As a business owner, are you dissatisfied with the number of sales you make through organic means? Do you wish to increase your online client base? If that’s the case, you probably need an effective automated system to bring in customers and turn them into repeated customers. A WooCommerce sales funnel may be the solution. Note that a WooCommerce sales funnel shouldn’t be mistaken by click funnels. To spot the distinction, you can view our article on how to make money with click funnels.
You may already own a Woocommerce store but still find it challenging to drive your customers to the sales journey’s last leg. (Believe us, it’s more common than you think).
What you need is a sales funnel system that works and will yield the results you are after. In this article, you will further understand what a Woocommerce sales funnel is and how it works. You’ll equally learn how to operate your WooCommerce store by creating a WooCommerce sales funnel that functions excellently for sales conversion.
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What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a step-by-step process that helps customers make a buying decision. This process benefits both the buyer and the seller. And to ensure that there’s an exchange of product for currency, specific steps of conviction need to occur. All of those steps are embedded in the sales funnel process.
The fact that you have new visitors on your WooCommerce store’s landing page or product page doesn’t automatically mean they will buy what you’re selling. While some leads are sure of what they want to buy, others still need to compare your products with those found in other stores.
They equally need to decide whether your price and quality are the routes to take. Others are simply not ready to purchase the product, or this is their first time coming across your store.
Trust is a big deal in sales. So, you have to take them through the process that will convince them to buy from you. As such, in a typical sales funnel, you start with a large number of potential customers (leads) then end with a lower number. It’s the remaining few who eventually go on to purchase your products.
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The Sales Funnel Variations
The variation in the larger size of ‘visitors’ and the narrower size of ‘final costumers’ in the sales process gives it the tag ‘funnel’. The different funnel steps are:
1. Top funnel
A modern online marketing funnel attracts a wide range of viewers, thereby achieving early awareness from the start. This means that a well-established sales funnel starting from great ad campaigns will drive a large number of people to your WooCommerce store and many people will see your products.
Also, at this stage, you should make your potential customer feel educated. They need to be sure that what you are offering is what they need. Also, endeavour to provide them with answers to the questions and problems they may have in the future.
2. Middle Funnel
At this mid-level, the tunnel thins out, leaving you with only people interested in your product. This doesn’t mean you should completely abandon those who backed out already. With a good sales funnel management system, you can follow up on the leads and ultimately convert them to customers.
3. Bottom Funnel
These are the people you can call your customers because they end up helping you achieve your goal. They hold the real purchasing power and decide to use some on buying your product. The number of people at this stage is usually only a fraction of the number of people you started with. It’s equally important to note that your sales funnel’s success depends on the ease and accessibility of the tools you employ.
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Purpose of a Woocommerce Sales Funnel
A WooCommerce sales funnel assists you with:
1. Connection
Creating a connection with your visitor right from the moment they contact your store or products. It does not matter if it’s from the ad campaign you created via Google ads, social media, or the content on your landing page.
2. Holding Attention
Establishing a connection is not enough. Securing your visitors’ attention and helping them transition from hot leads to not only customers but also repeat customers.
You can do this by putting in place just about everything the potential customer will need, e.g., the one-click purchase button and a popular payment gateway, which will make the buying process seamless.
3. Delivering the Needed Message at the Right Time
Consistently marketing your product is good, but do you provide adequate information about the product and why they need it? A good sales funnel will include a section that answers customer’s questions even before they ask.
It’s essential to ensure they don’t leave your e-commerce site in search of answers. Therefore, a detailed sales funnel will provide a portion for prospect’s questions and answers to problems they didn’t know they needed to solve.
4. Merging Marketing and Sales
A potential customer can decide to pause the purchase process and pick it up at any time. As such, they must be able to readily find the information they need or additional info whenever they resume the process.
Therefore, you must create an alignment between marketing and sales by dropping hints of sales, even within marketing content. For example, drop a direct link to your product page within your blog article and your ads copy. This ensures that as you’re talking about their problems, you also provide them with solutions. Even better is the fact that you don’t have to do it in person or with an individual prospect.
5. Conserving Time by Giving Focus to Hot Leads
The top funnel is the most difficult to sift through because there are so many prospects. More so, it makes it look like you are about to make a significant turnover. However, the reality is that most visitors won’t pay for the product they’ve viewed or added to cart. In order not to waste your time, a good sales funnel will help you note and put aside cold leads early on. It will do this so you can focus on the hot leads ready to use their credit cards.
6. Pushing Leads Into the Next Stage Sooner
After using a WooCommerce sales funnel for a while, your sales funnel process becomes more defined. You will also be able to improve on the tools that generate the most leads and sales conversion for your WooCommerce store.
