Sales channels are one of the most profitable concepts that an entrepreneur can master, as converting someone into a paying customer requires several steps.
What are sales channels and how do they work?
Sales channels are a series of strategic relationship-building experiences that convert unaware prospects into paying customers through an automated process. The “channel” is a visualization of the overall journey, where traffic flows from your target audience and high-value customers exit from the other side.
When the average conversion rate of an e-commerce site is below 3%, the sales channel is the method that helps you create, capture, grow, and reliably convert purchase intent by establishing a conversion pathway.
The channel starts from the moment customers become aware of your brand and continues until they purchase a product and become advocates for your business.
At a high level, sales channels consist of three parts:
Top of Funnel (ToFu):
The target audience that currently has no intention of buying from you.
Middle of Funnel (MoFu):
Prospects who have visited your site and are considering products or services similar to those you sell.
Bottom of Funnel (BoFu):
New and existing customers who are ready to purchase from you with the right push.
You can create sales channels for a single product, a complete range, or a specific target audience. If you don’t have the budget to support multiple channels, you can focus on creating a single sales channel for your flagship product. Regardless, sales channels work best when they meet buyers’ needs at each stage with relevant content and calls to action.
An example of a sales channel:
For instance, you see an ad on Instagram for a new pair of sneakers from a brand you’ve never heard of before. You’re part of their target audience, so you’re naturally intrigued. You click “Learn More” to check out the company’s website. Now you’re a prospect. When you leave the site, you get a pop-up window offering you a 10% discount if you subscribe to the newsletter. You enter your email. Now you’re a lead. After seven days, you receive an email reminding you of the 10% discount, along with testimonials from happy customers. You decide to buy the shoes and become a new customer. You receive another email five days later asking you to leave a review and share a picture on Instagram and tag the brand. You do both and also purchase a recommended pair of shorts from the email because you loved the shoes, becoming an advocate and a repeat customer. The cycle continues.
This is how sales channels work in practice. They are pre-planned stages carried out by the company up to the purchase and also include customer retention tactics to encourage repeat purchases and support.
Stages of the Sales Funnel: The AIDA Framework
The AIDA framework – Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action – is a model of the sales funnel that represents the consumer’s thought process at each stage of the funnel. Many e-commerce brands start with this buying funnel as it is easy to implement and build upon.
The AIDA framework helps you identify what buyers need at each stage of the funnel to deliver the right content and call to action.
Let’s take a look at the four stages of the sales funnel, with examples of how to apply them to your online business:
Awareness
The awareness stage is when you capture the attention of the potential customer. It can be an ad, a YouTube video, an Instagram post, a recommendation from a friend, or any other connection to your brand or products.
In this first stage, focus on three things:
- Making buyers aware of your products and services.
- Developing a marketing and communication strategy.
- Creating messaging that resonates with your target audience.
Your goal is to convince the potential customer to visit your site and engage with your brand. People who are at the top of your funnel are not interested in product information. They are often browsing randomly and come across your brand.
The content
It’s very important here. You want to create non-promotional lead generation content at this stage, such as:
- Informational videos
- TikTok videos
- Instagram stories and posts
- Google Shopping or Instagram or Facebook ads
- Podcasts
- Collaborations with influencers
- “About Us” pages
- Blog articles
Let’s take an example from a sales channel:
For instance, Great Jones offers cooking equipment for home chefs with a mission to empower people on their cooking journeys. Their blog, Digest, is prominently featured in the navigation menu of their e-commerce store. Digest includes delicious recipes, interviews with various chefs, and Great Jones products you can use to prepare the dish.
The blog provides a sense of community for readers, making them feel like they are in a home kitchen rather than reading a blog. They can learn about different cultures, recipes, and stories and get inspiration for their next big dish. It’s a great asset at the top of the funnel that attracts the right customers, builds trust, and showcases the products in the background.
Interest
In the interest stage, prospects are researching and comparing your products to those of other brands. You will begin to build a relationship with them and learn about their problems and goals.
