The eCommerce market is highly saturated, with thousands of brands vying for the attention of the same set of customers. To run a successful business on a platform like Shopify, you need a healthy and effective sales funnel.

Shopify sales funnels boost profits, increase customer base, and build brand loyalty. Many eCommerce brands have used this tactic to sell their products and achieve conversions. Digital marketers will tell you how effective sales funnels can prove to be in a competitive market.

However, if you are a novice in online marketing or sales structures, you might find it difficult to set up and optimize a sales funnel for Shopify. Here’s where we can help.

This article will give you an overview of the Shopify sales funnel, why your store needs it, how it can boost revenue, and which apps can help you set up the most effective profit funnels on Shopify.

First, let’s start with the obvious question.

What is a Shopify Sales Funnel?

Shopify is an eCommerce platform that lets anyone set up an online store and sell their products. It is ideal for all types of businesses - be it small stores, medium-sized companies, or large enterprises.

To make your Shopify store visible and profitable, you need a sales funnel. A sales funnel is a series of steps that form the buying process of a customer. It starts when a visitor comes across your product and guides them through the buying journey to become a customer.

The sales funnel aims to guide shoppers in their purchase decision by leveraging marketing aspects, such as landing pages, emails, promos, and so on. Without a sales funnel, any business will find it extremely difficult to identify potential customers and make a successful sale.

Technically, a digital sales funnel emulates the steps of a physical customer experience. For instance, say you are a customer visiting a store to browse products of your choice. There, you find a staff member who provides personal assistance. This salesperson asks about your requirements, preferences, and any specifications you may have. Then, they share suitable product details, along with current offers, discounts, and other applicable benefits.

Once you make a buying decision, the salesperson helps you through the checkout process and addresses any queries you may have regarding the usage of the product. This is exactly what a sales funnel aims to accomplish.

A well-created sales funnel will provide a personal customer experience right through your buying journey from the moment you show interest in a product. At each step of the sales process, the actions involved in the funnel will change.

For a Shopify store, the best way to create and maintain a sales funnel is to stick to a template. You can customize a typical template based on the goals of your store.

The template ought to have a visual representation of the steps your customers will pass through during the sales cycle. However, this process is like a funnel rather than a circle.

This is because, as you move through the steps, the number of leads and possibilities decreases. You lose many prospects along the way, and a few steps in, there will be a smaller number of shoppers to guide.

Just like the shape of a funnel, your sales process will become narrower and more focused further down the line. Hence, the name sales funnel.

In a typical Shopify sales funnel, there are five different stages in the customer journey.

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Engagement
4. Conversion
5. Renewal

Awareness

In the first stage of a Shopify sales funnel, your prospective customer will become aware of your brand. This can be done through advertisements, promotional emails, websites, social media pages, blog posts, and so on.

This stage has the maximum number of people to be considered and is thus the largest in the funnel.

Interest

In the second stage, the prospect will take an interest in your offerings. This can be ensured by building a lucrative Shopify store, which can compel viewers to spend time browsing your products. 

In this stage, visitors might consider buying your products, compare them with similar offerings from your competitors, and do some research on your brand.

Engagement

This is a crucial stage where the customer reaches out to engage with your store. This can be done by adding a product to their wishlist, placing an inquiry about a product, or simply responding to your ad or email.

A positive customer experience goes a long way in sustaining this stage of your sales funnel.

Conversion

In the fourth stage, the prospective customer takes action on your product. If your sales funnel is efficient, this will lead to a conversion. This means that the customer will buy from you.

The buying experience lays the foundation for brand loyalty and positive reviews. Remember, if you can satisfy your customer’s needs and preferences during the first purchase, they will be more likely to leave a positive review and recommend your store to their friends and family.

Renewal

This stage comes after the sale is complete. Based on the sales experience, the customer may seek to repurchase a product, come back for a different purchase, or renew a subscription.

These five stages are shaped like a funnel; you will typically lose a few prospects at each stage. 

Now that you know the steps involved in a Shopify sales funnel, you may feel like it is a lot of work to create and optimize such a funnel. However, your store needs a sales process to improve Shopify conversion rate and revenue. Here’s how.

