A well-executed marketing funnel is the difference between building a loyal base of repeat buyers and brand advocates, and not being able to turn your traffic into revenue.
Today, we’re covering how to create marketing funnels that sell, plus the top 6 marketing funnel examples and their use cases. This is Part 4 of our 6 part series, deep diving into Browsing Abandonment Funnels.
Key Takeaway: What Is A Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel is a roadmap that guides shoppers from discovering your brand to purchasing a product to becoming a loyal customer. The end goal is to build long term relationships with shoppers, nurturing them from brand strangers into repeat buyers.
The five stages of a marketing funnel are as follows: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and advocacy.
What Is A Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel is a roadmap that guides shoppers from discovering your brand to purchasing a product to becoming a loyal customer.
The end goal is to build long term relationships with shoppers, nurturing them from brand strangers into repeat buyers.
Marketing funnels can be online and offline. For the purposes of this article, we are focused solely on online marketing funnels—specifically those that apply to ecommerce.
Ecommerce marketing funnels are different from traditional marketing funnels, because every interaction online generates trackable behavioral data that brands can then use to better target potential customers across various online channels.
Examples of this include personalizing content to target customers more accurately at scale, as well as using real-time optimization and A/B testing different landing page variants.
While online and offline marketing funnels share the same five steps, online marketing funnels have grown increasingly non-linear.
Each stage can have many touchpoints, and a shopper can go back and forth between stages before finally making a purchase. Or, not making a purchase at all.
So, how do you ensure that shoppers go from customer to loyal advocate? By optimizing for a few key performance metrics for each stage of the funnel.
Let’s break it down.
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What Are The Stages Of A Marketing Funnel?
Marketing funnels usually contain the same five stages.
Another common method of thinking about marketing funnels is top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel, though this approach focuses more so on driving users to conversion, rather than creating a holistic view of the entire marketing funnel, which includes retention and customer loyalty post-purchase.
For the purposes of this article, we are focusing on the 5 stage marketing funnel first. Feel free to access the linked articles above to read more about the three stage approach.
Marketing Funnel Stage 1: Awareness
This stage is where customers discover your brand through search results, social media, lead magnets, and paid or organic content marketing.
At this stage, the goal of a brand is to build recognition and trust among a wider audience. Not everyone in this pool may be the target audience, but for the sake of exposure, brands do not need to get too targeted at this stage yet.
Key metrics to focus on at this stage include organic traffic growth tracking, engagement with paid or organic social media posts, social media followers, and sessions across the entire store.
Learn more about how to drive traffic to your store.
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Marketing Funnel Stage 2: Consideration
This is the stage when product evaluation and engagement takes place.
Customers are looking for product information to consider whether or not to hit buy. This is where landing pages come in (check out our templates from top brands or our recommended list of AI tools to help you build them!). Educational pages with extensive product detail and comparison sections, informative email flows, third-party review or product comparison websites (such as comparison shopping sites) become primary sources of information.
At this stage, the brand’s goal is to educate shoppers on the product and to build brand trust. The segment becomes smaller as marketing campaigns and messaging grow more targeted to specific demographics or psychographics.
Key metrics to focus on at this stage include email open rates, time spent on page per session, ad landing page bounce rates, and add to cart rates.
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Marketing Funnel Stage 3: Conversion
This is the stage when the shopper converts.
In most cases, that means making a product purchase, though it can also mean any number of activities that the brand wants to encourage, such as someone signing up with their email on a lead generation page or joining an exclusive loyalty rewards program.
In the case where a conversion involves a purchase, the shopper heads to the checkout page and becomes a brand customer.
At this stage, shoppers want a low-friction, easy to use, and transparent checkout experience. Make sure your cart page and checkout page fulfills all these elements by keeping your designs simple, clean, and to-the-point.
Reduce any sources of user friction, build in strong product guarantees (such as a 30 day product satisfaction or full refund guarantee), and add in trust signals (such as user generated social content or honorable mentions from reputable sources).
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Be transparent about product pricing and any additional shipping costs or service fees; build in urgency mechanics such as a one-time 15% off discount code that will expire in 15 minutes to seal the deal.
Key metrics to focus on at this stage are conversion rates, cart abandonment rates, revenue per session, and average order value (AOV).
