Do you know the importance of a sales funnel on e-commerce? In this post, we’re going to talk about what is a sales funnel on e-commerce, how you can apply it in your store and we’ll give you some tips on how to measure your results. Check!
Do you know the importance of a sales funnel on e-commerce? If you don’t, just know that you’re losing many business opportunities. But don’t think that the purchase process starts when someone enters your store.
Way before reaching you, the consumer went through many websites and searched various options to meet their needs. A well-structured sales funnel goes from the moment a client didn’t even know he had a necessity to meet and extends until the moment of the sale.
In this post, we’re going to talk about what is a sales funnel on e-commerce, how you can apply it in your store and we’ll give you some tips on how to measure your results. Check!
Contents
What is a sales funnel?
By definition, the sales funnel is a theoretical model to map the purchase path of your clients, and it takes into account from their first contact with your brand up until the moment they make the online purchase.
Your monitoring has the purpose of easing up the access to the client’s purchase and make them move forward quickly from a step to the next. In a simple way, the sales funnel is composed of three steps:
- Top of the Funnel: involves every visitor of your website, regardless of their location and interest in your products and services. This means that it might be people who want to buy from you or people who entered your store by mistake;
- Middle of the Funnel: this step involves every person that has already shown interest in your products, but that still isn’t ready to buy. The client still has doubts if that service or product is the best option;
- Bottom of the Funnel: Everyone that reach this step is ready to buy something from your store. In this moment the sales team has the opportunity of negotiating with the client.
Even though it seems something extremely simple, don’t misunderstand. Evaluating and classifying each step of the sales funnel on e-commerce requires a strategy very well elaborated. For that, you need to invest in applying each one of these steps.
How to use it on e-commerce?
Comparing with the traditional sales funnel, there are more steps before making a purchase. Despite the differences, it’s necessary to understand that they must work together in the process of capture and persuasion of the visitors.
See how is a funnel of e-commerce:
- Attraction: in this step of the process are available navigation pages to attract the visitor or lead (potential consumer);
- Initial opportunity: here are all the users that put products on their carts but that haven’t started the checkout process (payment);
- Advanced opportunity (login): every user that puts products in the cart and logged in or registered to finish the purchase;
- Advanced opportunity (delivery): after the previous step, the users of that step write their info for delivery and for payment;
- Advanced opportunity (payment): here are all the clients who began the payment process, whether with a credit card or bank slip;
- Client: in this step is every user that went through the process above and made the payment, that was confirmed by your team, which validates the request.
As we saw, there are some differences between the traditional sales funnel and the one of an e-commerce. However, you need to establish ways to check in which step the visitor is.
Conversion
For a successful funnel, you need to invest in content marketing strategies that stimulate the visitor to go from one step to the next. Depending on the step in which the client abandons the purchase process, we have indicators of different problems.
If your store attracts many visitors, but the conversion rate to possible consumers is low, it can be a sign that there are errors in the elaboration of your persona’s profile and it ends up reaching visitors that aren’t interested in your products.
Now, if the cart abandonment rate is high, you need to check if the payment methods you offer are considered the more accepted ones, or if the delivery deadline of the products you’re offering is large. For that reason, you need to monitor the metrics.
How to measure the results?
To know if your sales funnel on e-commerce strategies work, you need to monitor some metrics. See which are they:
Bounce rate
The rejection rate understands the volume of users that visited your website and right after that left without making any kind of action, like, for example, sign the offers newsletter.
In these cases, it’s more probable that the persona’s creation process was wrong or that the message used in the attraction pieces (posts, ads, etc) aren’t adequate to the intended audience.
Conversion of visitors to leads
The biggest indicator that a sales funnel works correctly is, without a doubt, the conversion of visitors into leads rate. For that conversion to happen, you need to establish strategies that encourage the visitor to write their information.
This process of growing the database with information about the client’s profile is known as a qualification. If it doesn’t happen, you need to revise your strategies, rethink layouts and even evaluate a possible change of the call-to-action.
And don’t forget to make A/B Tests (tests to improve the percentage of approval) in order to evaluate the effectiveness of those alterations! This procedure should be made once a week, for you to be able to identify which one of them brought the best results.
Cart Abandonment
Without a doubt, this is the main metric for the owners of an e-commerce. If you have a high cart abandonment rate, you need to investigate meticulously its causes, after all, it can be the result of various problems.
From the definition of the payment methods adopted, until the shipping price and the time estimated for delivery, we can have a high abandonment rate. However, you need to identify its cause and solve it as soon as possible.
Unfinished payment
If the client went through every process, confirmed the purchase and didn’t pay, it can indicate that the payment method doesn’t work correctly or that, for some other reason, the client gave up on the purchase.
In the cases of credit card refusal, if the purchase isn’t approved, your system needs to be able to alert the client that there has been a problem and that he should try again with another card.
If he opted to pay through bank slip, it’s common to forget to pay it. Therefore, the system must send a reminder on the day previous to the due date so that he can make the payment.
In this post, you learned how the sales funnel works on e-commerce and how he is essential to the success of your online store. Do you want to know more about online sales? Follow us on social media: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.