Why Your Shopify Store Needs a Sales Funnel

There are multiple benefits to creating a Shopify sales funnel. Apart from the obvious advantage of standardizing your sales process and streamlining tasks, you can achieve a lot more with a well-crafted sales funnel. Let's have a look.

Increase Sales Leads

Having an organized and standard sales funnel leads to a higher accumulation of sales leads from multiple channels. When you have a visual representation of the entire process, it becomes harder to miss prospects and ignore leads that might have led to conversions.

It also helps to improve customer targeting by analyzing responses and studying the relevant demographic to optimize your sales approach. 

Know Your Customer Base

The key to a successful business is knowing what your customer wants. Having a sales funnel lets you study your target demographic and identify their needs and goals. Another benefit is that you can craft buyer personas from a sales funnel and get an idea about their behavior patterns, buying motivation, and long-term loyalty.

This information is extremely helpful while creating effective marketing campaigns, formulating targeted messages, and reaching out to engage with prospective customers.

Identify Customers’ Pain Points

A sales funnel helps you identify your sales cycle's pain points and weaknesses. Certain pain points might hinder buying and discourage prospects from becoming your customers. With a dedicated sales funnel, you can pinpoint problem areas and work towards eliminating low-performing steps.

For instance, if you have multiple contact points for customers, you can analyze which points are working better and which are performing poorly. This will help you reach customers and figure out what is stopping them from converting. Identifying these pain points can lead to an optimized sales process and the right resource allocation for maximum profits.

Build Sustainable Customer Relationships

Studies say that the average conversion rate across eCommerce businesses in 2022 is 1.53%. Most first-time visitors do not convert into customers. Hence, to sustain your Shopify store, you must work towards retaining old customers and targeting them for a repurchase.

Your sales funnel helps achieve that by recording the customer experience and allowing you a chance to recognize and work on customer demands. It also opens up multiple ways of contacting customers and re-engaging them for more business in the long term.

Organize Your Sales Cycle

A more organized sales cycle gives better conversions and revenue generation results. You can also determine which strategies are fetching better results by testing multiple approaches simultaneously. Doing so requires massive organization and visibility, which a sales funnel provides.

A Shopify sales funnel helps improve store management, inventory, customer service, and lead generation progress. You can track your sales metrics daily, weekly, and monthly to get detailed data insights. This helps create more effective sales strategies and improve customer acquisition rates.

Boost Revenue and Conversion Rates

The goal of any sales process is to gain more customers and record higher revenue. A well-organized sales funnel helps you to do just that by eliminating silos, removing redundant steps, and optimizing your workflow.

Overall, this leads to higher chances of conversion and, in turn, more revenue for your Shopify store.

Beat Your Competition

Having good products is no longer enough to stay ahead of your competitors. You need advanced marketing strategies, data insights, effective campaigns, and proper store management to maximize your profits.

Your Shopify sales funnel can achieve these goals by taking each lead into account and following their buying journey to ensure conversion. This can be done by:

• Offering competitive rates and benefits
• Providing personalized service and guidance
• Creating value for the prospect
• Having a genuine intent to help the customer and not just achieve a sale
• Ensuring a positive customer experience 

Apart from these, you can create a sales funnel to address other business needs and make it a tool to boost the overall performance of your store.

8 Steps to Building a Successful Sales Funnel for Your Shopify Store

The ideal sales funnel will cover all the aspects of a customer’s buying journey, starting from the point where they come into contact with your company or its products. No matter how a customer comes to know of your brand (through advertisements, emails, social media pages, etc.), they will visit the product page before making a buying decision.

This is where you can start building an effective sales funnel. However, many companies start with pre-sales articles, ad campaigns, and other pre-website visit stops. Depending on your marketing approach, you can take the first step of the funnel.

Here are a few universal steps that you will need to build a sales funnel on Shopify.

1. Choose a Page Layout

The layout of your eCommerce page plays a crucial role in customer experience. Choose a page layout that is engaging, informative, and simple enough to hold customers’ attention. Your page can either be long-form, mini, or a traditional product page.

