In today’s day and age, a sales funnel is an important part of any business.
Sales funnels can be tricky to manage for clothing brands and fashion businesses though because you have to maintain a delicate balance between being available enough on your site so you don’t turn away customers, but not too available that they get bored and decide to go elsewhere.
This is why it’s important for these types of companies to carefully plan out where and how often they want to offer deals or promotions.
What Is a Cloth Fashion Brand Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is an important part of any business.
It’s especially necessary for clothing and fashion brands to maintain one because you don’t want to be too available, but not enough so your customers get bored and leave.
It’s also important to consider how often deals or promotions will be offered as well as where they will be present on the site.
A clothing brand sales funnel can be simply defined as a strategy and process of gathering leads, building an email list, and converting those leads to sales.
It also helps you gain new customers by bringing them back on your site so they can see all the new clothing items you have added since their last visit.
As we go further in this post, you’ll get to discover the process of creating a sales funnel for your clothing or fashion brand.
You will learn about the basics of building a sales funnel and best practices for converting sales funnels and elements that make a typical fashion sales funnel to convert.
Do You Need a Clothing Brand Sales Funnel?
Some clothing brands make a sale page a priority with a lot of information about the product and contact information, whereas others might include their store as part of an online directory with limited information on each brand.
Some companies choose to use a lot of ads to get people interested in the product, whereas others include links or images towards their purchase page.
Different types of clothing brands may follow different sales funnels because they have different audiences, but there are many practices that can be used no matter what type of brand you’re selling.
The first step is deciding what kind of audience you’re selling to, then building a funnel that would work for them.
For example, if you’re promoting fashion wears for the beach, your audience is likely to be people who are interested in buying clothes that they can wear while at the beach.
If there are any other audiences this clothing company might want to target (hiking enthusiasts, athletes), it’s important to know what their interests are and how you’ll sell to them as well.
Once you’ve chosen an audience, make sure all of your marketing materials appeal directly or indirectly towards that specific demographic. All images should match expectations set by your branding style.
So yes, you need a fashion sales funnel as this would help you streamline the entire process of selling apparel, following up on leads, and making sure they go through the funnel.
How Do I Create a Clothing & Fashion Sales Funnel?
In this part, we’re going to walk you through how to build a funnel for clothing and fashion brands, and we’ll walk you through the best practices of converting leads into customers.
1). Understand WHO You’re Targeting & What You’re Offering
This is where you get started by defining your audience, which would help you figure out who you’re selling to.
If you have an existing fashion brand, what are the types of people using it?
How do they feel about your brand? What’s their perception of it? What are they looking for in a fashion brand or clothing line?
You see, for your sales funnel to be a successful one you have to think about the questions they’re asking and list what you have in common with them.
Once you’ve figured this out, make sure all promotional content matches up with expectations set by your branding style.
Using social media is another way to figure this out. Especially if you have an audience.
- Who is following you online and why?
- What questions are they asking on social media that can give us insight into what kind of segment our audience is?
This way we’d know what to sell them within our funnels.
2). Map Out Your Funnel
Now, the next step is to actually put together the funnel. This is where you list all of the offers that will be linked with each other throughout your marketing strategy.
Your best offers should be featured at the top of your sales funnel, while lesser-quality offers are found further down in the process.
Start by listing out every offer on this page. Then decide which ones are best suited to your niche, audiences, and type of clothing you’re selling.
This is where you decide what part of the solution to the problems to figure in the previous step would make up the core product, bump order, upsells, and downsells.
Without spending some time to map out your funnel and what offer would go where your chances of selling to the right people is going to drop.
So it’s best to map out everything in detail before you start creating your funnel and promoting it.
3). Create Your Fashion Marketing Sales Funnel
Creating your funnel requires you to create a series of landing pages.
Examples of landing pages you could create for your clothing and fashion brand include:
- Squeeze Page
- Main Landing Page
- Checkout Page
- Upsell Page
- Downsell Page
- Thank You Page
Your main clothing landing page is where your core offer (shirt, dress, shoes) is featured.
This page is where you can present your best offer to your audience in exchange for their email address or whether they’d subscribe to your list so that you can sell them something later on.
The squeeze page is where you can get visitors to provide their email address in exchange for some free content, whether it’s an ebook or whitepaper.
