If you own a small business and use self-hosted WordPress, it’s important to focus on increasing your customer base and generating repeated sales. To achieve this, building a sales funnel on your WordPress and/or WooCommerce site is crucial.
With the global economy entering a period of economic slowdown, WordPress-based online businesses need to use every conversion tactic to keep earning revenue.
In this post, you’ll learn what sales funnels are, and how to build one on your WordPress site. A well-built sales funnel will help grab the user’s attention, pique their interest, appeal to their desire, and most importantly, convert them into consistent buyers.
Let’s get right to it!
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel refers to a set of actions taken by potential customers (leads) on a marketing platform like a website before becoming paying customers.
Marketers have different types of sales funnels that align with their products and services. However, they usually follow a series of activities or steps:
- Awareness: When the consumer becomes aware of your product or brand.
- Interest: When your website visitors start to develop an interest in your product/brand benefits.
- Desire: The consumer develops a fondness or an attachment toward your product or brand.
- Action: This is when a visitor either subscribes to your email, attempts to try your product, or even purchases it.
Why are sales funnels so effective?
Sales funnels are incredibly effective because they help you enhance your customers’ experience and identify what actions you need to take at each stage.
By analyzing the different stages of your sales funnel, you can improve your marketing strategies and boost your conversion rate. This will ultimately help you sell your products or services more successfully.
What are the steps within a WordPress sales funnel?
If you are a WordPress/WooCommerce user, you need to follow a series of steps known as AIDA Sales Funnel to ensure that your products or services get sold repeatedly. It is essential to set up your sales funnel campaigns correctly on your WordPress site.
The steps within a sales funnel are:
- Awareness: You have to unleash your marketing potential by creating engaging blog posts, sales pages, videos, audio, etc, to gain lots of viewers, and attract visitors to your site regarding your product offerings.
- Interest: You begin to attract prospects to your brand.
- Desire: You begin to generate potential leads.
- Action: Your leads begin to patronize your products and services.
What do you need to build a WordPress sales funnel?
Marketers using WordPress and WooCommerce rely on various tools to build sales funnels. In this article, I will show you the necessary tools to effectively build a sales funnel with WordPress.
They are:
- A WordPress website that serves as an excellent foundation for your sales funnel.
- A marketing plan with defined goals.
- Marketing content to support every stage of the funnel.
- An eCommerce plugin such as WooCommerce to set up an online store on your WordPress site.
- A WordPress sales funnel plugin (CartFlows).
- A WordPress page builder like SeedProd to design high-converting landing pages for product service-based WordPress sites.
- A Newsletter plugin (Mailpoet).
- Analytics and tracking tools.
Why is Cartflows regarded as the best sales funnel builder for WordPress and WooCommerce websites?
CartFlows is one of the best sales funnel plugins you can find in the WordPress repository. It offers distinct benefits to all types of businesses and marketers who use WordPress and WooCommerce. It is an all-in-one sales funnel builder plugin that helps optimize WordPress sites and WooCommerce stores for selling.
With its single solution, you can achieve faster results without having to put in too much effort. Although there is a paid premium version available, the main WordPress plugin is free and offers a lot of features too.
The free version of CartFlows allows you to have up to three sales funnels, which is ideal for most small businesses.
With CartFlows, online marketers can:
- Use fully customizable high-conversion sales funnel templates that boost sales.
- Add one-click upsells to increase the average order value of purchases.
- Add compelling offers like combos, discounts, and more on the checkout page.
- Use A/B testing to optimize conversions.
- And so much more!
Let’s learn how to integrate this must-have plugin into your WordPress or WooCommerce website in the next section, now that you’ve seen its benefits.
How to Create an Effective Sales Funnel in WordPress and WooCommerce with Cartflows
Let me walk you through the process of building a sales funnel in WordPress using one of the top sales funnel plugins available, CartFlows. As I’ve previously explained the significance of having a sales funnel builder on your WordPress site, let me show you how it can be achieved.
Step 1: Set up an Online Store with WooCommerce on your WordPress site
If you already have a WordPress site or a WooCommerce store up and running, you can skip step one. However, if you’re starting a new online store, it’s recommended that you purchase a WooCommerce hosting plan from Bluehost.
This plan is designed to help you scale your eCommerce business, especially if you have a lot of products and services to manage. It’s very easy to set up and cost-effective when done with WordPress.
After purchasing your WooCommerce hosting account, Install WordPress then go ahead and start to build a sales funnel by adding products to your store.
These products will be included in your sales funnel. If you need more help with the initial steps of creating your eCommerce site, check out our full WooCommerce setup guide.
Step 2: Install And Activate CartFlows WordPress Plugin to Create A Sales Funnel
Once your WooCommerce store is up and running, install and activate CartFlows using its setup wizard as seen below:
In the next setup step, select your preferred page builder and click the Save and Continue buttons as indicated below. Don’t worry if your page builder is not on the list, as CartFlows works well with all popular page builders.
Choose your preferred store checkout design from the options below. You can customize the colours, and text, and even select a new design later.
After completing the wizard setup, you will be prompted to create your first flow and a corresponding landing page.
Step 3: Design Your Landing Page, Checkout & Thank You Pages
One option is to use a pre-existing landing page template provided by CartFlows. Here are the steps to do so:
To create your first sales funnel, navigate to CartFlows > Flows. Click Add New to get started.
To create a successful WordPress sales funnel, you need to follow a set of steps and pages, such as the Landing page, Checkout page, and Thank You page.
You can choose from a variety of templates available and click on the Import button to go to the flow editing screen. If you prefer, you can edit any of the pre-made templates to suit your needs. For instance, you can import the protein supplement template and customize it to your liking.
Lastly, you can rearrange the sales funnel pages as you wish by dragging and also adding your own steps with the Add New Step button.
As for the checkout page, you can modify it by visiting the Checkout Settings where you can link your products or a specific product to this page.
Don’t forget to save your changes once you’re done with each funnel setup.
Step 4: Optimize your WordPress sales funnel with A/B Testing (Optional)
Once you have created your sales funnel, it is advisable to set up split testing in CartFlows. This feature is widely used by experienced marketers to optimize their sales funnels.
Split testing (also known as A/B testing) enables you to test various approaches and analyze the results to determine which one leads to more conversions. This way, you can identify the most effective method to attract and retain visitors.
Visit CartFlows > Flows and open up your flow. Then, click the three dots next to any page you want to split test and click A/B Test.
Note: To enable Split Testing in CartFlows, you would need to upgrade to a Pro version.
Step 5: Add Google Analytics To your Sales Funnels in CartFlows
To accurately track conversion rates for each page, you can use this procedure in combination with the Analytics tab.
To do this, you’ll need to connect your Google Analytics to CartFlows. This will allow you to track important events in your sales funnel such as checkout, add to cart, and opt-in leads.
Go to CartFlow > Settings and select the Google Analytics tab, tick the Enable button to enter your Analytics ID and other parameters.
Begin creating free funnels for your WordPress and WooCommerce websites today!
Creating sales funnels is crucial to increase conversions. It is a must-have strategy for any online business, regardless of whether you sell physical products or not.
If you are a WordPress user, then CartFlows is the best sales funnel builder available for both WordPress and WooCommerce platforms.
CartFlows has been designed specifically for busy store owners who want to increase their WooCommerce checkout conversions with minimal effort required.
With CartFlows, you can easily create unlimited sales funnels in WordPress to improve your store’s AOV (Average Order Value) and much more.
Disclosure: We get commissions for purchases made through referral links in this post.
