The Ultimate Ecommerce Funnel Guide
Understand Clickfunnels vs Shopify Sales Funnels, Free Plus Shipping Funnels,and Amazon Funnels
Shopify Sales Funnels
In our Shopify guest post 'Why Every Shopify Store Needs a Marketing & Sales Funnel' we were able to create an upsell funnel in Clickfunnels using their #yes-link / #no-link approach. The selected products were then dropped directly into the Shopify checkout using permalinks to preload the cart:
This worked pretty well however there been some recent developments regarding integrations with Shopify from the biggest landing page and funnel platforms as well as new players onto the market.
Let’s take a look.
Shopify Landing Pages
OPTION 1 - LEADPAGES
Leadpages have acquired the awesome Drip (“lightweight marketing automation which doesn’t suck”) who now offer a free trial.
To connect your landing page to shopify you will need Carthook (featured below).
OPTION 2 - CLICKFUNNELS
The trigger we are interested in is ‘New Purchase’ in Clickfunnels and the corresponding action is to setup a ‘New Customer’ in Shopify.
To get this to work you need to have both First Name and Last Name on your Clickfunnels order form as these are required fields in Shopify to set up a new customer. This means you can’t use the standard Clickfunnels ‘Order 2 Step’ element, instead we had to manually add and customize the input fields on our clickfunnels order page:
The fields in the clickfunnels order page above correspond with the required setup fields for Shopify below:
Whilst this integration doesn’t create an actual order to fulfil in shopify, it does create a new customer so that when that customer repeat purchases through your Shopify site it will show the combined number of purchases:
OPTION 3 - ZIPIFY PAGES
Zipify Pages by leading Shopify expert Ezra Firestone enables you to build landing pages from inside your shopify store and enable you to make more sales from your store’s most valuable pages.
The software enables you to create a product offer page thats shows a visitor a single product and sets out why they should buy it, similar to traditional sales pages.
Ezra believes that the product offer page is the most important page on your website. However his software can also be used to create replace the shopify homepage and promote multiple offers in the way pawandbone.com have done it below:
Shopify Single Page Checkout by Carthook
To improve on this, Carthook offers post purchase one click upsell functionality that is fully integrated into Shopify. The order gets pushed into Shopify as they provide an alternative shopify one page checkout solution which we’ve been using on our test Shopify site:
Being able to have an upsell which offers more of what the person just purchased at a special offer rate is a way to instantly increase front end revenue by at least 10%. But being able to offer upsell funnels particular to the product they just bought (i.e. if bought X, offer Y) opens up the potential to increase sales by up to 30%. Being able to massively increase Average Order Value (AOV) means you can spend more (than your competitors) to acquire the same customer.
Zipify One Click Upsell Within Shopify
Zipify One Click Upsell (see Zipify Pages above) is a Shopify post-purchase upsell tool that replaces the standard shopify checkout and enables you to offer additional products as an upsell AFTER someone has checked out on your shopify store.
If all you did were to add an upsell to every product (using an upsell tag) offering a reduction for purchasing a 2nd one then you could dramatically increase average order vaule and profitability. Start getting more granular and creative with downsells as well and you can potentially 2-3x your profit from the same number of customers.
Our FREE Perfect Shopify Funnel Template
We built and sold a shopify store (on empireflippers.com) that we built an upsell funnel as documented in this shopify guest post where we dropped customers into the shopify checkout with the products they selected (using permalinks to preload the cart).
This was a hack as back in November 2015 there was no way to take a purchase and then push customer data taken within Clickfunnels into Shopify.
Fast forward to July 2016 and Clickfunnels announces an integration with Zapier that allows you to send that customer into the Shopify dashboard – we wrote a recent post on the latest developments with shopify sales funnels.
As such our shopify funnel template has been popular with Shopify stores as finally there’s a way to build beautiful landing / offer pages, take payment, upsell and push that customer into Shopify. One store in the pet niche who we mentioned in detail at the end of this blog post ran with a free plus shipping offer that generated a 40% conversion rate- take that typical 2% shoppify product page conversion rate!
