If you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur (or solopreneur), hearing terms like “funnel analysis” can stress you out if you don’t understand them.
We understand how it must feel to be bombarded with all sorts of terms related to sales, UX, marketing, UI, and whatnot—that’s why we’ve created this article to help you understand and find everything you need to know about an ecommerce funnel and how you can optimize it to get more sales from your customers in the long run. Without further ado, let’s get started!
The Basics of the Sales Funnel
Let’s start at the very beginning—what exactly is a sales funnel? A sales funnel helps you keep track of what’s going on in your website – this will help you understand your customers’ behavior, and also understand conversion rates.
A conversion funnel analysis lets you understand how many visitors on your website turn into customers, and how many turn into repeat customers who keep visiting and purchasing your product more than once.
Generally, this funnel analysis is used by marketers (or yourself, if you’re a one-man business) to know what the customers are upto when they visit your website, and if the website is successful on the whole.
It’s called a funnel because one action leads to the next, until you eventually are able to make a sale. Here’s a step-by-step guide of how the sales funnel works in an ecommerce site:
- Visitor lands on your page – the funnel analysis begins when a visitor lands on your website. You’ll be able to see their actions on your website using a tracking pixel – this will also help you with marketing in the future.
- Visitor views a product – you’ll be able to get an understanding on which products your visitors take an immediate interest in, based on which products they view once they visit. This is a good time to show a pop-up chat window, this way, they can ask any questions they have while they’re still interested in the product.
- Visitor adds product to cart – once the visitor seems to have added the product to cart and is about to checkout, it’s a good time to use the email address you’ve captured to remind them about the purchase later on – this is because most people will not immediately buy the products in their cart – reminding them can help speed up the process.
- Visitor is about to complete their purchase – once the visitor heads to check, it’s a good idea to show them add-on products of similar items – this will help them view other products that might interest them and even add them to the purchase they’re making.
- Customer completes their purchase – once the customer has made the purchase, you can show them similar products based on their purchase on the website or app’s home’s screen, or send them marketing emails with offers if they’ve opted in for notifications regarding the same.
How to Increase your Funnel Conversion
Now that you have your sales funnel set up, it’s time to use that to optimize your sales and get more conversions using your funnel. Here are some steps you can take with the visitor data you’ve collected after some sessions of testing your website:
- Note the problem areas – where do you customers usually seem to lose interest and drop off from your website? Does this happen as soon as they land on the website, or during checkout? Using this data, you’ll be able to find new strategies to keep them interested or fix issues that may cause them to leave.
- Is the website user friendly – one of the main things you’ll be able to test is whether or not the website has good UX and UI. If you find visitors struggling to move from one step to another (refer to the funnel analysis we spoke about earlier), it could be because your website’s design is not intuitive enough or is simply not user friendly.
- A/B test the changes – once you’ve fixed some of the issues, run A/B tests on the new website. This will help you optimize it further.
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