An ecommerce sales funnel is the visual representation of your customers’ journey. It illustrates a user’s path from the moment they land on your ecommerce website to the point where they perform the desired action, like making a purchase. An ecommerce funnel consists of broadly four stages that mark a specific phase of the user’s journey –
- Top of the funnel – Discovery and brand awareness stage
- Middle of the funnel – Interest and purchase consideration
- Bottom of the funnel – Decision and conversion stage
- Post-funnel stage – Retention and loyalty
So, the customers enter the top of the ecommerce sales funnel and move down stage by stage until they become repeat customers. Some consumers may slide through the funnel very quickly and go from being a lead to a fan in the blink of an eye – they come across the product/service they want, buy that product/service, and then become a brand advocate. Other consumers might take a lot of time to navigate the sales funnel and take years or months to reach the checkout page.
Now the question that arises is – which consumers do you target? The answer is, both. If you craft your ecommerce sales funnel carefully, it will act as an effective conduit for the procrastinators and quick-decision makers.
Every business crafts a unique sales funnel for itself – but the basic pipeline anatomy remains the same for all businesses. If you sell low-cost items such as apparel, toys, pet products or beauty products, your sales funnel will be shorter than others because the product’s cost will not be a barrier during purchase. With the same logic, if you are into selling luxury products (expensive jewelry, high-end watches, vehicles, or cutting-edge technology), your sales funnel is likely to be longer because the high prices will increase the consideration time.
Sales Funnel for ecommerce website in 5 simple steps
Step 1: Know your buyer journey
The user flow and other metrics in Google Analytics can help you understand your user’s journey. It is important for you to figure out what your users do when they come to your ecommerce store besides analyzing where they’ve come from and how they behaved after leaving your website.
Step 2: Ensure your ecommerce store is easy to navigate and well-designed
Your prospects should have a simple and clear path to follow right from the moment they enter your ecommerce sales funnel and become aware of your brand to the moment they convert. It is important to provide a good user experience to your prospects and customers by avoiding difficult navigation and confusing layout. Ensure there is an intuitive and obvious way for them to get to any product page or category – irrespective of where the user lands on your website. Otherwise, visitors may abandon your ecommerce store at any stage of the funnel whenever they feel dissatisfied.
You can easily build a well-designed website in the minimum time with Bluehost’s ecommerce website builder. Our website builder has quick-start templates, live editing capabilities, custom CSS, custom fonts, 24/7 support, and more.
Step 3: Define the type of content for each stage and map the conversion triggers
It is imperative to create a plan for ushering the consumers through each of the funnel’s stages – awareness, interest/purchase consideration, decision, and loyalty/retention. You can define in advance the type of content you want on the pages that prospects visit.
Remember, these don’t have to be just on-site content types – retargeting ads that target the users who are already aware of your products and looked at them, and email marketing are very effective ecommerce strategies too.
Step 4: Form a lead nurturing strategy
Usually, visitors become your ecommerce leads when they subscribe to newsletters and share their personal information like email addresses. And once you capture the leads, you’ll need a lead nurturing strategy to transition them from the awareness stage over the interest stage to conversion. The lead nurturing strategy involves sending out your email subscribers the type of content designed to cover all the possible stages of the journey they may go through.
Step 5: Optimize your main, product, and checkout pages
Category pages, product pages and homepage are vital for all ecommerce websites. The more products there are, the more ‘main’ pages you will have. And, because all these pages will act as landing pages for your leads and prospects, it is important to work on optimizing all of them. You can do this by –
- Taking into account the SEO of every page
- Adjusting the content on each page for the optimal user experience
- Using only the essential copy/content that provides clarifications and value to users
Finally, you should treat your checkout page as a very special and separate entity. Cart abandonment rates are very high in general, and this happens when the shoppers find something very distracting, disagreeable, or off-putting about the checkout process. To minimize the cart abandonment rate and optimize your checkout page, there are some best practices that you can follow:
- Offer multiple payment methods
- Make user-registration optional, if possible
- Keep the page as minimalistic as you can and remove all the distractions
- Provide the proof of the security of transactions for easing out the potential concerns of shoppers
Takeaways on ecommerce sales funnel
Now that you have read through this article, you must have understood that optimizing your ecommerce sales funnel is important because – it generates more conversions as well as sales, acquires high-value prospects and qualified leads for your business, helps you in identifying optimal marketing strategies, reveals the type of content you should be working on, identifies the ways you can solve the pain points of your consumers and more.
So, before you launch your ecommerce website, do craft an effective and customized sales funnel for your business.
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