You’re sitting down to review your business performance. On the surface, everything looks fantastic.

Your Instagram Lives have been fruitful, giveaways successful, and your customer engagement appears to be through the roof.

It sounds like you’ve got a successful business on your hands, right?

But when you dig deeper, your data might tell you a different story.

You can’t build a successful business on vanity metrics or numbers that do nothing for your brand and marketing goals.

What you need is to analyze your efforts thoroughly to see where you’re failing and what you’re doing right. For this, you need marketing KPIs.

Keep reading to find out the importance of marketing KPIs for your small business and eight essential metrics you can track to determine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, streamline strategies, and ultimately increase your bottom line.

What is a marketing KPI?

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurable and actionable piece of data that reflects your company’s performance and how well you’re progressing toward your business objectives. In marketing, this means metrics that are linked to sales and marketing goals.

According to Ilia Markov, the Head of Content at ChartMogul, marketers often undervalue their work because they are too focused on the short-term benefits.

“A $500 blog post that brings in a couple of $10 sales isn’t that impressive. But once you consider the long-term impact of those $10 customers, the picture changes,” he says.

This is where marketing KPIs come in.

They help you track strategic activities and evaluate results to see whether your efforts are succeeding or need improvement. This way, you can plug the gaps in your marketing strategy before they become a big issue.

At ChartMogul, Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is an essential KPI. LTV provides a clearer picture of the kind of customers you’re attracting and how much you can spend on marketing to persuade them to join you.

“In the same example from above,” adds Markov, “that $10 initial sale, is actually a $120/year customer, who sticks around for 3 years on average, meaning that your blog post is actually turning a profit after just 2 conversions.

“For an even clearer picture, you should be looking at LTV (and comparing it to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)) segmented by marketing channels, content types, specific ad campaigns, etc.”

Using marketing-specific KPIs can thus take your performance to the next level.

Benefits of tracking your KPIs

Every healthy business runs on data. Without it, you’d be unable to make accurate, informed decisions that’ll effectively power your company’s revenue and growth ambitions. So, why is monitoring and analyzing marketing KPIs vital?

1. Learn your success points

As the saying goes, numbers don’t lie.

By monitoring the right metrics, you’ll know how specific decisions or campaigns contribute to your overall targets. Tracking your KPIs brings clarity to your market performance, enabling you to understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Consequently, you can figure out where your successes are coming from and keep building on them.

Nandini Sharma, Assistant Marketing Manager at ProofHub, says their marketing KPIs are the key drivers of their marketing strategy. She adds, “We actively pivot, re-iterate and abandon campaigns based on the performance; we have a heavy reliance on accurate reporting of marketing KPIs..”

ProofHub uses marketing KPIs for tracking the performance of their smaller campaigns by checking the success of a campaign over time and if it meets the desired results by analyzing deeper marketing KPIs such as average user session time and scroll behavior. This allows them to optimize their campaigns while they are live.

2. Enables better communication

It can be hard to motivate your team to keep pouring in time and effort into a campaign or strategy when there’s no proof their hard work is making an impact.

By tracking KPIs, you can show them how many leads, email sign-ups, or sales that a campaign has generated and get your team fired up.

At ProofHub, enabling better communication is essential to their marketing team’s success, especially when validating ideas. At every strategy session, they ensure the team reviews critical KPIs and are on the same page.

“By comparing previous campaign KPIs and user trend data, we push ideas from the to-do stage to execution, which helps reduce risk and maintain a steady traffic flow,” says Nandini. This keeps their team better coordinated.

3. Manage your strategy better

KPIs create a road map to your business objectives, and tracking them helps determine whether you’re still on the right path.

Natalie Slyman, Content and Social Media Manager at Benchmark Email, says, “Instead of simply looking back at your monthly or quarterly strategy to determine whether or not you were successful at meeting your goals, you should implement your strategies and tactics with your KPIs at the forefront.”

This way, you can easily adjust your strategy or replace it with a new tactic that’ll bring you closer to achieving your goals. Instead of just making guesses about what’s working, you can leverage data-driven decisions that’ll help your business outpace competitors and maximize returns.

