Content Marketing Funnel for Ecommerce Businesses

Imagine you’re browsing social media and you come across a post or an ad of some celebrities wearing stylish sunglasses from a brand you haven’t heard of before. It is possible that you will search the brand online and discover their website. You may go through their collection, be impressed by the variety and unique designs. 

You may even want to go through some reviews from customers. Finally, you may decide to add a pair of sunglasses to your cart and complete the checkout process. It may happen, right? I say may because while many might initially be aware of the brand through social media, only a portion will visit the website, and an even smaller subset will complete a purchase. 

One of the factors that would persuade you to make a buying decision would be the consistency of the brand’s presence. For you, it’d be important to come across the sunglasses multiple times before you finally decide to place an order. This process is what marketers refer to as a marketing funnel or an ecommerce sales funnel.

Now that you know what a marketing funnel looks like, let’s talk about ecommerce marketing funnel in detail.

What is an ecommerce funnel?

An ecommerce sales funnel is a sales funnel created specifically for ecommerce businesses. It comprises the stages that the potential customers go through, or steps that guide them from being aware of your brand to becoming its loyal customers. 

There are a series of steps because if you expect a potential customer to just come across your brand and make a purchase, it would be too much to expect! Thus, with each stage of the funnel, you address different needs of the customers to help them proceed to the next stage of the funnel, close to conversion. Think again of the example we talked about in the beginning. It’s called a funnel as it has many people in the beginning but only a few in the end. 

Every ecommerce business will have a different ecommerce marketing funnel depending on their business or product type. For example, businesses that sell low-cost products generally require short funnels (as it’s easy for potential customers to make a decision) compared to those selling high-cost products. 

Nonetheless, every ecommerce marketing funnel will essentially consist of 4 stages. Let’s talk about them.

Stages of an ecommerce funnel

Creating an ecommerce sales funnel helps the marketers plan their marketing strategy effectively for sales. When focusing on the different stages of the funnel, marketers will rely on different types of resources to provide what their potential customers need. That’s how the process is divided into the 4 stages and the funnel comes into existence.

#1: Awareness stage

It all starts with awareness. You aim to make people aware of your brand, generate interest and, if applicable, talk about the problems that your product/service solves. For ecommerce, when awareness is done right, it could begin with a potential customer visiting the brand’s website. However, at this point, it is unlikely for anyone who’s visiting your website for the first time to make a purchase. Remember, that’s not even the goal.

What you want to do is, feed them something relevant so that they return to your website when they want to make a purchase. It has to be awareness-oriented and not sales-oriented. Educating your potential customers around the topic they’re interested in is the key in the first stage. That’s how you gain their trust and start building authority in the niche.

In this stage, you’d start wondering ‘what exactly am I supposed to educate my potential customers on?’.

Tips for Finding Questions Customers May Have in the Awareness Phase

Ways to find out the right questions differ from industry to industry. For ecommerce, you can begin with the below methods. 

• Use Google search related queries to know about the questions your customers generally ask. Just start typing about your product in the search box and pay attention to the autofill.
• Use a tool like Answer The Public to search for questions around what, why and how based on the keywords you enter. This gives you a wide variety of questions that people generally ask.
• For being more specific about the questions, use tools like Keyword Planner.

Awareness Phase Content to Create

Once you know about the queries that need to be addressed, it’s time to generate resources around it. In the awareness stage, your content types will be:

• Blog posts
• Explanatory videos
• Interactive pages or games
• Webinars or even live videos

Example of Top-of-funnel Content Marketing Done Right

In 2012, Dollar Shave Club came up with a video, “Our Blades are F*ing Great”. The video used humor and a relatable pain point – shaving is a dull chore. The video went viral and garnered millions of views. It didn’t push a purchase, it wasn’t salesy but very engaging. So how did it help them? Thanks to this viral video, Dollar Shave Club experienced exponential growth and gained 300,000+ subscribers within its first year.

How They Used It In Social Media

Dollar Shave Club utilized different platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (no Instagram, it was 2012!) to generate buzz. They primarily focused on YouTube upload but shared it on Facebook too and encouraged the viewers to share it further. Twitter was used to spark conversations using relevant hashtags. 

Consideration stage

Once the potential customers have been made aware about your ecommerce business, they’re likely to start seeing your product as something that they require to solve their problem or something that they want. Thus, they will begin evaluating your product further. This stage is very important because they’re trying to understand if your product is the right product for them.

And this should give you a clue as to what’s to be done next. You need to tell them how your product helps. You will share information that helps them make an informed decision and you must create compelling content for this. You may even want to use an AI tool like Proco to create effective copies and product descriptions to engage your customers with the content. Remember, it’s a critical stage, feeding them generic content won’t do any good.

Tips for Finding Questions Customers May Have in the Consideration Phase

• It’s time to dig deep with competitor analysis. Find out what articles similar to your product/service are ranking first on the search engine. Read them and find out what questions are being answered in them. Also, check out the FAQs on their websites to get more clarity.
• While analyzing your competitors’ articles, go through the related content as well. This will help you with similar topics that your customers are interested in. And then, repeat the previous tip.
• Go back to Google search, go into further details around the questions covered under ‘people also ask’. You’ll get to know the questions that they are asking around the product’s specific qualities or drawbacks. 