The areas to focus on in this stage are:
- Addressing potential customers’ problems related to your products.
- Creating content that supports prospects in their purchasing decision.
- Showcasing social proof and testimonials.
- Making product information easy to find and read through text and video.
Your goal here is to help shoppers make informed decisions and provide assistance, establishing yourself as an expert in the field. The content you create here should be more in-depth. Why? Because you are proving that you are the best solution for the customers.
This stage is also a good opportunity to capture leads for remarketing using lead magnets such as:
- Interactive content like quizzes and calculators.
- Downloadable files like checklists and eBooks.
- Case studies of customers.
- Comparison pages.
- Webinars or live-stream events on social media.
For instance, Beardbrand generates interest through its interactive quiz. Visitors can discover the types of beards they have through personalized questions on their website.
The quiz asks a series of questions related to the visitor’s lifestyle and needs, such as “What activity do you prefer to do most?” and “What style of facial hair do you want?” To get your quiz results, Beardbrand asks the customer to enter their email address, which also subscribes them to its marketing messages.
Once you enter your email address, you will be directed to a landing page where you will find a description of your hair type along with relevant products to match it.
Desire
In this third stage of the sales funnel, individuals are ready to buy. They know that there is a problem that needs to be solved and are looking for the best solution.
Ask yourself the following questions when planning for this stage:
- What makes my product desirable?
- How will I follow up with qualified leads?
- How can I build an emotional connection with prospects (live chat, email, texting, tips and advice)?
This is where you promote your best offers, whether it’s free shipping, discount codes, or free gifts. Your goal is to make your products so desirable that prospects can’t refuse them.
Action
The final stage is where the prospect decides whether or not to purchase your product. Examine where to place calls to action and where they should be positioned on your product pages. Make it easy for potential customers to reach out to you if they have any hesitations or questions.
Whether you are in e-commerce or business-to-business sales, the sales funnel is something we all need to build. But it doesn’t stop there. Once a customer takes action, you will need to focus on retaining them (i.e., keeping them happy and engaged) so they come back to buy again and again.
How to Create an Effective E-commerce Sales Funnel
You are…
brands attract traffic from ads and emails directly to their product offer pages as a primary method for generating sales. Some brands also include collection pages, pre-sale articles, and other stops along the way. But the one controlled channel is the single-page channel.
This is why building a reliable sales funnel starts with optimizing the product offer page.
Here’s a process for designing an e-commerce product page that attracts and converts:
1. Decide on the page design
The first step in designing a converting and attractive e-commerce product page is to determine the overall page design. You have three basic designs to choose from:
- Traditional e-commerce product page
- Long-form e-commerce product page
- Small product site
This step is relatively straightforward. Ask yourself: Is there a lot to say about this product?
If the answer is no, you likely want to stick with the traditional product page. This is often the case for many easily understood or highly visual products, such as clothing or sunglasses, like the example from Hawkers below.
But if the answer is yes, and there’s much to say about this product, you’ll want to use a long-form product page or a small product site. This is usually the case when you have stories to tell, technology to explain, benefits to reveal, or objections to overcome.
For example, Boosted Boards clearly showcases its electric skateboards on this long-form product page:
The only real difference between the long-form page and the small site is how the content is organized. In the long-form design, everything is placed on one long page. With the small product site, the same content is presented across several shorter pages that are linked to each other and easy for the shopper to navigate.
Both designs can be extremely effective, so you can’t go wrong by choosing one.
The process:
Decide on the design for your e-commerce product page.
2. Format the header
The header is a very important part of any product page design. So while we’re talking about navigation links, let’s discuss it for a few minutes.
The header is simply the top part of your site. It’s where your logo, site menu, shopping cart, and any other important links or information you want to have on every page usually reside. When formatting your site’s header, here are some tips that can help improve your conversion rate:
- Keep it slim and showcase your logo
- Ensure the header is important, but it should not overwhelm the page content. You should try to make your header as small as possible to allow for the largest viewing area.
