Instagram has done an incredible job at staying relevant. The introduction of Reels means it can compete with short-form video content on TikTok, and features like Shops have had a major impact on social commerce. Users can not only follow their favorite brands, but buy from them too—without leaving the app.
Instagram’s evolution has helped maintain its position in many purchase journeys. Almost 40% of Gen Z uses TikTok and Instagram for search over Google, and eMarketer expects that 46.8 million US consumers will make at least one purchase through Instagram this year.
But to sell on Instagram, you need a sales funnel that guides people from discovering your brand to becoming loyal customers. This guide shows you how to build one.
- Understand your target audience
- Build awareness with Instagram ads
- Create engaging content for Instagram users
- Drive Instagram traffic to your website
- Convert visitors into leads
- Nurture Instagram leads into customers
- Create a genuine community
- Leverage user-generated content
- Run contests and giveaways
- Measure and optimize your Instagram funnel
1. Understand your target audience
It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics when building out an Instagram sales funnel. Thousands of likes and millions of views look good on the surface, but if those people aren’t your target audience, social media fame is unlikely to result in paying customers.
Identify your ideal customer and create a buyer persona to guide your Instagram sales funnel strategy. This should underpin the entire foundation of your social commerce model—it’ll help attract the right people and increase conversion rates.
To do this:
- Use Shopify Analytics to benchmark your current acquisition rate and the content that drives website traffic.
- Build customer feedback loops to uncover factors that drive current customers to buy—you can double-down on this to attract more of the same.
- Use Instagram Insights to analyze your existing audience and understand their demographics, interests, and behaviors.
- Research your competitors and identify gaps in the market you can use to differentiate your brand.
For example, data might show that people click your Instagram Story links when you post video content, or that competitors regularly share customer reviews to their own profiles.
Incorporate these insights into your Instagram sales funnel—whether by allocating more budget to produce video content or reviewing your post-purchase automation to collect more reviews to share on Instagram.
2. Build awareness with Instagram ads
You’re no longer guaranteed to reach everyone who follows your Instagram business profile with an organic Instagram post. Competition for the limited slots in a user’s feed is fierce, and social media platforms—including Meta, the company that owns Instagram—are driving brands towards a pay-to-play model.
Instagram Ads let you reach a wider audience and drive traffic directly to your online store. To prevent overspending on ads and maximize the return on investment for your ad spend:
- Target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors that your buyer persona research revealed.
- Experiment with Instagram’s various ad formats, such as photo, carousel, and video ads, to determine which combination your audience responds best to.
- Drive people toward tailored landing or product pages rather than your homepage.
- Use creator-generated content and run influencer marketing campaigns using their Instagram profiles to boost social proof.
- Set a bid cap to prevent acquisition costs from exceeding the lifetime value of a typical customer.
- Build multistep campaigns that show targets different ads depending on their reaction to campaigns they saw earlier in the customer journey. For example: If someone clicks your brand awareness campaign and visits the “Shoes” product category on-site, show them your best-selling sneakers in a retargeted Instagram ad.
Fashion ecommerce brand Kate Hewko enlisted the help of Shopify Audiences to improve the targeting of their Instagram campaigns. Their founder was looking for a way to fuel the brand’s next phase of growth—and it worked. During the three-week campaign, Shopify Audiences helped Kate Hewko achieve a 45% higher ROAS and an 8% lower cost per acquisition.
“With Shopify Audiences we saw one of our best performing campaigns, ever,” says founder and CEO Kate Hewko. “The results exceeded expectations, and Shopify Audiences now plays a vital role in our buyer prospecting strategy.”
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Install Shopify Audiences3. Create engaging content for Instagram users
Carousels are the most effective type of content on Instagram—they get the highest reach and engagement over all content types. Single-image posts and Reels follow closely behind—though the only way to determine if this holds true for your brand is to experiment.
Aside from the content format you’re using, test different topics or themes. Content that tends to perform well on Instagram includes:
- Behind-the-scenes content
- Sneak peeks
- Exclusive deals or flash sales
Your Instagram content strategy should showcase your brand’s personality and resonate with your target audience. If your brand’s tone of voice is corporate, avoid trying to sound too Gen Z on Instagram. If you want to be known for healthy cereal that’s better for your customers than alternatives on the market, use the same messaging in your Instagram content.
Similarly, if you’re using Instagram as a way to drive foot traffic to physical stores, use niche hashtags along with location tags to reach followers in that area.
Consult Instagram Insights to track engagement and adjust your content strategy accordingly. This built-in analytics feature shows you your most popular content, who your followers are, and how they found you. Double down on whatever’s working—not just for vanity metrics like views and engagement, but for what turns them into sales.
