Most people trying to grow eCommerce businesses just set up their website and try to send as much traffic as possible to it. But they rarely think about what needs to happen before someone lands on a website. Because of this, conversion rates trend low, producing a high cost per acquisition.
Smart businesses avoid this cycle by “warming up traffic” ahead of time. This approach filters out users with no purchase intent, attracting only those who have a potential interest in your product to your website. While some businesses do great by increasing their total traffic, most need to segment to produce the best results.
What’s an eCommerce Funnel?
eCommerce funnels help facilitate segmenting and priming your website visitors. They act as bridges from the referral source to the website, filtering out traffic with no purchase intent. These eCommerce funnels, while common and widely used, have one purpose: warm up traffic for conversion.
Below, we’ll explore some eCommerce funnel models that you may not have in place today, but that could make a significant impact on your conversion rate. Let’s get started!
Advertorial Funnel
Businesses have utilized the advertorial funnel for a long, long time. However, modern marketers may have overlooked this option thanks to the “easy” advertising approach that companies like Meta and Google have been providing over the past decade or so. That luxury, as everyone has come to realize, no longer exists.
With the changes and irregularities in performance caused by iOS14 and later, marketers need to find solutions outside of just driving traffic to home pages or product pages. This massive-scale traffic approach no longer converts the way it used to, but a business can’t stop marketing—especially while in growth mode.
Enter the advertorial funnel. You’ve probably seen it before.
Have you ever clicked on an ad or a link about an interesting topic? Then, after clicking, you’re redirected to a page that basically looks like an article, or maybe just a page full of content, maybe even in the style of a news article?
If you pay close attention, you may notice that the page is linking to a product or products. The purpose of the page is to serve as a bridge between the ad and the product page. The ad grabs the attention of the user by promising interesting content. The advertorial delivers on such promise by providing interesting content and, within it, promotes some type of clickable product or offer.
This works great with Meta Ads traffic, which has suffered a sizable performance hit due to its impacted targeting features. This is a good point to make, as the majority of growing eCommerce businesses are currently using Facebook for, likely, the majority of their paid traffic.
If any of the above applies to your business, give the advertorial funnel a try—you may be surprised by the results.
Keep in mind that in order to have a successful advertorial funnel, you’ll need a few things:
- First and foremost, you need a quality copywriter. We cannot emphasize this enough. The content ultimately makes or breaks the advertorial. It’s the most important element, so you should not cut any corners here. Advertorials can prove to be expensive pieces of content to put out, but have the potential to open up an entirely new stream of traffic.
- You have the option to take advantage of advanced LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT to help with initial content production, but always require human editing and direction to assure you don’t produce AI slop that hurts rather than converts.
- Second, you need to design the actual page. The design doesn’t need months of planning. As a matter of fact, we’ve seen extremely simple article pages perform well. As long as you have a landing page builder and someone who feels comfortable with the software, you can move on to production.
- Finally, and this is the obvious part, you need a traffic source. The good news is, because the goal of the advertorial is to entertain first and promote second, it can work well with any type of traffic source: organic, social, etc.
Lead Gen Funnel
If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably heard the term “first-party data” a lot lately. While first-party data has always had a key role, it has turned into table stakes in the marketing world. The lead gen funnel, like the advertorial funnel, has a long history of success. However, it shines now more than ever with the very real need to capture first-party data.
You want to get the most value out of every visit to your eCommerce website. This funnel helps you get closer to achieving that goal. Let’s break it down so you see its simplicity and power.
The lead gen funnel consists of a landing page with a form and some type of offer, which, upon completion, redirects the user to the final destination: (usually) the eCommerce website. The landing page acts as a door, where the only way to gain admission is to complete the form, which usually asks for an email address or a phone number. That’s it. It’s that simple.
But…why does this deserve its own highlight? Mainly because of what it means to now hold that user’s email address, or phone number…or data…or first-party data!
Let’s use an example. The landing page says “Get Early Access & Unlock 40% Off NOW”. Below that line sits a two-step form asking for an email and phone number. The user fills it out, gets the 40% off discount and heads to the website. Great! But now what?
Well, you have two data points on this user. You can put them on an automated email flow, you can send them SMS messages, or you can add them to your retargeting audiences. You’ve now created at least three more opportunities to communicate with this user that you wouldn’t have had if you didn’t generate any first-party data.
There are many efforts you can undertake beyond those three steps, but the main takeaway is that you’re maximizing how much juice you get out of every visitor—a necessary step, as traffic comes at a cost.
Let’s say you’re spending $2 for every visit you generate via ads. Without collecting any data, all you get for your $2 is a visit. But with the lead gen funnel, you now acquire an email address and a phone number for some of those visits, which allows you to remarket to them in the future, thus stretching your dollar longer.
Quiz Funnel
Quiz funnels became extremely popular on Meta Ads in the past few years. Want to know why? Because they work.
