How to build a sales funnel in WordPress & WooCommerce for free?

As online storekeepers looking to constantly grow brand awareness and increase sales, we’re always looking for ways to acquire new customers. Caught up in this expansive frenzy, it’s easy to overlook the importance of placing existing WordPress users or WooCommerce customers in a targeted e-mail sales funnel. So that it’ll keep them coming back to our stores for more of what they like.

WooCommerce doesn’t natively let you build a sales funnel based on emails.

Some e-mail marketing tools can help integrate this for ease of use. Let’s see a free email marketing plugin for building a sales funnel in WordPress and WooCommerce!

Table of contents

• WordPress Sales Funnel
• WordPress sales funnel with custom emails
• WooCommerce sales funnel: Personalized discounts
• Email sales funnel in WordPress and WooCommerce
• Build Email marketing lists first!
• WordPress funnel builder: Blog
• WordPress sales funnel: E-book
• Collect more customers for your WooCommerce email funnel
• Abandoned cart recovery: A WooCommerce sales funnel example
• Take care of your loyal customers!
• Send personalized e-mails

WordPress Sales Funnel

➡️ We previously discussed the importance of automating abandoned cart emails to reclaim and convert prospective customers into paying customers. By doing so, we ensure the continuation of the sales cycle. And increase the likelihood of paying customers turning into repeat customers.

✔️ We also discussed the importance of collecting customer e-mails for our mailing lists. Customer e-mails are an invaluable asset that provides us with long-lasting marketing value. And they should be collected at every possible junction.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. While superior product and service offerings may convert paying customers into repeat customers based on merit alone, we still want to reach out and give them a nudge in the right direction: back to our stores. As product vendors and service providers conducting business online, the most optimal way to do so is by placing our customers into sales funnels.

WordPress sales funnel with custom emails

✅ Sales & email funnels are essentially automated marketing workflows that spring into action, for both your general customer population and segmented populations. Examples of different customer segments include cart abandoners, high-spend customers, and those with an interest in specific product or service categories. Also, other niche segments that you can set based on your needs.

Download the free email marketing plugin to send emails and build your sales funnel in WordPress and WooCommerce.

WooCommerce sales funnel: Personalized discounts

✅ One highly useful e-mail funnel is unique, personalized discounts for customers. While still fully retaining automation, ShopMagic can send out personalized and exclusive special offers to customers while also integrating directly into WooCommerce’s existing coupon system.

👉 Some other examples of great e-mail funnels to have on hand include e-mail courses and/or valuable free content, seasonal and holiday sales, and limited-time price slashing to reward customers who are opening our marketing emails. Of course, our efforts are also heavily skewed toward outcome dependency. What are we trying to achieve? Get the free plugin to build email funnels.

Email sales funnel in WordPress and WooCommerce

Why does your store need one?

All of our time and attention focused on e-mail funnels are meant to produce optimized gains for our store. By cultivating and nurturing continuing relationships with our customers, we’re building up a solid foundation to continue growing our most crucial customer segment: loyal, repeat customers who will advocate our products to others.

We have an interested audience who is interested in staying aware of our new product offerings, and may even help us market by word of mouth (product and service advocacy) on places such as social media and niche interest forums, thus generating more interest in our products and services.

Aweber detailed the flow involved in creating and integrating a marketing funnel that would ultimately lead paying customers to become paying customers and advocate our products. Creating automated e-mail funnels to do the marketing for us is crucial to ensuring the sales cycle repeats itself. E-mail funnels also provide us with a low-input, low-cost way of creating a high return on our time and resource investment.

WordPress funnel builder – build email marketing lists first!

👉 The first step to successfully building an e-mail funnel for your marketing needs is to gather e-mails and build your marketing list.

By default, ShopMagic offers native support for Mailchimp. It’s another great e-mail marketing tool that is invaluable for e-mail collection and automated e-mail marketing.

