What is an ecommerce sales funnel and what’s the best and fastest way to get one? An ecommerce sales funnel is a marketing funnel with either digital or physical products attached. It lets anyone build an online business which can be automated and scaled. Take a look at the video by clicking the image below. This is the website which is the ‘start’ of the ecommerce sales funnel. From the website, you can ‘capture’ your visitor’s email address, and deliver a series of emails to them. This is effectively the ‘funnel’ which you are going to send your visitors down.
Ecommerce Sales Funnel – The Website
As you can see, anyone can use this software to build a website. See also ready made sales funnel. The website also has a sales funnel attached to it, with a range of products you can sell. The ‘E’ in ecommerce means electronic. E-commerce is the act of buying or selling over the internet. With digital products in particular, anyone can earn commissions of up to 40% on sales they generate. An ecommerce business has a number of benefits over a traditional business:
- Earn 40% commissions on products you don’t personally own
- Digital products can be accessed immediately online
- Email delivery and sales can be automated
- The model is scalable globally with no barriers to delivery of products
The automation and scalability of an online business makes it one of the most attractive opportunities. This is because you can work from anywhere, build a sales funnel and scale up your advertising to reach an ever growing audience.
E-Commerce Sales Funnel – The Landing Page
Once you get your visitor to a landing page you can offer them a free ‘giveaway’ of some kind. This you deliver to their inbox after they enter their email address into your email capture page or your website. This is the first step in the sales funnel. From there you need to build trust by delivering useful content and helping your subscribers in some way.
Over time your subscribers should get to know, like and trust you. Only then will they see you as a person of value and decide whether to purchase something from your sales funnel. Your emails should be useful and informative and allow your subscribers to both get to know you and the products you promote.
If they decide that your products will be of value to them, and you have already offered value, they’ll be much more likely to purchase from you.
Building Trust and Delivering Value
My first purchase of an affiliate marketing product was several years ago. I bought a book from a guy who had already helped me learn a lot already. I figured that the small charge for his book was far less a price than I had already received in value from him. This is known as the law of reciprocity. It’s useful to know if you’re going to build a sales funnel and start marketing to your potential customers.
Ecommerce Sales Funnel – A Product ‘Suite’ vs. A Single Product
If you’re going to create a sales funnel, you’re much better off with a product ‘suite’ vs a single product. A product suite is a range of products within your sales funnel. It starts with your first ‘entry level’ product, and has a range of other products for sale which offer more value for a variety of customers. A single products will only pay you a single commission. Whereas a range of product can pay you commissions from a range of income streams:
- Up-sells – later products sold to your existing customers
- High ticket items – Higher value items offering greater value
- Multi-tier sales – Commissions which come from sales of your team
- Subscription based products – offering you ongoing commissions from previous sales
As you can see, a product suite offer a much larger range of income possibilities. It can also offer a built in sales team who close sales on your behalf. See this video series to learn more.
Ecommerce Sales Funnel – Marketing
Once you have an ecommerce sales funnel (get one here), you’ll need to market your landing page and/or website. With a good business model which offers all of the above through a product ‘suite’, you’ll be able to use many more marketing strategies than with a single product. When your ‘back-end’ sales are much higher in value, you’ll be able to bring in a much higher return on investment through your funnel. This means you’ll be able to use more expensive paid marketing strategies to market your business.
If you don’t want to use paid strategies, you’ll need to create content and be more creative about how you market your website. Checkout my ebook below Niche Blogging For Profit for the strategy I use to create content for my blog and attract visitors into my sales funnel.