No matter which way you go, the final result should have adequate information about the products, ample visuals, and necessary details like prices, benefits, etc. A simple product page does well with maximum visuals and bare minimum text. 

However, if your product is too technical or informative, you can choose a long-form layout for maximum customer engagement. 

2. Optimize Your Landing Page

An optimized landing page leads to lower bounce rates, higher conversions, and more website traffic. To make sure your store’s landing page is well-crafted and effective, you can take the following steps.

• Optimize the header by including your brand logo, menu options, shopping cart, home button, profile shortcuts, and anything else applicable. The header section should have navigation options that are required on every page of the website.
• Include important navigation links at all prominent places. If your user has to search for straightforward actions, they are more likely to give up on the shopping attempt.
• Choose font size, color, graphic placements, and subheadings with care. Make sure your page does not look too crowded or too empty.
• Optimize your website for mobile browsing. More than 40% of all eCommerce customers browse websites on their mobile phones. If your site has a slow loading time on a mobile device or the graphic elements malfunction on a smaller screen, you will end up losing many valuable customers.
• Always include a link to the shopping cart. Typically, the cart link should be present in the header of all pages. Difficulty in reaching the cart will make customers leave purchases midway, so make sure you don’t overlook this aspect.
• Highlight your call to action (CTA) buttons. Include clear CTAs on your marketing campaigns, landing pages, and ads.
• Promote important offers, free shipping and discounts, email opt-ins, and other such elements on the landing page.

3. Personalize the Experience

Each company has its own sales strategy and customer engagement points. Make sure your sales funnel reflects those values and creates a personalized customer experience. Personalization helps set your brand apart and acts as a selling point for your prospective customers.

You can personalize the sales funnel by gathering feedback from customers, adding customized messages, and optimizing underperforming channels. The best way to create a successful sales funnel is to ensure your customer experience and marketing workflow improves together.

4. Feature Reviews and Testimonials

Feature client testimonials on the landing page for better visibility. Also, have a reviews section on your website with positive feedback from your customers. The great idea is to have one testimonial inside your buy box.

This can be an outstanding customer quote or stats to impress your customers. Adding testimonials to a buy box increases conversion rates and boosts revenue. This strategy has had proven results, so you cannot go wrong with it. 

Choose reviews and testimonials for website features that:

• Have a positive endorsement of your product or service
• Is real, organic, and relatable
• Is short and to-the-point
• Reflects your most popular customer demographic

5. Create Effective Product Carousels

The right pictures can make or break your product impression. Make sure to choose the right images while creating product carousels as part of your landing page design.

Online shopping greatly depends on how users perceive your product pictures. If the images are vague, uninformative, or confusing, they might not take the risk of buying the product. So, make sure you include pictures that give the right impression of the product and its quality.

• You can include images of the product against a neutral background and also a photo of how it can be used in the real world.
• Add multiple photos of the same product for better viewing.
• Your image quality must be high resolution.
• Capture different angles and positions of the product, if possible.
• Ask customers to include product images while they are using it.
• Add details of the product, like material, guarantee, etc., in the form of an image in the carousel.
• Make sure the images load quickly,
• A new trend is to include videos or demos of the product. If it’s an electronic device, you can keep an unboxing and usage video. For products like clothes and accessories, you can include a video of someone wearing or showing it from close quarters.

More pictures increase the credibility of your website, so make sure you include this step while creating a sales funnel.

6. Have an Active Customer Support Platform

Customer support channels form an important part of your sales funnel. Pick a platform that works best for your customers, like email, chat support, call center, etc. Make sure the channel you advertise is active and prompt.

Display your business hours on the website so your customers know when they can reach you. And in active hours, there should always be a dedicated resource to address customer queries.

Prompt customer support leads to more conversions and helps to retain your customers.

7. Pick the Best CTA Text

Although we have talked about the importance of the call to action, it deserves a separate mention. Your Buy button should reflect the image of your brand and what your products stand for.

