HOW TO CREATE A SALES FUNNEL IN WORDPRESS

If you want to boost your online sales and drive more conversions, it’s essential to create a sales funnel in WordPress. This will help you streamline the buying process and make it easier for potential customers to become paying ones. 

By strategically guiding potential customers through a series of stages, from initial awareness to final purchase, a sales funnel helps optimize your marketing efforts and takes your online business to the next level.

In this guide, we will explore the essential components of a sales funnel and provide step-by-step instructions on how to set it up effectively in WordPress. Harness the power of automation, lead nurturing, and targeted messaging to boost your sales and grow your business.

Excited? Let’s dive in.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a step-by-step visual or diagrammatic representation of a potential customer’s journey to buying a product. It depicts the sales process from the moment of awareness to the point where the product has been sold; a stage called the purchase stage.

A sales funnel as the name implies can be likened to a water funnel which is wide at the top and narrows down until it gets to the bottom.

At the top of the sales funnel are many potential customers which narrow down until the product is purchased.

What Is a Sales Funnel Used For?

A sales funnel also called a marketing funnel, is used to boost a company’s sales performance by giving important insights into the needs of customers and the challenges the company is facing. And helping the company to make decisions that will ensure the growth of their sales.

The 5 Stages of a Typical Sales Funnel

From the image above you can see that the whole idea of the sales funnel is more or less like a water funnel that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.

However, it is worth noting that different companies have different sales funnel structures.

To fully understand what a sales funnel is, you will need to know what each stage entails.

Luckily, you have me to guide you through each stage.

Awareness Stage

This is the first stage of the sales funnel, and it has the largest number of potential customers.

At this stage, you are tasked with making your presence known. It usually comes with the question, what can I do to make people understand that my business exists?

Creating awareness is very important in any business. This is because it is the only way people will get to know about your business and what it is all about.

Running an online store entails that you must make your presence known to potential customers through the creation and promotion of your content.

How will you do this?

You can do this through;

• Advertising on social media.
• Using google search ads.
• Advertising via local means e.g. television, handbills, radio etc.
• Search engine optimization and content marketing strategy.
• Being active on social media can greatly influence your brand awareness.
• Video and in-person events.
• Your company’s site.
• webinars.

Also in this stage, the potential customers are aware of their challenges, and they tend to look for solutions.

Through the content you create and the advertising strategies, you put in place. You can attract potential customers to your business and get them to look at the services you offer and how it affects them positively.

If you aim at making consistent sales and boosting your sales performance, then this first stage should be noticed.

Interest Stage

Just below the awareness stage is the interest stage.

In this stage, there are fewer prospects than in the first stage. They are mostly those that picked interest in your product.

You have succeeded in getting their attention. To engage them further you will need to create more content on topics that are related to your business offers.

Below are some of the strategies that you can apply in this stage.

• Create contents that are engaging and speaks about your prospects’ root problems.
• Try as much as possible to identify the top keywords your potential customers use when looking for online information about any product.
• Creating posts that are relatable to your potential customers is very important and should not be overlooked.
• Target more traffic to your social media handles as well as your website.

To effectively actualize these strategies, you should be able to promote your product further in this stage.

Luckily I have just what you need.

You can promote your product at this stage through.

• Email campaigns
• Chatbots
• Blog posts
• Social media
• Free trials
• Remarketing campaigns

Evaluation Stage

If you get to this stage, congratulations as you are halfway to closing a deal.

However, there are some things you still need to know at this stage.

What happens in this stage is that the potential customer will start looking out for the solution that best meets their needs and this is where your company comes in.

Your company is expected to stand out with the most suitable solution to their problems; problems, otherwise, you stand a chance of losing the prospect.

If you find yourself here at this stage, there are a couple of things you will do.

You will need to build trust with your potential customers.

How will you do this?

You will do this by demonstrating, through product reviews, the values that your solution will offer.

And also through testimonials, how it has helped your previous customers solve similar issues.

To seize this opportunity, there are some strategies you need to apply.

These strategies include

• Landing pages.
• Newsletter subscriptions.
• Social media posts.
• Free tutorials.
• PDFs on how-to manuals.
• The E-book download and so on.

To apply these strategies, you will need to promote your content at this stage in form of;

• Product reviews
• Testimonials
• Pricing pages
• Live tutorials,
• Case studies
• Customer recommendations and reviews.

However, to achieve this, you will need to apply elements that can attract the attention of potential customers.

Elements such as photos of your product, attractive descriptions and videos play an important role at this stage.

Engagement Stage

The aim at this point is to ensure that your brand or product is at the forefront of your prospects’ minds.

Your task is to ensure that you keep your prospects engaged.

How will you do that?

