Away Luggage’s “TSA-approved lock” guarantee:

So next, take some time to think about guarantees you can offer. Your goal here is to minimize any feeling of risk and replace it with a sense of security in your shoppers.

ACTION ITEM: Decide on your guarantee(s).

10. Select social proof images

Our final step in creating a high-converting ecommerce product page design is to add social proof images to your page. These are usually small images or logos—about the same size as your USP graphics—that lend credibility to your product or your company in some way.

If you’ve been featured in a magazine or on a website, for example, you can add their logo for a little extra social proof:

Even more effective is to feature a quote along with the logo, like Frank Body does here:

Purple Mattress follows the same formula:

Having a quote like this from a well-known media source is ideal. But if you don’t, you can always use quotes from current customers. The idea is to add more social proof to your product page.

Here are a few places you can look for quotes to turn into social proof images:

• Reviews or testimonials from current customers
• Celebrity endorsements (remember that a “celebrity” could be anyone who is well-known in your niche; this doesn’t have to be an international movie star)
• Certification logos (if you’re certified with the USDA, certified organic, certified with PETA, etc.)
• Quotes and/or logos from magazines or blogs
• Expert reviews or recommendations (such as “9 out of 10 dentists recommend it”)

In short, you’re basically looking for anything from a third-party source that gives your product greater credibility. Then throw those credibility-boosting images onto your ecommerce product page.

ACTION ITEM: Select social proof images.

Shorten the sales cycle, improve bottom line metrics

Sales funnels outline a straightforward path to conversion. In reality, most customer journeys aren't as linear. 

We sat down with expert Amanda Tallon, Account Strategist at growth marketing agency Shoelace, to uncover how to build a more profitable marketing funnel. Let’s dive in. 

Companies that create an easy buying process are 62% more likely to win a high-quality sale. A solid sales and marketing funnel, targeted at the right buyer personas, can help find new customers, move them through the decision stage, and turn them into paying customers. 

If you’ve been following along, you should have everything you need to finalize your high-converting ecommerce product page design. Just take the assets you created from each of the 10 steps and build them into a winning ecommerce product page. Going step by step will ensure you don’t forget any of these important conversion-boosting elements or ecommerce metrics. You can also download a sales funnel template to skip the building process. 

Phase 1: Acquisition and awareness 

The broadest part of the funnel represents anyone who hears about your product and business. This might be through your own marketing efforts, a recommendation from a friend, a roundup article on Google, or a social media post. These folks are aware your business exists and may or may not have a need for one or more of your products. 

The strategy for each stage of your funnel depends on your target audience and AOV. But, there are a couple of activities that generally make sense for acquisition and awareness. Yes, you can run paid ads, but developing organic content and working with influencers for this stage in the funnel sets you up for longer term success. 

Contributing to a blog on your site not only helps you get traffic via SEO, it further nurtures customers who want to learn more about your products, your business, or your industry in general. 

A presence on social media does similar good. It allows prospects to learn more about your products, get a sense of your brand’s personality and voice, and engage with you by asking questions, posting comments, or sharing content with friends. 

Sometimes you fail to get traffic. Sometimes you succeed with traffic but fail to get conversions. You have to put both of them together in order to grow and grow profitably.

John Hart, VP of Operations & Ecommerce for Peepers

Inviting someone to join your email list is another great way to engage with consumers and teach them more about your products. Many businesses offer a discount code to convince people to join; others simply promise compelling content. Whatever you decide, providing the option to subscribe gives you a way to stay in touch with someone, even if they haven’t made a purchase yet. 

When you need to expand your reach further, try partnering with micro-influencers. 

“What I really recommend to brands right now,” Amanda told us, “is to work with micro-influencers or use the audience that they already have built out, because it’s getting very expensive to acquire new audiences through paid search and social platforms.” 

Micro-influencers have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers on social media. “If your brand is in line with that micro-influencer,” Amanda says, “chances are their followers are also going to be in line with your business.”

⚠️ Choose your acquisition tactics carefully 

Though we’re talking about awareness and acquisition right now, the methods you use to drive traffic to your site should target prospects that will eventually convert. For example, you might drive a lot of traffic to your website via a podcast. But the listeners aren’t in your target audience, and while they’re curious about your product, they never actually convert. 

Peepers, a brand that sells trendy eyeglasses, ran into a similar issue. The business, like many other ecommerce stores, is trying to diversify how it’s finding customers and getting traffic to its store. The team experimented with some nontraditional routes, and though they had great ads and strong content, they drove traffic—but not conversions.

As John Hart, Peepers’ VP of Operations & Ecommerce told us, “Sometimes you fail to get traffic. Sometimes you succeed with traffic but fail to get conversions. You have to put both of them together in order to grow and grow profitably.”

