How to Optimize Marketing Funnel for Your Shopify Growth Strategy

Is the growth of your Shopify business stuck at a point? Want to find the ‘Aha Moment!’ after which your eCommerce business will skyrocket exponentially? In this blog, we will talk about marketing funnels, a powerful tool that can drive your Shopify growth strategy. Plus, you will learn how to optimize marketing funnel for the best results. So, let’s get started.

What Are Marketing Funnels? Why They Are Crucial for Shopify Growth & Success

A marketing funnel is a systemic approach or framework that details the journey of capturing customers, making sales, retaining customers after purchase and so on. Using marketing funnels properly can play a key role in driving your business growth.

Now, what are the major benefits of using a marketing funnel in your Shopify business strategy? Here are some of the reasons why it can be a great Shopify hack:

• Based on a Systematic Approach: Marketing funnels are frameworks that adopt a strategic approach and do not rely on luck.
• Contains Easily Measurable Steps: You can measure every major stage of the customer journey for insightful analytics.
• Boosts Conversions: Implementing marketing funnels in your strategy can help increase the conversion rate.
• Helps Predict Sales: Once you have a marketing funnel in place, you can accurately forecast your sales.
• Helps Optimize Marketing Strategy: Marketing funnels can help you optimize your marketing strategy.
• Transforms Leads into Revenues: You get a money machine that converts customer interest into income.

Traditional vs Modern Marketing Funnels

Marketing funnel models have evolved over time. So today, you will find many different types with their own pros and cons. Traditional marketing funnel models include the AIDA model. Here is the breakdown of this well-known model:

• Awareness: Creating brand awareness through your products.
• Interest: Encouraging potential customers to research your products further.
• Desire: Creating an emotional connection with the audience so they want your products.
• Action: Taking the potential customers to the ‘interaction’ stage.

However, traditional models like this might not be very effective for modern Shopify businesses. Let us take a look at the AIDA model itself. We do not find any mention of post-purchase steps like customer retention, upselling activities and others in this model.

This is why more modern marketing funnel models like the Hourglass Model are more relevant for businesses today. Here are the 8 different steps covered in this model:

• Awareness
• Engagement
• Subscription
• Purchase
• Excitement
• Expansion
• Retention
• Advocacy

As you can see, this model defines the most important pre-purchase steps and covers crucial post-purchase steps as well. So, adopting a modern marketing funnel model like the Hourglass Model will be more beneficial for your Shopify growth strategy if optimized properly.

How to Optimize Marketing Funnels for Shopify: Exploring the 5 Optimization Steps

Meet Max. He just started his Shopify journey by setting up a t-shirt store. Now, the question arises: how can Max optimize his marketing funnel for the best possible results? To answer this, we will explore 5 different marketing funnel optimization steps:

• Step 1: Optimize your lead magnets
• Step 2: Implement tripwires
• Step 3: Offer your core product
• Step 4: Utilize profit maximizer
• Step 5: Create a retention path for customers

Step 1: Optimize Your Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information, like email address, name, phone number etc. The goal of this step is to maximize the list for retargeting. Lead magnets are specific, so they solve specific problems for specific segments of the market through offering:

• Specific Promise
• Specific Example
• Specific Shortcut
• Specific Question
• Specific Discount

Here are a few examples of some good lead magnets:

• 7 Digital Marketing Hacks to Grow Your Business – An ebook promoted within a blog or digital ads to collect names and email IDs
• How to Generate 200K+ Visitors a Month without Spending a Dollar on Ads – A webinar that is promoted in the YouTube channel or video descriptions
• Google Drive’s 15GB free storage – A part of Google Drive’s freemium model, which is a real-life example

Now, here is a lead magnet that Max can use for his t-shirt business:

• 10+ T-Shirt Styling Tips for This Summer – A mini ebook that is promoted in a form placed within an article of Max’s Shopify store

Note: To bring more traffic to his article with the lead magnet, Max can use StoreSEO, an all-in-one Shopify SEO solution powered by AI. The app offers on-page optimization, SEO schema options, multilingual SEO, Google Analytics integration and more. So, it can be a very useful tool for generating leads organically.

Lead magnets work best among a starving crowd. So instead of just randomly targeting various audience groups, find starving crowds where lead magnets will work the best. Here are 4 indicators of such an audience:

• Massive Pain: Your target audience should have a significant pain point or need that your offerings can address.
• Purchasing Power: Potential customers within your target group should be able to purchase your products.
• Easy to Target: Your target audience should not pose great challenges when it comes to targeting them.
• Growing: Your target audience should ideally be part of a growing market, not a declining one.

Step 2: Implement Tripwires

The goal of Tripwire is to change the relationship from prospect to client or from lead to user or customer. Tripwire is a small, irresistible portion of the product, but not the entire product. For example, you are selling a 12-module course at $200. However, using a tripwire, your customers can access the first 3 modules for only $20. This is also called a splinter offer, which is one of the best ways of setting tripwires and does not sell the whole product.

The most common way to make tripwire irresistible is to sell at cost or sometimes at a loss. But remember that a tripwire is not a coupon or regular discount. So, when you are selling the entire $200 course at $180 ($20 discount), you are providing a regular discount offer, which is different from the tripwire example discussed above. 

