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Marketers love funnels. But let’s be honest most eCommerce funnels are leaky, outdated, and dangerously detached from how real people buy in 2025.
Today’s shoppers don’t move neatly from awareness to purchase like obedient chess pieces. They zig-zag across channels, do their own research, and ghost brands that fail to add value.
If you’re still treating your funnel as a linear slide from ad to checkout, you’re already losing revenue.
At WIRO, we’ve seen this first-hand while scaling growth for ambitious UK DTC brands and we’ve rebuilt their funnels around real customer journeys. A strategic funnel not only boost sales but also long-term brand loyalty and revenue growth. Let’s break down how.
Understanding the Marketing Funnel Stages
A marketing funnel is simply a framework that maps out the prospects from discovery to loyalty. More than just attracting attention, the funnel is about building relationships turning awareness into trust and loyalty. While the model is old, its power lies in how you adapt it to modern behaviour.
Core Stages of the Marketing Funnel
Let’s look into main stages of the marketing funnel and explore the strategies to master them.
Awareness (TOFU)
The first stage of the funnel where the main goal is increase visibility of your brand.
- Objective: Capture attention and attract new audiences.
- Tactics: SEO content, social media, paid search, influencer collaborations.
- Example: For luxury interiors brand Casa by JJ, we helped launch editorial-style content that doubled their organic impressions in three months.
Consideration (MOFU)
The middle of the funnel where the goal is to educate, nurture, and build a relationship with potential customers.
- Objective: Build trust, educate, nurture.
- Tactics: Email campaigns, webinars, lead magnets, retargeting ads.
- WIRO Insight: “Brands win this stage by showing they get their customers not by shouting louder than competitors,” says Laura Rincon, WIRO’s Head of Strategy.
Decision (BOFU)
The final stage of the funnel where you want the prospects to purchase or take an action.
- Objective: Drive purchase conversions.
- Tactics: Product demos, testimonials, transparent pricing, checkout UX optimisation.
- Example: For Avery Row, we streamlined their product pages and saw a record jump in Add-to-Cart rates.
Extended Stages of the Marketing Funnel
Once you’ve covered the basic stages of the marketing funnel, it’s time to focus on what comes next: nurturing customer loyalty and inspiring brand advocacy. These stages are essential for maintaining relationships with your existing customers and turning them into enthusiastic supporters of your brand.
Loyalty & Advocacy
- Objective: Turn buyers into repeat customers and brand champions.
- Tactics: Loyalty schemes, tailored post-purchase comms, referral programmes.
- Thought: Too many brands see purchase as the end. It’s the start.
Mapping the Customer Journey
The customer journey is the lived experience across every touchpoint not just the path to purchase, but also support, returns, and post-purchase care.
Typical stages:
- Awareness → Research → Purchase → Post-purchase → Advocacy
Key difference from the funnel: Funnels show how you sell. Journeys show how people buy. If you only optimise for your funnel, you miss 80% of the actual experience.
Why Most Funnels Fail UK eCommerce Brands
Most brands still run campaigns in silos. Awareness teams chase impressions. Performance teams chase ROAS. Customer support is an afterthought.
The result?
- Mixed messaging across stages
- No emotional connection
- Fragmented customer experience
That’s why customer journey-led funnels are now outperforming traditional funnels across every sector. They meet people where they are, not where your budget calendar says they should be.
Aligning Funnel Stages to the Customer Journey
To drive growth, every stage of your funnel must align with what the customer needs at that moment:
When we rebuilt Avery Row’s journey, we identified gaps between consideration and decision. Bridging those gaps with on-site UX changes and automated nurturing helped them hit record annual growth.
Measuring Funnel Effectiveness
To know if your funnel works, obsess over data, not opinions.
Track stage-specific KPIs:
- TOFU: Reach, engagement, new sessions
- MOFU: CTR, time on site, lead quality
- BOFU: Conversion rate, AOV
- Loyalty: Repeat purchase rate, CLV
We build custom dashboards for our clients that combine GA4, Shopify data, and customer feedback loops to spot leaks instantly.
How WIRO Helps Ambitious Brands Build Smarter Funnels
At WIRO, we don’t just optimise pages, we engineer entire ecommerce ecosystems.
- We combine data-driven CRO with Shopify Plus development to make funnels frictionless.
- Our CX audits and journey mapping expose where prospects drop off.
- We deliver personalised, scalable ecommerce strategies that grow with your brand.
Our work has helped brands across homeware, lifestyle and luxury fashion boost conversion rates by 20–40% and cut acquisition costs all by aligning strategy to different marketing funnels to real-world customer journeys.
Conclusion
Funnels aren’t dead, they just need rebuilding for the modern customer. Understanding these funnels is important for guiding prospects and helps in understanding the decision making process through out there customer journey.
If you’re a UK brand still running a funnel that treats customers as transactions, it’s time to evolve. Start by mapping the actual journey your customers take, then rebuild your funnel around it not the other way around.
And if you want a partner who’s done it for some of the UK’s fastest-growing brands, WIRO can help.
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