Quiz funnels provide a take on the lead gen funnel with a fun twist. They gamify the concept by asking the user to take a quiz, answer a few questions, and to enter their email (or some other data point) in order to get access to the quiz result.
You may have seen those “Which Italian brainrot character are you?” type of links on Meta. These are quiz funnels, with the ultimate goal of warming up a lead, collecting data, and generating a conversion.
The answers each user selects generate data points that get collected and can help you in multiple ways. First, the data helps you pick the most appropriate quiz result, which can increase your overall conversion rate. Second, this data allows you to create segments of users based on their direct responses. You can then analyze which quiz result (which is based on answer combinations) produces the highest value user or lead.If you want to see examples of types of quiz funnels, you can see 7 proposed ones here by Sleeknote.
Zero-Party Data Funnel
Another buzzword in the marketing world you have probably heard a million times: zero-party data!
So, what is it? Zero-party data is data that your customers intentionally share with you. This can include purchase intentions, personal context, communication preferences, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize them. It goes beyond just a phone number or an email address.
You may be wondering: how is this a funnel you can use for eCommerce? In the following example, we’ll look at how a pop-up serves as a great way to experiment with a zero-party data funnel.
Consider the following scenario: a user sees a pop-up on your site. It offers a free $5 gift card. It has a form asking for an email address. However, once they enter their email and click submit, instead of just giving away the gift card, a multi-step display proceeds, each screen with a unique question that gives you an insight into the type of customer the user can be.
For example, an online clothing store could ask: “What are you interested in most? Shirts, Pants, Hats.” Or maybe “When are you looking to buy? Today, tomorrow, in a week, in a month.” Once the user completes all the questions, they are then redirected to the checkout page with the free gift card in their cart. They must complete the checkout as if they were buying any regular product (keep in mind, they’re not actually spending any money).
Let’s analyze what we’ve done here. For a $5 offer, we’ve collected:
- An email address (at the beginning)
- Multiple answers to key questions
- A phone number (at checkout)
- A first and last name (at checkout)
- A physical address (at checkout)
That’s a lot of data that you wouldn’t get with a regular lead capture. You can now set up various retargeting campaigns on paid channels, you can put them in email campaigns or SMS, you can even set up direct mail campaigns.
But the best part is the question-answer data you’ve collected. You can aggregate this data, and from it, pull the most optimal user “profile.” You can learn which combinations of answers produce the best results (in terms of likelihood of conversion), and then tailor your marketing campaigns and overall messaging around those learnings.
Using zero-party data properly to create better relationships in your marketing efforts has immense potential. We encourage you to play with this idea or even give it your own twist. But whatever you do—definitely go out there and collect that data!
What Are the 5 Stages of the eCommerce Funnel?
Now that we’ve gone over some of the best funnels for eCommerce, let’s dive into the 5 stages of an eCommerce funnel.
- Awareness: Reach your potential customers on whichever medium makes the most sense for your business. You may want to utilize paid ads (Meta, TikTok, Google Ads, Bing, etc.), content (blogs, SEO/AEO), organic social media, or influencer partnerships.
- Consideration: As your potential customers compare your offerings against competitors, give them the educational materials they need to make a decision in your favor during their consideration stage (Us vs. Them content, product videos, social proof, etc.)
- Conversion: Here, your users want to make a purchase. Make it as easy as possible for them with a wonderful user experience on your site or app (a streamlined checkout process, intuitive navigation, more social proof, perhaps free shipping, cart emails, and clear return details).
- Retention: Bringing new customers into the fold costs more than encouraging existing customers to purchase again. Encourage your existing customers to buy from you again with loyalty programs, post-purchase emails that give them a chance to rate their experience or earn rewards, excellent customer support, and future product recommendations.
- Advocacy: If you keep your customers happy through retention, they’ll likely want to share their positive experience with friends and family. Ask this happy cohort to review your products, offer referral rewards with them, or consider a VIP program that allows them to earn increasing benefits for repeat purchases.
Use eCommerce Funnels to Lower Costs and Grow Your Business
eCommerce funnels offer opportunities that every eCommerce business should experiment with. And when you start to think in terms of CRO, growth can really take off.
Keep in mind that many more eCommerce sales funnels exist outside of the ones mentioned in this article. Not only that, but you can create unique combinations that fit the needs of your business. The sky is truly the limit!
For even more insights on eCommerce funnels, conversion funnel optimization, and email marketing, please contact us!
To recap, using eCommerce funnels allows you to significantly increase the number of opportunities for experimentation and testing. Even if you don’t see a big impact in terms of conversion rates, you can always take the learnings you collect and apply them across all of your marketing efforts.
For example, you may learn that a funnel with a different type of messaging than what you’ve been focusing on results in more clicks through to the site, and that messaging can help improve your email flows and offer future test options on paid social
Creating a machine that constantly pumps out business-related learnings will only help lower your costs and increase your revenue in the long term. So go out there, create some funnels, and test them out!