It can only be through your content. The more engaging your contents are, the more you tend to attract your prospects towards buying your product.

Offering more support and extra educational materials about your product at this stage is very crucial. This will help them to know how to use your product effectively giving more value from what you tend to offer. It also increases their chances of buying your product.

To ensure your success at this stage, be sure to apply the strategies below.

• Build more relationships with them by ensuring you send relevant emails consistently to them.
• Apply remarketing or retargeting techniques.
• Perform live demos and consultation sessions.
• Be available to provide responses to questions and queries about your product or company.
• Offer limited product discounts and promo codes.

Ways you can apply these strategies include:

• Via follow-up emails
• Training videos
• Webinars
• Bundled packages.
• White papers
• Special offers.
• Case studies.

Note: if you want to improve your sales, you have to focus on ways to make it easier for people to buy your product.

Purchase Stage

The purchase stage is also known as the commitment stage.

Here you have successfully convinced the prospect to buy your product and they have. But it does not just end with the potential customer buying your product.

You would want them to come back for more, isn’t it?

At this stage, your main focus should be on retention.

It is because retention is the key component to effective sales, and it helps boost your sales performance.

Retention is vital because it will help you reduce the cost and hassle of finding new prospects.

Provided that your customers are satisfied with the services and values you offer, they will keep coming back for more.

To keep your customers coming back for more, there are strategies that you can apply.

Some of which are listed below

• You will need to create re-engagement email campaigns.
• You should follow up with feedback polls.
• You should be able to offer discounts or coupon codes to your customers when they refer new prospects.
• Implement customer reward programs to appreciate them.
• Implement a customer care facility that is highly responsive.

The tips below will help you keep your customers engaged and motivated to come back for more.

• Re-engagement email campaigns.
• Referral programs.
• Upsell campaigns
• Product videos.

7 Benefits of Creating an Effective Sales Funnel

You might be wondering how creating a sales funnel will benefit your business.

I’ll be taking you through some of the benefits that an effective sales funnel can bring to your business.

• Creating an effective sales funnel will help you to convert cold prospects into buying customers.
• An effective sales funnel will help you to deliver the right message at the right time.
• An effective sales funnel saves time and effort. This happens through the creation of rich one-time content that is organized for all the various stages of the sales funnel.
• An effective sales funnel helps you make continuous sales of your product and services to your existing customers.
• It helps you to move your deals and get your prospects to the next stage at a faster rate.
• It also helps you to build relationships with potential customers automatically through simple processes and automation.
• It helps to improve your forecast accuracy. This is done basically by monitoring how prospects move through the funnel. You can then make better predictions about future purchases. Doing this will also help you to make decisions about Cashflow, your budgets and customer demands.

How to Create a WordPress Sales Funnel for Free in 6 steps.

Now that you have understood what a sales funnel is, its stages and benefits, we will dive into how to create a simple sales funnel in WordPress.

I will give you a detailed step-by-step guide as to how you will be able to create a sales funnel in WordPress for free.

Note: if you have a WordPress online store, you can proceed with the steps; but if you don’t, you will need to create an eCommerce website with WordPress to continue to the steps below.

Step 1: Install Woocommerce and Cartflow Plugins

Note: CartFlow is a sales funnel builder that is available for WordPress. There are, however, other sales funnels plugins such as ConvertPro and clickfunnel.

Our focus will be restricted to the Cartflow plugin.

Cartflow allows you to easily build a sales funnel using any page builder of your choice.

It also works well with the WooCommerce plugin.

To install the WooCommerce and CartFlow Plugins,

• From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to the plugins tab.
• Click on the Add new button.

• From the add new screen, type in WooCommerce into the search bar.

• Install and activate the plugin.

After you have activated it, WooCommerce will launch its config set up which will help you set up your store.

Answer the available questions to set up your store.

Also, set up your payment gateway and shipping zones as the case may be.

Once you are done with the setup, the next thing you will do is add your products.

Go to

• product from your admin dashboard.
• Click on the add new button and input the details of the product you want to include in your sales.

Note: you will repeat the step above for all the products you want to include in your sales funnel.

Once you have finished adding your products and your store is running, now it is time to install and activate the Cartflow plugin.

To do this, navigate to the plugin button from your dashboard, just as you did with the Woocommerce plugin.

• Click on add new and
• Search for Cartflow from the search box

Install and activate the plugin.

Run the configuration setup after you have activated it.

The Cartflow plugin allows the use of page builders, so you can choose the most suitable one for you.

Step 2: Create a Landing Page for Your Product

It is important to design a landing page for your product. This is because it will help to convert visitors to your site during the interest stage of your funnel.

To create a landing page for your product, go to

• Cartflow from your dashboard and then
• Click on flows and finally
• Click on add new to select and customize the suitable template for your funnel.

