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15+ Common Sales Funnel Mistakes & Solutions [2025]
Building a sales funnel is easy—but having it generate your desired results is the challenge.
A sales funnel is a system that turns visitors into leads and leads into your paying customers. However, your funnel has to be strong enough to hold them in throughout the journey.
Many eCommerce brands make common sales funnel mistakes that lead to a lack of engagement and conversions, and ultimately damage their revenue potential.
So, in this blog post, we’ll cover all such common sales funnel mistakes that kill conversions. Plus, the solutions to prevent or fix these mistakes and avoid any negative impact on your revenue.
TL;DR — Sales Funnel DOs and DON’Ts
First, let’s go through the quick DOs and DON’Ts:
Sales Funnel DOs |
Sales Funnel DON’Ts |
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Begin with customer research. |
Don’t just copy-paste a template. |
|
Target the right audience through the right platforms. |
Don’t run ad campaigns for a general audience. |
|
Plan and implement strategies for all levels and stages. |
Don’t just focus on setting up the automated funnel with no deep strategy. |
|
Focus on a singular direction, i.e., getting sales and repeat purchases. |
Don’t try to achieve too many goals with one funnel. |
|
Nurture your leads with high-quality content. |
Don't abandon your leads into the void. |
|
Use GemPages as a sales funnel builder and landing page builder. |
Don’t neglect the user experience, speed, and conversion optimization. |
|
Design CTAs that drive leads smoothly through the funnel. |
Don’t create too many CTAs or CTAs that divert/distract your leads. |
|
Optimize the entire funnel for mobile. |
Don’t use copy or media elements that are too large and heavy for mobile. |
|
Keep the branding consistent. |
Don’t change the color scheme and messaging on each asset. |
|
Create a valuable lead magnet through real and helpful insights. |
Don’t stuff AI-generated knowledge in your lead magnets. |
|
Nurture leads with high-quality, engaging, and conversion-oriented content. |
Don’t leave your audience to make the buying decision on their own. |
|
Personalize product recommendations, email, SMS, and offers. |
Don’t throw generic stuff together to all your visitors or leads without segmentation. |
|
Use a data-driven approach. |
Don’t assume things without tracking the metrics. |
|
Optimize your funnel based on analytics. |
Don’t keep the analytics just for the sake of measuring performance numbers. |
|
Conduct A/B tests to optimize the conversions. |
Don’t settle for below-par or average numbers. |
|
Put efforts into building a loyal customer base in the re-purchase stage. |
Don’t consider the job done after the initial purchase. |
|
Collect customer feedback and implement the needed changes accordingly. |
Don’t disregard the customer feedback. |
15+ Sales Funnel Mistakes in eCommerce + Solutions
Now, let’s go through the detailed guide on some of the biggest sales funnel mistakes in eCommerce and the solutions to prevent or fix these problems.
We’ll list these common mistakes based on broad categories from strategy, design, analysis, and other crucial perspectives:
A. Sales Funnel Strategy Mistakes
These are some of the sales funnel mistakes beginners make. Without building a solid foundation for your sales funnel, you can’t expect it to generate desired results.
Mistake #1. Building a Sales Funnel Without Customer Research
Customer research is at the core of your sales funnel.
Some brands just fail to support their sales funnel through valuable content — because they don’t emphasize customer research. Creating content without customer research is like serving a burger and French fries to a customer who ordered diet food.
For example, if you’re offering an eBook as a lead magnet, how would you know what your customers want if you haven’t done customer research or created buyer personas?
Solution:
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Build your sales funnel strategy based on thorough research and a deep understanding of your target audience.
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Don’t just copy-paste a template. It’s okay to use one as a framework, but customize it to your business case.
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Use the buyer personas to personalize your marketing materials. (Or create them if you haven’t already.) Buyer personas will help you create assets that resonate with your ideal customers.
Kettle & Fire understands the health consciousness of its target audience very well. Thus, it’s offering a free eBook that covers recipes for a healthier life.
Mistake #2. Poor or Wrong Targeting of the Audience
So, you identified the target audience and defined your buyer personas.
But what if you’re targeting the wrong audience? All your efforts might go in vain as you’ll not be able to attract enough leads. And even if you do so, you might end up getting a lot of unqualified leads that won’t convert.
This could be one of the reasons your conversion rate is low.
Here’s the industry-wise average conversion rate shared by Dynamic Yield:
Solution:
During your customer research, identify the platforms your ideal customers hang out on. Make sure to prioritize your marketing and ad campaigns on those specific platforms to attract high-quality leads.
For example, if you’re running a business in the fashion industry, social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest are great channels to find your audience.
