Table of Contents
Introduction
In this article, we will explore the concept of cross-selling in a funnel and how it can be optimized to drive more revenue for your business. We will discuss the traditional conversion funnel and its limitations, as well as introduce a new model that is more effective for modern brands. We will then dive into the essential campaigns that make up the funnel and provide step-by-step guidance on how to build your own. Let’s begin!
The Traditional Conversion Funnel
The conversion funnel, also known as the sales funnel, is a visual representation of a shopper’s journey with your brand. It encompasses all of their interactions, from initial discovery to making their first purchase and beyond. Understanding your funnel is crucial because the success of your business relies on its conversion rates. If the rates are too low, you won’t have the resources to scale your growth or your business may fail altogether.
However, traditional conversion funnels often leave store owners and marketers confused about how to improve their funnel and what steps to take next. The traditional funnel illustrates a customer journey starting with the awareness stage and ending with converting and retaining the customer. While this funnel makes it easy to empathize with your audience at various stages, it doesn’t provide clear guidance on how to move shoppers from one stage to the next. It also fails to help you focus on the metrics that need improvement, such as product view rates, add-to-cart rates, cart abandonment rates, and checkout rates.
Most brands drive shoppers to their stores, but their stores aren’t designed to effectively convert visitors into customers. Shoppers are overwhelmed by options to browse, click, learn, and shop on the home page, and they’re not given a compelling offer or assistance in finding a product. This leads to the need for more advertising and other channels to drive shoppers back to make a purchase.
To address these issues and efficiently guide shoppers through the path to purchase, we need a new interpretation of the ecommerce conversion funnel. After working with thousands of brands that use ConvertFlow, we have discovered a new model that brings more customers to checkout. This new funnel focuses on providing a strong offer, guiding shoppers to the right products, delivering a personalized shopping experience, reducing the number of clicks to purchase, and effectively cross-selling and upselling to increase return on ad spend (ROAS).
The New Ecommerce Conversion Funnel
The new ecommerce conversion funnel looks more like the actual journey a shopper might take on the way to making a purchase on your website. It focuses on providing a strong offer, guiding shoppers to the right products, delivering a personalized shopping experience, reducing the number of clicks to purchase, and effectively cross-selling and upselling to increase return on ad spend (ROAS).
To bring more customers to checkout, this kind of funnel emphasizes the following actions:
- Activating a strong offer
- Viewing relevant product recommendations
- Adding products to the cart
- Checking out and completing the purchase
These actions are facilitated by specific campaigns that connect the funnel stages and guide shoppers toward making a purchase. The essential campaigns that make up this funnel include:
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The Welcome Offer Popup: This popup is shown to new site visitors and offers a compelling incentive to sign up for your email or SMS list.
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The Product Quiz: This quiz helps shoppers quickly find products they love without getting lost on your website or scrolling through multiple product descriptions. The quiz asks questions to understand the shopper’s preferences and needs and then provides personalized product recommendations based on their answers.
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The Browse Abandonment Survey: This survey is shown to shoppers who are about to leave your website without making a purchase. It addresses common objections and helps shoppers find what they’re looking for by offering tailored solutions.
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The Cross-Sell/Upsell Popup: This popup is displayed when a shopper adds a product to their cart. It recommends complementary products or higher-value alternatives to increase the shopper’s cart value.
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The Abandoned Cart Popup: This popup is shown to shoppers who are about to abandon their cart. It reminds them of the items in their cart and offers incentives or assistance to encourage them to complete the purchase.
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The In-Cart Cross-Sell Popups: These popups are displayed in the shopping cart and encourage shoppers to add more items to their cart to qualify for free shipping or other milestones. They visually represent the progress toward the milestones and recommend products to help shoppers reach them.
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The Checkout Abandonment Popup: This popup is shown to shoppers who are about to abandon the checkout process. It offers help and addresses objections to encourage shoppers to complete their purchase.
By implementing these essential campaigns, you can reinforce your ecommerce conversion funnel and guide shoppers toward making a purchase. Each campaign serves a specific purpose in moving the customer from one stage to the next, preventing them from leaking out of the funnel.
Building Your Ecommerce Conversion Funnel
Now that we have a clear understanding of the essential campaigns that make up the ecommerce conversion funnel, let’s discuss how to build it for your website.
The Welcome Offer Popup
Start by creating a welcome offer popup for new site visitors. This popup should offer a compelling incentive, such as a discount, free gift, or free shipping, to encourage visitors to sign up for your email or SMS list. This popup should be triggered after a few seconds of the visitor arriving on your website. By offering a strong incentive to buy now, you can earn subscribers and continue to nurture the relationship through email or SMS campaigns. Experiment with different offers to find the one that provides the highest conversion rate and leads to the most purchases. Evaluate the long-term success of these customers by tracking their lifetime value (LTV).
The Product Quiz
Next, create a product quiz to help shoppers find the right products for their needs. The quiz should be positioned as a tool to benefit the shopper by answering their questions and providing personalized recommendations. Ask questions that are relevant to your product or industry and use the answers to guide shoppers toward the best product for them. For example, a beauty brand might ask questions about skin type and concerns to recommend the right skincare products. Make sure the quiz provides value to the shopper by helping them solve a problem or make an informed purchase decision. Customize the quiz based on your customer segment and where they are on your website. For example, you can create tailored quizzes for different collections or product pages.
