How to Build a Solid Sales Funnel for Your WordPress Website

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WordPress powers 39.5% of all the websites on the Internet and sales funnels are one of the most effective ways to guide potential customers toward a purchase.

Unfortunately, it can be a little tricky to design one on WordPress.

In this post, we’ll teach you how to build a sales funnel for your WordPress website.

Let’s begin!

1. What is a sales funnel and why do you need one?

A sales funnel is a marketing term that defines the customers’ journey from the moment they find your brand to when they make a purchase.

It’s a process all your paying customers go through and, if optimized, it’ll make the journey more comfortable leading to more sales.

As the term implies — numerous people enter the funnel, but only a fraction of them will make a purchase.

Each funnel section will push the most qualified leads to the next stage and filter out those who aren’t a fit for your offer.

According to the AIDA method, the customer journey is divided into 4 stages:

1. Awareness — A potential customer finds your brand

2. Interest — The customer wants to know more about your business

3. Desire — The seller convinces the lead that they need the product

4. Action — The lead completes the checkout process and becomes a customer

Sometimes a 5th stage is added:

5. Retention — You prepare strategies to bring back existing customers and persuade them to purchase more products

New leads will always go through the customer journey, so having a solid sales funnel will make it smoother and will help you visualize the whole process.

WordPress comes with numerous free plugins, some of which specialize in generating leads and building sales funnels — making the process much simpler.

With frequent updates and new plugins being added, WordPress’ popularity and familiarity are understandable.

2. What you’ll need to build a sales funnel on WordPress

Source: ElegantThemes.com

There are a few things you’ll have to do before you create a sales funnel in WordPress, especially if you have a new website.

Some necessary components have to be in place or you won’t be able to do anything.

Keep reading to find out all about them.

2.1. Setting up the foundation

These are the main steps you’ll have to take to get your WordPress online store and sales funnel up and running.

To set up the foundation you only need 2 things:

1. Dedicated WordPress hosting — This is where your WordPress website will be located.

A lot of hosting platforms offer shared hosting as well as WordPress hosting.

We recommend picking the WordPress hosting option for the following reasons:

The servers are dedicated to providing the best WordPress experience
You have more space than on a shared hosting option
WordPress hosting servers often provide support and security measures tailored for a CMS
Since the servers are optimized for WordPress, they have better loading speeds
Some WordPress hosts will back up your website for you

There are several hosting platforms for WordPress, so pick one that fits your needs and budget.

2. A suitable ecommerce theme — Pick a theme that’s attractive, easy to navigate, lightweight, and customizable.

You can find a lot of fitting themes in the WordPress Repository as well as in ThemeForest.

Some popular ecommerce themes are:

Savoy — A modern and minimalist design that focuses on showing your products
Flatsome — A modern theme with a drag-and-drop page builder, SEO-optimized code, and a built-in wish list
Porto — An extremely customizable theme that’s optimized to load fast

Once you have the foundations ready, you’ll need to install the tools for building your WordPress site and sales funnel.

2.2. Install the tools you’ll need

Building a sales funnel in WordPress is a little different than on a dedicated platform because WordPress needs third-party tools/plugins to access those functions.

The tools you’ll need are:

WooCommerce — An ecommerce plugin that will let you configure store details, payment methods, and shipping information for your sales page
CartFlows — A dedicated sales funnel builder plugin to guide customers through the sales process
Elementor — A page builder to design all your pages (landing pages, sales pages, Thank you pages, opt-in pages, etc. ) with less effort and in less time
MailPoet — An email marketing platform to send emails to leads and slowly push them to the next funnel stage

Some of WordPress’ sales funnel tools

With these plugins installed into your WordPress dashboard, you’ll be able to create sales funnels that’ll help you convert visitors into customers.

To install them, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your WordPress Admin profile

2. Head to “Plugins”, then “Add New”

3. Search the plugin, click “Install Now”

4. Select “Activate”

Now, let’s get into how to build a sales funnel with the tools listed above.

3. How to build sales funnels for WordPress

Source: CloudWays.com

All the mentioned plugins can integrate and they can incorporate a sales funnel into your WordPress WooCommerce store in 5 simple steps:

3.1. Build a flow

To “build a flow” means to create a sales funnel or customer journey — in CartFlows’ terminology.

CartFlows’ Flows page

To do that, follow these steps:

1. Go to “CartFlows”, then “Flows”

2. Select “Add New”, then pick the pre-built template you want

3. Click “Import Flow”. You’ll see a “Landing Page”, “Checkout Page”, and “Thank You Page”

4. To add more click on “Add New Step”

5. Name your Flow

Once your sales funnel pages are in place, you can start editing them accordingly to your offer.

3.2. Optimize your design

Before you edit the funnel pages, you need to integrate Elementor into CartFlows.

Adding Elementor as page editor

A dedicated page builder like Elementor allows for better control over your page’s design and elements.

To integrate Elementor, you’ll need to:

1. Click the “Edit” button, then “Edit with…”

2. Select Elementor from the drop-down list

Keep in mind that if you are using CartFlows’ Free version, you can only assign products on the Checkout Page.

