How to Build The Right Ad Funnel Strategy For eCommerce

According to Salesforce, more than 68% of companies have not identified or attempted to measure a sales funnel (or don’t even have sales funnels in the first place). With that being said, a whopping 79% of marketing leads are never converted into sales.

That’s no coincidence. 

It’s virtually impossible to bring in sustainable and dependable sales figures without a sales funnel in place. If you run paid advertising ads (and hence spend advertising dollars), you’ll need a custom ad funnel strategy in place (maybe with various ad funnels, depending on the campaigns you run) to turn your eCommerce business into a profit-generating asset. 

No funnels; no marketing. 

You don’t ask, you don’t get. 

If you don’t lead, your potential customers won’t know where to go. 

For these reasons alone, you need a robust and well-executed marketing strategy along with a well-crafted sequence of funnels all the way from front-facing ads or calls to action all the way to intermediary landing pages and email marketing sequences. 

eCommerce marketing success depends on the right sales funnel strategy. If you don’t get it right, you’ll still have a sale here and there (if you are lucky), but it’s going to be far from sustainable. 

A sustainable, ever-flowing revenue stream (which is growing consistently) is what you need for your business. Learning how to build the right ad funnel strategy or sales funnels for eCommerce is what you need to make that happen. ‍

Plan ahead. Think Through the Steps‍

For the right ad funnels, you’ll need a plan. You won’t get to an ad funnel until you think about a few things first. 

It all starts with a few fundamental questions about your business, your brand, and your products. 

1. Who exactly is your target audience? Who are your typical customers? Where do they live? What do they do? How much do they make? What drives them? What motivates them? Create a specific customer persona. 
2. What problems do you solve and why should your intended customer base consider your solution? Are your products of much better quality? Are your products known for something in particular?
3. Take a stand with your USP (build one if you haven't thought about this yet). How uniquely are you positioned to help solve the problem above?
4. Think of the steps that a customer goes through to first be a part of your marketing system. What will you do to entice your customers? How will they be able to sample your products, buy your products, and spread the word about your offerings? 
   

Then, think about the following: 

• What can you offer right now to get your potential customers’ attention, elicit interest, invoke desire, and get them to “act”? 
• What different angles, approaches, and ways can you think of to communicate everything above? 
• Which advertising platforms (or specific ad formats) do you think are the best for your business? Will Google Shopping ads work best? Are your products better suited for Facebook eCommerce ads? How about both? 
• How will your ad funnels be aligned? What does the ad promise and how will it do the job of getting attention and enabling action? 
• Which pages will your ad be pointing to? What’s the destination page (usually a landing page) singularly built to do? 
• What happens after a potential customer signs up? 
• How will you nurture that potential customer and lead him or her to drive sales? 
  

These questions, essentially, will form the basis of the ad funnels you build to grow your eCommerce business. 

Create your Ad funnels

This is where you get into the nitty-gritty of the art of creating sales funnels or ad funnels for your eCommerce business. There are three broad levels of campaigns you can run. 

Here’s what is common for all the campaigns below: 

1. Well-crafted, powerful, and attractive ads lead to landing pages (dedicated, single doorway pages that are built to showcase your products) built for generating leads with persuasive copywriting to help lift conversions. 
2. The landing pages will be singular in purpose, built for a very specific goal of generating leads. Give them an offer (such as a discount code, a PDF checklist to use your product better, a brochure, etc.) 
3. Follow through with email marketing (read more below). Want to see how other businesses in your industry use email marketing? Sign up with Panoramata and see how they do it. 

If you are raring to go, here are a few basic campaigns (sometimes you’d have to run these simultaneously to maximize your gains) you can run: 

The Traffic Campaign

Goal: Drive Traffic (and trailing sales, if any) 

Run an evergreen campaign to push your products continuously by sending relevant traffic to your eCommerce site. Regardless of the advertising platform you use, use a much broader audience base to maximize reach (and hence more relevant traffic) to your eCommerce site. 

For the traffic campaign, refrain from pushing your products directly. Instead, entice potential visitors to read blog posts, watch videos, and consume content of some sort. 

Parallel Direct Campaign

Goal: sales 

Enable direct sales on your eCommerce store (similar to the traffic campaign above) but focusing on products themselves by using formats unique to eCommerce such as Google Shopping ads, Facebook Dynamic ads, Instagram shopping ads, and so on. 

Retargeting follow-up Offer Campaign 

Goal: Bring back previous visitors (resulting in trailing sales, if any) 

By focusing the campaign only on actual visitors (from the previous campaign) -- and after excluding audiences who already signed up as customers -- to sign up for some sort of an offer (such as a discount coupon). 

Running ad campaigns in layers (as shown above) helps warm up audiences (allows them to familiarize themselves with your brand), eases the transition from mere visitors to customers, and sets up the pace for sustainable sales. 

Nurture & Drive Residual Sales with Email Marketing 

For all of the types of campaigns above, you’ll need a way to 

• Collect leads 
• Nurture leads (your potential customers) 
  

This is where email marketing campaigns kick in. By partly driving automated email campaigns and partly sending in broadcast messages on the go, your email marketing messages help with: 

• Staying connected and nurturing your potential customers (without pushing too hard)
• By offering them more information about your products or services 
• Provide incentives to help them make better decisions. 
• Drive sales with actual “sales emails” that you can send out regularly. 
• Stay on top of your competition, get valuable insights, get inspired, and see what kind of email campaigns they run by using our brand new tool at Panoramata 
  

Of course, you’ll also use emails for various other purposes related to eCommerce such as transactional emails (order notifications, shipping notifications, subscription reminders, and more). 

Additionally, email marketing can also be used for retargeting campaigns (above) by getting granular and selective about the audiences you target to drive sales.