You must notice and understand how to see the pattern of users’ interaction with your website and optimize the conversion funnel accordingly. A conversion funnel is a journey when each customer goes through different stages in the website. It ultimately sums up to a conversion. These various stages include the homepage, product page, cart page, and checkout page. As you get closer to conversion, the drop-off of the visitors increases.

An e-commerce conversion funnel is a visual representation of a customer’s journey. These customers enter the top of the sales funnel and go through each stage until they become repeat customers. Some customers quickly slide through these stages, but others take months or even years to reach the checkout page. Hence you must target both of these customers and please your funnel carefully so that it can become a great way for quick decision-makers and people who take a lot of time to make a purchase.

The four stages of a conversion funnel in e-commerce

There are four stages in an e-commerce conversion funnel that includes awareness, interest, desire, and action.

Awareness

This is the first stage where consumers become familiar with your brand and your products. These consumers understand that they need to solve a specific problem, and hence they look for solutions. 

This stage is critical as you are supposed to provide educational content and give free information through blog posts, guides, or webinars. This will further amuse your audience, and they will be interested to know more about your brand.

Interest

Now that you have intrigued your audience, you cannot let them escape. Keep providing them value through educational and entertainment content so that they are interested in your products. You can use strategies like sharing memes on social media or creating helpful blog content. You can also use email marketing or post valuable stuff on YouTube.

Desire

Once you have your audience’s interest, you will have to create the desire. Talk about the benefits of your products so that your customers can understand what kind of result they will bring. In this case, you will need to build your CTAs strategically.

Action

Now it’s time to close the sale. You would want your prospective customers to add the desired products to the shopping carts, provide their payment information, and hit “Buy Now.” 

An average e-commerce site only convinces about 3% of the visitors to take the step, but you can do better. Try examining the reasons as to why someone might abandon their shopping cart.

Benefits of creating an e-commerce conversion funnel

There are many benefits of creating an e-commerce conversion funnel for your business. Here are some of the reasons why you should have one –

• It helps you understand your customers’ journey
• It gives you all the data that you need to understand why your customers might abandon their carts
• It helps you work on your conversion funnel to make it work even better
• You can implement various strategies to make your finals completely optimized
• It will help you optimize the checkout process so that more people add products to their carts and then buy them
• It gives you the option of A/B testing so that you can understand what kind of style or variation will work best for your funnel

Ways to Boost your e-commerce conversion or purchase funnel

It is essential to understand the conversion funnel to optimize each stage for maximum sales. You must know which areas impact the conversion to maximize your funnel accordingly. If a specific social media platform plays a tremendous role in getting conversions, you would have to collect the data and use it to boost the activity on the platform. You can use a powerful CTA you will be able to draw people into your circle and then to your website.

Synchronize your checkout page with the website

You must synchronize your checkout page with the website. Cart abandonment happens whereby only 3% of people check out. You can offer more payment options or use two checkout pages to get better results. Add features like progress bars so that consumers can feel more secure. You can also add trust badges to show your consumers that you are concerned about their privacy and security. Also, avoid adding surprise charges during the checkout phase.

Take a note of where customers are dropping off in the purchase funnel

In understanding customers’ journey through your conversion funnel, you must note where your customers are dropping off. If you notice a high cart abandonment rate, you must understand that there must be something wrong with the checkout page. To improve the checkout flow, you can also send card abandonment emails if someone leaves your site without purchasing the products they put in the cart. You can invite them back by offering them a discount code.

Leverage the impatience of the customers

To simply put it, you must create urgency. You can tap into the insecurities of the buyers so that you can create an edge over your competitors. You can also make your inventory live and display the number of products left. A product that moves fast will always keep the customers on their toes, and hence they will be able to make a decision quickly.

Use product videos along with images

Videos have become quite popular as a new marketing norm, so it would be a great idea to use them for e-commerce. 71% of customers think that videos of a specific product explain the product better and hence boost the conversion rate by 73% compared to images. Videos are more engaging, and therefore it is easier to attach a story with a specific product so that customers can connect better with it.

Launch an app and send push notifications to your customers

If you consider launching an app for your online store, that would be a great decision. App notifications are great to get more business leads. Most of these e-commerce apps send messages if you add products to your cart and then exit the app later. But if you receive a notification that says that you would receive an additional 5% discount, you would be interested in purchasing the product.

The E-commerce industry is growing day by day and now stands at $23 trillion, according to UNCTAD estimates. It has excellent opportunities only if you play correctly. Hence optimizing a purchase funnel would be a significant step in success with your e-commerce business.

FAQs:

1. What are the stages of the conversion funnel?

Ans: In simple terms, a conversion funnel is a journey each customer goes through consisting of different stages on the website that ultimately leads to conversion. The different stages being homepage, product pages, cart page, and checkout page.

2. What is the main characteristic of a funnel conversion?

Ans: In its most basic form, conversion funnels follow the classic AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). Not all customers will make it till the end of the funnel and will drop off as they move through each phase.

3. What happens in the conversion stage?

Ans: At the conversion stage, your buyer already has a degree of purchase intent. They have established that this type of product is something they need or want. Make them aware of why your business is the only choice to buy from, and smoothen their path to their buy.