Hello, and welcome to another whiteboard session with me Andrew Maff. I am the founder and CEO of BlueTuskr. We're a full-service digital marketing company for e-commerce sellers. And today what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through the exact e-commerce marketing funnel that every e-commerce seller uses, I don't care who you are, you use this funnel. Now, it definitely adapts over time.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk through the beginning of it, and then exactly how it can adapt over time. So if you're really looking to start off your e-commerce company, or even if you're already well established, you really need to reassess where your funnel is, how people are getting to your site, and then of course, what their entire journey looks like. And the best way to do that, at least in my opinion, is to visualize it.
So what better way than on a whiteboard, so what we're gonna do is we're going to focus first on obviously, let's just assume we're driving people directly to the homepage, right, it doesn't really matter where we're driving them to, at least in this initial scenario, it could be a product page, it could be a landing page, it all kind of ends up working out the same, we're just gonna call this the homepage for now. This is obviously you know, the first place that we're going to send them to.
The Starter Funnel
So there are countless ways to send people to a homepage, homepage, right? So you have like, you have their top-of-funnel stuff. So you have like blog posts, and you have social media and you have email, and you have other search ads that you're doing, right? Like there are so many ways that you could be driving traffic to your website, that's not what this video is about.
So we're gonna pretend obviously, that you're doing an entire top-of-funnel strategy, you're pumping a bunch of traffic into your homepage, or product page or blog post or anything along those lines, right. And then obviously, what's the goal when someone gets to your homepage is for someone to actually kind of venture off and visit a product page, right, so now they're a product page, they're checking out the product page, they like what they see. And then the next thing we're going to do is they're going to add to the cart. So now they've added to their cart and things are looking great, and then they purchase and you've made your money and we're all rich, thank you for watching my video. Clearly, it is not that easy, right?
Adding an Upsell
So there are so many holes here where you can lose someone and there are so many opportunities where you can upsell someone and then the other thing I'm going to touch on is it shouldn't end here even though it's obvious this is the end goal think about if you just got a purchase from someone and then did nothing else after it it's like a one night stand it's you know, it was great for everyone but it's a little rude and you kind of want to make sure that you're continuing thereafter so we're gonna get into that too.
Upper-Funnel Strategy
So here's what we're thinking. So we have this upper-funnel strategy, we're sending the homepage and then they immediately go to the product page right but what if they didn't What if they didn't go to the product page? There are some retargeting options here that I would suggest right so you have your you know 10 different ways you can remarket people use social media, you can do display ads, you should have a browser abandonment email right so rather than email the guy told me that horrible handwriting and that this probably isn't a good idea so I'm definitely gonna keep doing these videos.
So basically someone lands the homepage nothing happens right or even someone lands on the product page. So what we're gonna do is we're going to retarget them in several different ways of trying to get them back to the homepage or back to the product page. The benefit about them coming to a product page is that we now know a little bit more about them we know what they're interested in.
So let's say that we sell I'm going to Kaiser, San Jose this let's say that we sell different markers right and I see that that this guy visited the green marker channel red or green marker product page so he's a degree marker one so what I'm going to do is I'm obviously going to retarget him with specific to green marker ads, right so we have browser abandonment email, we have all this stuff so I'm going to show him something a little bit more specific.
This is obviously a different funnel aspect of just kind of customizing these guys. From here right so we've now figured out a little bit more about what product they're interested in or if they visited a collection page if you're on Shopify or you know any kind of category page that you can obviously customize those ads based on the product that that person saw. And now obviously the goal being did they get over to the add to cart so this is very standard by now I hope you guys have gotten a little bit ahead of me.
Abandoned Cart
Okay, we're doing an abandoned cart ad so again, your social media can do this you have display ads, they can do this. You have your abandoned cart emails, they can do this through a ton of different things that we should be obviously retargeting to get them back to the cart. Just a little insight on this, you know, emails, maybe you're gonna send it an hour or two after they've abandoned it's always good. I mean, depending on your product, or maybe you're going to wait another 24 hours after that and offer them a discount, there's a ton of different things that you can do.
So what we've got so far is that we've done top of funnel into a homepage or trying to get them over a product page, maybe customizing the retargeting that we're doing to obviously get them back to then go to the next step, which is abandoned cart that they still haven't gotten this far, we're helping them out with some different ad copy and some different creative to get them to convert with their cart. And then, of course, the end goal with them being that they've purchased.
Now, there's another thing here that's always very interesting is like, Okay, great, they purchased Awesome, thank you shouldn't end there. And that's why this whole concept of like a funnel, right, so like you think of a funnel kind of looks like this. As you see, like, you know, we stopped all that we started last top of funnel stuff, we work our way down to more mid-funnel, which is your retargeting and your abandoned cart. And then of course, obviously closing, which is your bottom-funnel.