⚠️ Keep in mind, we want to immediately add customers to our e-mail lists for future marketing opportunities that will yield greater than 0% conversions. Opting not to do so is tantamount to setting money on fire. The return on investment of an e-mail collection is higher than almost anything else you could choose to do as far as digital marketing opportunities go. We offer you the ability to collect this crucial marketing asset. It doesn’t matter if you use a standalone WordPress or run a WooCommerce store.

WordPress funnel builder: Blog

👉 To reduce the possibility of customers perceiving opting in to marketing emails as unattractive is to offer value directly.

There are many ways to do this. One great way to do this is to create a blog. You can run a blog only or do it as a support for WooCommerce product and service reviews. By doing so, customers get a more detailed look at your offerings that they might miss. Sometimes the brief product description is just not enough.

You can also link to your review blogs somewhere in your product description – this has the added benefit of internal cross-linking. It may also boost SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

WordPress sales funnel: E-book

📖 Another way to create a highly valuable content offering that prospective customers would trade their e-mails for is offering a free e-book. This could be a niche guide that helps them navigate the market or industry your store is part of.

The main point to take away is that e-mail collection is crucial. Of course, it can help you develop a better WordPress or WooCommerce sales funnel in the future. Whatever method you choose to use to give yourself an edge over your competitors in this realm will pay immeasurable dividends for your efforts in the future.

Get creative ✨!

Abandoned cart recovery: A WooCommerce sales funnel example

Next, we can use ShopMagic to send out automated abandoned cart e-mails to prospective customers. Let’s imagine they have already added items to their cart but were not ready to finish checking out.

The e-mail collection ShopMagic does for you is automated and streamlined into WooCommerce. It’s based on requiring customers to submit their emails to add items to their cart. To find out more about this feature, check out our guide to recovering abandoned carts and the subsequent abandoned cart email template tips that will set your store up for success.

Collect more customers for your WooCommerce email funnel

✅  Another great opportunity to build your e-mail marketing list for future customer placement in e-mail funnels if you choose not to opt-in to ShopMagic Abandoned Cart E-mail workflow is immediately upon customer purchase of a product or service from your store. By default, we want to offer customers the option to opt-in or out of marketing e-mails. This option should also be placed on the checkout page.

Take care of your loyal customers!

That’s the most receptive customer segment for your WooCommerce e-mail funnel!

We’ve already created a relationship with customers who have decided to purchase one or more of your product offerings 😊. These customers will be the most open to our marketing attempts. So it’s important to ensure that we place them in our e-mail funnels and marketing attempts. They are the most likely to stay repeat customers and become future advocates of our products and services. Of course, we need them to help us build a strong brand.

Send personalized e-mails

We want to continue to offer them value – this can be in one of many forms such as personalized discounts, pre-release beta tests (for software developers), pre-release discounted offers, and other creative ways of ensuring they stay onboard✨. If you have social media, offering them staggered discounts for liking one of your social media pages or re-posting a blog post/public discount can also have a great impact on increasing awareness for the wider public.

➡️ Brand loyalty is important, and we want to do all we can (within reason) to make sure our customers see the light. Don’t let them go unrewarded for supporting your business. If you’re running a low-margin business that has little room for proactively giving away discounts, do it anyway. Marketing and advertising costs are a major part of building brand awareness, but it’s difficult to buy brand loyalty – that can only be done by giving back in some ways to the very customer segment that is responsible for your continuing success. Word of mouth is powerful, and your customers will remember the gestures of good faith.

Integrating e-mail funnels into WooCommerce with ShopMagic

WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platform by a large margin, and we aim to provide users of WooCommerce options to create and maintain e-mail funnels at a low cost of entry.

Summary & more about ShopMagic

Today, you’ve learned how to build a sales funnel in WordPress and WooCommerce with ShopMagic (our email marketing plugin).

Visit the plugin page to see all features.

Finally, read our blog for more email marketing tips. If you have any questions let us know.