The Perfect eCommerce Funnel

Your funnel is a nurturing system that takes someone who knows nothing about your business and pushes them to make their first order on your website, and then keeps them coming back to purchase over and over again.

For this article, we’re focusing entirely on Facebook ads and how a sales funnel relates to Shopify ecommerce Facebook ads.

Let’s take a look at the different steps of a sales funnel and how you should use them to generate buyers for your ecommerce store.

Top of the Funnel: Awareness
The first step of your funnel is the awareness stage. At this point, you’re not necessarily trying to sell anything. Instead, you’re trying to get customers on board with your product lifestyle, vision, and brand.

Your ultimate goal here is to get as many people to know who you are as possible. You want to create ad content that is engaging and clickable. When you do this, you’re creating a memorable experience for your audience, which will help keep you fresh in their mind.

Something you might want to do at the awareness stage is create an ad with a visually emotional headline, a product lifestyle video, and a call-to-action that draws attention. In the end, you want to get a bunch of people into your online store so they can check out your stuff, look through your products, and get a feel for who you are.

Some people might buy something during the awareness stage, but it’s okay if they don’t. Our Middle and Bottom layers will keep these shoppers coming back to create more action!

Middle of the Funnel: Interest
The next step in the funnel is the interest stage. Here is where you want to retarget the people who’ve already shown interest in your business. These people have clicked through to your store or engaged with your social media content in some way.

At this stage, you want to retarget the individual with product-specific ads and invite them to participate in your content. You’ll also want to hit them with their first product-specific CTA at this point. You’re inviting them to purchase the item, and your ad content should make them feel some sort of emotional attachment.

Write descriptive imagery copy that makes them imagine their life with your product. Explain how the item makes a difference and make it relevant to them. The people at the interest stage know who you are, and they are considering buying something from you - now you need to get them to commit.

Bottom of the Funnel: Intent
The final stage of your ecommerce sales funnel is the intent or offer stage. Here is where someone has already made a commitment to buying something, but they might not have completely followed through on it.

For example, someone may have viewed a specific product or added something to their cart but never purchased it. If the customer added a grey sweatshirt to their cart, you'd want to send them an ad with that same sweatshirt. Provide them with a unique offer, such as a 10% discount on the product, and make sure to include plenty of social proof (reviews). You could type out a recent powerful review in the copy or visually show that the sweatshirt received five-star ratings across the board from all your previous customers with a five star badge made with star emojis.

This final step works because these people know you, they likely trust you, and they want to purchase something. Now all you need to do is make them commit with high frequency and no brainer promotional offers.

The intent stage is more about giving them a push off the fence than it is informing them about anything. You don’t need to worry about telling them about your business or acting like you need to convince them of anything.

If they’ve already added something to their cart, it means they’re in the market for the product, but they might have backed out due to a variety of reasons.

Now is your chance to seal the deal with a hyper-specific retargeting add that keeps the product fresh in their mind and provides them with a special one time only (OTO) offer to get them to purchase the product.

Recap
Let’s take a quick run through the three steps of the essential ecommerce funnel.

Step 1: Top of the funnel (awareness)

Teach customers who you are
Get to know them
Create engaging ads with interesting copy
Preach your brand and mission
Step 2: Middle of the funnel (interest)

Retarget customers who engaged
Talk about specific products
Preach the benefits of the product
Make them feel like they already own it
Step 3: Bottom of the funnel (intent)

They want to buy something
They’ve already added something to their cart
Send retargeting ads with the product they’re interested in
Provide an offer (10% off, BOGO, etc.)
Use the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) in your copy
Now that you know the three primary steps of your funnel, you should have no problem creating awesome Facebook ads that generate attention and convert shoppers to buyers!