Often, websites experiment with CTA text on the buttons. However, the simplest and most effective way is to have a clear and concise call-to-action text that says what it means. Some examples can be:

• Buy Now
• Add to Cart
• Proceed to Checkout
• Pay Now
• Add Promo Code, and so on.

Clear CTAs look familiar to users and nudge them to proceed with the purchase. It is better not to be too experimental in this aspect.

8. Optimize Your Post-Sales Service

Your relationship with a customer does not end with one sale. If your post-sales service is not up to the mark, you will quickly lose your customer base. Make sure you offer product guarantees, return options, money-back guarantees, and other similar support.

It should be easy for customers to reach you if they have issues with your product or service. You should also be promptly available to assist them and offer solutions as needed.

How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel

Optimizing your sales funnel lets you target your marketing campaigns toward the right demographics and also boost conversions. The aim is to create a sales process that can guide and nurture prospects through various stages in the customer journey. An optimized sales funnel leads to better financial performance, higher ROI, optimal usage of resources, and positive customer experience.

To optimize your sales funnel, you must optimize the individual aspects of your sales funnel.

This can be done through the following steps.

1. Analyze Results Through Reports

One of the most valuable advantages of having a sales funnel is that you can gather and analyze sales data. Define metrics that are important to your business, and have clear stages in your sales funnel that deal with these metrics.

For instance, if you have multiple sources of lead generation, analyze which channel is fetching the maximum results. Identify low-performing areas in your sales cycle through Shopify analytics and eliminate or optimize those to boost the efficiency of your strategy.

Shopify has built-in reports and dashboards to give you data insights. You can check metrics like store conversion rate, lead generation sources, and so on through these reports. You also get a step-by-step view of the customer’s buying journey.

You can also use Google Analytics to get insights into how a visitor browses your store and what actions they take. You can set goals, track landing page performance, and analyze customer behavior to get higher success rates. These detailed reports and dashboards will also help you identify aspects of your sales funnel that need to be optimized.

2. Identify Quick Solutions to Sales Issues

In case you face issues like high bounce rates, low conversions, or an unusual number of customer complaints, you must be fully prepared with quick solutions. Identify potential issues and have an action plan to deal with them.

For instance, if a particular product page gains high traffic but low conversions, it might be time to re-evaluate the pricing and proposition for the product. Basically, you must remove factors that stop visitors from becoming buyers.

3. Have a Secure Payment Process

Invest in a security app and display safe badges on your website to gain the trust of your customers. Buyers need to know that their payment details and banking information are safe with them.

4. Optimize Your Checkout Process

Your checkout process should be quick and easy for high customer satisfaction. Remove extra steps, delays, and glitches from the checkout process. This is the step where you stand a high risk of losing customers who have come to the very end of the buying process. So, it is important not to mess things up.

Research says that about 69.57% of shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. If your website has a high abandonment rate, there might be something wrong with the checkout process. Work towards reducing friction and making the customer experience smoother at this stage.

Also, declare any hidden charges, delivery rates, or other factors that might impact the buying decision.

5. Optimize Your Landing Page and Product Pages

Product pages are often neglected by store owners. To ensure your Shopify sales funnel does not have any loopholes, optimize your product pages. After all, each of your prospective customers will visit at least one product page to make a purchase.

You can make a product page the landing page of your ad campaign. Provide all relevant information on this page to guide a buyer. You can also add visual elements, bullet points, reviews, descriptions, and other details that will urge a visitor to buy the product.

6. Speed Up the Delivery Process

The shipping and handling workflow of your store must be optimized. Customers love quick and secure deliveries. A big example of this is Amazon Prime and its one-day delivery guarantee. Don’t delay shipping so long that the customer forgets about the purchase or gets restless due to uncertainty.

7. Reduce Loading Times

Optimize the loading time of your website, landing pages, payment page, and other important links. Longer loading time turns off potential customers, who are likely to abandon the cart or switch to a competitor’s website in such a scenario.

Make sure your store loads quickly on desktops and mobile devices. For instance, if a customer searches for the “best Shopify apps for clothing stores'', the top results will be stores with high-performing websites. That’s where you want your store to feature.