For example, at Benchmark Email, their key metrics specific to their business strategy include the following, with the corresponding tactics to drive it:

• Social media community growth: Growing their business’s social network helps establish credibility and build a community of brand advocates. It also taps into other channels for lead and customer engagement. To drive this strategy, Benchmark Email recommends you:
  • Use hashtags with keywords or phrases applicable to your audience so you can pop up in more feeds or garner more attention, generating opportunities for engagement with potential customers.
  • Tag or mention other brands you’ve included in your content to encourage reshares, broadening exposure and increasing your brand visibility.
  • Follow industry peers and professionals to encourage follow-backs and build your professional network.
• Email conversion rate: Integral to their email marketing; every email sent has a desired action for leads to take. To drive this strategy, they recommend you:
  • Use eye-catching buttons or images for email CTAs.
  • Keep the lead-in copy short and simple.
  • Create campaigns around specific promotions and sending a follow-up email to recipients.
  • Segmenting your list based on specific data so you can send personalized content.
• Referral traffic: This shows the source of your visitors who come from other sites. To drive this strategy, they recommend you:
  • Contribute content to other high-quality sites with lots of traffic.
  • Create content that is sourced easily or that other people will be more inclined to link to in their content. For example, a reader is more likely to click a link to your brand from a content piece written on an authority website with high SEO value than one from a lesser known site. This can help better shape up your referral traffic strategy too.
  • Solicit press mentions so your company can be included in industry roundups or articles.

Top KPIs for small businesses

Thanks to technological advances in digital marketing, you can obtain data on practically every marketing initiative. If you don’t know what data points to focus on, selecting the marketing KPIs to track can be challenging and overwhelming.

Here are some of the most impactful KPIs that your business can benefit from monitoring.

1. Customer acquisition costs (CAC)

Many expenses go into promoting your business and convincing a customer to follow your brand. The sum of those expenses determines your customer acquisition cost.

Tracking CAC helps measure the impact that each customer has on your profits. You don’t want to spend too little getting customers and inhibit your business growth. On the contrary, you don’t want to spend too much and run your business into the ground.

Ideally, your CAC should decline over time, which means you should be spending less on each new customer you acquire.

How to measure

Add up all the marketing costs spent during a particular period and divide it by the number of new customers acquired in that time frame.

This includes costs of any activity that directly contribute to your marketing efforts, be it spending on ads, SEO, or social media campaigns. The total of these costs from all channels is your Sales and Marketing Cost. 

You can also determine the CAC for each marketing channel that you employ. This is referred to as the CAC per marketing channel. For example, you can look into the CAC from Instagram ads versus Facebook marketing tactics.

By weighing up individual channels, you can see which have the lowest CAC and decide where best to spend your marketing budget.

Pro tip: Consider the average worth or spending value of each customer.

For example, a customer acquisition cost of $1,000 might seem on the high side. But if each customer is worth an average of $7,000, spending that much money acquiring them is reasonable.

For more information on how to determine your CAC and analyze these factors, check out Neil Patel’s blog post on the topic here.

2. Lead conversion rate

The percentage of visitors who come to your site and turn into leads by handing over their information or performing some other action makes up your lead conversion rate. This metric is usually used by those businesses with an established website and strong online presence. It aims to show how effective the website is in generating interest in the business’s product or service.

Measuring the number of qualified leads you generate from month to month can help you determine if you’re targeting the right audience — those who are most likely to become paying customers.

If your lead conversion rate is low or decreasing, that’s a sign for you to rethink your marketing strategies and create stronger campaigns that resonate with your target market.

One of the best ways to improve your lead conversion rate is to focus on attracting niche audience segments that are highly interested in what you’re offering rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

For example, Lefty’s is a popular online store that specifically sells products for left-handed people. What a specific but creative niche to tap into, right?

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Lefty’s targets prospective customers through smart SEO strategies and online ads, effectively positioning them in the eyes of the customer. In the long run, this helps improve their lead conversion rate.

How to measure

Divide the number of leads captured by the number of prospects generated in a given period.

3. Customer conversion rate

Of all the leads that your business drums up, how many of them take a desired action that furthers them along your sales funnel into being converted customers?

