More and more people have become savvy at online purchasing in a tech-driven world. Looking up products, visiting websites, comparing prices, and searching for discounts are common.
But do you know that of the 43.8% of site visitors who view a product online, only 3.3% make a purchase? Having a low conversion rate isn’t just restricted to your company site.
Whether you’re on a platform like Amazon or Shopify, you need to develop a strategy to convert site visitors into paying customers. But how do you go about it? That’s what we’re going to discuss in this article.
In this post, we’ll talk about the practical ways to improve your eCommerce conversion funnel. But first, we’ll walk you through the basics:
What is a Conversion Funnel?
In a nutshell, an e-commerce funnel will define your customer’s journey from the time they’re aware of your product up to the moment that they end up buying it.
The thing is that the buying journey doesn’t come out of anywhere or doesn’t happen overnight. It allows your customers to get to know your products, land on your site, check out product pages, and decide whether or not they want to make a purchase.
What are the Conversion Funnel Stages?
Here are the three primary stages of the e-commerce conversion funnel:
- Upper funnel: The upper funnel is where people try to gather information about a specific product.
- Mid-funnel: Here, people explore the best brands that are offering the product that they want and choose their top website:
- Lower funnel: At this time, the audience has already chosen a website that they want and is looking to purchase the product.
The key to all of this is to optimize your eCommerce funnel. While this is easier said than done, you need to develop a solid strategy to create an excellent conversion funnel.
That’s because your customers tend to be unpredictable, and you have to make sure that you want to put in your best efforts in converting visitors.
Why Should You Improve Your Conversion Funnel?
No matter how large or small your business is, it needs sales to funnel. Turn opportunities to business, nurture the audient into paying customers, and sell your products and services to them is what every business must go through to succeed.
You know that you’re offering the best products and services at your very core. You’ve put in a lot of time and effort developing them because you believe in their value.
But you can’t just say to your customers, “this is one of the best products/services you’ll ever come across. You have to buy it.” You still need to stand out from the rest of the pack.
Tips to Make Your Ecommerce Website Conversion Funnel More Effective
How do you ensure that your e-commerce website conversion funnel is effective? Here are six practical tips:
Map Out the Customer Journey
One of the first things you need to do is know your customer’s journey. It would be best if you came up with a plan to entice customers through your sales funnel, depending on where they are on their customer journey.
Come up with different types of content that you want to serve at every stage. Make sure that you nurture leads to turn those visitors into paying customers.
It would help to consider how much validation your customer needs to go through before purchasing. How many times are they excited about buying something only for that excitement to go out the window?
This is true, especially if they have to go through different shipping options, purchasing policies, account set-ups, or a form that’s not user-friendly to their phone.
Think about how many fields your customer needs to fill in. What are the things that can be automated? How can you be creative with the written descriptions to keep up the excitement of that new purchase?
You can also look for the user flow in Google Analytics, such as:
- When visitors come to your site, and how they behave.
- What are the referring domains that tend to bring in the most traffic?
- What are the different touchpoints the average customer does before they purchase?
- Think about your answers to these questions to define the customer journey on your site.
Create Goals in Google Analytics
Creating goals allows you to visualize better your sales funnel and a plan that you can work towards. Doing this on Google Analytics lets you systematically track your goals.
The data you’ll collect on your e-commerce site allows you to see how users interact with your product and service. It includes how much time they spend on your site and what point they either abandon their cart or make a purchase.
Design a Relevant Landing Page
The primary purpose of your landing page is to attract users and make them want to purchase your products, or at least make them interested. At Sytian Productions, (web design Philippines,) we always tell clients that people tend to choose products or pages that give them value, and during this step, you know what you need to do.
When creating landing pages, be aware of the “temperature” of your traffic. Is there traffic that you’re getting cold where most users are unaware of how you even are? Ideally, the traffic you’re getting should be hot enough to be sure of you and what they want. They should be on the verge of buying.
Attract Customers Through Social Media
There are different social media platforms out there, and you have to ensure that you’re picking the right one for your branding.
As of the moment, the leading social media site is Facebook. Therefore, running ads on the platform allows you to generate targeted traffic.
However, bland or unattractive ads won’t work. You have to make sure that they’re attractive enough to promote your products the right way and inspire potential customers to buy.
Create Informative Educational Content That Answers Questions
Creating educational content makes customers more likely to purchase from you. When you create great content that educates people looking for solutions to their problems, you position yourself as an expert, instantly building trust.
So, think about the everyday problems of your target market. What are their pain points, and what are the solutions they’re looking for?
Optimize Your Checkout System
The key aspect of your conversion funnel is the checkout system. To avoid visitors from leaving the checkout page without buying anything, make sure that:
- You’re offering prices in local currencies.
- You don’t make your shoppers register. Instead, offer them a guest checkout or automatically create an account.
- Free returns and shipping. You might want to consider adjusted product prices to include shipping.
- Mobile-friendly design. It should be responsive to different mobile devices, loads quickly, and has more straightforward navigation.
Over to You
Enhancing your conversion funnel is one of the essential tasks for businesses. It is an ongoing process and one that’s certainly worth your time. If you do it the right way and strive to improve constantly, then you’ll reap the results.
So there you have it. We hope you start implementing these strategies today to optimize each stage of your sales funnel and boost your eCommerce conversions.