As a result, you can quickly provide your leads with the necessary information and answer their concerns before they know they have any. As such, the time between the first contact with your store and purchase time will be shorter.
7. Tracking Important Sales Metrics
It’s crucial to track activities on your WooCommerce sales funnel, especially if you want to make the most of the information about incoming and outgoing traffic. Tracking sales metrics helps you know which customers have visited the site, checked out a product and where they left off.
It also makes sure you have a healthy funnel and robust sales whilst saving time. To keep track of some key metrics in your funnel, you can make use of Google Analytics.
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The Woocommerce Sales Funnel Process
It may seem logical, but don’t just jump into creating an excellent WooCommerce sales funnel. Preferably, initially try to understand the mind processes the prospect goes through before arriving at the purchase stage.
As much as we want to think each buyer is unique, there is a consistent pattern to every buyer’s mind. This pattern often starts with them coming in contact with your brand and deciding to become loyal customers. However, there are four significant stages between this beginning and final step.
1. Awareness Stage
This is where they come in contact with your brand, but aren’t that sure of what you sell. Awareness starts when the potential customer discovers you through one of the marketing campaigns you’ve set up. The purpose of creating awareness and curiosity in prospects to find out what you can offer them.
A significant way of achieving the right level of awareness and curiosity is to develop a lead magnet, a brochure, an eBook, or even a workbook. All of these must include content that is linked to the problem and solution you’re addressing with your product. The best way to present this content is by hiding it behind a form on your landing page and requiring prospects to input their email address and other details before they can access it.
Your lead magnet content should also be search engine optimised – in line with your expertise and industry area. It should also be linked to your social media accounts/posts and ad campaigns. This way, there are awareness opportunities from different sides that the prospect cannot escape. So, even though they haven’t landed on your product page yet, they have a fair idea of what you have to offer.
To make good use of this stage, you should create an automated email follow-up series that you will send out regularly.
What this does is to help you continue working on your prospects’ minds and consistently remind them that great offers await them. What you don’t say outright is that you’re urging them to make a quick decision, but that’s precisely what you’re doing.
Take note: Don’t start right away with marketing your products to them. The rule of giving value for free applies in this case. Educate them on things surrounding the products you offer for a while, then introduce your products and their benefits in subsequent emails. So, even though they aren’t ready to purchase anything just yet, they are already thinking about doing so.
2. Priority Stage
By now, the prospective customer already knows your brand and what you offer. They even know the benefits your products provide. However, they will still want to do their research because everyone wants the best option, even if they aren’t paying top dollar. So, what the prospect does is to browse reviews of your product and similar top brands, then do a side by side comparison.
If they think yours is better than others, they won’t think further about buying from you. Another thing that would work in your favour is that you have built a level of trust with them and so they will give you preference over other brands, especially if you have done your homework well.
3. Buying Stage
This is the stage every WooCommerce site owner looks forward to because there will be an exchange of money for products. It means they are convinced they want to buy from you for a customer to reach this stage.
At this stage, too, they might discover other products they didn’t know they needed. You can then project this additional offer through different options such as up-sell, cross-sell and order bump. You can also increase their purchasing desire by using plugins that allow increased quantity purchases at this stage. Suggesting matching products is also a great way of increasing sales.
However, the most important thing to do at this stage is to make payment options as flexible and as easy as possible. Many customers end up leaving their cart filled but can’t complete payment due to technical problems. This is why you need to know how to set up an effective Woocommerce sales funnel.
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Creating Your Own Woocommerce Sales Funnel in 4 Easy Steps
By now, you already know that your WooCommerce sales funnel is supposed to attract shoppers at different stages and convince them to progress to the stage of purchasing your products.
WooCommerce owners come up with updated ways to make the WooCommerce store easier to navigate and below are some proven tools to help you set up and maintain an effective WooCommerce sales funnel for your store.
1. Awareness Creation and Generating Leads Through Targeted Ads/Content
Content is crucial at the awareness stage because people want to get free education about products, even if they didn’t know they would be buying it. As such, you don’t want to sound sale-sy from the start.
The goal is to give information on what your product offers. For example, a store into kiddies’ clothing items could educate parents on appropriate seasonal clothes for their children through social media platforms.
This strategy isn’t called top-of-the-funnel content for anything but because the right content marketing does the trick every time. It is your ad campaign, but your prospects won’t know this because you are serving them great value without charging them a penny.
The moment they start looking for the solution you’ve hinted at in your content, they will move to your site for more information. This is where the remaining sales funnel stages will attract them in and they will read sales targeted content.
