| Index |
| ? What Is an E-Commerce Funnel? ? Why Should You Create Your E-commerce Funnel? ? What Is the E-Commerce Industry’s Average Conversion Rate? ? Let’s Establish the E-Commerce Funnel Stages ? How To Create Your Own E-Commerce Funnel ? How to Drive More Conversions? ? A Smart-Site Search to Begin Your Customer Journey |
Your e-commerce business is likely going through many challenges. While it can be tempting to hop from one problem to another, you need to make sure you have a solid foundation. This groundwork is where an e-commerce funnel comes in.
A proper e-commerce funnel will make your business scalable, allowing you to increase revenue without sacrificing profit margins.
Understanding what an e-commerce funnel looks like can make or break your success. That’s why we’ve created a guide to help you understand the step-by-step process for creating and analysing your e-commerce funnel.
What Is An E-Commerce Funnel?
? Wondering where you’re losing out customers?
? Or from where a good majority of your leads come from?
? Or how to plug the holes in your customer journey?
The answer to these questions lies in understanding your e-commerce funnel.
The e-commerce funnel describes a potential customer’s journey from first encountering your online store to becoming a paying customer. It can be considered a series of steps each visitor must take to complete a purchase.
An efficient e-commerce funnel aims to get more visitors to convert into paying customers. You want them to move through your site in a way that makes it as easy as possible for them to find what they’re looking for, get in contact with you or make a purchase without losing interest or getting frustrated.
Why Should You Create Your E-commerce Funnel?
The key to any successful online business is understanding how to turn visitors into customers. If you cannot do this successfully, you will not have enough people buying your product or service.
By creating an engaging e-commerce funnel, you can increase your conversion rate dramatically and grow your business quickly with minimal investment.
Creating a funnel will benefit your business in several ways:
- An e-commerce funnel can help you understand where your visitors are coming from, who they are and what they want from your site.
- It makes it easier to see where potential customers drop off during the buying process — like abandoning carts, leaving after looking at search results, etc. This way, you can focus on fixing those areas and improving customer satisfaction.
- It allows you to identify which parts of the funnel are working well and capitalise more on them with minimal investment.
- It can help optimise each step in the buying process for a seamless user experience (UX).
- You’ll also see how different groups of customers interact with each step differently — and whether they’re likely to convert at all.
- An e-commerce funnel will help increase your conversion rate by ensuring that every visitor goes through their personalised path through your site.
What Is The E-Commerce Industry’s Average Conversion Rate?
The average conversion rate of e-commerce websites stands at 5.2%, according to the recent Unbounce report.
However, this can differ wildly based on your industry and geographic location.
According to an IRP Commerce, the conversion rate for e-commerce stores in the Home Accessories and Giftware category is at 0.99%, while Arts and Crafts have a conversion of 4.91% and Health and Wellbeing at 3.46%.
So instead of considering the mean average of conversion rates from all e-commerce industries, it’s best to utilise your KPIs compared with your industry-based metrics to develop your benchmarks.
Let’s Establish The Four E-commerce Funnel Stages
An e-commerce funnel has five stages: awareness, consideration, interest, decision, and action. Each stage builds upon the previous one and leads to the next. Let’s look at what each can do and how you can practically implement them.
Stage 1: Awareness
The awareness stage is where people become aware of your brand and products. This is where you build a reputation and develop trust with your audience. In this stage, it’s essential to understand what motivates people to buy and their expectations from you.
It’s important to note that many visitors will drop out here and never go further down the funnel as they find other options more appealing. So it’s crucial to capture your visitor’s attention and stand out from the competition so that they move on to the next step of the funnel.
How can it be done?
● Plan for the first point of contact: Since you need people to discover your brand at this stage, work on optimising for organic SEO and, if you can, paid online ads. The awareness stage can come from other avenues like social media marketing and influencer marketing.
● Create educational content: You can also create educational content like blogs, downloadable resources, and videos that provides more information about your product and distinguishes your brand from the hoards of others.
Stage 2: Interest
Once people become aware of your product or brand, you will start driving more attention and interest. This is when customers start to compare options and decide which product or service they want to buy.