The checkout is where you would process the payments via credits cards or PayPal.
The upsell and downsell pages are basically where you list out the other complementary products that are available for purchase after the checkout of the main products.
The thank-you page is where you send people who’ve already purchased your product after the order has been processed.
My recommended software for building and connecting these pages with ease is Kartra.
Kartra makes the process seamless without you worrying about any tech issues like design and coding.
The best thing about Kartra is that it provides a user-friendly interface that allows beginners to get started without any difficulty.
Creating these pages for your fashion brand should be done with conversion in mind because every element of the sales funnel is meant to bring you closer to that big goal – increased sales.
4). Connect Your Autoresponder & Get Emails Ready
Now that you have your landing pages built out, it’s time to set up your funnel.
This is where you’re going to link all of the pages together with an email autoresponder service.
As may know, email marketing is the most effective of all marketing tools that exist today.
You can use an email autoresponder to send out a sequence of emails to customers who’ve just given you their email address on your initial squeeze page or main sales landing page.
When someone subscribes to your free content, they usually get an immediate autoresponder email containing the information they’re after.
You should also have an email autoresponder that sends out another sequence of emails once they’ve reached your sales copy and the checkout page as well as when they reach the upsell and down-sell pages.
It helps in following up abandoned carts.
As we discussed earlier, knowing your audience starts with lead magnets, which are low-cost products created for the sole purpose of gaining information that will turn into email subscribers or sales later on.
This is followed by an email sequence that’s designed to build trust and rapport between you and your customer, eventually turning them into paying customers when it comes time to close the sale.
This makes email marketing and automation an integral part of the fashion sales funnel.
5). Drive Traffic to Your Funnel
The part on creating your clothing brand sales funnel is driving traffic.
You can drive traffic to your offer using Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google Adwords, organic SEO/blogging, and lots of other platforms.
Any platform could actually work for you as a clothing/fashion brand. What matters is how well you know your audience and what they’re after.
You need to be able to find a solution for their problem on a platform that’s free or low-cost so you can keep the cost of driving traffic down as much as possible.
However, the best advertising platform I’ve seen for fashion is Instagram ads. This is because Instagram is the best photo-driven social media platform and fashion is all about beautiful imagery.
I’ve seen a lot of fashion brands do really well on Instagram.
You could also use retargeting as a way to get people back onto your funnel. You can run ads that will send people back to the pages they just left from.
6). Optimize Your Sales Funnel for Conversions
Conversions are the result of a well-optimized funnel.
To make sure everything is optimized correctly, you’ll need to split test every part of your funnel – from your website to where your offer is displayed.
There are different funnel optimization tools out there, some of them include:
Hotjar: A software used for optimizing sales funnels, collecting user feedback, and performing heat mapping.
Google Analytics: A tool used for collecting data, optimizing bounce rates, and converting more users. And also track where your traffic is coming from and the pages they’re dropping off at.
Kartra: A tool used to build your funnels and also for split testing your funnels, landing pages, email automation, and sales funnels.
There are other funnel optimization tools but I use Kartra because it allows me to easily track conversions on the client’s site while also allowing me to experience their product without having to create an account or anything like that. Things are inbuilt!
Without measuring and optimizing your funnel, it’ll be very difficult to improve your overall conversions.
Doing A/B split tests on different parts of your funnel helps you understand what’s not working and make the necessary improvements.
7). Keep Building Your Brand & Following Up Customers Who Drop Off
Once you begin getting sales, keep growing your brand with new products that are complementary to whatever it is that led them into the funnel in the first place.
People who already purchased something will be more likely to give you a try when you have something else they might be interested in.
Remember to keep building your brand, continue providing value to your email subscribers, track where they dropped off from in the funnel so you can optimize for better results in future campaigns.
5 Things That Makes a fashion Sales Funnels Convert
One of the main things that will make a fashion sales funnel convert is its high quality. This is because people are less likely to buy something if it doesn’t meet their expectations or if they simply don’t like it.
A good way to promote your brand and make sure your brand provides high-quality clothing is by hosting events where you can showcase your apparel and build relationships with other brands too.
If you’re a small business, this would be the best place to start- Instagram influencers take photos of themselves at shops and post them on their accounts helping promote smaller brands.