Here, the word “conversion” in the customer conversion rate refers to any specific action you want your leads to take. Depending on the nature of your business and the channels being used, the customer conversion rate formula can be tweaked to give you the insights you need.

For example, for an ecommerce business, the customer conversion rate could be measured by dividing the number of new customers by the number of site visitors. Alternatively, say you’ve launched a new and optimized landing page with a lead magnet for a new product you’ve launched. Then, your customer conversion rate would be the number of successful leads divided by the number of visitors to the page.

Knowing your customer conversion rate will help you understand whether you’re successfully turning more leads into customers or losing them at some point in your funnel.

From there, you can refine your tactics and redirect resources toward channels that are bringing in qualified leads and identify the areas that are lacking.

Maybe the problem is that you’re getting the wrong kind of leads, or you have poor product quality/market fit. Or perhaps your sales process leaves something to be desired.

A great way to approach this KPI is by doing an overall calculation for your site, and then segmenting the conversion rates per channel to see where you’re getting the best results.

You can improve your conversion rate when you know your strongest channels.

How to measure

Divide the number of conversions generated (i.e., number of leads taking a desired action) by the total number of visitors.

4. Customer lifetime value

Your customer lifetime value tells you how much a customer is worth to your business throughout your relationship. Tracking this KPI can help you project your expected ROI, better allocate your budget, and formulate strategies to achieve your business goals.

It tells you which audience segment brings in the most profit and which ones reduce your net profit and are hard to convert. It allows you to determine whether it’s more profitable for your business to retain old customers or acquire fresh ones. Your CLV can also help you arrive at a reasonable customer acquisition cost.

If you have a low CLV, you can adjust your marketing efforts to reduce your cost per lead. But if you have a high CLV, it might make sense to invest more money in acquiring customers.

How to measure

Multiply the average purchase value for each customer by the average purchase frequency per customer and the average retention time for a customer.

For example, if you run a SaaS company and the average subscriber pays $150 per month and stays with your company for 24 months on average, your customer lifetime value would be $3,600 ($150 × 24 subscriptions).

5. Net promoter score

Your current customers are the most effective and easiest way to acquire new customers. If they love your business and are satisfied with your products, service, and overall customer experience, they’ll be more willing to recommend you to others.

Your net promoter score measures your customer’s loyalty, satisfaction, and how likely they are to tell people about your offerings in their personal and professional network. If it’s high, you have nothing to worry about as long you keep reminding and incentivizing customers to recommend your brand.

But if you get a low score, you need to talk to your customers and find out what you can do to improve their experience.

There are three categories of customers, according to Netigate:

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How to measure

1. Conduct customer interviews or surveys and ask respondents how likely they are to recommend your business to colleagues, friends, or family on a scale of 1 to 10.
2. Break down the number of responses you received that are Detractors, Passives, and Promoters. Add up the total responses for each.
3. Determine the percentage for each category by taking the group total and dividing by it the number of total respondents.
4. Finally, subtract the percentage total for Detractors from the total percentage of Promoters to get your Net Promoter Score.

Simply put as a formula, NPS would be calculated as:

(Number of Promoters — Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100

6. Cost-per-click (CPC)

This refers to the price you have to pay whenever a visitor clicks on your ad. The price is usually determined by the platform you’re advertising on based on several factors and is related to your clickthrough rate and ad quality score.

Tracking your CPC can tell you whether you’re getting your desired returns on ad campaigns and help you optimize your marketing activities to maximize results and nail your goals.

According to the CPC model, no matter how many times the ads are viewed, the advertiser will only pay the publishers for the number of times it is actually clicked on by a user. It does not differentiate for unique visitors.

Ideally, you should strive to achieve a high clickthrough rate with a low cost per click. Otherwise, you could end up spending too much on advertisements without getting good returns.

How to measure

Divide the total cost of clicks or amount spent on the campaign by the total number of clicks generated. Alternatively, you can go to the analytic reports page of the platform you’re advertising on to see your cost per click.

7. Bounce rate

This KPI shows you the percentage of people who visit your website and leave without making any further interactions or opening any additional pages on your site. It tells you the number of visitors that didn’t stay on your site long enough to do anything. They just landed on your page and bounced right off.