The Pro version allows you to add:

Coupons
Order bumps
Upsells and downsells
Special form fields
Dynamic offers
Special product options

The price for the Pro version is $239/year or a one-time payment of $999.

3.3. Enable A/B testing

With A/B testing, you can create different sales funnel variations and analyze them to determine which had more sales and performed better overall.

A/B testing on CartFlows

A/B testing is a Pro feature, so you’ll have to upgrade to use it.

To do A/B testing:

Open CartFlows and head to “Flow”
Click the three dots next to the funnel pages, then click “A/B Test”, this will clone the page for you to edit
Edit the clone, then click the cog icon, this decides how many people will see each version of the page
Click “Start A/B Test”

To test more alternative pages, you’ll have to select the “Clone” option that appears when clicking the three dots.

You can check each funnel’s progress by opening the funnel and clicking “Analytics”.

3.4. Implement Google Analytics

Integrating Google Analytics will facilitate more accurate data tracking, but for that, you’ll first need a Google Analytics account to get your ID.

Adding Google Analytics to CartFlows

Then follow these steps:

1. From CartFlows, head to “Settings”

2. Then select the “Google Analytics” tab

3. Check the “Enable Google Analytics Tracking For CartFlows Pages” checkbox

4. Enter your Google Analytics ID, select which settings you want CartFlows to track

Google Analytics is free to use, so don’t worry about prices.

3.5. Create an email marketing campaign

The most important component of a sales funnel is the email marketing campaign because that’s what makes the retention stage possible.

Making an email campaign in MailPoet

An email marketing campaign has the power to build a relationship of trust with every lead in your email list.

With email marketing, you can launch a newsletter to educate your leads about your WordPress website and brand.

There are many newsletter/email marketing plugins, but in this tutorial, we’ll use MailPoet because its Free plan has the features you’ll need.

To integrate MailPoet into CartFlows:

1. Open MailPoet, head to “Forms”

2. Pick a template and edit it

3. Place the lead capture form in one of these two ways:

Head to the “Form Placement” tab, click the gear symbol on your template and select the pages you want to display it on
Or click the “Shortcode & other” box and copy the shortcode
Head to your flow, click on “Edit” and insert the code on the shortcode block

This way you can insert the sign-up form on any of the checkout pages of your sales funnel.

To do email marketing with MailPoet:

1. Open MailPoet, head to “Newsletters”

2. Select “Create a new email”, then enter a subject line

3. Edit your email, once done select “Next step”

4. Click the “Schedule” button and set a date for your emails

We covered all the essentials to create a solid sales funnel in your WordPress website, but before moving on, let’s answer some frequently asked questions.

4. Frequently asked questions about CartFlows

Here we give you some of the most common doubts users tend to have:

1. What payment gateways does CartFlows support?

CartFlows supports all the payment gateways available for WooCommerce, like Auth.Net, iDeal via Mollie, PayPal, Stripe, and Cash on Delivery.

2. Does WooCommerce charge any fees per transaction?

No, your only WooCommerce fee will be your subscription of $29.00/year.

The payment gateway you use might charge you a fee for every transaction.

3. Is the Elementor plugin Free?

Elementor offers a Free plan that has all you need to get started, but for more advanced features you’ll need one of their 4 paid plans:

Essential — $49/ year
Expert — $199/ year
Studio — $499/ year
Agency — $999/ year

If you feel all these integrations are unnecessary or confusing, let us present you with an alternative that doesn’t need integrations.

5. Systeme.io: The all-in-one alternative to WordPress

systeme.io logo

Systeme.io is the best WordPress alternative for you to build your sales funnel together with your website.

That’s because systeme.io is an all-in-one platform with tools to help you build and run every aspect of your website.

Systeme.io is also an advanced sales funnel builder that can:

Build funnels and landing pages with a drag-and-drop editor
Provide dozens of proven pre-built templates to edit
Integrate your email list, payment system, and membership sites
Automate your funnel steps — Include workflows and customer tags to improve the sales journey
Launch fully-integrated email sequences
Do A/B testing
Create deadline funnels — Build exclusive funnels for limited time offers

We also have other advanced features for email marketing, website building, webinars, and creating affiliate programs.

5.1. Systeme.io’s pricing

systeme.io’s pricing plans

Launching email marketing campaigns is one of the actions that help push leads through the sales funnel.

We offer unlimited emails in all of our pricing plans and you can build up to 3 sales funnels in the Free plan, perfect for you to test our features.

You can also migrate to us — free on our Unlimited plan or with any annual subscriptions.

6. Conclusion

A sales funnel is an important element for a successful WordPress website.

It has up to 4 stages that push the most suitable customers to your offer while filtering out those who aren’t.

Sometimes it has a 5th stage for keeping existing customers.

It’s possible to create complete sales funnels in WordPress, but to do it you’ll need several third-party tools/plugins because WordPress doesn’t come with every function preinstalled.

On the other hand, systeme.io is an all-in-one platform with everything you need for your website and you can migrate it from WordPress to systeme.io.

You can even try our platform for free before migrating.

Curious to see what we can do? Sign up with us to find out!