Ecommerce Sales Funnel – Everything you Need to Know
You want customers to leave your e-commerce site having filled their shopping carts with expensive items and having spent a lot of money. That’s natural. But what if they don’t?
The average consumer has an active lifestyle. They are always searching for information online, and as a result, they don’t necessarily respond immediately – at least not in the way that you would like them to.
No of the circumstances, it is not always possible to win a consumer over on their very first visit.
However, you are able to include them into the conversion funnel for your online store. Put in motion the steps necessary to transform them from leads into paying clients.
What is a Conversion Funnel in Ecommerce?
When it comes to e-commerce, a conversion funnel is a diagram that shows the path that a consumer takes from the moment they are introduced to your brand to the moment they make a purchase.
Every company has a unique ecommerce conversion funnel because the intricacies of how customers traverse their websites give rise to a variety of possible outcomes. The phases remain the same but the specifics change depending on the product and the audience.
The Importance of Developing a Customer Acquisition Funnel for Online Shopping
Knowing which areas effect conversions, the most enables you zero in on those areas and improve your funnel.
When you have access to this information, you can put it to use by increasing the amount of activity on your Facebook page and encouraging people who visit your website to follow you on Facebook. By having a visible CTA for Facebook, you take use of existing website and bring visitors into your social sphere.
Where can you find out the typical conversion rate for online shopping?
Companies have a great amount of room for improvement when it comes to the product pages on their websites in order to increase the percentage of visitors who add items to their shopping carts. More significantly, companies may profit from streamlining the checkout experience so more consumers actually buy the things in their carts.
A typical ecommerce conversion funnel contains four steps. During each step, the consumer takes decisions based on his or her opinion of your brand, product, and the competitors.
You’ll be able to earn more money if you optimise your website for each stage of the conversion funnel.
Stage 1: Awareness
During this phase, customers become acquainted with your brand and the products or services you provide. They are aware that they need to find a solution in order to solve a problem or accomplish a goal, thus they search for solutions.
Yours is simply one they’re likely to stumble onto. That’s why this stage proved so essential.
The awareness stage needs instructive material from your brand. Demonstrate your kind-heartedness by providing useful resources for free, such as blog entries, webinars, reports, and instructions.
Stage 2: Interest
Now that you’ve created the hook, you can’t let your audience escape. Continue to supply them with entertaining and instructional value so they remain interested in your items.
Stage 3: Desire
When you have your audience’s interest, generate desire. Talk about your product’s advantages — not its features — to convince your prospective buyers want the same fantastic outcomes.
Apple excels magnificently in this regard. The firm doesn’t talk about dull details (features); instead, it regularly informs its audience that its products are stylish, attractive, easy to use, and secure (benefits). Focus your marketing communications on how the buyer will eventually benefit.
Build your CTAs strategically. Tell the reader how they will benefit from what you have to provide rather than concentrating on what you have to offer.
Here are two such CTAs:
- Grab your own XYZ Backpack and enjoy more storage and stronger shoulder straps
- Grab an XYZ Backpack for more storage for your items and ergonomic straps that decrease back ache.
The second one produces more desire since the reader can imagine the rewards.
Stage 4: Action
It’s time to finalise the sale. You want your prospective buyers to add your goods to their shopping baskets, fill in their payment information, and click “Buy Now.”
As indicated earlier, the average ecommerce site convinces just approximately 3 percent of its website visitors to take this step. You can do better.
Check out how your purchase is processed from beginning to end. What can trigger someone to abandon his or her purchasing cart?
It can be needless form forms, unexpected delivery expenses, or a lack of alternate payment methods.
Test different checkout pages to evaluate which elements should go and which need to be added.
Build an Optimized Ecommerce Conversion Funnel
There are three stages you can take to design an ecommerce conversion funnel that helps you understand what your consumers want and need. Let’s look at them separately.
First, determine the path taken by your customers.
Google Analytics can help you map the customer journey with reports like user flow. Figure out what users do when they come on each of your website pages:
- Do visitors respond differently when they first touch on your homepage than they do if they reach one of your product pages?