It would help if you showed them why your products are better than others, like better features, more value for money, etc. In this stage, educating your audience about how your products work and why they should buy from you instead of others is critical. Also, you should have easy-to-use interfaces that simplify the customer’s journey and helps them sail through the rest of the process.
How can it be done?
While many e-commerce sites focus on creating more specific and in-depth educational content in this stage, there are a few more things you can do.
● Collect email addresses: If you have any newsletters to sign up for, this is the stage where you get your visitors’ emails and convert them to leads. You can encourage them to follow and engage with your brand through social media platforms.
● Simplify site search: Also, one of the most critical factors that many ignore is having simple navigation, including a swift, user-friendly search feature with faceted search. If a visitor is searching for a ‘pink, knee-length bodycon dress’ in size L, then your search should provide instant filters for each one of these attributes. This will help you take the visitor quickly from browsing through your site (interest) to the next stage of contemplating adding to the cart (decision).
● Have an exit strategy: Despite everything you do, some people may leave your site at this stage. So make sure to have an exit strategy, like a pop-up with discount codes and offers to entice them to stay.
Stage 3: Decision
This is where the customer decides on their purchase based on price, quality, service, support, etc. This stage is crucial because it will determine whether or not you lose the customer before they get to the final payment. At this stage, we want them to consider our product seriously and allow us to convince them further to choose our product.
Please remember that these stages of the e-commerce funnel don’t always happen in one session or a day. A person can go through the first two stages and return to your site after a few days. So it’s essential to retain your leads and gently direct them to the next stage.
Imagine that you’re standing at the top of a funnel. At the bottom of the funnel is your ideal customer. This person has visited your site, browsed around, and you have successfully made them interested in what you offer. Now they need to be convinced to take action.
So look through your site from the eyes of a potential customer. Think about all the factors that could influence their decision — and ensure that everyone is geared towards a conversion.
How can it be done?
● Email marketing: If you’ve already landed a few leads, say through your newsletter sign-ups, you can send out email reminders along with offers and discounts to persuade them to take the next step.
● Optimised product pages: Your site should also have detailed product descriptions, social proof, and reviews that further reinforce your brand.
Stage 4: Action
The final stage of the e-commerce funnel is the action. This is where your customers make a purchase.
At this point, they have decided which product they want, so now they’re on the verge of completing the purchase by checking out their cart. So all you need to do is to create a seamless checkout experience.
But, almost 59% of the shoppers abandon the cart for various reasons. Just imagine 59 out of 100 people leaving your website after adding the products to the cart. So think about what makes people leave your site/ Analyse this final stage, talk to your customers and improve this final process to improve your conversions drastically.
How can it be done?
This is when the lead has already added the product to the cart and is about to complete the purchase. You can offer several features during the checkout process like:
● Automatic field populations
● Provide options for multiple choices of payments
● Reinforce your data protection measures and
● Most of all, create a mobile-friendly experience.
Three Steps To Create Your E-Commerce Funnel
To create an e-commerce funnel for your online store, you need to get into the mind of your target customers, understand their goals and motivations, and ultimately guide them to purchase.
1 – Define and Identify Your Customer Journey
The first step in building your e-commerce funnel is understanding who our shoppers are. It’s essential to consider the various steps involved in the customer’s journey with your brand.
You need to figure out what makes them want to buy from you, where they’re getting their information from, how they overcome objections, and what steps they take before making that final purchase. You should also identify all the touchpoints along their path and what actions they took at each point.
The more specific you are in this initial stage, the easier it will be for you to map out the steps of your funnel later on.
2 – Map Your Funnel Stages with Triggers to Move People Through Funnel Stages
Next is to map out your funnel stages. These should correspond to where your buyers are in their journey. Then think about what triggers them to move from one step to another.
If someone comes across one of your products or services on social media or search engines, think about where they go next.
? Do they click through to your website?
? Do they add directly to the cart and purchase?
? Do they fill out an email sign-up form?
? Do they follow up on their own time?
By understanding this process, you can create triggers that guide people through each stage of their journey — from becoming aware of your brand to becoming a lead, customer, and beyond.
