Ecommerce Sales Funnel: Complete Guide for Marketers

8 Min Read

The ecommerce market is positively booming. As of the second quarter of 2024, its sales accounted for 16% of total retail transactions. So of course it’s natural to want to capitalize on such prosperous growth. The key to doing so is creating an optimized ecommerce sales funnel. 

Here’s everything you need to know. 

What Is an Ecommerce Sales Funnel?

An ecommerce sales funnel is a visual representation of the stages a customer goes through before buying one of your products. You can think of it as a path that leads prospects from their initial awareness of your brand to being a loyal customer.

Your goal should be to create a frictionless sales funnel that draws people in and leaves them eager to buy more of your products. You’ll also need to follow up with customers to encourage long-term loyalty and maximize their lifetime value (CLV). 

Before we continue, if you’re looking for an article with more of a B2B slant, check out our B2B sales funnel piece.

Sales Funnel vs. Marketing Funnel

Both marketing and sales funnels visualize customer journeys. However, the two differ in terms of their goals and final stages. Sales funnels operate on a singular focus: You want people in the funnel to buy products from your online store and become repeat customers.

Similarly, a marketing funnel is designed to make people aware of your brand and educate them about relevant products, and its final stage involves spurring those individuals to action. 

The key difference, however, is that the “action” in a marketing funnel is not making a purchase. Instead, your goal may be to get them to a landing page for a hot new product, encourage them to sign up for your email list, or simply convince them to create an account on your ecommerce store.

You can use your marketing funnel to draw people into the sales funnel and nurture leads until they are ready to buy something. The two systems work together to promote collaboration between sales and marketing.

• Learn more about sales funnels vs marketing funnels.

Benefits of an Ecommerce Sales Funnel

What are the benefits of a sales funnel? A great ecommerce funnel will set the stage for the following advantages:

1. Higher Conversion Rates

It’s no secret that you spend your hard-earned money on marketing campaigns and advertising. However, you aren’t going to enjoy a high conversion rate unless you create a cohesive funnel, and you’re more likely to convert leads into paying customers if interacting with your brand is natural. 

2. Improved Customer Retention

A well-managed funnel doesn’t end at the purchase. By focusing on post-purchase engagement and loyalty, you can keep customers coming back. Customer retention is more cost-effective than prospecting, as the longer you can retain someone, the higher their LTV and the better your return on investment. 

3. Enhanced Customer Insights

By using marketing and sales funnels, you can better understand what it is that prompts someone to make a purchase from your brand. Use them to analyze the key steps in your customers’ journeys and identify where you are losing high-quality leads. Such insights will help you refine your strategies and create more personalized shopping experiences. 

4. Increased Average Order Value

By targeting customers at different stages of the funnel, you can offer cross-sells, upsells, and product bundles. These tactics can boost the average order value (AOV) of online transactions. If you consistently target customers with offers that speak to their unique needs, they will probably spend more.  

5. Streamlined Marketing Efforts

Understanding your funnels allows you to streamline your strategies. You can ensure each campaign and effort is aimed at moving prospects further down the funnel while also avoiding pushy ads that cost you opportunities. 

Ecommerce Sales Funnel Stages

The ecommerce funnel consists of five fundamental stages. The sales funnel stages are: 

Stage 1: Awareness

In the upper funnel, you need to make people aware of your brand and showcase its offerings. 

You can use a variety of tactics and channels, including search engine optimization (SEO), social media, paid ads, and Connected TV (CTV) content. You just need to ensure that your strategy is cohesive so you can provide a consistent experience across all touchpoints. 

Stage 2: Interest and Evaluation

After someone gets to know a little about your brand, you’ll want to serve up personalized content that nurtures their interest in your products. In the mid-funnel, leads will be most interested in product pages, customer reviews, and ads that showcase the value of your offerings. 

Stage 3: Desire

By now, your prospects are close to making a purchase, but they still need a little push. Consider offering special deals or discounts to set yourself apart from the competition. Limited-time offers are especially useful because they create a sense of urgency. 

Stage 4: Action

In the lower funnel, your customer finally makes a purchase. Make sure your checkout process is as smooth as possible, and keep the customer in the loop about their order status and estimated delivery timetable to make the entire experience as frictionless as possible. 

Stage 5: Loyalty and Re-engagement

The funnel doesn’t end with the purchase. After the sale, focus on nurturing customer loyalty and re-engaging with them for repeat purchases. Send a follow-up email a few days after they’ve received their product and encourage them to leave you a review. 

You can even include a discount code to encourage them to buy something else while reviewing your products. 

How To Build an Ecommerce Sales Funnel

Successful funnel-building hinges on keeping up with the following steps:

• Know who your ideal customers are and the problems they have
• Create content to address each stage of the funnel
• Use performance marketing and demand generation tactics to generate quality traffic 
• Keep prospects engaged with relevant content and product recommendations
• Optimize your checkout process to ensure purchases are quick and easy
• Continue to engage with customers through email marketing and loyalty programs

What makes the ecommerce sales funnel unique is that customers will never enter your store or interact with your team in person. This means follow-ups and frequent nurturing are both crucial components.

Measuring Ecommerce Sales Funnel Success

Here are a few funnel metrics that measure the efficiency of your ecommerce sales funnel: 

• Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that convert into paying customers 
• Cart Abandonment Rate: How often customers add products to their cart but don’t follow through 
• Customer Lifetime Value: The total revenue a customer is expected to generate over their lifetime 
• Average Order Value: The average amount a customer spends per transaction 

Each of these data points provides a piece of the puzzle. Therefore, if even one metric is off, get to the bottom of it so you can fix the problem. 

How To Optimize an Ecommerce Sales Funnel

Optimize your funnel in the following ways to ensure that you’re maximizing conversions and delivering a great customer experience:

• Create messaging that resonates with your audience at each stage
• Use personalized emails and retargeting to nurture leads
• Make the checkout process quick and easy
• Use data to deliver customized product recommendations and offers based on customer behavior

You must provide a cohesive omnichannel experience across every channel and stage. Use consistent (and consistently on-brand) language to build trust with your audience and encourage them to continue their journey.  

Ecommerce Sales Funnel Examples

Here’s a look at how you might target each phase of the sales funnel:

• Awareness: A potential customer discovers your online store through a Facebook ad
• Interest: The customer browses your collection and reads product reviews on your site
• Desire: A few days later, you target the person with emails offering 10% off their first purchase
• Action: The customer takes advantage of the discount and places an order 
• Loyalty: The customer receives a follow-up email with a loyalty program offer 

You can customize this basic strategy for just about any ecommerce niche. Just remember to plug in different marketing channels as well, such as CTV ads or email marketing campaigns. 

• See more real-world sales funnel examples.

Performance TV: A Full-Funnel Solution

MNTN Performance TV offers a powerful full-funnel marketing solution for ecommerce brands, allowing you to create a variety of campaigns tailored to different stages of the funnel, from top-of-funnel awareness campaigns to conversion-focused ads for the bottom of the funnel. 

One of the key benefits of using MNTN is our cutting-edge keyword-based audience builder, MNTN Matched. With it, you can find and target audiences based on their pain points and how likely they are to convert, thus making your marketing efforts more efficient and impactful. 

Streamline your ecommerce funnel with MNTN today. Request a demo to get started.

Ecommerce Sales Funnels: Final Thoughts 

A well-structured ecommerce sales funnel is essential for driving growth and building a loyal customer base. By understanding the different stages that customers navigate and how to manage them, you can guide prospects through the buying journey and create lasting relationships.