To drive a faster campaign, you should learn to use social media to sell. You can do this by creating a marketing budget for paid advertisements through Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads etc. Google Ads is also a good option. These targeted ad features enable you to display your ads solely to people interested in your products.
2. Arouse Thoughts About Your Products by Creating a Smooth Shopping Experience
For anyone to reach this stage, it means they are considering buying from you. So they would want to know more about what you sell or do. They have shown their interest; it is left to you to convince them you have what they need.
You can up your aggressive product promotion by providing detailed yet exciting content about the product right there on your store’s frontend. They aren’t ready to buy, but they still need to be treated like they are. So, you need to make the information readily available and accessible. One way to do this is by providing search and filter options, making it easier for shoppers to find what they are looking for on time.
The Woocommerce product search plugin is an excellent extension for achieving a stress-less searching experience. The Woocommerce Product Table is another Woocommerce plugin that you use to create a great shopping experience for your prospects. This tool helps you create a tabular layout of your products where you can show more of your products without consuming much space or creating different pages.
Your shoppers will also be able to search and filter all your products in a single catalogue. Shopping is a lot more streamlined without having to reload the page or scroll down too much.
Another strategy for creating a smooth blogging experience is to create an ‘About Us’ landing page with the story of your brand. When in doubt of building a customised page, use a page builder WordPress plugin such as Divi, Beaver Builder or Elementor.
This landing page is perfect for running retargeted ads on Facebook and Google. It’s especially useful if you want to bring back people who left before they made a purchase.
3. Give Absolute Information and Reviews to Aid Quick Decision
The prospect is leaning closer to the ‘Buy Now’ option; they just need further conviction before they do so. You can help them progress quickly by giving full details of your products, such as the colours, sizes and dimensions. The WooCommerce Product Table plugin is a great tool for arranging such information in one place without stress. There is also the option of listing all product variations if available.
Reviews are crucial in customer’s final capitulation because nobody would buy something bad, right? As such, you want to make it easy for customers to view each product’s reviews and ratings. The WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin allows you to add a ‘quick view’ button behind each product so customers can see reviews and information without leaving that page. You can also combine WooCommerce Quick View Pro with the WooCommerce Product Table plugin to create the best experience for your shoppers.
4. Create the Opportunity and Desire to Shop for More
Once your customers are ready to buy, how easy will it be to make a payment? Don’t lose a hot lead by providing insurmountable payment options problem for them. The goal of this stage is to make it extremely easy for them to check out. To achieve this, clearly state details for shipping and returns because these two are issues that make shoppers wary. Will you be shipping to their region? How many days will their order get to them? What is your return policy?
Then, what payment options are you using? Will it make it easy for the customer to pay for the products purchased? There are over 50 Woocommerce payment gateways, the most common being Stripe, PayPal and WooCommerce payments.
The WooCommerce One Page Checkout plugin enables you to convert any page into a checkout page. This streamlines the purchase process and easily allows your customers to buy the product straight from custom checkout pages. These basically display both product selection and checkout forms on one page.
The second purpose is to make shoppers add more items to their initial order, so payment gateways need to be hassle-free. To get more sales, encourage your customers to buy more by using up-sell and order bump tactics, which will boost your revenues.
The up-sell tactic simply means that you suggest a higher-value product that they most likely would choose. You can achieve this with the Iconic Sales Booster plugin. This option presents shoppers with pop up of recommended related products in a sophisticated way.
Order bump also prompts your shoppers to add more to their cart. The Iconic Sales Booster plugin also has extra features. This includes an ‘order bump’ feature, which allows you to promote more related products to your customers as they checkout.
The WooCommerce Default Quantity plugin allows you to encourage shoppers to purchase your products in larger quantities. They do this by switching the default quantity of the product chosen to a more significant number. Your clients don’t need to wait for Black Friday shopping before they buy more.
The WooCommerce sales funnel process isn’t complete without email marketing post-purchase communication. If you want repeat customers, you need to send them emails consistently. Also, use ads that retarget your old and existing customers.
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How to Build a WooCommerce Sales Funnel: In Conclusion
Setting up an optimised WooCommerce sales funnel will change the rate at which you make sales and help you improve on sales strategies over time. Creating your WooCommerce sales funnel won’t be difficult once you understand its purpose. You also need to understand your customer’s mindset during the process, and how to get them to follow through to the ‘Order’ and ‘Pay’ options.
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Hopefully, this article has addressed your concerns about what WooCommerce sales funnel is about and how to set one up. Do leave a comment, and share it with other brand owners.