Notably, according to a 2025 report by Statista, nearly 40% of U.S. consumers abandoned online purchases during checkout due to high added costs, such as shipping, taxes, or fees. On top of that, around 20% cited slow delivery and the hassle of creating an account as reasons for backing out of a purchase.
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Marketing Funnel Stage 4: Retention
This is the stage when customers make additional purchases and build loyalty towards the brand.
At this stage, the brand’s goal is to leverage that initial purchase or conversion to encourage a stronger customer-brand relationship, strengthen customers’ familiarity with the brand, and recommend products relevant to the customer.
This can occur through personalized email newsletters, loyalty programs with exclusive content or promotional discounts, subscription plans, social media marketing about brand-hosted events, targeted paid influencer marketing, and even mailing out thank-you gifts to first-time customers.
This stage of the funnel can require a longer timeline, as it involves a continuous maintenance of relationships with the customer.
Key metrics to focus on include repeat purchase rates, email flow engagement rates, and customer lifetime value (LTV).
Marketing Funnel Stage 5: Advocacy
This is the final stage of the customer marketing funnel. It is also the ideal stage. All brands should aim to reach this stage with all their customers.
This is the stage when your customers support your brand so much they help you market yourself to their own networks through referrals and word-of-mouth.
At this stage, customers are voluntarily mentioning your brand and products in their own social media content, or to their own friends and family.
Brands can further encourage this behavior.
Tactics include featuring high-quality user generated content on landing pages or product pages (or product-centric homepages) and tagging the customer, giving stellar customer reviews a shout-out in email and social marketing channels, or by setting up a referral program where both your customers and you can benefit.
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Key metrics or indicators to track include the quantity and rating of user-generated content and customer reviews, the performance of your brand referral systems, the customer acquisition cost, and the customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio (LTV/CAC).
In general, the target LTV/CAC ratio brands should aim for is 3:1. This means that for every $1 spent on customer acquisition, such as paid ads or cold sales outbound, a brand is earning $3 in revenue in return.
The baseline is 1:1, meaning the brand is just breaking even. Anything below that requires immediate attention, as this means the brand is spending more on customer acquisition than it is gaining from the acquired customers.
Anything above 5:1 is exceptional; this means that the brand should actually seek to spend more on customer acquisition by scaling its marketing and sales efforts, or by expanding into new audience segments.
This will attract more sales and increase LTV over time, meaning LTV/CAC will stabilize at a new, lower ratio, but drive more total revenue in the long run.
The formula for LTV/CAC is: (Average Order Value × Purchase Frequency × Customer Lifespan) ÷ CAC
For more detail about LTV/CAC and how it impacts your business, check out our full guide. Or, use our ecommerce calculator to see how your brand compares against the target range.
In summary, to drive maximum revenue and conversions, brands should balance brand building with performance marketing across all five stages of the marketing funnel.
Let’s take a look at the 6 most common marketing funnel examples that leading DTC brands such as Simple Modern, Woxer, Tushy, and more like to use to grow their revenue.
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How To Create Marketing Funnels
Usually, the general steps of a marketing funnel do not differ too widely between use cases, given the end goal is often to drive to a product purchase for revenue or an email sign up for lead generation.
However, there are many different ways in which brands can customize the content and structure of their ads, emails, or funnel pages to better target shoppers at different places in the marketing funnel.
For example, you would not market to a more familiar shopper who has already added items to their cart (meaning they are further down the funnel), the same way you would someone who is completely brand new to your store (meaning they are still near the top of your funnel).
Let’s take a look at Part 1 of the 6 most common marketing funnel examples and their use cases.
Marketing Funnel Examples 4: Browsing Abandonment Funnel
Like cart abandonment funnels, the goal of this marketing funnel is to help reel back in shoppers who’ve been considering your brand but have not made a purchase.
The difference between this funnel and a cart abandonment funnel is the shoppers at this stage have not gone as far down the funnel. They have only looked at items in your store, but not intentionally added any items to cart.
Use Case
In this funnel, you want to be more informative and focus on awareness-building with your landing pages, as the target audience here is likely not as familiar with your brand as the target audience from a cart abandonment funnel.
The goal is to educate audiences on product benefits to better inform their purchasing decisions.
Promotional deals, such as limited time discounts, are always helpful for driving urgency towards purchase, though they may not be as effective for this target audience as compared to those in the cart abandonment funnel.