A high bounce rate indicates that your website/landing page either has a poor design or user experience. It could also be that your content doesn’t meet readers’ expectations or that you’re attracting the wrong kind of audience to your site.

Alternatively, it could also indicate that you have customers at the top of the funnel who are simply seeking out informational content and not yet looking to make a purchase.

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When you know your bounce rates for specific pages, you can figure out why it’s happening and implement changes to your content marketing strategy to drive your rate down.

How to measure 

Use a tool like Google Analytics to track the bounce rate for your whole site or for the particular pages that you’re running paid marketing campaigns on.

Your bounce rate is calculated by dividing the average number of bounces across all your pages by the total number of visits to those pages within a specific time frame.

8. Customer churn

If your business is involved in ecommerce activities or a subscription-based model, you want to track customer churn.

Not all customers stay with you forever. Some will make a single purchase and never return, while others will remain loyal for many years before eventually ending their relationship with your business. This phenomenon is known as customer attrition or churn.

Tracking this metric allows you to know how many new customers or sales you have to generate to make up for your losses and keep your company running profitably.

How to measure

Divide the number of customers lost during a given period by the total number of customers at the start of the period, then multiply by 100.

If your business works on a subscription model, you can calculate your attrition rate by examining the number of canceled subscriptions within a given period. So if you had 5 cancellations in January with 200 active subscribers at the beginning of the month, your attrition rate would be 2.5% (5 ÷ 200 × 100).

For those in the retail business, you can calculate customer attrition rate by measuring how many of your customers do not visit your website or app to purchase in 30 days (short-term) or 90 days (long-term), then dividing by the total number of customers you had at the start of those periods.

Customer churn rate is, in essence, a very simplified formula. A business’s definition of the total number of customers for a period can vary, especially if there are other factors at play to consider.

For example, the total number of subscriptions for a month can vary as a concept due to subscription cancellations, renewals, and sign-ups.

Many marketers tweak this formula to suit their business model. For more information about how you can do this and the factors to consider, check out this in-depth article by Profitwell.

If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it

Marketing KPIs are a great way to keep track of your growth and performances to ensure you’re effectively working toward your business goals.

Focusing on the right metrics can help validate your marketing activities while enabling you to identify and fix any issues.

Check out AppSumo deals to find innovative tools you need to grow your business at unbeatable prices.

If you’re not actively working to capture your potential customers, your competitors are. This is where creating an optimized ecommerce sales funnel comes in, and many brands wonder what the secret is to a successful one.

Truth is, there’s no magic ingredient. It all lies in knowing your customers well and using that knowledge to your business advantage.

This in-depth how-to guide will break down the ins and outs of building an ecommerce sales funnel that will take your sales to the next level and keep the customers flowing.

What is an ecommerce sales funnel?

How do you get your customers from point A — their first contact with your business to B — a successful sale?

This is the golden question that your ecommerce sales funnel is made to answer.

An ecommerce sales funnel includes the various marketing actions taken to help you convert a potential customer into a loyal one.

This could include employing various content strategies such as creating articles, landing pages, automated emails, interactive videos, and more.

Investing your resources in building a strong funnel can benefit your business in a few ways:

• It creates an organized sales process to generate leads continuously.
• You build better, more long-standing relationships with your audience, transform prospects into customers, and encourage repeat purchases.
• It improves retention and stabilizes your revenue streams.

Sales funnel strategies to optimize conversions

So, you’re ready to slay your sales goals and get the big bucks rolling in. But how do you do that? What strategies can you use to optimize conversions throughout your sales funnel?

When brainstorming your plan of action, remember the four stages of the sales funnel.