- What referring domains bring in the most traffic?
- And how many contact points does the average buyer make before purchasing something?
Step 5: Map your funnel steps to conversion triggers
By using the four steps stated of awareness, interest, desire, and action — build a plan for leading people through your sales funnel. List the sorts of material you want to serve up at each step, for instance, and the pages on your site you wish to test.
Step 6: Define the moment at which a visitor converts into a lead
For most ecommerce organisations, a visitor becomes a lead when he or she turns over contact information – generally an email address. If that’s the point when a visitor becomes an ecommerce lead, you need a lead nurturing plan.
Decide how you’ll assist customers go from awareness to interest to desire to action. Your email subscribers should get material intended for all four stages so you appeal to your whole target demographic.
The Secrets to Get More Conversions on your Ecommerce Offers
There are two aspects of a legal contract: offer and acceptance. The same is true for sales.
You present an offer to your target audience. Consumers decide whether or not to accept it.
How do you tilt the scales in your favour? By offering a deal too alluring to pass up. This goes for lead magnets, sales and promotions, sweepstakes, and more.
Brainstorming is one of the enjoyable aspects. Grab the nearest piece of paper and pen, then start scribbling down thoughts.
Later, you may study each suggestion, list the advantages and downsides, and decide which ones make the most sense. Compare and contrast the two to determine which one will appeal to your target audience the most.
The following are some suggestions that may help you convince your audience to take advantage of your offerings.
Evaluate the performance of your primary pages, and then strive to enhance it. The core pages of your e-commerce website will include your homepage, individual product pages, and category pages. The number of things you provide for sale through your online shop will determine how many of each type of page is included on your e-commerce website. If you offer hundreds of things rather than concentrating on one or two flagship items, you will have a greater number of “primary pages” on your website.
You should get started with optimising those initially.
Take into mind both search engine optimization and user experience in order to increase the amount of traffic that Google sends your way and ensure that people find your material appealing.
Investigate and make adjustments to the effectiveness of your forms. Lead capture forms have the power to make or break conversion rates, depending on how they are designed. In the event that individuals do not choose to complete your forms, they will not bother to do so. In a nutshell, it may be stated as follows:
When it comes to e-commerce, forms that are shorter and have fewer fields tend to perform better than forms that are longer and have more information. It doesn’t seem like as much work. If someone is interested in your lead magnet, discounts, or product, they won’t waste their time filling out hundreds of form sections to demonstrate their interest since they don’t want to squander their time.
Reduce the number of questions on your forms until just the most important ones remain. Asking for someone’s email address is the only thing you need to do if all you need is their email address. Do not insist that the prospect provide you with their name, location, or any other information that is not essential.
Check out the performance of your checkout pages and see what may be improved.
Do you recall what I stated before with reference to the percentages of people who leave their shopping carts? If 15 percent of your site’s visitors place products in their shopping carts but only 3 percent of them go through with the purchase, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
If you want your clients to feel more secure, you should offer them a wider variety of payment options, adopt checkout procedures that use two pages, and give progress indications. You should make it clear to your consumers that you care about their privacy and security by displaying trust badges, and you should prevent any unexpected costs from being added at any point throughout the checkout process.
The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) That Are Absolute Necessity When It Comes to Optimising Conversion Funnels
If you want to make extra changes to your ecommerce conversion funnel, one thing you need to do is continuously measure key performance indicators, often known as KPIs. The success of your optimizations may be measured using these metrics, which will give you a sense of how well they are working.
There are dozens of different KPIs, but keeping track of all of them might make you feel as like you’re drowning in data. Nobody is interested in that. Tracking the following metrics, which I have discovered to be the most informative when it comes to determining how good a conversion funnel is, is what you should do instead.
Traffic is essential to the success of your conversion funnel since no one will enter it until they first discover your company. You may generate traffic from a diverse range of sources, including search engines, social media, email forwarding, and so on; but you want your traffic to steadily expand over time.