Peepers makes trendy eyeglasses. Peepers

Phase 2: Consideration 

Consideration is all about developing and nurturing the relationships you have with the people you acquired during the awareness phase. When a prospect reaches the consideration stage, they’ve identified a need for your product. They might need it to solve a problem, spark joy, or give as a gift. When someone reaches this stage, they’re aware of your business, what you do, and the types of products you sell. They might be on an email list or follow you on social media. 

Amanda cites email marketing as the best tactic for prospects in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. The benefit? These individuals have already bought into your brand at some level because they're on your email list. 

“You can develop a strong personal story with email marketing,” says Amanda. “You can do quite a bit of brand building in someone's personal inbox.”⚠️ Don’t leave consideration out in the cold

It’s easy to ignore consideration and focus on the bookends of the funnel—awareness and conversion. Amanda warns that though some customers will convert right after you acquire them, oftentimes they need more pull to actually make a purchase. 

Phase 3: Convert 

This is the big moment—you’ve posted some great social media content, sent emails that were on point, maybe even worked with an influencer or two. Now, it’s time to drive home your product benefits, business ethos, and unique value props to get that prospect to make a purchase. 

If you don't have a lot of money, run ads at the purchase stage to get the most revenue for your ad spend.

Amanda Tallon, Account Strategist at Shoelace

Two tactics are particularly effective at this stage:

💬 Customer conversations. A customer will likely reach out to you only when they’re actively looking to make a purchase. They’ll look to you to remove any obstacles in their path. Questions might include product clarifications (Can I see a photo of the earrings on?), shipping concerns (Will you ship to Canada from England?), or custom requests (Can you make this in blue?). Speaking directly to a customer builds trust, gives them a sense of who you are and what you’re like to work with, and can quell any remaining concerns they have.

📰 Paid ads. “You can run paid ads at any stage of your marketing funnel,” says Amanda. “But if you don't have a lot of money, run ads at the purchase stage to get the most revenue for your ad spend.” Paid ads can go farther at this stage in the funnel because prospects already know who you are, what you do, and the products you sell. Ads serve as reminders and should include copy that drives home the things that make your products and brand better than any of the other choices out there.

The inverted funnel: inspire loyalty and get customers to return 

Enticing past customers to return is one of, if not the most, cost effective way to increase your average order value. “It can get really expensive for a business to acquire a new customer. The best case scenario is for a customer to return and make a second, third, fourth, etc., purchase and increase their lifetime value,” says Amanda. 

The Peepers team thinks about driving repeat sales at every point in their business plan, starting with product development. The team creates products with great designs that set them apart from competitors, uses high quality materials, and sells items at a very competitive price point.

“The next step of that, and something that we’ve tried to be even more focused on,” John says, “is delivering the best possible customer experience.” 

Aside from delivering top-notch customer service, here are three marketing activities we recommend for the loyalty section of the funnel. 

Try out a direct-mail campaign. The Peepers team sends direct mail to drive more traffic to their website. There’s so much to experiment with here. Send a postcard with a unique coupon code, a fun branded sticker set, a handwritten note—sky's the limit. 

Ask for user generated content. After a customer makes a purchase, Amanda recommends sending an email asking for a photo of their purchase and a review. After customers provide the content, you could send a discount code to use on their next purchase. This gives you new content for the awareness stage of the funnel, brings people back to the website, and prompts them to use their discount code. 

Create a loyalty program. Another way to encourage repeat customers is through loyalty programs. Loyalty programs reward customers for making repeat purchases. Girlfriend Collective runs a loyalty program that offers perks based on the lifetime value of a customer. As a customer spends over time, they unlock benefits like free shipping and returns and early access to sales.

Girlfriend Collective

Tracking attribution through data and surveys

Now that you've completed your marketing funnel, the final step is to ensure that you know exactly where your traffic actually comes from. This tells you where to double down on efforts and where you can pull back.

Because analytics tools don’t take into consideration content that’s nurtured customers to the point of purchase, relying on them solely for attribution doesn’t provide the full picture. To solve for this gap, Amanda recommends setting up post-purchase surveys.

One client, she recalls, was ready to give up on TikTok as a marketing channel after both the platform and Google Analytics showed few conversions. But when they ran a post-purchase survey, TikTok was the third leading platform for new purchasers. 

“We thought the average order value was significantly lower than other channels in the business in general, and it was the second highest,” Amanda says. “So after that, we doubled down on our TikTok ad spend and realized that it was opening up an entirely new market for us.”

If you run a post-purchase survey, include the question, “How did you find out about us?” Be sure to leave a comment box alongside an “Other” option so that respondents can provide an accurate response. 

Unlock new opportunities with a sales and marketing funnel

For some, the journey to becoming a customer is short and direct. For others, it’s a meandering path that winds through many obstacles before they finally commit.

The sales and marketing funnel, while a clear framework for marketing activities, won’t be a true depiction of many customers’ journey. That’s to be expected: some customers will flow through acquisition, consideration, and conversion. Others will bounce back and forth before committing. 

Ultimately, sales funnels help you clearly map your marketing efforts for any person, from raving fans to newcomers.