Cart flow comes with the Gutenberg page builder as a default page builder. Although it has several page builder plugins that it supports. And its templates are designed in such a way that each page builder has templates that are compatible with them.

Select one of the page builders and click on import. This will take you to the editing screen.

Note: not all templates come with a checkout and a thank-you page. If for any reason yours didn’t come with both pages, you can add them from the add new step button and then build it from scratch using your installed page builder.

Also, don’t forget to always save your progress while editing or building your pages.

Step 3: Create Your Checkout and Thank You Pages.

Once you are done editing your landing page to suit your needs, the next thing to do is to design your checkout and thank you pages respectively.

To do this, go back to the flow screen and repeat the same steps as you did on the landing page for your checkout and thank you pages or any other page that you added as the case may be.

However, there is a step that you need to complete before the checkout pages become fully operational.

If you view the checkout page you will notice that the page reads No product is selected. Please select products from the checkout meta settings to continue.

If you view this page, you will need to go back to the flow screen and in the checkout tab click on the edit button.

After clicking the edit button, an editing screen will be opened for you. Scroll down to the section that is labelled checkout settings.

The checkout settings provide options where you can link your products to the checkout page.

If you don’t understand how to fully go about setting up your flow pages, cartflow provides informative documentation that will take you through each option in detail.

You should understand that the idea of the thank you page is to serve as a medium of confirmation of completed purchases to your customers. As well as to make them feel valued in other to build brand loyalty with them.

With Cartflow there is no limit to your customization.

You can create another call-to-action button directing your customers to an upsell page somewhere in your store or direct them to your social media handles.

Step 4: Activate the Split-Screen Testing

Although split testing for CartFlow is a pro feature, it allows you to switch between products for visitors. It works with Google Analytics, which will help you to know which product has the most conversions. All you need to do is to upgrade your account.

To use this feature, go to

• Cartflows
• Click on flows and
• Click on the dots at the right-hand side of the pages you want to split and finally
• Click on the A/B test.

Clicking on the A/B test will create a clone that you will have to edit.

Note: if you want to have more screen test pages, all you need to do is to create as many split test pages as you need.

And you can edit each split test page to suit your needs as well.

Also, click on the cog icon on the split test to set the number of users who see each version of the split page.

Once you are done, click on the start split test to go live.

Step 5: Add Google Analytics to Your Cartflow

Google Analytics will help you to track your products and to know which one has the most conversions.

This will be easy if you already have a Google Analytics account.

But if you don’t, there is no cause for alarm; all you need to do is to create one and get your ID.

It is essential to add your CartFlow to your Google Analytics as it is a vital tool for boosting your sales performance.

To do this,

• Navigate to Cartflow.
• Click on settings and then.
• Select the Google Analytics tab.
• Check to enable Google Analytics tracking for Cartflow pages box.
• Input your ID and tick what settings you want to track.

Step 6: Start Directing Prospects to Your Sales Funnel.

Now that you have successfully created and linked all your CartFlow pages together. You should note that CartFlow will direct users through your site in the other specified by the flow builder by default.

You can see that from the example we used all throughout this tutorial. The template we used started with a landing, then a checkout page and finally, a thank you page.

You can add more pages to your flow using the add new step button and rearrange them the way you want from the flow editor.

Now that you have successfully published your sales funnel, you will need to start driving traffic to your landing page.

How will you do this?

I guess you already know.

You will achieve this via your content marketing channels and strategies which I showed you initially.

Those prospects that show interest in any of the products you attached to the funnel will automatically be moved to the checkout page. Where they will make their purchases and then to the thank you pages as they click on your call-to-action buttons to complete their purchases.

It is vital to retain your customers at this point, so you might want to create a newsletter.

A good email campaign that comes with rewards for loyal customers will make your customers come back for more and even refer new prospects to your store.

There are several newsletter plugins for WordPress, of which many are free. All you need to do is to install one and set it up, and then you are all set.

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Conclusion -HOW TO CREATE A SALES FUNNEL IN WORDPRESS

Building a sales funnel for your business is an easy way to get prospects to buy your product.

Now that you have a detailed idea of what a sales funnel is and how to create one for yourself in WordPress.

These 3 things will help you to further understand what a sales funnel is and how it will help in the growth of your business.

• The first thing you have to understand is how your customers think.
• Know how to create an attractive and effective landing page to suit their needs and finally;
• Know how to retain your customers once they have passed through your sales funnel.

So go ahead and create that funnel, make those sales and boost your sales performance.

And if you feel we missed any step since this is a broad topic don’t hesitate to call my attention in the comment section below.

I’m always open to feedback and new ideas.