Increased front end conversions combined with an average 21% conversion rate on upsells we have seen means that you will massively increase Average Order Value and ROI from ad spend.
So what does this Perfect Shopify Funnel Template look like you may be asking? Check out our free plus shipping Rolex offer into a Porsche upsell below!
1) Shopify offer page
You can check out the full offer page here.
2) Shopify free plus shipping order page
Here’s the link to the order form that will push customers into shopify.
3) Shoppify Upsell Page
And this is the link to the upsell page template.
Free Plus Shipping Funnel Ski Wax Fail
After watching episode 2 of funnelhacker.tv where Russell Brunson, the founder of clickfunnels (the software we use for all our sales funnels), interviewed Trey Lewellen about his free plus shipping funnels I had to give this a go. Trey is making over $100,000 a month with over 3000 people in a $39 continuity program (and aiming for $400k/m).
I started thinking about which products I could give away where the shipping we would charge would cover the cost of purchasing the product. I went back to my Four Hour Work Week style whiteboard of different communities I’m a member of and chose the ski market.
I then started looking at ski magazines and the accessories section on online retailer websites to try and find a suitable product and thought that ski wax seemed like a good play. I’d attended the London ski show a couple of years back and met the founder of the ski wax company Butta and emailed to get trade prices. I chose their ‘rub on’ wax product as anyone could use it (their other ones you need to use an iron and it’s more for hardcore enthusiasts).
I then started thinking how the funnel could be structured and thought about which product I could use to get people into a continuity program and what I could use for the final upsell.
Butta also make plastic wax scrapers which are very cheap to purchase and I thought this would be an excellent complementary product to the initial offer. “Wax on, scrape off” made a lot of sense in my head and remember I’m a skier and snowboarder and a member of this community.
Butta also had a ‘wax service kit’ for £30 retail which I thought would be a great final upsell (below):
Onto the sales funnel
Ok so that’s the products sorted.
I then started building out the sales funnel in clickfunnels and it looked like the below:
The first page was a squeeze to capture email addresses:
The next page was the 2 step order form to take the shipping payment of £2.99:
The next page was the 2 step order form to take the shipping payment of £2.99:
Then the final offer was an upsell to go from one bar of wax to a complete wax service kit:
I then built out an entire members area offering the best curated ski & snowboard content on the web – I was proud of this:
Onto the sales funnel
Ok so funnel built, onto testing to see whether it converts. Seeing as I was going to the ski show anyway I decided the smartest thing to do would be to take 1000x flyers and a popup stand with me with the link to the subdomain the funnel was on.
The popup stand was a good way to save £5k for a booth. Just ensure you have ninja skills to scout out the best spot and erect it lightening fast! Amazingly the stand lasted the full four days of the ski show as I was still getting text optins (using LeadDigits by Leadpages as the Clickfunnels Text Optins hasn’t arrived in UK yet) on the final day!
I thought the setup and funnel structure was great and I was super excited to start promoting and paying facebook and instagram pages to promote the funnel…
Funnel results
First up the good news.
I succeeded in getting real life cold traffic (in person at the show) to opt in and go through the funnel.
The squeeze page was converting at 40% and the order form page at 30% so it seemed like ski wax was a great front end bait.
I was covering the cost of the product (at trade price) by the £2.99 shipping cost being taken, however I was losing £3.40 each time in packaging & posting with Royal Mail. The intention was obviously to make this up with the continuity.
After the order form, 20% of people were taking the scraper into the £9/m continuity programme and 20% were buying the full service kit (didn’t expect that, these funnels sure do upsell well!) and I was making £5 profit on each one.
Ok so let’s do the math(s for us Brits) to work out how many months people would have to stay in the continuity (or “stick”) to make this funnel breakeven…
For every 100 people who were saying yes to the free wax we received £3 but the cost of the wax and to post was £6.40 total. So for 100 customers we receive £300 in revenue but our expenditure is £640 for a front end loss of £340.
20% of people enter the continuity which is 20 and then 20% of them are buying the service kit which is 4 for £20 profit.
