What is an ecommerce conversion funnel?  Ecommerce is the sale of products conducted electrically over the internet. Conversion refers to sales or ‘op-ins’ to a funnel. A funnel is a system of email capture and series of emails sent out to subscribers, usually for the purpose of making online sales.
Ecommerce Conversion Funnel
Landing Page
A typical ecommerce conversion funnel will start with a landing page. A landing page is a page specifically built to ‘convert’ a website visitor into an email subscriber. Here’s an example of a landing page:
So why would you want to convert a visitor into a subscriber? For the sale of goods and services through email marketing. Email marketing allows you to build alist of subscribers and build a relationship with them for the purpose of selling goods and services over the internet.
Selling something directly from a website is much more difficult than selling over an email marketing campaign. A website visitor is typically only on a website for a matter of minutes. If you are selling on your ecommerce website you only have a few minutes to convert your visitor into a customer. Email marketing makes this process possible over a much longer time scale.
Once you have a subscribers email you can market your products to them over weeks, months and years. You can build a relationship by offering information and value. Once you build trust with your subscribers you have a much better chance of selling to them.
Email Follow Up
Once a subscriber opts in to your landing page, they are typically given a series of steps to confirm their interest in your subscription service. A landing page usually offers some ‘legitimate bribe’ to the visitor in order to incentivise them to hand over their email address in exchange for some piece of information, an information download or a some such material. Once into the funnel the subscriber will receive some regular automated information as per the offer.
An email series of follow ups can be as short or as long as you like. A series of 10 email follow ups is a normal amount before offering some kind of product or service. After that you can send out regular updates manually to your email list if you choose, or you can automate as many emails as you like. The main purpose of sending out more emails to your list of subscribers should be to build trust and offer value. If you do this your subscribers are much more likely to open your emails and keep opening them for the long term.
Products
A good ecommerce conversion funnel should have products to sell. Otherwise you won’t make any money! Ideally you should have a range of products which range in features and price. Products usually start from the ‘free’ giveaway item to a low valued product which is available to anyone. Further down the conversion funnel and to exisiting customers, you can offer higher valued items. See more about a ready made sales funnel. For most online marketers building a funnel of their own takes time and a lot of effort. In addition to this it is very difficult to replicate a sales funnel which have:
- High Ticket Commissions
- Memberships (Recurring Commissions)
- Built in sales team
- Multi-tier sales
- Up-sells
So it’s far better to access a sales funnel which already has these features rather than trying to build your own. Access one here.Â
Ecommerce Conversion Funnel
Even though an ecommerce conversion funnel starts for the subscriber at the landing page, for the marketer is starts even before then. If it’s your landing page you need to get people to it before you can send then down your sales funnel. This starts with traffic generation and you can either get people to your landing page from a paid advert or by creating content.
Content Creation
Article writing, video creation, podcasts or webinars are all methods which can bring people to your sales funnel. Blogging is a popluar low cost method of generating leads to your sales funnel. Creating the right content is key since getting the wrong type of visitors to your landing page/website won’t result in any opt-ins. By getting to know your target audience, you are in a better position to create valuable content which draws highly targeted buyer traffic into your sales funnel. See more about targeting your content for your specific audience in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit.
Content can be found through Google and via social media platoforms. By sharing your content and more importantly writing good quality and useful content, you are more likely to get shares and rankings on both social media and the Google search algorithm.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a much faster way of generating immediate traffic flow to your ecommerce conversion funnel. Again, you need to make sure your audience is well targeted. This means getting to know the platforms you will be using in your paid advertising campaigns. A simple error can mean you choose a much broader audience to send to your website. You can waste money if you don’t get 
it right and there are ways of saving money and getting a much more targeted audience to your site. See my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing for more information on this.
Ecommerce Conversion Funnel – Summary
To get an ecommerce conversion funnel right you need a number of things in place:
- Your marketing
- Your landing page
- Your email series
- Your products
Each one of these steps deserves a book to itself. Get any aspect wrong and your sales will suffer. Get them right and your ecommerce sales funnel will let you build a life of freedom and flexibility. Ecommerce is an amazing model because in large part it can be automed. Your marketing can be automated, your landing page is simply an automated website, even your email follow ups are automatically delivered to subscribers as they opt-in to your funnel.
A sales funnel can work much better too if you have a built in sales team who are closing sales on your behalf. It’s also worth considering a ready made sales funnel which has:
- A range of products ready to go
- Automates the process of setting up the sales funnel, landing pages and website
- Allows you to skip straight to the marketing step (and teaches you this too)
Learn more and access a fully pre-made marketing funnel. You can start sending targeted visitors directly to it with the minimum of fuss.