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 6 of our 6 part series, deep diving into Lead Generation 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 6: Lead Generation Funnel
Unlike all other marketing funnels we have covered here, the lead generation funnel is unique because it covers both types of conversions: product purchases and email sign-ups.
Because of this, the content in a lead generation funnel is less offer- or product-forward. Instead, it aims to create an informative and engaging online experience that helps communicate the brand’s identity.
Use Case
The goal of a lead generation marketing funnel is to build brand awareness, provide some informational value or solution to shoppers pre-conversion, create a more detailed profile of a new or current customer, such as by gathering their emails.
Getting a product purchase through the lead generation funnel is a major added benefit, though it is not the primary purpose of the marketing funnel.
This funnel works especially well for brands with a larger number of SKUs or product types, where customers might be overwhelmed as to wear to start when looking at options to purchase.
It is also a great way to build brand familiarity by encouraging audience engagement with their products, even if only digitally.
Step 1: Quiz Landing Page
This landing page can feature any or all of the quizzes that your store website has. Landing page traffic can come from either an ad with aligned content, or just from organic traffic via search engines or shoppers browsing your site.
The content of your quiz should be highly relevant to your product and be able to funnel quiz-takers towards a purchase. Include a hero section and CTAs that clearly state what benefit viewers get from going through your quiz series.
For example, a makeup brand would say “discover your ideal product” to attract viewers to get started with the quiz.
This is ideal for users, because it helps decrease decision fatigue, it is fun for shoppers to go through, and it helps solve a problem for them.
Step 2: Quiz Series
The quiz series should be a maximum of 5 to 8 steps. It should be simple, quick to go through, and does not require much thinking or decision making on the users’ part.
Most importantly, it should provide informational value to the quiz-taker. For example, a quiz about identifying the ideal skincare product helps quiz takers resolve their concerns about not being sure what to buy.
Ask questions that are relevant to both the quiz and your knowledge-building of this shopper’s profile; the more information you get, the more you can create personalized content for this shopper.
Better yet, include high-quality and engaging designs that make the series a highly enjoyable experience. Remember, whatever experience users have here will be associated with your brand!
Build up excitement for viewers to get the results of their quiz at the end.
Step 3: Quiz Email Sign Up
The final page of the quiz sign up should have one clear CTA to get the quiz-taker’s email. This email will then be used to deliver the final results of the quiz, plus any relevant product recommendations or product related content.
For example, the end of a quiz from a makeup brand will ask for an email to send over the recommended product personalized to the quiz-taker’s responses.
Step 4: Quiz Series Product Detail Page And Cart Page
You don’t want to stop after getting their email; brands should continue while you still have shoppers’ attention.
Once they’ve submitted their emails, the next page should be a landing page with a cart that’s already been pre-filled with a recommended product from the quiz, plus more informative content related to the brand and the product overall.
This page is a product detail page (or PDP) and cart hybrid, where shoppers can learn about the recommended product in-depth, including detailed product descriptions and high quality product imagery.
Include generated content, high ratings and reviews, comparison charts, and other related offers or bestsellers. Offers can include bundled discounts with complimentary products, subscription plans, quantity breaks, and limited time promotions to boost conversions and 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 apply” section is great for a makeup brand.
However, as this page also features a cart, you want to make this page is still as simple and easy to understand as possible. Be transparent about pricing, service fees, and delivery timelines upfront.
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 positive checkout experience is key to making sure first time customers come back if they like your product.
Step 5: Quiz Series 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. Use their contact information to keep shoppers informed on any delivery timelines and product updates.
The goal should be to pre-emptively address any possible uncertainty or concern a potential customer may have about purchasing on your checkout page.
Step 6: Email Welcome Flow
Don’t stop after their first purchase. Given that a customer may or may not go through with Steps 4 and Steps 5 in the quiz marketing funnel, you want to continue engaging with everyone, no matter if they’ve bought something from the quiz results.
With shoppers’ contact information, brands should focus on strengthening customer relationships over the long term by delivering timely, relevant, and engaging content through targeted email flows.
The best examples of this would be an email welcome flow that focuses on brand awareness, or weekly or biweekly newsletters.
Make sure the content of your emails are actually informative, relevant, and engaging; this will keep your brand top of mind and build a positive impression over time.
For example, a beauty brand might include weekly make-up guides or exclusive celebrity interviews on makeup-related topics in their newsletters. This type of content is interesting to their target audience, and makes them look forward to opening your emails.
Do not be too sale-sy or product focused or pushy in the content of your email, otherwise your email engagement metrics (such as open rate) will perform poorly, and readers may unsubscribe all together.
Be selective when delivering promotional or product focused content; focus on timely or seasonal elements, lean into the categories of content or products that you know a target segment is likely interested in.
This is where the information you collected about a quiz taker will come into handy.
That’s a wrap for Part 6 of our 6 marketing funnel examples! Read Parts 1 to 5 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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