A wholesale funnel is a visual representation from the first contact with potential customers to the final deal. The wholesale funnel helps you understand your future customers’ thoughts, challenges, and decisions at each stage of the purchasing journey. Wholesale at a digital trade fair like FAIRLING also works like a classic marketing/sales funnel. By placing ads, you let shop owners get to know your products so that they would love to order from you. Therefore, it is very important that you build up their interest step by step during your membership.
There are three phases in the wholesale funnel: Awareness, Interest, and Purchase.
1. Awareness
In this stage, customers are being made aware of your product for the first time – this happens primarily through your advertisements. Whether customers are captured by your products depends on your presentation and marketing of your brand. You have to emphasize your unique selling point (USP): What does your product do? What makes it more valuable than other similar products that are being offered? What unique features does it have? Who are you and what is the story behind the product? By doing this, the shop owners form an emotional connection with you and the products you offer. Bear in mind that the first advertisement that you place on the platform might not be the most successful one. However, it is very important as it establishes the first contact to the potential clients.
- Introduce your brand: Most of the resellers probably don’t know your brand yet. For the first ad, it can be therefore helpful to tell something about you and your brand so that the resellers can get to know you better.
- Use bullet points or headlines: When you structure your text, it is often easier to read instead of one block of text. With different headlines or bullet points, you can communicate your benefits and USP clearer and your potential customers are more likely to read the text.
- Address the retailers personally: By referring to how your products look in the shop or how useful they are for the shopowner’s customers, your B2B customers will feel better addressed.
- Include a call-to-action: Always end your text with a call to action so that your customers feel called to want to connect with you now.
In your first ad, feel free to also share the founder’s story with great pictures of you as a founder or of your team. This often makes a personal impression and is a nice addition to better understand your brand and the story behind it. Additionally, you can also include some “behind the scenes” images and content so that your target audience feels involved – your brand appears also trustworthy this way.
2. Interest
Here you focus on helping shop owners create an emotional attachment to your products. Once again show the customers why they should order your products, by emphasizing the value. This stage is also an opportunity for you to develop a relationship with the shop owners/customers. This can be done through personalized emails, advertisements, and newsletters that are targeted to specific shops that you want to place your products in. Introduce yourself to the shops by reaching out to them via your advertisement or mail and always showcase the benefits of your products over others. Maybe offering a product sample to awaken the interest of the customers can also help.
- Attractive offers: In the best case, you have a great offer for your customers so that they are immediately interested in your brand. This could be free shipping, a discount for new customers, no minimum order or a free sample. Communicate it clearly and understandably so that everyone can see it immediately.
- Put your benefits right in the title: In order to awaken the interest immediately, it can be helpful to put your best-selling argument or offers right in the title of your advertisement.
- Stress your USP: Focus on why people should buy especially your products. List all the great benefits and work out what sets you apart from the competition to convince your customer.
- Establish a relationship: Communicate clearly what shops you are looking for and what values are important to you. This way, you connect with shops that share these values and you can make an instant connection.
For example, for an ad in the interest phase, you can also share a love story from one of your existing resellers. Are there great pictures of how your products are presented on the shelves of the shop? Is there convincing feedback that customers love coming to the shop for your products? Feel free to share your “happy customers” experiences and share all your recommendations. Sometimes, it can be also convincing to advertise your bestsellers so that your resellers immediately know what they should go for. All this can also help potential new retailers to choose your brand.
3. Purchase
Shop owners will get in touch with you to buy your items. A positive buying experience for the customer can lead to referrals and more people will be made aware of your products. The wholesale funnel starts from the beginning. It is important to make sure that customers actually order from you. So don’t forget to keep on publishing advertisements to raise awareness and create interest in your brand to new customers. Many more customers will follow!
- Get the customers on board: By now they’ve seen a few of your ads and know your brand quite well. The last phase is really about convincing customers of your products through a clear call-to-action.
- Additional benefits: Use the last, perhaps previously unknown arguments to take away the last doubt from your target group. Is there anything you haven’t mentioned yet that is still special? Think about why the resellers might still have doubts and try to solve them immediately. In case if you need inspiration, just check out our help center article here!
- Artificial shortage: This increases the pressure for your customers to order now. You can do this, for example, by limiting the time of your offer (only in June!) or by limiting the number of offers (for the first 5 customers!). Of course, people don’t want to miss out on this offer and therefore tend to order immediately.
For the purchase phase ad, the most important thing is to answer all potential questions and communicate your USP really clearly. It’s no longer about getting to know the products and your brand, but really working out the benefits of the products for the shopowners and giving them good sales arguments. So you can also differentiate between B2B retailer benefits and B2C end-customer benefits in the ads.
Moreover, the purchase stage goes hand in hand with closing the deal. So after you have received your first inquiry, it is super important to actually turn this request into a deal! You will find some great tips in our help center article “How to close the deal?” in case if you need some advice.
The wholesale funnel can once again be viewed as a funnel to symbolize its goal:
Even if there are times when wholesaling seems more difficult, it’s still important to be visible and tell the shops about your great products. Maybe you got some ideas from this article and found inspiration on how to make your ads on FAIRLING interesting.
Are you excited to tell the people more about you and your brand and are you looking for new resellers?
We would love to help you find those.
Just book a free demo call and we will be very happy to talk with you about your possibilities or answer your questions!
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