Mistake #3. Not Creating a Robust Structure for All Levels & Stages
A sales funnel has three levels and five to six stages, depending on the specific business type and strategy:
If you don’t define your structure and prepare a strategy for each stage, your sales funnel will have a leakage issue. A sales funnel leakage is an issue where leads move out of your funnel without completing the purchase.
Solution:
We have created a sales funnel template for you, covering the templates for three different business models — B2C eCommerce, B2B eCommerce, and service business:
Download and customize the template based on your goals, strategy, and requirements.
Mistake #4. Focusing on Too Many Goals & Stages
Having a strategy in place is great — but going overboard with your sales funnel goals and stages is something you need to be mindful of.
The goal of your entire sales funnel must have a clear, singular direction, i.e., converting leads into buyers and converting first-time buyers into repeat customers. In this process, having too many stages creates a risk of losing hot leads.
Solution:
Be clear about your goals and define the stages based on your business case. For example, if you’re selling low-priced accessories, you don’t need to go for the evaluation stage.
Mistake #5. Missing Out on Lead Nurturing Strategy
Not all leads you bring into your funnel will convert immediately.
Some leads would just lurk around for a while before making a purchase. If your brand is not prepared with the email or SMS flows for lead nurturing, you might lose them.
For example, if you have created a lead magnet but have no plan on how to nurture those leads, those leads will be of no use.
Solution:
Here are two great lead nurturing solutions for your sales funnel:
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Newsletter + Email marketing: Prepare an email marketing strategy around an engaging newsletter. Your newsletter can nurture the leads and keep them in your funnel until they’re ready to buy.
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Blog Content: Publish valuable blog content. When your leads get value through your content, it helps create a great perception of your brand.
Make sure to have automated email marketing flows. Here are some interesting findings from Omnisend about “Automated emails vs. campaigns”: This data clearly shows the importance of running automated email flows for a welcome sequence, back-in-stock alerts, and abandoned cart recovery. Incorporate all these automated email flows in your sales funnel. Ruggable — a popular eCommerce brand — shows a great example of how you can make your welcome email not just enticing but also strengthening the sales funnel. After enticing the new leads with a “Mystery Welcome Offer”, it also encourages them to join the “Spill Club”, which can help keep the leads engaged with the brand. Throughout the overall structure of your sales funnel, you must nail the design elements with great branding, user experience, and of course, conversion optimization. A sales funnel is a system that consists of several parts. If you don’t have a reliable system in place, you won’t be able to streamline your sales funnel. Also, not having a system can increase your time and effort. Solution: GemPages Sales Funnel is a complete solution to build a high-converting sales funnel. Choose a sales funnel framework you need — “Full Sales Funnel” or “Post-purchase Offers”. And start building your sales funnel with an intuitive editor. Learn more: GemPages Sales Funnels - The Ultimate Solution for Maximizing Your Shopify Store Profit Also, landing pages play a crucial role in your entire sales funnel. Especially when you use landing pages at the MOFU and BOFU stages, you need to make sure they’re optimized for conversion with special design elements. Again, you don’t need another app to create landing pages! GemPages offers an extensive library of professionally designed and high-converting templates. GemPages is one of the most loved Shopify apps, with a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars and over 2,600 reviews and counting. During the sales funnel journey, you need to guide visitors through a journey. To do that, you must have CTAs that drive them to further steps in your funnel. Every CTA in your sales funnel must be designed for a specific goal, and it must be incorporated in your CTA copy. For example, when visitors land on your blog post page, you need to have a newsletter CTA to get them into your sales funnel. If you’ve written a blog post on a skincare topic, you can write a CTA copy — “Get fresh skincare tips every week!” — to promote your newsletter. Don’t miss out on the mobile user experience when designing your sales funnel. Mobile commerce has been booming in recent years, and the trend is only going to go up from here. If your mobile user experience is poor, leads might leave your funnel. Solution: Throughout the sales funnel, all assets must be optimized for mobile. From website copy to images to CTAs — everything must fit well on mobile screens. Learn more: Shopify Mobile Optimization: Boost Mobile Speed & SEO Throughout the sales funnel, your visitors/leads should experience the same branding. If your brand theme is not maintained consistently, it’ll weaken your brand’s identity and perception. For example, if you create the ad creative and landing page with a completely different color scheme, it will make it skeptical for the visitors. They won’t see your brand as a professional one. Solution: Maintain consistent branding elements as well as messaging. Set up guidelines regarding your brand’s elements, such as logo, tagline, color scheme, font