1. Awareness: Do your potential customers know you exist? It’s a painful question we all have to ask ourselves. Here, you put your business on the map by attracting new audiences to your business using different strategies. Once you’ve identified your consumer segment, you can focus on creating and distributing informative content to them that highlights a potential problem and creates brand awareness.
2. Interest: Here, potential customers are genuinely interested in your product. It’s time to add fuel to the fire and build their curiosity. You can gauge how far along they are in the early stages of the funnel by checking engagement rates with your ads.
3. Desire: The potential customer has now become your viable prospect. They are interested in your product and are growing more comfortable with the idea of a purchase but aren’t completely at the finish line. It’s time to give them a little nudge. In this stage, you focus on making your product seem irresistible to the consumer and inculcate a sense of urgency to make a purchase.
4. Action: It’s time to bring out your persuasive skills and close the sale. In the Action stage, you finally drive the customer to purchase and close the deal. After doing so, you’ll also build strategies to provide customers incentives to stay with your product or service, transforming the one-time shopper into a loyal customer. By giving them a reason to stay with your product, you keep your brand top-of-mind and incite a continuous desire in them to purchase from you. This will make them come back for more in the long run.

Now that you’re aware of the different stages to consider, here’s a sequential flow of strategies you can consider and employ to achieve those sales numbers you want.

1. Use Facebook ads 

With 1.84 billion daily active users worldwide, Facebook offers businesses direct access to consumers.

And leveraging paid Facebook ads gives you a lot of control; you can target the ads directly to a particular segment of users. Though paid Facebook advertising can cost you more than an organic social media campaign, the results are worth it in the name of creating brand awareness.

At the Awareness stage, you can design your Facebook ads to be more educational and provide information on how your brand offering will address the audience’s needs and problems.

See how Casper, a mattress company, does this with their sponsored ads.

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By linking to an informative piece of content, Casper promotes itself without appearing outwardly salesy.

Don’t make explicit offers to your audiences to buy your products at this stage. Instead of making a conversion goal, focus on attracting more potential customers to like your page, explore your offering, and become familiar with your brand.

At this stage, the best Facebook ad types to use include video and image ads, collection ads, carousel ads, and Instant Experience ads.

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Pairing informative content with storytelling techniques will make your brand linger in your consumers’ minds and easier to identify as they progress down the funnel.

So, how can you make the most of your Facebook ads? Here are a few tips to help you:

• Again, consider using a variety of ad types. These examples show image and video ads, but using a combination of the types available will make your ads more interactive to potential customers. Carousel ads are a great way to showcase several products together in one ad.
• Use high-quality images and visuals. Make sure every representation, especially the visual ones of your brand, is on point. For example, you want to ensure brand consistency across multiple platforms that you’re promoting your products on. Inclusion of a brand logo on Facebook should match up with the logo on Instagram, Twitter, etc.

Source: Snapfish

• Incorporate engagement with your customers as part of your ad. This drives a better connection with them from the outset and can pull in potential customers, as it showcases more human sides of your business. For example, Bellabeat engages with its audience below by directly phrasing a question to them and enticing them into clicking for more information to satisfy their curiosity.

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For more information on how to run Facebook ads, check out AppSumo’s nifty e-book here!

2. Create engaging content

Engaging content helps show your customers what your brand is all about and what it represents. Remember that your audience knowing the name of your brand isn’t enough. They should also understand the qualities that make your brand stand out.

This is where content creation comes in.

To create content that sets your brand apart from your competitors, share the unique details about your brand. Make your prospects want to choose you over your competitors.

One great way to do this is by positioning yourself as a subject matter expert.

Have a look at how the razor brand Dorco does it:

(Image Source)

Instead of trying to sell their razors right away and coming across as annoyingly promotional, they emphasize educating their customers and making them aware of their pain points.

As you focus on your content creation strategy, go through this checklist to create a winning content strategy:

• If you decide to create a blog and write articles, be sure to optimize your content for SEO. Learn about the methods you can use to rank higher on Google and incorporate quality, long-form content into your strategy (it gets you extra brownie points with Google’s algorithm!).
• Leverage Instagram to boost your following and social media presence among a more visual crowd. Instagram is the king of social media platforms when it comes to their visual content. Nailing your brand aesthetics on Instagram can do a lot for your business. As with Facebook ads, Instagram ads allow you to promote posts you’ve published to a specific audience. Ipsy, a beauty brand, has gained over 3 million followers on the platform by using smart and interactive ads. In the below example, they’ve tagged partners and used a hashtag in a social media contest to attract new audiences.