£340-£20 = £320 / the 20 people in the continuity means each person had to get billed an additional £16 or 2 months for this funnel to breakeven.
Sounds good right? Now the bad news…
Everyone who signed up cancelled their free trial (by sending an email) within 2-3 days!
In Trey’s video he mentioned that he had a five month average stick rate.
If this happened with this ski membership then for 100 people who hit the squeeze page, 40 would hit the order form, 30% which is 12 would take the wax, 20% take the continuity (so let’s say 3) and then 20% (so let’s say 1) would purchase the service kit.
This works out so that for every 100 visitors, 12 (30% of the 40) spend £3 (but we lose £3.40) , 3 spend £135 (3x5x£9) and 1 spends another £5 for £176 income – £40 cost = £136 total profit.
This means that we could spend up to £1.36 a click to profitably acquire a customer.
Assuming the 5 month stick, if we could buy ski traffic for less than 68p CPC then for every £1 invested in advertising we’re making more than £2.
However we couldn’t even make a 1 month stick as skiers were cancelling within days…
Funnel fulfilment
So even though this was a massive fail it was still cool to receive the ski wax via UPS and then send out our free+ shipping goody bags – we felt like Father Christmas.
Funnel conclusion
Skiers are either super savvy or cheap.
And I don’t believe in the former…
Claim your FREE Perfect Free Plus Shipping Funnel Template – It Does Actually Work!
At least we’ve been getting better results for our customers. We built a pretty innovative sales funnel for a customer in the pet niche where we started with an optin giveaway competition that led into a free plus shipping offer with upsells. We did a test with facebook and sent over 721 people into the funnel.
Optin
We achieved a crazy 69% optin rate on the giveaway where 481 people reached the thank you page.
F+S Offer
Of that number 295 hit the button to go to the free plus shipping page and 40% took us up on that first offer which is 117 purchases paying $4.95 for shipping as well as a $5 order bump for an additional product.
Upsell 1
Then we hit them with an upsell for one of two options at either $19.95 or $39.90 and we got 8 purchases.
Upsell 2
We then hit them with a final offer for one of two $14.95 products and we got 8 purchases.
From 721 visitors we generated 495 emails as well as 141 purchases (117 unique) totalling $1,534 in revenue. Cost of facebook $214.
The customers’ typical cost per acquisition is $22-28 – here we we brought that down to $13!
Amazon Funnels
There is a huge opportunity building up and selling Amazon FBA businesses right now. Many more are being listed on mainstream marketplaces such as empireflippers.com (who recently wrote this excellent guide on the FBA business model) and there is even a dedicated FBA broker.
There is also a big risk with only having Amazon as your only sales channel and traffic source and many FBA businesses are looking to diversify through building their own shopify stores and funnels.
The issue with Amazon is that they own your customers. Sure you can follow up by messaging people who purchased your product through the platform but you can’t market to them and build you own list.
It’s a good idea to diversify traffic sources and build your own list. It doesn’t make sense to send traffic straight to your Amazon page as you can’t measure the effectiveness of your ad spend as obviously cannot put conversion tracking code on Amazon.
What you can do is create a marketing funnel that builds a customer list, increases your sales velocity on Amazon and generates product reviews on your listing. All of this increases the likelihood of your product being found by other people.
Amazon Coupon Funnel
You can do this through offering an Amazon Coupon Funnel which offers a discount in exchange for their email and a product review.
The funnel stacks up like this:
Facebook > Coupon Optin > Instruction Page > Amazon Product Page > Follow up for review
You are then able to follow up with people through:
A Facebook retargeting pixel on the coupon optin page to target those who didn’t hit the conversion pixel on the offer page
Your autoresponder with content and offers to your other products.
Be careful with those promotion codes – make sure you limit use to one redemption per customer buyer accoun and make sure they do not show on the product detail page like what happened to one guy who lost $45k in a day.
Amazon PPC Funnel
We’ve ALSO created a new AMZ optin funnel that will work great for PPC where you’re sending external traffic from Facebook to your listing to increase sales velocity through cheap clicks. The funnel enables you to capture your customer’s email before they head to Amazon where you will never receive their email!
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