style, etc. Lead magnets help you attract potential leads to your funnel. Some brands create hype around their lead magnet, but when potential customers go through it, they find no value in it. This damages the trust factors of your brand. Solution: Before creating a lead magnet, ask your customers what they’d find helpful and make sure to put in genuine efforts to solve that problem. When your leads find your lead magnet helpful, they stick to your brand as a gesture of gratitude. You can bring traffic into your funnel with TOFU content and ads, but you can’t keep them with you without high-quality content. When the leads are exploring your brand in the MOFU and BOFU stages, they’re likely to make decisions based on your content. You must offer them content that not only helps them but also drives them to make the purchase. Solution: Consistently deliver high-quality content at the MOFU and BOFU stages of your sales funnel. If visitors are exploring your products but not adding them to their carts, it’s likely because they’re not finding those products relevant. According to Dynamic Yield, the global average add-to-cart rate is only 6.41%. Solution: Set up the sales funnel in a way that you can collect details to enhance personalization in your marketing campaigns. Here’s how you can do it: Personalize product recommendations: Depending on your product offerings, you can segment your leads and offer personalized product recommendations. Personalization in email and SMS marketing: Gather details on the recipient’s preferences and then send personalized email and SMS offers based on those preferences. Offer personalization: Create special offers based on the specific segments. For example, offering special discounts to leads that sign up for a membership or loyalty program. Your sales funnel must be implemented with a data-driven approach. Without proper tracking of the key metrics, you won’t be able to quantify your sales funnel performance. Solution: Here are some of the key metrics you can track with GemPages Sales Funnel: Visits Offer Accepted Offers Conversion Rate (CR) Orders Revenue Average Order Value (AOV) Offers Revenue (OR) Learn more: Mastering GemPages Sales Funnel Statistics: Key Metrics Once you’ve implemented a sales funnel and have the data on key metrics, don’t ignore those insights. You must use those insights to optimize your funnel. Solution: Find the areas of improvement based on the metrics, and enhance the respective areas. For example, let’s say your conversion rate is performing below par, you can check your offer and checkout page to see what’s stopping leads from taking that final step. Once you’ve published your sales funnel, you must monitor and iterate to keep on improving it. So, we talked about fixing the areas of improvement and optimizing the sales funnel. But how do you do that? You can find that answer through an A/B testing tool. For example, if your data suggests that your leads are abandoning the cart after visiting a specific product or landing page, you can perform an A/B test to optimize your product or landing page. Solution: You can use GemX: CRO & A/B Testing app to easily create and conduct A/B tests. Just go to the GemX dashboard, click “Create new experiment”, select your control and variant — and hit “Start experiment”. Learn more: A Complete Guide to Shopify A/B Testing Your sales funnel doesn’t end with the initial purchase. If you don’t put in your focus and effort in the re-purchase stage, you’ll lose the opportunities for repeat sales. Solution: Prepare strategies encouraging customers to purchase again from your brand. For example, set up an email sequence for special offers on reorders. You can even offer special reward points through a loyalty program. Customer feedback is crucial for any marketing campaign. If your sales funnel is not driving the results as expected, no one could tell you better what needs to be improved than your customers. Solution: Conduct customer surveys to collect feedback on the user experience or the overall customer satisfaction. You could also conduct post-purchase surveys to learn about any areas of improvement. Learn more: Post-Purchase Surveys: Guide, Examples, and Questions As you can see in this guide, there are a lot of things to take care of in your sales funnel. But don’t over-complicate things unnecessarily. Keep things simple. Use GemPages to build your sales funnel builder and power it with high-converting landing pages. Monitor your analytics regularly and keep enhancing your sales funnel performance. To learn more about other eCommerce marketing strategies, tools, and best practices — check out more resources on the GemPages Blog. Also, join the GemPages Facebook community to network and learn from like-minded entrepreneurs and experts.
B. Sales Funnel Design Mistakes
Mistake #6. Not Having a Reliable System in Place
Mistake #7. Wrongly or Poorly Designed CTAs
Mistake #8. Poor or No Mobile Optimization
Mistake #9. Not Keeping the Design of All Assets On-Brand
C. Sales Funnel Content Mistakes
Mistake #10. Offering a Lead Magnet with No Value
Mistake #11. Nurturing Leads with Poor Quality Content
Mistake #12. Not Implementing Personalization
D. Sales Funnel Tracking & Analytics Mistakes
Mistake #13. No Proper Tracking for the Key Metrics
Mistake #14. Not Using the Analytics for Enhancements
E. Post-Implementation Sales Funnel Mistakes
Mistake #15. Not Optimizing the Sales Funnel with A/B Testing
Mistake #16. Lack of Effort in the Repurchase Stage of the Funnel
Mistake #17. Disregarding Customer Feedback for Needed Changes
Final Thoughts on Sales Funnel Mistakes
FAQs About Top Sales Funnel Mistakes to Avoid