For example, the trigger for moving from awareness to interest may be seeing an ad on Facebook or Pinterest or an influencer’s post about your brand. Reading reviews may motivate shoppers to consider buying your product. By identifying such triggers throughout the journey, you can start consciously placing those triggers to move the visitors to the next stage.
3 – Define When a Casual Shopper Becomes a Potential Lead
Most often, a potential lead is someone who has visited your website more than once and spends considerable time browsing through your site. And the best way to convert this visitor into a lead for e-commerce sites is to get them to create an account on your website or sign-up for your newsletter.
You can then use that email address to contact them later with information about your products or services. This will help you build up your database of leads who are interested in what you offer and nurture them into becoming customers.
How To Drive More Conversions?
A simple way to think about an e-commerce funnel is that it’s like a salesperson at a retail store: there’s one person who greets customers at the entrance, another who helps them find what they’re looking for, one who rings them up at the register, and so on. Each person in this scenario has a specific job to ensure that the customer leaves happy with their purchase.
The same goes for an online store. Each buying process step should be designed with one goal — getting people from “interested” to “converted.”
It is essential to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all conversion strategy. Your strategy should be personalised and adapted to your customers, brand, and product.
Keep Shoppers Engaged On Your Site
The first step in driving more conversions is to understand how visitors flow through your website and what they do on each page of your site. This will help you identify where you can improve their experience, increase engagement, and ultimately generate more sales.
This is where A/B testing comes in.
A/B test your pages: You can run tests at each stage of your purchase process to determine which elements work best for your users.
For example, if a lead abandons a shopping cart and just before making payments, think about A/B testing alternate checkout experiences. Suppose someone spends a lot of time on your website but leaves without converting as a lead, A/B test your navigation.
If someone leaves from your page, consider if you can add more detailed product descriptions or explanatory videos that make it simpler for them to make decisions.
Similarly, think hard about every single exit point of your visitors and leads and find ways to keep the shoppers engaged and present in your e-commerce store.
Create a positive search experience: 9 in 10 customers say that a good search function is “very important” or “essential,” with 77% avoiding websites with poor search functions. Since a lot depends on your search functionalities, it’s vital to have a super-smart site search that is interactive, visual, and offers instant search results. You should optimise your site search for contextual searches and include autocomplete features that quickly help the visitors find what they’re looking for.
Analyse, Analyse, Analyse
Now that you’ve established your e-commerce funnel, it’s time to reel back and analyse its performance. This is when Google Analytics helps.
Meticulously go through each stage of the funnel and analyse the metrics. Ask questions like:
? What entices my visitors to move to the next page?
? Why did visitors leave this page?
? Where do I notice a considerable drop in my visitors and leads?
? Why have my email open rates dropped?
? How can I increase my lead conversion?
? Is my exit strategy working?
The first step in analysing your conversion funnel is understanding where people drop off. You need to know how many people look at each page and where they go when leaving. If there’s a lot of drop-off between two pages, then there’s probably something wrong with the content on one of those pages or the user experience.
Similarly, drill down each of the metrics to find out key pointers that you can use to improve user experience.
As much as you’re analysing your site stats, pay attention to search analytics.
You must know what your site visitors search for, what search queries lead to sales, which queries are popular, why people leave after looking at site searches and when your site searches are returning no results.
Since site searches are crucial in the e-commerce funnel, you should focus on the site search metrics and find ways to improve the search experience.
A Smart Site Search To Begin Your Customer Journey
Wizzy is an AI-based site search tool that’s intuitive and ultra-fast.
● Wizzy supports contextual searches — even if the search queries don’t match your product names, Wizzy can still display the relevant search results.
● Wizzy can autocomplete search queries, so it helps visitors quickly find the products they need.
● Wizzy is intelligent enough to return the right search results if your visitors search for queries that include price ranges, colours, occasions, and other such attributes.
● Plus, Wizzy has visual search options with enhanced search filters, which further help drive the visitors to the next stage.
By including Wizzy, many e-commerce brands have increased their sales conversions.See how an apparel D2C brand grew its search-to-sales conversion by 200% with Wizzy.
