How To Build An Ecommerce Sales Funnel Strategy To Drive Sales & Conversions

December 15, 2022

e-Commerce

Obviously, as an online merchant or ecommerce business owner, you don’t want that any buyer leave your site without purchasing anything and knocking on the doors of your competitors’ website. And if you are not working hard to capture your target audience, indeed, your rivals are doing this day and night.

However, if you are active and fully engaged in hooking your customers to your site but still their carts are empty, or your website is getting few visitors, which causes anxiety and stress, this is where the ecommerce conversion funnel comes to work as an anchor of your e-commerce business.

Many brands wonder which magic portion they are missing, but the myth is there is no such portion whose drops have supernatural powers to skyrocket the growth of ecommerce stores; it’s all about knowing what your customers are looking for and how you can deliver the same in the best possible way. To achieve this, the ecommerce sales funnel plays a crucial role as it allows you to map the whole customer’s journey and let them know about your brand, so they become your loyal customer from a simple lead.

This blog will give you an elaborate idea of ecommerce sales funnel optimization, and we are going to break down all the ins and outs into a simple form, so you can have a deeper look inside the ecommerce sales funnel.

What Exactly Is An Ecommerce Sales Funnel?

To have heard the term funnel before and probably know what it looks like. However, in the ecommerce industry, “funnel” is used as a metaphor that demonstrates the route or series of steps that a customer would take from the start to the end of the journey. Beginning from the top of the funnel to moving toward the bottom and coming out as a lifelong follower.

During this process, a buyer goes through multiple stages, and each stage has its objectives for all visitors; however, the visitors who enter the funnel are all unique and undergo different experiences under the same funnel.

So by seeing through the visitors’ eyes and associating with them while they progress in your sales funnel, you can unveil what exactly they appreciate the most and how they respond, which eases the process of ecommerce sales funnel optimization.

The Standard Four Stages Of Ecommerce Sales Funnel

Awareness –

Also called the discovery stage, in this stage, your potential customer becomes familiar with your brand and gets to know what you are offering in the market and how your product or service will solve their problem.

This stage demands educational content (webinars, blogs, guides, and videos), giving enough explanation of what your enterprise is about with the help of inbound and outbound marketing to ensure that you are targeting the right audience who could find interest in your business.

Interest –

Now, this stage involves creating a relationship with your buyer. You can’t allow your audience to escape after coming out of the first stage. At the interest stage, you can utilize email strategy; then, you can update them with more valuable content in terms of long-form videos, in-depth guides, newsletters, and many more.

Have a predetermined, well-developed plan for the best impression. Grab their attention with pleasing copies and captivating creatives everywhere in such a way formatting will hook, thus leading to an increase in conversion rates.

Desire –

Now, as the name suggests, this stage refers to creating a more powerful desire for your product/service; it’s a trust-building stage. Customers will compare how you are different and better than other companies offering the exact product/service in the market.

Once customers have their eyes upon you, talk about how you are more profitable for them and what essential and extra features you are offering, this need to use higher-level attention-grabbing techniques to tempt them to place orders for your product. Let them visualize the gain, and in case they finish the purchase procedure, don’t forget to ask for some reviews.

Action –

The action stage is the most significant; now it’s time to take a big action in the ecommerce sales funnel, adding products to their shopping cart and going through the checkout process. In this stage, there are higher chances of dropouts, so you have to take the help of exciting offers for every unique user.

Remove even a small struggle or issue so customer experience a seamless transaction. It’s a perfect time for offers, gifts, vouchers, coupon codes, and discounts, plus multiple payment options to get more conversions.

Do You Really Need An Ecommerce Sales Funnel Optimization Strategy?

Absolutely yes, every ecommerce business needs it. After acknowledging the four stages, optimization strategies come next; these stages allow you to understand the customer journey that proceeds inside it with the movement of time.

For a lead generation ecommerce funnel that drives engagement, conversions, and leads, follow these optimization steps:

Track Your Buyer’s Destination –

It would be excellent to know your buyers’ journey before you start working on the further process in the ecommerce sales funnel optimization. This requires user flow and other metrics to map the whole journey.

So from starting, you have to figure out what exactly the visitor is doing as soon as they arrive at the store, where they have arrived, and what their behavior is when they leave your website. You can ask some questions like which domains are bringing relevant traffic to your site or which platforms have performed well in getting conversions for your brand, what steps or actions an average shopper take on your store before making a purchase, and how the visitors are behaving when they arrived at the homepage or any product page.

Map conversion triggers and determines the type of content –

Each ecommerce conversion funnel stage has its own goals, and as per that, plans must be defined. You have to define in advance the type of content you are going to use at every stage. This plan or content (email marketing, brand awareness ads, social media post, and so on) can be varied as per the platform and strategy you have developed.

These content marketing techniques will assist you in gaining customers; every content has their own advantages; valuable information can be provided with well-written and informative blogs, product reviews, and client testimonials that show the greater importance of your product whosoever visits the store, and through videos, you can demonstrate the unique value proposition of your product.

Store Must Be Easy To Navigate –

From entering the website to exiting, users have a clear path to move. In other words, since they enter your ecommerce funnel till they get converted as a buyer, they avoid all the confusing elements on your website and give a more extraordinary user experience.

Everything must be clearly defined on the website, like the search bar, products, and product categories, so users don’t need to put much effort while purchasing a product. Keep in mind that visitors can leave your website at any time whenever they feel some tricky.

