Building an e-commerce sales funnel to optimize the business

Building a good conversion funnel on your e-commerce site means optimizing it in many different ways that can enhance your conversions and profits. This includes many practices that contain the whole design of your site, not just one aspect of it. You will have to provide a complete package for your users. The conversion funnel consists of many smaller stages, and each of them can increase your chance of getting more sales on your site.

The essence of successful e-commerce marketing lies in knowing your potential customers well.

1.  Where are they in their buyer’s journey?

2.  What are their main problems?

3.  How can you solve those problems for them?

A typical e-commerce conversion funnel has four stages:

1.  Awareness(The Landing Page)

2.  Consideration(The Product Page)

3.  Decision(The Shopping Cart)

4.  Loyalty(Purchase)

The awareness stage- The Landing Page

 In the awareness stage, customers in this stage are just learning of your brand. They’re learning about you through organic search, paid traffic, referrals, and other top-of-the-funnel marketing tactics. Social media marketing that is, being active on different social media platforms has several advantages. About 90% of marketers claimed that social media created large exposure for their business. Among others, you can grow your brand awareness, generate more inbound traffic, improve brand loyalty, increase your search engine rankings and the most important boost your conversion rate. The purpose of your landing page is to attract users and make them want to buy your products, or at least to make them interested. People seem to choose pages and products that offer them value, and during this step, you need to do that.

Consideration – The Product Page

When you are presenting your products on your products page, it is important to display some sort of proof, confirmation that your products are worth the customers’ time, money and maybe efforts. The best way to do it is by displaying social proof (customer reviews, posts, or helpful comments) on the product page. That way, your products will look more worthwhile.

  • ·         Use Social Proof across Channels

Social proof, a go-to tactic for many marketers, refers to our assumption that other people’s thoughts and actions are the correct behavior in a given situation. Social proof applies to many aspects of everyday life, and e-commerce is no exception. Social proof works in every stage of the e-commerce sales funnel and it’s an especially great tool to convince site visitors about the quality and credibility of your online store.

  • ·         Optimize Your Product Pages

Product pages are where you win the hearts of your prospects at the consideration stage. You need to assure visitors that your products are the best solution and nudge them to add products to their cart. At this stage, you should align your product page copy with customers’ common questions and remove any doubts.

Decision -The Shopping Cart

Too many shopping carts get abandoned. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to decrease that number. One of the best actions you can take is creating a pop-up message when the customer is about to leave the cart. You can do that with exit-intent triggers, which can be very effective for this.

·         Optimize Your Checkouts System

One of the most important parts of your conversion funnel is your checkout system. 7 out of every 10 visitors leave the checkout page without buying anything. And that’s a big number, there are several evergreen ideas to reduce that:

·         Offer prices in local currencies

·         Don’t make shoppers register

Instead offer a guest checkout or create a user account automatically.

·         Free shipping and free returns

The retention stage

These are beyond-the-funnel customers. You’ll use email sequences, customer accounts, and loyalty programs to keep these customers back for add-ons, upsells, and cross-sells. The goal of stages one through four is to keep the customer moving deeper down the funnel toward becoming a customer. The goal of stage five is to keep the customer coming back. Implement upsells, cross-sells, and add on. Effective email marketing is about continuing the conversation between your company and your customer. It’s a highly viable digital marketing strategy. In fact, nearly 60% of marketers say email marketing is their biggest source of ROI.

Conclusion

Improving your conversion funnel is one of the most important tasks for businesses. It is an ongoing process, but one that is certainly worth your time. If you do it the right way and strive to improve something constantly, then results await.