Now, Max can trigger a tripwire with his Shopify store as well. Suppose, he sells a bundle of 2 t-shirts, 1 cap and 1 shorts at $150. Max can offer to sell the cap at just $5, which will act as a tripwire. 

What about other niches? Well, the good news is that you can trigger tripwires across various niches and product types. Take a look at the major types of tripwire:

1. Physical premium
2. Small but critical offering
3. Book or report
4. Paid or free webinar
5. Paid or free trial
6. Software or plugin

So, why set tripwires? Let us take a quick look at how tripwires help optimize your marketing funnel:

• Boosts intimacy with your target audience
• Enhances money and time commitment from potential customers
• Taps into the emotional motive behind the purchase

And how do you exactly create tripwires? Follow these steps to set high-converting tripwires efficiently for your Shopify store:

• Stage 1: Examine your product line
• Stage 2: Find the product with the most sales
• Stage 3: Think of a relevant tripwire related to the product
• Stage 4: Decide on the tripwire type
• Stage 5: Determine the name
• Stage 6: Set the price 
• Stage 7: Design the tripwire
• Stage 8: Start promoting
• Stage 9: Have an upsell system
• Stage 10: Optimize the tripwire further as needed

Step 3: Offer Your Core Product

The core product is the flagship product or products that your business is offering, which might change over time. Once you provide immense value with lead magnets and tripwires, customers will be interested in buying your core products. Here are the major features of a core product:

• In some cases, sales from core products will make you profitable
• Core products hyper-deliver and provide immense value
• Core products should not be promoted to cold prospects who are not familiar with your offerings or have not yet tried them

In Max’s scenario, his core product can be 180 GSM lightweight fabric t-shirts with limited edition designs. Once enough hype is created among his audience via lead magnets and tripwires, he will find more success with his core product sales.

Step 4: Utilize Profit Maximizer

Profit maximizer, as the name suggests, maximizes the profits made by the business after the purchase stage. Cross-selling or upselling activities are some of the best profit maximizers. In this step, you get to increase the immediate or lifetime customer value.

For example, once your customer has bought a camera from your store, you can suggest additional products like lenses, memory cards and bags as profit maximizers. In a similar way, Max can push products like hangers and stain removers once a customer has purchased t-shirts from his store.

Step 5: Create a Retention Path for Customers

Finally, you should formulate a pathway for retaining your customers. The single biggest business expense is the cost of acquiring a new customer. So, retaining an existing customer will always be more cost-efficient than acquiring new ones.

Stay in touch with the customers after the purchase stage. Find out if they are facing any issues. Maintain communication via calls, emails, docs, articles and other channels to discover if they are interested in newer features or solutions.

When it comes to Max, he can create a retention path by sending automated review collection emails to customers using an app like TrustSync. With this approach, he will be able to gather his customers’ feedback and collect reviews for popular platforms like Google Reviews, Etsy, Trustpilot and more.

Optimize the Marketing Funnel of Your Shopify Business & Achieve Success

A marketing funnel can be one of the best tools for elevating your Shopify business growth. Following the optimization steps explained in this blog, you get to make the most out of this handy tool. And take inspiration from different industries and niches to create a powerful strategy that maximizes your sales.

Subscribe to our blogs for more insightful articles like this one. And feel free to contact our support team if you have any queries.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Want to find out more? Explore the following FAQs section, where we will discuss various important questions related to the topic.

1. What are the basics of business growth?

Jay Abraham, who is one of the world’s highest paid marketing consultants, has said that the only 3 ways to grow any business are the following: 

• Increase the number of clients
• Increase the average transaction value of clients
• Increase the number of transactions per client

These ways form the Irrefutable Law of Business Growth. Every marketing funnel, tool or optimization technique that you adopt should ideally follow this law.

2. Which is better between AIDA and the Hourglass Model?

AIDA is a more traditional marketing funnel model that covers the customer journey from Attention & Interest to Desire and Action. On the other hand, the Hourglass Model consists of Awareness, Engagement, Subscription, Purchase, Excitement, Expansion, Retention and Advocacy. In this model, the funnel covers both pre-purchase and post-purchase stages.

3. What features should a good deal magnet have?

Good lead magnets are irresistible and should be offered to a starving crowd. They are also specific, so they solve specific problems for specific segments of the market by offering:

• Specific promise
• Specific example
• Specific shortcut
• Specific question
• Specific discount

4. Is a tripwire the same as a regular discount offer or coupon?

No. Tripwire is a small, irresistible portion of the product, but not the entire product. For example, you are selling a 5-part book at $60. But with your tripwire, customers can read the first part at $5 only, which is not the complete product.

Meanwhile, regular discounts or coupons reduce a portion of the original price. Suppose, you are selling your 5-part book priced at $60 at a 20% discount. So, you are selling the entire product at just $48.

5. Can you recommend a few more useful Shopify apps other than StoreSEO and TrustSync?

Sure. Besides StoreSEO and TrustSync, you can also check out the following apps that can be great for your Shopify store:

• BetterDocs for Shopify: Easily create docs in your Shopify store using AI
• StoreFAQ: Build FAQs in your shop with various options
• EasyFlow: Add unlimited options and option sets to your Shopify products