8. Have a Remarketing Plan

Recapturing customers is an effective way to boost revenue and increase sales. Your sales funnel must have a remarketing strategy for old buyers. Add upsell and cross-sell opportunities to the workflow and follow up on customers to keep them engaged.

Use offers, discounts, and incentives to attract customers with prebuilt Shopify plug-ins from the app store. Have notifications and email templates in place for abandoned carts and dormant customers. This can help rekindle customer relationships and boost retention rates.

To keep your Shopify sales funnel optimized and profitable, you need the support of various apps and plug-ins. We can help you with that too.

10 Best Sales Funnel Apps for Shopify

There are several high-performing apps that help you drive traffic to a Shopify store. A Shopify sales funnel app works by optimizing your entire sales structure, right from building landing pages to creating upselling strategies for customers during checkout.

With the right apps, you can improve the sales funnel, maximize revenue, acquire more customers, and build a successful business on the platform. Here, we have a list of the 10 best sales funnel apps for Shopify (in no particular order) that you should check out for building your sales funnel.

1. Shogun Landing Page Builder

This Shogun Labs app helps you build landing pages. As you already know, landing pages are a key to a successful Shopify store. With Shogun’s drag-and-drop page builder, you can easily use tools and templates to create a page that best reflects the needs of your business.

Several eCommerce brands, like Leesa and Chubbies, have used this app. You can start with a free trial of 10 days and then opt for their packages, starting at $39 per month.

It is simple, easy to use, and lets you build home pages, product pages, contacts, blogs, and so on. It has over 30 prebuilt themes that you can use to build custom forms, discount tags, actions, buttons, etc. It also includes A/B testing tools and performance analysis features that can smoothly integrate with your existing systems.

Argoid Upsell Cross-sell Engine

Argoid’s AI-powered upsell and cross-sell engine offers product recommendations, top deals, trending items, and many such recommendation banners. Using AI to analyze first-party customer data, activity trends, and more to create a smooth real-time customer experience.

You don’t need any coding knowledge to use or build on this app. The service can be scaled up to higher-priced packages based on the number of monthly orders and SKUs. They also offer a free trial of 21-30 days to test out its most exciting features.

3. Metrilo Growth Platform

Metrilo is an integrated platform that brings eCommerce analytics, powerful CRM, and email marketing under one roof. It takes care of your customer experience to boost repeat sales and customer retention.

You can opt for this app’s 14-day free trial, following which the prices start from $119 per month. Its CRM provides sales insights, lead opportunities, and built-in customer engagement tools. You can track sales and funnel metrics on its dashboard and gather performance data for brand building.

This is one of the best apps for monitoring the entire customer lifecycle and building stronger business relationships. 

4. Text Funnels SMS Marketing

This app helps you recover lost sales in the form of abandoned cards and existing customers. You can use SMS messages to contact prospective customers and boost sales opportunities.

It has free plans as well as paid ones for your benefit. Leverage the perks of SMS messaging, which is proven to be more effective than emails in certain situations. Text Funnels provides more than 15 funnel templates for customer engagement. You can also create your own template for funnel pages. 

It also has automated support for customer queries and features like subscription options and automatic message rescheduling.  

5. FB Messenger Marketing & Sales

This one-click messenger chatbot app helps you sell products, market to customers, and auto-respond to comments on Facebook. You can pin this bot to automate these marketing tasks and increase social media leads and sales.

This app also helps you connect to customers who have abandoned carts and offer them upselling options to convert the sale. It also has AI-controlled customer service that is capable of answering FAQs and client questions.

6. Zipify Pages Builder & Editor

This is a sales funnel and landing page designer app that helps you stand out from your competitors. It has proven templates to produce leads, generate interest, and boost revenue. You can use Zipify’s drag-and-drop builder to customize pages and add advanced eCommerce features.

It is mobile responsive and integrates with platforms like Facebook and Google. You can build an unlimited number of pages after opting for its plans, which start from $67 per month.