Step 1: Pop-Up
Many times, shoppers come to a store, and then leave after only looking.
While we can’t stop browsers from leaving, we can offer an incentive, such as a certain percentage of discount on their first purchase, in exchange for viewers giving us their email.
Gathering their contact information means brands now have the opportunity to re-engage these shoppers, even if they are not interested at the moment.
Plus, since they’ve already looked around your site, you now have information on the specific items or categories they are interested in—this means you can create content and offers that better target these shoppers.
Step 2: Targeted Emails
Tap into re-engagement email flows to remind them of the products that they’ve looked at but not purchased.
Shoppers are already familiar with the brand, even before they ever saw your email. Therefore the content of these emails should be to educate and inform, and not to introduce the brand to a newcomer.
Feature engaging content about or adjacent to your product, such as gift guides or styling guides if you’re a clothing brand, or recipes if you’re a food brand. Include high quality images of the products that shoppers have browsed.
Add in limited time discounts or seasonal product releases to pique their interest.
Step 3: Collections Page
When a shopper clicks on the CTA in the email in step 1, they get led to the collections page page.
The content on the landing page should always be directly aligned with the content on the email, especially when you are targeting shoppers who are already interested in a certain product category or in your brand.
If your email talks about a specific category or product, then make sure the landing page features those related items. Get shoppers back into browsing.
For example, if you feature a suit jacket in your email, then make sure that item is also featured in the collections page they land on. It shows shoppers they’re in the right place, and guides them towards exploring other products they may find interesting.
Feature content that helps differentiate your brand from other stores. At this point, shoppers are still considering if they want to buy from you.
Include a strong CTA that directs shoppers to the next step of the funnel.
Step 4: Product Detail Page
The product detail page (or PDP) is where you want to get serious about communicating product information and leaning into social proof.
Include clear and detailed product descriptions, high quality product imagery, user generated content, high ratings and reviews, comparison charts, and an enticing offer. Offers can include bundled discounts with complimentary products, subscription plans, quantity breaks, and limited time promotions to drive urgency and boost your average order value.
Show related product sections and recently viewed product sections, as well as any complimentary educational content that can help shoppers envision how your product fits into their daily lives or specific use case.
For example, an informative “how to style” or “style inspiration” section is great for the PDP of a clothing brand.
This step is crucial to informing shoppers’ consideration of your product. The goal is to get audiences to add items to cart and hit checkout.
Step 5: Cart Page
The cart page is the final step before shoppers convert by making a purchase. You want to make this page as simple and easy to understand as possible.
Be transparent about pricing, service fees, and delivery timelines upfront. Customers want to know what they’re signing up for before they pay. Make sure to include any compelling offers here, but only where relevant.
Don’t cram the space, as it detracts from the user experience. Examples can include a bundle offer with a discount, complimentary products for shoppers to consider, a form fill to insert discount codes, or a free gift if shoppers buy above a certain threshold. A
dd a reminder as a banner or countdown timer if there are items going fast or selling out soon—this helps add urgency for the shopper.
A positive checkout experience is key to making sure first time customers come back if they like your product.
Step 6: Checkout Page
The checkout page is the page where conversion occurs. Again, simplicity and clarity is key.
Keep things informative, easy to use, and include any product offers to improve average order value where relevant.Also make sure to include strong guarantees on delivery timeline, product satisfaction, refund or exchange policies, and delivery address information.
Keep your bases covered on all fronts, even at the final stage. The goal should be to pre-emptively address any possible uncertainty or concern a potential customer may have about purchasing on your checkout page.
Ask for contact information to keep shoppers informed on any delivery timelines and product updates; you can also use their contact info to enroll shoppers into welcome email flows, upsell flows, and abandonment flows in the future.
That’s a wrap for Part 4 of our 6 marketing funnel examples! Read Parts 1 to 3 and Parts 5 to 6 for the complete rundown of the top marketing funnel types to use in your online store.
Remember, A/B testing with different elements at each stage of each funnel is what allows leading brands to confirm what changes help generate the most revenue, traffic, or leads for their store.
Best practice requires periodic and continuous testing to accommodate for constant shifts across ecommerce industries and competing brands.
Read the related articles to learn how you can build better marketing funnels and landing pages, faster.
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