4. Drive Instagram traffic to your website
Unlike Instagram, your website isn’t restricted to a particular content format. Your website showcases your brand without content from other social media users, including competitor products. In other words, you’re in complete control over the user experience that someone has on your website.
Studies have shown that a positive online experience encourages almost two-thirds of people to buy, with almost half saying the experience is more important than a product’s price.
Instagram has a handful of features to help you take advantage of this by driving Instagram traffic to your website:
- The link in your bio
- The link stickers in Instagram Stories
- Instagram Shop, where you can tag products in your posts and Stories and divert them to a specific product page on your website
The tricky thing about selling through the link in your Instagram bio is that the more actions someone has to take, the less likely they are to follow through. Linkpop solves this problem by allowing users to click the link in your Instagram bio and view specific products, then use one-click checkout to buy in a fraction of the time it’d take to do the same thing on your website.
5. Convert visitors into leads
Because you want to get someone from your Instagram to your ecommerce store as quickly as possible, you need to be able to offer an incentive that entices—and you need to make it worth their while. This is where lead magnets come in.
Coupon codes exclusive to Instagram are a straightforward starting point for generating leads. You can use them to reward followers and let them know to keep coming back to your Instagram for more exclusive deals. The added benefit is attribution—once someone places an order via the code, you’re able to track Instagram ROI easily.
Beyond exclusive discounts and sales, think creatively about how you can help your Instagram followers. For example, you could offer the following in exchange for an Instagram lead’s email address:
- Early access to a new product that’s only available to people on your mailing list
- An invitation to a webinar on a topic they’re interested in
- A free tool, workbook, or product guide
- Entry into a competition or giveaway
From free samples and giveaways, to training and eBooks, the most important thing to remember about your Instagram lead-generation offering is that it should be relevant, attractive, and tailored to your brand.
Don’t bank on the idea that followers will see your post and take action on their own accord. Take advantage of Instagram features that make it easier for followers to opt in, such as polls and quizzes that engage your audience and encourage them to share their contact information without leaving the Instagram app.
6. Nurture Instagram leads into customers
It’s not always feasible to acquire new customers the first time they see your post on Instagram. Trust is a core component of any purchase journey, and it takes time to build that with your followers.
That said, there’s a fine line between gently encouraging your followers to progress through the Instagram sales funnel and leaving them to their own devices. You don’t want to spam your Stories with product links every few hours, or neglect customers who’ve taken the next step—like signing up to your email list—but still haven’t bought.
The best approach is personalization—offering customers the messaging they need, at the time they need it. Per Salesforce, 65% of customers expect brands to adapt to their changing needs and preferences. Doing so gives you a competitive advantage: 71% say most businesses treat them as just a number.
Shopify’s segmentation feature makes this easy. It automatically groups customer profiles based on the qualities they share, allowing you to run a multisegment marketing strategy that sends personalized messages to specific customers when they’ve expressed a need for something. For example:
- Instagram followers who’ve visited your website but haven’t converted yet: Nurture this segment with Instagram retargeting ads that show the products they viewed or had in their cart, with an exclusive and time-sensitive discount code to incentivize a purchase.
- Subscribers who opted into emails through a discount pop-up form but still haven’t bought: Develop an email marketing strategy to nurture leads and encourage them to make a purchase. This might include making the coupon time-sensitive, making personalized product recommendations, or diverting customers to your local store.
- Existing customers who found you through Instagram but haven’t bought something in X days. Set aside some marketing budget to retarget people who haven’t bought something for a longer period than your typical sales cycle. A skincare brand, for example, might send emails or run retargeted ads to people who haven’t bought their moisturizer in 30 days (the average purchasing frequency of customers who restock when their previous item is empty).
“We identified the segment in Shopify, created a discount, communicated with them in a way that was very personalized, and we saw about 30% of those people convert,” says Alex Dashefsky, cofounder of Airsign.
7. Create a genuine community
Sprout Social’s recent report concluded that connection is the new currency. Consumers don’t just want to see perfectly polished product imagery on Instagram—they expect brands to be positive contributors to society, connect with other customers, and use their power to help.
Develop a community-building strategy to engage with your Instagram audience and encourage user-generated content. That might include:
- Responding to comments on your posts
- Sharing behind-the-scenes content of your business on Instagram Stories
- Hosting livestreams on Instagram to connect with your audience and answer questions in real time
- Using the Q&A sticker on Instagram Stories to answer questions from your community
- Identifying key community members and rewarding their loyalty with store credit, free products, or Instagram shoutouts
Most importantly: Back up your core values and claims with evidence. “I see all the time these reports about consumers—especially in the sort of demographic that we market to, the millennial and the Gen Z—that they're much more likely to align with brands whose values they see themselves in,” says Noel Mack, chief brand officer at Gymshark.