Consideration Phase Content to Create

I’m sure it’s clear by now that you need to create content focussed on your product. You’ll require:

• Product descriptions
• Product videos
• Tutorials/how-to guides/videos
• Real-life stories like testimonials

Example of Middle of Funnel Content Done Right

A how-to blog post by HubSpot called “Flywheel Framework” on aligning marketing, sales and service for growth helped customers who used to consider different solutions for inbound marketing. It was about a framework called Flywheel and offered in-depth insights on addressing a common challenge of businesses – aligning marketing, sales and service.

The downloadable guide not just established HubSpot as a thought leader in the field, it also worked as a lead magnet, capturing information of the users. It worked out as expected because it solved the most common challenge of their potential customers and provided actionable insights to them.

Conversion stage

Your potential customers are now at the bottom of your ecommerce conversion funnel. They already know what you’re offering and how it helps them. They are now just a click away from making a purchase. So now, to help them move further, you need to share the value propositions of your product. This is almost similar to utilizing all the sales materials you have but the resources you actually require will depend on your specific product or service.

In this stage, you can share in-depth product materials like explanations, share use cases and/or infographics for quick understanding. You can even share product comparisons with your competitors’.

On a side note, you need to make sure your product pages are optimized, check out flow is streamlined and customer support is real-time (if possible).

Conversion Stage Content to Create

• Share product descriptions
• Share detailed reviews of your products
• Testimonials

Bottom-of-Funnel Content Done Right

Let’s talk about Dollar Shave Club’s bottom-of-the-funnel marketing strategies. They have prioritized implementing strategies that address common buying concerns in the final stages of the purchasing journey. For example,

– They recognized buyers were uncertain about switching razor brands and offered a free trial.
– They created a customer-focused subscription management system in which customers could adjust their delivery frequency, receive notifications before automatic renewals, etc.
– They invested in targeted email campaigns based on customer behavior and purchase history. This included:
* Limited-time offers like free shipping or discounted blade refills that encouraged people to make a purchase.

* Product recommendations based on past purchases or browsing behavior to drive upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Overall, Dollar Shave Club’s efficacy in bottom-of-the-funnel marketing lies in its multi-faceted approach.

Post-purchase

So does the ecommerce conversion funnel end after the customer has made the purchase? Not exactly, if you want them to repurchase. Think about it, not just repurchase, they can leave a great review or recommend your product to a friend. You’ll have to influence them to do it by aligning your efforts for retargeting, cross-selling marketing, loyalty programs, etc.

And don’t forget to offer great post-purchase support. Remember, existing customers are much more likely to buy from you than first-time shoppers.

How is the ecommerce funnel tracked?

I know the ecommerce marketing funnel looks like a linear progression (which it is), but it’s not so clean. Meaning, you won’t know how many times a website visitor will engage with your product before they decide to purchase it. Even the amount of time your potential customers will take to move down to the next stage in the funnel will differ. However unlikely it may be, some potential customers will make a purchase when they engage with your product for the very first time.

Since the journeys are multiple, tracking is important. Let’s see the ecommerce funnel metrics or different approaches you can take to measure the same.

KPI-based measurement

If you have KPIs for the different stages of the funnel, you get a good idea as to how your marketing efforts are impacting the KPIs. This method is simple and gives you an overview of the overall effort in a particular stage. For example,

• In the awareness stage, track the reach, new users, views, etc.
• In the consideration stage, track the returning users, reviews, etc.
• In the conversion stage, track the number of add to carts, conversion rate, abandoned cart, etc.
• In the post-purchase stage, you can track the revenue from returning customers.

Campaign-based measurement

KPI-based measurement doesn’t give you a good understanding of the individual marketing efforts. In such a case, you can go for campaign-based measurement. For this, you need to have campaigns assigned to different funnel stages, which will be measured through specific metrics.

For example, some of the campaigns will be tagged as ‘awareness’. There, you’ll be tracking the reach, add to carts, etc. The following set of efforts, like product ads, will be tagged as ‘consideration’ for effective tracking.

Attribution/journey-based

This approach only focuses on ‘contribution to revenue’. For this, you will categorize all customers depending on their channel-based history and assign different amounts to various touchpoints. The aim is to consider all marketing touchpoints a customer encounters before buying, assigning partial credit to each touchpoint based on its influence on the final outcome. This approach works because there is just one KPI, it gives you a holistic view of the marketing efforts and provides data-driven insights.

Let’s take an example to understand this in a simpler manner,

• A customer saw your product ad on Instagram
• They were redirected to your website
• They added the product to the cart
• They didn’t purchase it
• They were sent an abandoned cart email
• They opened the email
• They purchased the product

In this journey, the purchase was impacted by the ad and the email. Thus, the customer’s $100 purchase (let’s say) will be attributed both to the ad and the email.

Remember, you might need a data engineer or a technical marketer for capturing relevant data from different platforms. However, post-implementing, be assured you’ll get the most comprehensive picture of the funnel performance.

Takeaway

The ecommerce funnel is a crucial part of planning your ecommerce content marketing. And it all revolves around understanding your customers and providing what they require. The funnel helps you go deep in their minds and align your efforts accordingly. If you plan it right, your ecommerce marketing funnel will help you attract potential customers, retain the existing one and build awareness for the future. And yes, do not forget to implement the ecommerce funnel metrics to keep a track of your efforts.