Pay close attention to the locations from which your website traffic originates. If you are getting a lot of traffic from search engines, you should invest more of your marketing budget and effort into the production of content and search engine optimization. Perhaps a significant portion of your visitors come from Twitter. Increase the frequency of your tweets and strive to make each one more valuable.
Monitoring your conversion rate will inform you how well your audience is responding to the offer(s) you are making to them (s). It may be a discount to encourage them to make a purchase, or it could be a lead magnet to get people to sign up for your email list.
You may create a more in-depth understanding of the people you wish to attract to your business by keeping track of the percentage of people who make a purchase of each of your offers. Test out a few different offers using the A/B split testing method to determine which one generates the most interest, then use what you’ve discovered.
Rate of bounce
The percentage of users that navigate away from your website after viewing only a single page is referred to as the site’s bounce rate. By providing extra reasons for users to travel to other pages, you may be able to reduce the percentage of site visitors who quickly abandon the website.
If the percentage of visitors that leave your website quickly is large, the “stickiness” of your site should be your top concern. On your page, you should include a good number of internal connections to other sites as well as calls to action for the various offers.
Sales
The total amount of sales is yet another essential measure to monitor.
It makes very little difference if your website has tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views every single month. If you are unable to persuade them to purchase, then your business will fail.
In a perfect world, sales would continue to rise over time. You may have some setbacks due to elements that are beyond your control, such as the changing of the seasons, but the overall trend should be one of improvement. In the event that this is not occurring, you should place a greater emphasis on the action step of the conversion funnel.
Abandoning Cart
You will also need to know the percentage of site visitors who place things in their virtual shopping carts but do not complete the purchase by exiting the page before doing so. There may be an issue with the way the checkout process is handled if there is a high incidence of abandoned carts.
You might want to consider emailing consumers who have abandoned their shopping carts an email once you have streamlined the checkout process and made it more user-friendly for them. Customers who leave your website without purchasing the items they have in their shopping baskets should be sent a friendly reminder to complete their purchases. To recoup those missed purchases, send them an invitation to shop with you again, maybe along with a coupon code.
Keep an eye on how your users behave and make any necessary adjustments to your conversion funnel.
If you want to optimise the conversion funnel for your ecommerce store, data is very necessary. You are left with little choice but to make educated guesses in the absence of concrete evidence.
Utilize the tools available to optimise your ecommerce conversion funnel in order to increase the number of leads generated and the number of sales made. Changes may be made to a call to action (CTA) to see whether they have an effect on how well it performs. For instance, if you know that your site visitors don’t interact with a certain CTA, you might try switching it out to
Make advantage of recordings in order to enhance the user experience.
You may observe how customers use your website by recording customers’-
- mouse movements and clicks
- playing back the recordings
- form involvement
- scrolling-
They are fantastic for optimising different pages on your website individually. Recordings of your checkout page should be scheduled in advance if you’re having issues with customers not completing their purchases. You will notice when customers stop participating in the process.
Start putting your pages through A/B testing.
After you have amassed all of this knowledge, it is time to put it to work for you. Conduct A/B testing on aspects that lead to conversions, such as calls to action (CTAs), in order to discover which design or variant performs the best.
Conclusion
If you are equipped with the necessary data, you can improve the experience of your consumers and make more sales. However, you may discover that the conversion funnel for e-commerce is challenging to navigate. For this reason, I advise regularly performing tests and gathering data.
To review, the conversion funnel may be broken down into four distinct steps, as follows:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Make sure that all of your content and pages are optimised to the appropriate degree by following the procedures that are essential.
When building the conversion funnel for your online store, you should stick to these three simple steps:
- Identify your customer journey
- Construct the several tiers that make up the funnel.
- Specify the criteria that must be met for a visitor to be considered a lead.
With the assistance of that framework, you may arrive at conclusions regarding your content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and any other type of marketing you engage in.
Last but not least, you should monitor the key performance metrics that are significant for your conversion funnel. They are as follows:
- Sales;
- Conversion Rate;
- Bounce Rate;
- Traffic; and
- Leaving of the Cart Behind
