Jonathan Denney

Fall 2022 Update: The New ConvertFlow

Spring 2022 brought us one of ConvertFlow’s biggest updates yet: the introduction of product recommendation elements. This was inspired by the rising ad costs ConvertFlow customers were seeing across the board after the infamous iOS 14 update.

Now, we’ve gone even further—moving hard into helping ecommerce brands collect and use first-party data to build personalized on-site funnels.

Why?

In short: Because brands need it.

So in this post, we share some background on this decision as well as a fall update on everything we’ve been doing recently to align the ConvertFlow product with this new direction.

How iOS 14 changed everything

The introduction of iOS 14’s tracking prevention features was the nail in the coffin for the wild west era of digital marketing. Big tech ad platforms no longer got unlimited access to data from other websites for full-funnel marketing, personalization, and attribution.

As the big tech advertising platforms become increasingly siloed from one another with privacy regulations and tracking prevention features from browsers, their visibility into what happens on your website decreases.

This limits targeting, personalization, and attribution capabilities… but only when redirecting shoppers to your own website. The privacy limitations largely don’t exist when shopping within their platforms, such as Amazon and Facebook/Instagram Shops.

In other words:

Big tech is increasingly incentivizing brands to keep their ecommerce funnel within the walled gardens of each platform—where they’ll make brands dependent and squeeze out higher fees. All while disincentivizing the brands that send shoppers to their own websites.

The rebellion begins

Perhaps the future of ecommerce this decade is most brands defaulting to being merchant “profiles” on big tech platforms.

We already see it today with Amazon, the ecommerce incumbent infamous for using shopping data from smaller merchants on its platform to undercut with the Amazon Basics product line.

And with Zuckerberg’s dystopian Metaverse platform on the horizon, we can already see where Meta/Facebook/Instagram’s heading with its ad platform—toward another walled garden.

Perhaps for ecommerce, Amazon is already “the empire.” And the brands that adapted to rising ad costs by leaning on their own websites and building first-party are the rebels fighting for independence.

Big tech vs. ecommerce brands
Source: Disney

Shopify has already declared that they are arming the rebels with infrastructure for independent merchants. Plus, the iOS 14 fiasco showed it’s more important than ever that brands keep their independence with first-party marketing that they control.

This is precisely where ConvertFlow can help.

ConvertFlow’s new mission

The future of ecommerce that we envision is an ecosystem of thriving independent brands:

  • Independent brands’ margins don’t get crushed by big tech platform fees
  • Independent brands can survive ad and search algorithm changes
  • Independent brands own a first-party audience of subscribers and customers that they can reach directly
  • Independent brands deliver a personalized shopping experience through owned channels—and they can track, personalize, and test each step of the funnel as needed

We're "arming the rebels" by empowering independent brands with the tools they need to deliver personalized shopping funnels across their own channels, such as their website, email, and SMS audiences.

Our goal is to help brands “own the funnel” when faced with increasing pressure to depend solely on big tech platforms for their whole business.

As we embark on this mission, to start, we’ve overhauled the current ConvertFlow product with a better understanding of its purpose.

The funnel builder for ecommerce

Head to ConvertFlow’s new home page, and you’ll notice the focus on being the “funnel builder for ecommerce.”

ConvertFlow home page screenshot

Why just ecommerce? The brands who see the most success with ConvertFlow deliver a personalized funnel that guides shoppers to a self-service checkout—whether that’s Shopify, Stripe, or another online checkout.

ConvertFlow’s no-code platform has a long history of also serving B2B brands. But, we found that the most successful B2B brands adopt consumerized marketing funnels and self-service experiences—and believe the rest will inevitably be forced to catch up.

To reflect our mission, we’ve focused our product strategy and mission on helping with that goal.

Since we started expanding ConvertFlow beyond list growth tools, here are some of the funnels you can now build:

Funnel examples

And to make building funnels in ConvertFlow easier, we’ve overhauled the product in some key areas.

Fall 2022 Update: What’s new in ConvertFlow?

Over the summer, we’ve been hard at work both building new features and improving existing ones.

Here are some of the key highlights:

Introducing the new ConvertFlow dashboard

ConvertFlow’s dashboard has been redesigned to make building funnels easier than ever:

Aside from the new interface and navigation, you’ll notice the campaign creation process now recommends the top campaign templates needed to build your ecommerce funnel:

Launch funnels in ConvertFlow

Our recommended campaign templates now come paired with helpful playbooks from the ConvertFlow team on how to launch that type of campaign:

Playbook examples

Templates for elements, sections, and funnel steps

We’ve expanded template functionality to elements, sections, and funnel steps:

When adding new content, whether a new headline, form, survey, products feed, row, section, or an additional funnel step, you'll now have the option to choose from a template or create from scratch.

We've started seeding these libraries with assets from ConvertFlow's existing library of 100+ campaign templates and will be adding new template assets with each new campaign template we build moving forward.

More powerful product recommendations

ConvertFlow's product recommendations feature became much more powerful with the new conditional recommendations feature:

Conditional product recommendations

Instead of configuring separate funnel steps for each product recommendation, you can now use conditions to define multiple product recommendations on the same product element.

In other words, you no longer have to create separate product quiz outcomes and campaigns for each recommendation.

Instead, just send shoppers to the same funnel step and have the products dynamically change out based on any conditions you've set, such as quiz answers, products in cart, URL, etc.

Shopify collections filter

Shopify product elements now support filtering products by Shopify collections.

This is extra helpful if you've already got a lot of product filtering work done in Shopify using their collections feature.

With Shopify collection filters and the new product recommendations feature, building personalized product recommendation funnels in ConvertFlow is much more productive than before and much more powerful.

Even more improvements

Due to the summertime overhaul, we steadily released lots of new updates.

In case you missed it, here’s a recap:

  • Duplicate button for broadcast campaigns
  • Shopify cart products elements now update in real-time upon popup trigger, allowing for one-click upsells based on latest product added to cart
  • Control for the default country code for each phone/SMS form field
  • Form submission alert automations now support phone-only contact submissions
  • Section column layouts now support 25%/50%/25% layouts
  • Two-tap trigger button mobile font size control
  • Ability to transfer websites between accounts (with new customer referral attribution for affiliate partners)
  • A complete timeline of payment receipts/invoices now downloadable from the billing page
  • Delete contact action added for Zapier and API

What’s next for ConvertFlow?

We’re doubling down on helping ecommerce brands build their funnel and grow their first-party audience with our email & SMS partners such as Klaviyo and Attentive.

Look out for new funnel playbooks, more templates across ConvertFlow, improved reporting, and more integrations with the ecommerce marketing stack.

Join the rebellion

If you’re an ecommerce brand, join us for a demo, and we’ll help you with your funnel and first-party marketing strategy. If you’re an agency, join the partner program to help build funnels for brands and get connected to clients.

And if you’d like to join ConvertFlow’s team, check out our open roles. We’re hiring!

About the author
Jonathan Denney
Co-Founder & CTO, ConvertFlow
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Jonathan Denney leads product at ConvertFlow. After running a conversion marketing agency, Jonathan co-founded ConvertFlow with his brother Ethan Denney to help brands build conversion funnels without code or waiting on developers. Since then, ConvertFlow's no-code funnel builder has helped launch 100k+ conversion campaigns, across brands such as Volkswagen, NectarSleep, CampingWorld and more.