- Make sure there is a link to the shopping cart. If you have an e-commerce store, you should place a link to the shopping cart in the header on both desktop and mobile. People expect it. They anticipate it. And if you don’t include it in your header, there’s a chance they will feel frustrated trying to find their shopping cart and leave without completing their purchase.
- You can even add a notification displaying the current number of items in the shopping cart, like M.Gemi does here:
- You’ll want this on your mobile site too. You should also ensure your brand logo is present on desktop.
- Ensure your brand logo is on desktop
- A good logo can help reinforce your brand identity. So if you have one, place it in your desktop header. Here’s an example from BOOM! by Cindy Joseph:
- But
- Since your header is a very visible part of your site, it’s also a great place to promote an offer such as:
- Free shipping threshold
- Limited-time offer
- Incentive to subscribe to the email
- In this example, Keeps uses the header bar to promote a special registration offer.
- Meanwhile, BOOM! includes a community newsletter subscription button in its header.
- On your mobile site where space is more limited, another option is to put the email subscription inside a pop-up.
- When BOOM! added this call to action to its header, it saw a 30% increase in email subscribers – a noteworthy addition to your e-commerce product page design!
- Make your links easy to read.
- A 2016 eye-tracking study found that fonts sized 18 points or larger are best for online reading. Make sure to use a large, easy-to-read font and a color that stands out from the background.
- Pay special attention to the mobile site menu. Many businesses ignore this part of their site, missing the opportunity to convey value and include additional calls to action.
- Hims effectively utilizes its navigation space with larger links that expand to sublists, and a prominent call to action at the bottom:
- Large links are particularly important on mobile, as it’s easy to accidentally click the wrong link. Keeping links large, with space between them, helps reduce this frustrating experience.
- Make your header “sticky.”
- A “sticky” header, like the one on Hims’ mobile site, is one that stays at the top of the page. So when you scroll down, the header is always there at the top.
- Sticky headers work especially well on long product pages because you can keep a call to action on the screen at all times.
On mobile, it’s better to skip the logo. Screen space is very limited and valuable. Include a call to action to subscribe to the email or make a purchase.
The Process:
Format your main page header.
3. Choose a Featured Testimonial
Now it’s time to choose a featured testimonial. This is different from reviews. You still want a reviews section with lots and lots of people saying how much they love your product.
But what we’re talking about here is one standout testimonial that you place in your checkout box. It will be a very prominent customer quote, so make sure it’s good.
Why do you want to add a featured testimonial to your product? Because it improves your conversion rate.
BOOM! tested that. They took their original checkout box, which looked like this:
and tested it against this version:
The only difference is that one version has the product name on top, while the other uses a featured testimonial.
Adding the testimonial increased the conversion rate by 5.25% and average revenue per user by $1.25. BOOM! retested this multiple times, and the testimonial won each time.
This shows how important it is to use social proof on your product page.
Some tips for choosing the right featured testimonial:
- Choose a testimonial that enthusiastically endorses the product. It seems obvious, but this should be one of the best quotes you can find about your product.
- Keep it short. Because if it’s too long, people will skip over it. The image below is a great example of a concise and effective testimonial.
- Choose a testimonial from the larger category of your target customers. If your purchases are 75% female and 25% male, use a testimonial from a woman. You can’t rotate this featured testimonial, so make the most of it by having it represent your most common buyers.
The Process:
Choose a featured testimonial for your product page.
4. Specify Product Display Images
Now it’s time to add product images to your product page design.
Do not
Online shoppers can touch and examine your product themselves. They must rely on your images to give them a good idea of the actual product.
In other words, your images represent the value and quality of the product, just like MVMT watches do here:
According to Shopify’s survey on customer trust signals, images are consistently rated as a “must-have” when making online purchasing decisions.
So it’s no surprise that product page images get a lot of engagement. Here’s an example of harnessing heat to prove that:
Because your images get a lot of attention, they should be as good as possible. There are generally two types of product images:
- Pure product images. These images show the product itself against a clean white background (or a background of another color).
- Contextual/product-in-use images
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/sales-funnel
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