Source: Ipsy

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• Participate in a wider community of visual medium seekers through YouTube. If you have a knack for video creation and can whip up an exciting script that’s conversational and draws the audience in, YouTube is a great platform to choose. At this stage, your videos should be more educational in content. Consider explainer videos of your offering and short video ads that identify problems and show how you can solve them effectively. Sun Bum, a sunscreen, hair care and lip balm company, does this wonderfully by regularly posting informative content on topics ranging from fabric dyeing tutorials to educational ads.

[insert Sun Bum ad]

• Create a targeted strategy. You don’t want to be a jack of all trades and master of none here. It’s best to start with 2-3 content channels and focus on building them up strongly. By focusing your brand awareness strategies on a few platforms, your concentrated marketing efforts are more likely to wield the success you’re hoping for!

3. Capture email addresses 

As you move from awareness into the interest stage, there are several ecommerce strategies you can use to help you capture email addresses along the way, a valuable customer insight for all ecommerce businesses.

Why is this important? Not only do you get more prospects in the bag compared to other passive forms of marketing, you also get their information. And in today’s digital age, having that information handy will make your customers more accessible to you, providing you more lead generation opportunities.

You can get a prospect’s email address many ways; one is creating an effective lead magnet. Lead magnets are free items or services given to an audience in exchange for their contact information. Lead magnets usually provide valuable resources that may not otherwise be available and include:

• Trial subscriptions
• A free e-book, case study, or in-depth guide
• A quiz with the results sent directly to the provided email ID

Think along the educational angle and use tools like quizzes to generate interest and incentivize a prospect to provide their information before the results are displayed.

Here is how Zenni Optical, an eyewear brand, used its “You’ve Been Framed” quiz to increase brand awareness and bring more traffic to its site.

Source: Uberflip Case Study

The quiz asks questions to match consumers with eyewear that suits both their personal style and general lifestyle. The quiz is instantly shareable because it’s just plain funny and lighthearted.

The best part? The quiz generated 29,410 lead conversions and an ROI of 9,655% in six months.

4. Leverage social proof

You can implement social proof at any stage of the ecommerce sales funnel. That said, it works best when you want to convince site visitors about your product’s quality and credibility.

Displaying on-site social proof on your website is essential, as it’s a digital storefront you operate wholly on your own. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, your website is entirely yours to control and display to customers what your brand is all about.

A popular way to display social proof is customer testimonials. You can show reviews and ratings on product pages and your homepage.

If you’re on a platform that’s more visually oriented, like Instagram or Facebook, you can even share the positive review as your Story or on your Facebook Page.

Here’s an example of K9 Sports Sack, a company that uses a testimonial to establish social proof in a sponsored Facebook post.

Source: K9 Sports Sack

It’s fine if you have a few negative reviews as well. It humanizes your brand and, if done well, can showcase your awesome customer support skills.

5. Optimize product pages

Product pages can help you win the hearts of your prospects. You just have to convince your visitors that your products are the best solution.

Your goal is to nudge them to add your products to their cart.

Naturally, your product page copy should align with customers’ common queries and eliminate any of their lingering concerns.

Good keyword research will help you to understand what your buyer persona is searching for. You can use the insights across your copy and offer your products as a solution to those concerns.

Look at how Firebox aces their product marketing by using witty language on their product pages and insightful product descriptions:

Want a better look at their copy? Here’s a close-up of their product description:

Source: Firebox

The folks at Firebox show a common problem and offer a hilarious solution. It works because customers can relate. In no time, they will add these funny (and slightly terrifying) products to their cart.

Engaging product descriptions are crucial when your leads are still on the fence about making a purchase. Product descriptions should be a one-stop-shop for all the possible questions a prospective customer may have. Any final doubts they have about your offering should be clarified so you can close that sale without any lasting confusion on their end.

You can use testimonials, live demos, tutorials, and product comparisons to make sure they get the most out of the product.

Here’s how Squarespace incorporates testimonials within their product description to increase trust and compel prospects to convert.

(Image Source)

6. Build great exit pop-ups 

Remember, no two visitors are alike. And since different customers might make their purchase at various stages of the funnel, it’s crucial to distinguish between first-time visitors, subscribers, and returning visitors.