Other factors include:
1). Clothing Brand Sales Funnels Require Better Targeting
Think of your target market as the foundation for every other step in an effective sales funnel. We talked about this at the beginning.
Your audience will drive how much traffic you can get to your site, which will determine how well conversions go, and ultimately the success of your campaign.
Be it on your ads, offers, or influencer partnerships, without a good targeting strategy, you’ll be wasting money.
Lets take for example you sell women’s clothing. Your target market should be women between the ages of 18-35 who have a social influence and are from English-speaking countries that have an interest in fashion or shopping online.
So, your entire targeting strategy would be to advertise to women between the ages of 18-35 from English-speaking countries with a social influence and a shopping interest.
Your entire marketing copy and story should speak directly to them and the lifestyle they live.
2). Avoid Pushing Too Hard In Sales Funnels
Pushing too hard is one of the worst things you can do when building a sales funnel for your clothing brand or fashion business because people will see you as untrustworthy and this will make them less likely to purchase your products.
You’ll want to keep away from aggressive marketing techniques unless they relate directly to the product you’re selling.
For example, if your clothing brand is a sports-oriented brand- you can use aggressive marketing techniques to push people towards purchasing your apparel by offering a discount for a limited time only on a new jersey collection.
You’ll want to keep away from being too pushy because it may have an adverse effect on your sales – especially if your brand is not well-known.
3). Keep Your Funnel Short & Sweet
The longer the length of your funnel the higher its cost to acquire customers.
This means that, in order to keep costs low, you’ll want to keep each step as short and succinct as possible.
The goal is to have people come into your funnel, take the next step right away without having to answer too many questions or do too much thinking.
This will let you drive more people towards your goals, which is why it’s important to have clear goals for each part of your sales funnel.
4). Clothing Sales Funnels Need More Social Proof
Social proof is the best way to get people into your funnel- which is why clothing sales funnels need more than just an email list.
It helps to have social media influencers working with you or promoting your brand because it adds to the sense of trustworthiness and authority you’ll be able to build over time.
Most people will take action when they see others are doing it too.
Other things that add social proof include but are not limited too: customer reviews, testimonials, popularity amongst their peers, influencer endorsements, success stories/case studies, etc.
5). Decrease Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is a major issue for all fashion brands and clothing lines.
This is because cart abandonment occurs when people put items into their cart but don’t buy them.
People will do this because they either forget, run out of money, or change their minds.
In order to decrease cart abandonment, you’ll need to communicate with your audience and provide incentives for them to purchase from you via emails, retargeting via ads, etc.
In other words, don’t send people directly the product page without giving them a reason to buy- whether it’s a discount or a free shipping coupon, you’ll want to incentivize people in order for them to complete the purchase.
What is The Best Funnel Builder For Clothing Brands?
Kartra sales funnel builder comes with built-in eCommerce features so you can sell products directly from your website without the help of 3rd party apps, tools, or integrations.
Its drag and drop editor makes it simple to build all kinds of sales funnels including product launch funnels, rebranding funnels, event funnels, eCommerce sales funnels for fashion brands, etc.
It comes already built-in with automatic cart recovery for clothing sales funnels which means that people won’t have to put items into their cart only to abandon them later on when they don’t purchase them.
What is the Best Email Marketing for clothing and fashion brands?
I know, I’ve said this before but ActiveCampaign is the best email marketing platform for any kind of eCommerce business or fashion brand because it’s easy to use and provides all the features you’ll need to successfully grow your business.
It also comes with a free trial so you can test out its features first.
Final thoughts
The key to building a successful sales funnel for your clothing brand is understanding how your customer’s brains work and what they need in order to purchase from you.
This means that, if it’s too easy for them or there are so many questions, they may abandon the process entirely- which will lead to lost revenue.
The best way to build an effective clothing sales funnel is by making sure each step is short and sweet- meaning that people should be able to take the next step without having any time lapse in between.
Social proof also plays a major role in enticing customers into purchasing products because when others do something, most individuals will follow suit as well. Lastly, don’t forget about cart abandonment.
You’ll want to incentivize potential buyers with discounts or free shipping coupons in order to help them complete their purchases.
With these tips in mind, you’ll be able to build a profitable clothing sales funnel for your fashion brand and grow your clothing business.