So do an audit of your store and remove anything that you may think will decrease sales. Your website can be improved in terms of product categories, so define them properly; you can also suggest different products to the user as per the recent search history and preferences, and showing breadcrumbs will also be helpful.

Create A Lead Encouraging & Fostering Strategy –

Any visitor who comes to your website becomes a lead when they sign up, give their contact details, or subscribe to your newsletters, right?

Now the time comes to properly nurture them for their transformation from a lead into a conversion which wouldn’t be possible without a perfect strategy; this could involve sending your leads such type of content that encourages them to take further action, so they move from awareness, interest, desire to action stage. The offer must be appealing and enticing, so they can’t deny that.

For creating pleasing offers, you can generate many ideas according to your product and do some experiments to know what results they are delivering. Such offers could be deals for discounts, gifts, offers like buy one, get one free, store credits, and so on.

SEO Optimization Of Home Page & Product Pages –

Main page and products page of all ecommerce websites play a crucial role in driving traffic as these pages work as the landing page for the visitors, so they definitely require optimization, especially to drive traffic from search engine result pages, and for higher visibility.

You have to take all SEO strategies into account for proper optimization, including keyword research, keyword density, word limit, meta title, meta description, alt tags, canonical tags, breadcrumb, and other such activities.

Satisfying user experience is the most significant thing; you can keep your content personalized using simple and effective copies with relevant details about products and offers, keep the content easy to read, and add bullet points that will be impressive, influential, and compelling. Don’t forget that each stage of the ecommerce funnel must provoke the visitor; it should not distract them towards actions that are not worthy of your defined strategies.

Make Your Form & Checkout Page More Productive –

How you will acquire sufficient leads if users don’t fill up the form; sure, you will miss out on many leads. Your form should be optimized so that it creates less friction and takes only a few seconds to fill it, as users feel frustrated if the form is too long or has many questions. Just ask for some necessary fields, and it’s sufficient to have contact details.

The other concern is that if the user is new to your website, undoubtedly, they will hesitate to share too much information and suspect you of security issues.

Now, if you have followed other optimization strategies and your cart abandonment rate is too high, they find something misleading, discouraging, and objectionable. To discover the exact issue, let the form be filled by other team members of your company or conduct a survey from the regular customers and ask them what they do not like about the checkout page and what changes you think are needed here.

However, you can follow some of the tactics to decrease the abandonment rate:-

No user will leave the site due to the unavailability of payment methods if you avail them of many payment options simultaneously.
Use a simple process to complete the transaction that would be less time-consuming and easy to proceed.
Here, just focus on payment not on promotional activities, then it would a cause for the distraction of users.
Never compromise on security, and ensure that your website is protected from cyber threats.

What Are The Most Significant KPIs To Keep Track Of Ecommerce Conversion Funnel

Ecommerce metrics and KPIs help to monitor whether you are hitting your business goals or not. An abundance of data and analytical tools (Google Analytics, a popular free tool) can help you in this process. There are numerous KPIs that marketers and online merchants track, but here we are going to mention some of the most significant KPIs that are critical when it comes to the ecommerce conversion funnel:-

Traffic sources & Medium –

It includes defining the source of your traffic; traffic basically refers to the visitors you are entering on the storefront. There are various sources that invite users, including social media, different domains, referrals, search engine ads, organic searches, direct searches, and other channels.

Without traffic, sales are impossible, so you must check which channels are admirably working for your brands and focus on that side. For instance, if you are a cosmetics enterprise and generating good traffic from social media, then stick to that, and build more strategies for its growth.

Conversion rate –

The conversion rate of average ecommerce websites is 2 to 3%. The more the conversion rate, the more you will get conversion which could help you in increasing sales; however, it’s not similar to sales. It could be downloading your e-book, subscribing to the emails, or using a free trial, and many more could be on this list.

Bounce rate –

Bounce rate is considered as a weighted metric. If there is a higher bounce rate for your website, it means many visitors leave the site immediately after landing on the page. You must invest time in investigating why it’s happening and what is demotivating the users to click or move to other pages. Take a closer look at user behavior and, after conducting a thorough analysis, improve those segments of your ecommerce store.

Repeat Purchase rate –

It comes under retention KPIs that help to determine how often repeat customers come back to make the purchase again. If the customers are landing on your site, again and again, it means they are happy with you and generate customer lifetime value for your store. However, if the repeat purchase rate is low, it can be escalated by offering frequent offers, more choices of products with 100% satisfied quality, seamless navigation, and more.

Recommended: How to Retain Customers in Retail?

Cart Abandonment rate –

It means the percentage of buyers who are adding products to the cart but as soon as they reach the payment process, they abandon to move further. You have to check your purchase flow for this; many companies send emails regarding this or use remarketing tactics to reduce it.

Build a Proper eCommerce Conversion Funnel Optimization Strategy

Ecommerce sales funnel a journey of an unknown visitor to be a potential buyer; however, it can be a little complicated, especially when it comes to know what best works for your business, although with frequent experiments and guidance, you can exactly know the techniques you must use for your ecommerce sales funnel optimization.

In this blog, we have shared all the secrets that might work for you if applied accurately. You can use the framework given for the four stages funnel in ecommerce with optimization strategies and monitor them using KPIs.

We can help you implement these tips and optimize your eCommerce store to the fullest. Connect with us to start your project.