Once you identify your customers by these parameters, it’s time to create and promote unique marketing campaigns by personalizing your website for better targeting.

Look at this exit-intent campaign example by J.Crew. In the below example, J. Crew is targeting first-time visitors to the site who aren’t part of the loyalty program they offer. Here, they’re killing two birds with one stone. Not only is the exit pop-up incentivizing potential customers to purchase, it’s also nudging them into joining the brand’s loyalty program! This is a strategic conversion move on J. Crew’s part.

Source: J. Crew

A high-converting exit-intent campaign should have a clear message, input fields, and a CTA. Offering a discount also makes a huge difference. (Who doesn’t love/expect a coupon these days?)

These campaigns can help you reduce cart abandonment rates and gather leads to further nurture with email marketing.

You have to focus on engaging your prospects with on-site messages and gently give them a nudge if they leave your site. Also, make sure to send instant messages or create smart pop-ups before your prospect exits the webpage.

7. Send behavior-based emails 

Now you’ve done it. You’ve invested in creating a good site, appealing to your customers on social media and more. You’ve finally got their interest. It’s time to act on it. 

Leverage the information you already have about your subscribers to personalize their shopping experience and increase conversion rates. You can use valuable data to create highly targeted email campaigns and make your prospects take the last step.

Take this abandoned cart email, for instance:

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A good abandoned cart email should also contain a short subject line, introductory text, items left in the cart, offer or discount, CTA, reviews or social proof, and a closing text. For more inspiration on how to do this, check out Sumo’s blog post on crafting amazing abandoned cart emails!

8. Upselling and cross-selling 

Have you ever been shopping for just one product online, and then 30 minutes later, you’re at the checkout page and it’s (figuratively) filled to the brim?

It’s possible upselling and cross-selling strategies got you there.

Upselling is convincing a buyer to upgrade their product or buy a different version of it than the one they intended to purchase. Cross-selling is recommending complementary or related products alongside the one they’re buying.

Cross-selling strategies are used by most ecommerce platforms and Amazon is one great example of it. In the below example, Amazon recommends several other products to be bought along with the purchase of the Kindle Paperwhite.

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In the Action stage, marketing would be more promotional and focused on building customer temptation. A great tactic for this is to add urgency to the offer, as pictured in this example:

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9. Include a loyalty program invite

A loyalty program is a great way to incentivize your customers to transform a one-time purchase into a long-term relationship. You can encourage multiple purchases from customers by starting with the previously mentioned strategies; once you’ve confirmed regular purchase activity, position the loyalty program as an attractive offer.

This is an especially useful tactic with relatively new but active customers who have made repeat purchases. Consider exclusive promo codes or discount offers to loyalty program members. For a customer making regular purchases, they will see the savings as a valuable incentive to join.

When you promote your loyalty program, it will give your customers, both existing and new, a good reason to return to your site.

A great time to promote your loyalty program is right after a transaction. Customers from around the globe surveyed in 2020 said they are more willing to join the loyalty programs of brands they feel loyal to.

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In fact, nearly 68% said they would join the loyalty program of a brand they make frequent purchases from. This form of brand loyalty is greatly advantageous for ecommerce businesses.

Your turn to build an ecommerce sales funnel

Keep in mind: a robust ecommerce sales funnel is great to help you attract long-term customers and grow your returns. Make sure you think about each of your touchpoints with your customers when you’re doing that.

As a recap, here are the tips for creating an ecommerce sales funnel for your business:

1. Use Facebook ads to target your ideal demographic and grow brand awareness.
2. Create engaging content to familiarize your prospects with your brand values and product/service offerings.
3. Capture email addresses to gain customer insights and create opportunities for future engagement.
4. Leverage social proof and showcase your brand authenticity and its value to customers.
5. Optimize product pages to enhance the customer experience on your site.
6. Build on-site messages to entice customers into staying for a sale.
7. Send behavior-based emails to connect directly with your prospects.
8. Use upselling and cross-selling to encourage related purchases.
9. Include a loyalty program invite to transform one-time purchases into a long-term relationship opportunity.