7. Raid Funnels Multi-Step Upsell

This app has some of the best customer reviews in the market. It helps you upsell products in the checkout process to create more value per customer. Use options like bundled sales, bulk discounts, and multi-step upsells to recommend relevant offers to users.

It has both free and paid plans, and also a free 30-day trial policy. Raid funnels help customize your sales process, add visuals like images, pop-ups, badges, banners, etc., cross-sell relevant products, and offer exclusive deals.

It also has prebuilt templates and an analytics dashboard for better performance insights.

8. PageFly Fast Page Builder

Another efficient page builder is PageFly. It has drag-and-drop functionalities for efficient page creation. It is available in free and paid plans, starting from $19 per month. It has over 60 templates to help you save time and design your store pages easily.

With this app, you can optimize your product and checkout pages, use saved sections, customize the screen for mobile and desktop viewing, and reduce page loading times. It has multi-language support and round-the-clock customer service options.

It also integrates with Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and so on. You can use its built-in analytics features for metrics tracking and customer behavior analysis.

9. Upsell Funnels & Checkout URLs

This app lets you create checkout URL links for a better customer experience. You can direct users to the checkout page without having to navigate multiple other web pages. It can add items directly to the cart and save time on the sales process.

These URLs can be used in greeting pages, messages, ads, and so in. It also offers third-party integration and can be used to optimize your sales funnel effectively.

10. GemPages Page Builder & Funnel

This is a cost-effective landing page builder, and sales funnel assistant for your Shopify store. You can use it without having coding knowledge to create optimized product pages. Its prices start from $15 per month, and it has a free trial of 10 days.

Use over 50-page templates that ensure high conversions. It is suitable for small stores as well as big businesses. Design the home page, blog pages, product pages, and collection carousels with this app that supports all Spotify themes.

FAQs

1. Can you create a sales funnel on Shopify?

-> Yes. A sales funnel helps optimize your marketing process, boost conversions, gather more leads, and optimize profits. Build a well-planned sales funnel to make your eCommerce business on Shopify more successful and profitable.

2. How do you create a sales funnel?

-> There are a few typical steps involved in creating a sales funnel on Shopify.

• Create an optimized landing page.
• Offer value to your customers in the form of products and deals.
• Nurture a prospect to boost conversion.
• Close the deal with personalized support.
• Offer post-sales service to retain customers.
• Optimize all aspects of your sales funnel to eliminate roadblocks.

3. Are sales funnels effective?

-> Sales funnels are an incredibly effective way to convert leads into customers. Stores with a smooth buying process are more likely to achieve sales. Perform lead nurturing, and metrics analysis in your sales funnel to get more revenue at lower costs.

4. How do I create a sales funnel for eCommerce?

To create a successful sales funnel for eCommerce, you must consider the following stages:

1. Awareness - This is when customers come into contact with your brand. Educate prospects about your company and products, and reach them with an effective message that encourages them to consider your business.
2. Consideration - Work towards building interest in your brand. Place clear CTAs for engagement. You can use customer testimonials, informative product descriptions, and other attractive content to draw interest.
3. Purchase - Make the customer’s purchase decision easier by offering customized products, better shipping options, after-sale service, optimized prices, and so on.
4. Retention - Boost chances of getting repeat orders from customers by offering loyalty discounts, free services, subscriber-only offers, and so on.

5. What is a sales funnel example?

A typical sales funnel begins when a prospective customer comes across an ad or video for a product and clicks the link to visit the landing page. This page provides further information about the product and asks the customer to register their email or phone. Then begins the purchase journey, where the lead must be nurtured to convert to a sale. This can be done through email marketing, customer service, or personalized assistance.

Conclusion

Shopify is one of the best modern platforms to set up your online store and reach customers directly through a few steps. With a well-constructed sales funnel to support your business, you can leverage the powers of eCommerce to become a successful and profitable entrepreneur.

Build a sales funnel that caters to your business requirements, accommodates the needs and choices of your customers, and eliminates silos and loopholes that can hinder prospects from becoming loyal buyers.

With the steps discussed above and the apps to support your Shopify store, you can harness the potential of Shopify to increase revenue and build a solid brand.