“There's never been a better time probably, in our lifetimes anyway, for a brand to really show what its values are—to stand up now and be counted and say, ‘This is what we stand for,’” Noel says. “I can hand-on-heart say that Gymshark has absolutely done that.”
8. Leverage user-generated content
Sometimes the most effective way to engage your audience is to show them unbiased user-generated content (UGC)—whether that’s from a creator they trust, an influencer they follow, or a happy customer who can vouch for your products.
The most difficult part of UGC is acquiring it. However, you can collect it on autopilot by emailing customers post-purchase and asking them to share photos or videos featuring your products. Brand advocates could reply to your email with a video, or contribute it through a submission form—you just need their permission to repost it to your Instagram account.
📌 Pro tip: Collect more UGC with Shopify Collabs. Find and vet influencers of all follower counts through the app, then send them free products to encourage them to post about your brand on Instagram—all without leaving your Shopify admin.
Ramen brand immi leaned on the app to build authentic relationships with creators in its affiliate network. In a few short months, Shopify Collabs helped immi earn more than $200,000 in sales—with its highest-performing affiliate seller having just 10,000 followers on Instagram.
“We love using Shopify Collabs because it’s simple and easy to use,” says immi’s senior partnerships manager Simal Adenwala. “The Collabs team is easy to work with, always open to feedback, and the platform saves us so much time with really easy-to-use features for affiliate tracking, gifting and commission tracking.”
9. Run contests and giveaways on Instagram
Generally speaking, you don’t want to run a competition more than once a month because your followers will associate your brand with “freebies,” which lowers its value. That said, you should definitely take advantage of everything competitions and contests have to offer in generating leads from Instagram.
Everyone loves a chance to win—whether they’re already following your brand on Instagram or aren’t anywhere close to your sales funnel yet.
To launch a lead-building Instagram contest, all you need is:
- A giveaway featuring a specific product (or set) you want to promote
- An easy-to-remember hashtag that combines your brand, the competition, and your followers’ interests
- A contest type, such as like-to-win, tag-to-win, or a photo challenge
- A simple set of share-friendly instructions, such as “Follow our Instagram page and tag a friend in the comments to enter”
- A top-of-funnel metric to measure your end goal
If you're looking for a way to quickly boost engagement and heighten awareness, a “like-to-win” competition might be enough to do just that. It doesn’t require a lot of effort from participants because it’s about as straightforward as contests come—however, these competitions probably aren’t going to give you very invested leads.
On the other hand, if someone is willing to go somewhere, take a photo, and share it with your company and their friends for a chance to win something—they’re far more interested in what your company has to offer. It’s a higher bar, and often generates less engagement—but it drives followers toward becoming loyal customers.
Sustain your Instagram sales funnel after announcing the winner with a follow-up strategy to target people who’ve entered the competition but not won. You could send an Instagram DM to everyone who commented and give them a discount code or free-shipping coupon to incentivize them to buy, for example.
10. Measure and optimize your Instagram funnel
Is your Instagram sales funnel working as intended? Gut instinct is notoriously unreliable—the only way to know for certain is to look at the data.
Luckily, there are several data sources to measure the effectiveness of your sales funnel:
- Instagram Insights: Track engagement, website traffic, and conversions without leaving the Instagram app. Double down on the content that’s best at engaging your audience, and compare your Instagram follower demographics to your buyer persona to confirm you’re building an audience of people who are likely to buy—even if they haven’t done so yet.
- Instagram Ads Manager: Use the A/B testing feature to optimize your ad creative, targeting, and CTAs. The tool will test different formats to highlight the combination that your Instagram audience responds best to.
- Shopify Analytics: Isolate metrics like sales, sessions, orders, conversion rate, and average order value for people who access your website through Instagram. Compare this data to stores like yours with Benchmarks, and build custom dashboards to prove the value of your Instagram sales funnel to stakeholders.
Drive sales from Instagram with this marketing funnel
A successful Instagram sales funnel requires a deep understanding of your target market, engaging content, and a clear call-to-action. Combine your insights with Instagram tools, such as Instagram Ads Manager and Instagram Shopping, to drive traffic and sales from the platform.
Make sure that you make the best impression on your audience with high-quality, relevant images, valuable lead magnets and competitions, an incredible brand bio, and plenty of social proof. The visual, personal, and inherently social nature of Instagram makes it a powerful tool for getting your brand both seen and heard.
Confirm whether you’re doing this effectively by continuously measuring and optimizing your Instagram sales funnel to ensure maximum conversions. Combine Shopify Analytics with Shopify Audiences to improve your targeting and reduce acquisition costs, as well as monitor the long-term impact of your campaigns.