The Browse Abandonment Survey
To prevent shoppers from leaving your website without finding what they’re looking for, create a browse abandonment survey. This survey should address common objections and help shoppers navigate your catalog to find a product or collection that suits them. Ask questions that help understand why shoppers are leaving and provide tailored solutions based on their responses. For example, if a shopper says the options are too expensive, you can suggest a cheaper alternative or highlight an installment payment plan. If they need more information, direct them to pages that offer in-depth details about your products. If they can’t find something they like, guide them to a quiz to help them discover the right products.
The Cross-Sell/Upsell Popup
When a shopper adds a product to their cart, use a cross-sell or upsell popup to encourage them to add more items to their cart and increase their order value. The key is to recommend products that are complementary to what the customer already added to their cart. This helps increase the likelihood of them being interested in the recommended products. You can also promote higher-value alternatives that provide more value in terms of quality, features, or volume. For example, if a customer adds a journal to their cart, you can recommend a pen that goes well with it or suggest a higher-end version of the journal with additional features. Experiment with different cross-sell and upsell offers to find what works best for your store.
The Abandoned Cart Popup
According to a report by Fresh Relevance, an estimated 77.73% of carts are abandoned in the United States. To recover potential revenue from these high purchase-intent customers, it’s important to follow up with abandoned cart campaigns. While cart abandonment email flows are effective, you don’t have every customer’s email address and as time passes, customers may lose interest. To address cart abandonment before it happens, use an on-site abandoned cart popup. This popup should remind customers of the items in their cart and provide incentives to encourage them to complete the purchase. You can highlight discounts, free shipping, or limited-time deals to make the offer more tempting.
The In-Cart Cross-Sell Popups
To further boost your average order value (AOV), create in-cart cross-sell popups that use free shipping as an incentive to encourage customers to add more items to their cart. This works especially well if you gamify the experience by setting a free shipping threshold and showing customers how close they are to meeting it. Use a visual meter in the shopping cart that shows the progress toward the threshold and recommend products to help customers reach that goal. For example, if a customer is only $10 away from qualifying for free shipping, recommend a product that costs $14 to reach the threshold. Once the customer adds that product to their cart and surpasses the threshold, update the meter to promote a new free gift offer or another incentive.
The Checkout Abandonment Popup
To prevent shoppers from abandoning the checkout process, create checkout abandonment popups that address objections and provide assistance. Shoppers might abandon at checkout due to reasons such as high added costs (shipping, tax, and other fees), slow delivery, lack of trust in the website with payment information, website errors, or an unsatisfactory returns policy. Your checkout abandonment popup should help customers overcome these objections by answering frequently asked questions, offering alternative payment options, providing assurances of secure transactions, or highlighting your customer support channels.
Personalizing Your Campaigns
While the essential campaigns mentioned above provide a great starting point for optimizing your ecommerce conversion funnel, personalization is key to maximizing their effectiveness. By leveraging customer data and utilizing customer segments, you can create more targeted and relevant offers for each shopper. For example, you can create segments based on customer status (new site visitor, subscriber, first-time purchaser, returning customer, high-value customer), quiz responses, demographic information (age, gender, geographic location), or purchase frequency.
Once you have defined your customer segments, you can tailor your campaigns to each segment using ConvertFlow. This tool allows you to create dynamic visitor segments that automatically update based on the information you gather on your site visitors. You can then use these segments as conditions for your campaigns, ensuring that each shopper receives personalized messages and offers.
Here are some examples of personalized offers based on customer segments and where they are on your site:
- Personalized welcome offers for specific product collections
- Product recommendations for returning customers on general pages
- Reorder prompts for products customers purchase frequently
- Special offers to celebrate the return of customers who haven’t shopped in a while
The possibilities for personalization are endless. Use your imagination to discover new ways to target shoppers with relevant messages and offers. The ConvertFlow platform provides ready-to-use campaign templates to help you get started.
Testing and Optimizing Your Campaigns
As an ecommerce marketer, it’s essential to test and optimize every aspect of your campaigns to ensure maximum impact. What works for one brand may not work for another, so it’s important to experiment and find the best variants that encourage customers to take the next step in their journey. Test different triggers, timing, copy, images, buttons, and colors to see what resonates best with your audience.
In ConvertFlow, you can easily set up A/B tests for your campaigns. Create different variants, set a testing duration, and let the platform automatically split the traffic between the variants. At the end of the test, analyze the performance of each variant and choose a winner based on the desired outcome.
Conclusion
By creating dedicated marketing campaigns for your customer segments and guiding shoppers through the ecommerce conversion funnel, you can drive more revenue and develop sustainable growth for your business. The essential campaigns, when implemented effectively and personalized for each shopper, reinforce the path to purchase and help shoppers make informed decisions. With ConvertFlow, an all-in-one funnel builder, you can easily create popups, quizzes, landing pages, forms, and more in one place without the need for coding knowledge. Start building your ecommerce conversion funnel today and maximize your conversions and revenue.