But it always seems to end here, and no one ever wants to talk about, like what happens when they've basically completed the funnel. So there's a bunch of different ways, right? So let's think about what the pros and cons are of advertising to them after or targeting them later on. So obviously, if you release a new product, or if you're doing a deal, or you're doing something along those lines, yeah, you're gonna want to probably eventually send like, you know, email, or maybe you're doing some social ads or something along those lines, to basically like retarget them after they've purchased to come back and you know, start the whole process over again.
Building a Community
But there are also some other ways that a lot of people don't talk about. And that's really like, essentially building a community. So when you think about marketing, and you think about the different ways that you need to get someone to really understand your brand is to really connect with them. So when you think about social media, social media is not exactly like, hey, look, what we have come by this think of social media as like a party.
When you go to a party, if all you did was talk about yourself, no one gave a shit about you, and they're gonna want to ignore you because you're annoying. But if all you did is talk about them, they're gonna love you, because like, Oh, this guy's really interested in what I have to say. And it makes me feel good. So obviously, you're going to continue. So with social media, it's a similar concept.
If you can build that audience of Okay, here's a group that I always talk to, this is something different. So now we're thinking about, okay, what if we started sending emails, or even ads to them to join? I don't know, a Facebook group, or an exclusive membership that you offer, where they get exclusive content or something like that? Or what about a Slack workspace? Or what about a newsletter that offers different things.
So you're getting all these different areas where all of a sudden, now you're gaining. Facebook group buys, just to get them on Facebook and you reach out to my everyone membership, chances are, they're part of your email list or newsletter part of your email list. Now you can reach them however you want. slack workspaces Slack, like there are so many different ways that you can do this. Now you also have things out there like discord and you know, there's 10 other ways that you can basically own the data and own the group that you've developed.
So, I really kind of allow this big top-of-funnel strategy to narrow down and I know I've kind of gone off on a little bit of a rant here, but basically like this is this right here is your standard e-commerce funnel that everyone does. This is a little bit different. Now to expand upon this is to actually personalize a little bit more in these beginning spots here.
So instead of a homepage, what if we're sending people to let's say, a landing page, right, so now I have one less thing that I need them to do because they're just going to go straight to adding to the cart, or if this is, you know, if you're a little bit more b2b commerce and then this is a lead, then Okay, then we're going this is a little bit easier because all you're asking for is an email or something along those lines. But otherwise, e-commerce traditional DTC, you're adding to cart right, and then which case they're going to purchase.
So this is obviously a little bit more different, where you're obviously going to want to make sure all this top-of-funnel stuff is a little bit more related to whatever your main page that you're first sending them to is. Outside of that, you could also think about skipping over the homepage and going straight to the original product page that you had there. So this is a very specific email or this is very specific social media. Maybe you want to send them straight to a product page or straight to a collections page.
Replicate The Funnel
Then this is where you start to just replicate this entire funnel for different strategies like okay, here's the funnel for this product. Here's the funnel for this landing page. Here's the funnel for this collection page and you start to build it out and then you can map out here like okay, what is the top of funnel strategy that we're doing to drive traffic here? What is the middle funnel? What's the retargeting of the abandoned cart that we've set up and this gets so much more intricate.
This is a very high-level way to review the funnel that you're doing but if you think about like, Okay, how much time passed how many retargeting ads? Are we going to show them? How long has it been since they've been in their cart? Do we want to continue to retarget them with ads? Do we want to send multiple emails so there's a lot of other conversation that comes out of this?
But when you're first setting things up, it is very simple. It is straight homepage product page cart checkout top-funnel, mid-funnel, lower funnel, close and then ideally you're thinking about after funnel marketing so this is kind of where the whole flywheel thing comes into play where they talk about like okay taking this and sending them back here and then it's just a giant circle and you can see how pretty this board gets after a while.
But basically, that's the entire process. So this really is the broken down real high-level visualization of exactly how every e-commerce seller should be setting up their marketing funnels. Now whether you're saying funnels are dead and it's all about the flywheel now or I don't care we can be talking about this in 2030 and you can come up with different things to call it but at the end of the day, it is still essentially a funnel but like I said, this is exactly how you should set this up and then it's as simple as just taking this and utilizing it almost like a template and duplicating it for different products or different landing pages or anything like that.
That's all I wanted to cover today obviously I appreciate everyone joining make sure you comment to let me know if you agree to disagree. I love the debate or comment let me know what other videos you'd like us to cover but otherwise per usual please rate review subscribe. We come out with these at least on a weekly basis. And if you have any questions, feel free to comment but as usual, appreciate your comment and I will see you next time.
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