The Ecommerce Conversion Funnel: 9 Strategies to Get More Sales

Imagine a world where everyone who lands on your website instantly buys and then comes back every month to buy again.

Spoiler alert: that’s never going to happen.

While some visitors might be ready to buy, others are just browsing the web during their lunch break or trying to compare your product against those of your competitors.

All of these potential customers are in different stages of the buying process and they need your guidance to move on to the next stage. As you can’t always know where each individual prospect is hanging out, the best thing you can do is make sure that wherever they find themselves, you’ve mapped out a clear path for them to follow.

That path is your ecommerce conversion funnel.

In this article, we’ll discuss exactly what an ecommerce conversion is, how you can track the performance of your sales funnel, as well as give you strategies for funnel optimization.

What Is an Ecommerce Conversion Funnel?

The ecommerce conversion funnel refers to the visual representation as a funnel of the journey someone makes from becoming aware of your brand to making a purchase from you and becoming a customer. This journey consists of multiple stages and a good ecommerce conversion funnel goes accompanied by sales and marketing activities that guide leads from one stage to the next.

These activities are often labeled as “top of the funnel”, “middle of the funnel”, or “bottom of the funnel” depending on which stage in the funnel they’re trying to guide leads through.

Why Should You Create an Ecommerce Conversion Funnel?

Without knowing which stages a lead or customer can find themselves in, it’s hard to send targeted messages. Someone who has just found out about your brand needs different information than someone who put a product in their cart but then abandoned it.

Having an ecommerce conversion funnel allows you to create a different communication approach depending on where in the buying process someone is at, giving you a higher chance to convert them and turn them into a loyal customer.

The Stages of the Ecommerce Sales Funnel

The type of store you run and the kinds of products you sell will influence what your conversion funnel looks like. However, the general stages of the conversion funnel are the same for every type of ecommerce business. While they sometimes get different names depending on who you talk to, the below five stages are widely accepted.

1. Awareness

Also known as the Discovery stage, this is the point at which a potential customer finds out about your brand. In ecommerce, someone is typically considered to enter the awareness stage once they visit your ecommerce website for the first time.

They could also learn about you through an article you’re featured in or because a friend recommends your brand, but in these cases, there’s very little you can do to make them take the next step.

2. Consideration

In the Consideration or Interest stage, the potential customer actively shows interest in your products. A good example of this is someone looking at a product page.

This stage is also where, according to some, the ecommerce marketing funnel stops, and the conversion funnel begins. The marketing funnel aims to generate leads. Once someone is considered a lead – a potential customer – they enter the ecommerce conversion funnel which aims to convert them.

3. Intent

When a site visitor adds a product to their shopping cart, they’re acting on their interest, but they’re not purchasing just yet. They are showing Intent or Desire, but they might still leave your online store without coming back.

4. Decision

The Decision, Purchase, or Action stage is when the visitor finally buys a product and becomes a customer. This isn’t where the conversion funnel ends, though.

5. Loyalty

Ideally, first-time customers become repeat customers and, eventually, loyal fans. When a customer becomes a repeat customer and even a brand advocate, they’ve reached the bottom of your ecommerce funnel. Just realize your work never ends. Loyal customers are your most important customers and you’ll want to make sure they stay happy and keep buying from you by keeping them engaged.

Be aware of non-linear customer journeys

The concept of an ecommerce funnel is linear: leads go in at the top and – hopefully – end up at the bottom as loyal consumers once they’ve passed through all of the stages of your conversion funnel.

The reality, however, often looks different. Their current life situation, goals, and external factors influence potential customers and might make them jump out and back into your conversion funnel multiple times. Likewise, each of them will experience a visit to your ecommerce website differently, and it’s up to you to figure out which stages of your conversion funnel people easily move through, and where there’s a high risk of them leaving.

We’ll discuss strategies to help you improve your conversion funnel further down below. First, let’s have a look at an ecommerce sales funnel example.

Ecommerce Sales Funnel Example

A potential customer sees an ad for cool-looking, sustainable sunglasses on Facebook. – Awareness
They click the ad and are taken to a product landing page on the brand’s website. – Consideration
but they don’t find a lot of information about the brand’s production process, and so they send the company an email to ask how sustainable the sunglasses are. – Consideration
While they wait for a reply, they Google some reviews to figure out whether the company is trustworthy. It appears to be. – Consideration
They get an extensive reply from the brand’s customer support, which assures them the sunglasses are truly sustainable. – Consideration
They’re convinced and go back to the website to have a final look at the product page. – Consideration
They decide they really like the look of these sunglasses and place them in their shopping cart… – Intent
… after which they complete the purchasing process and buy the sunglasses. – Decision

Tracking the Performance of Your Conversion Funnel

You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken, and you can’t double down on what works when you have no idea what’s making customers convert. That’s why it’s crucial to track the performance of your conversion funnel in each stage of the funnel.

Here are a few ways to do that.

Track crucial KPIs

These include:

Conversion rates
Conversion rate optimization is an important part of improving your conversion funnel. Examples of conversion rates to track are your overall conversion rate, the conversion rate of your individual marketing campaigns, the conversion rate of each of your product pages, marketing channel conversion rates, and individual ad conversion rates.

If you’re in ecommerce, the primary conversion rate you want to track is your sales conversion rate. Not only is it a general indicator of how well you’re doing, it also allows you to understand the ROI of your marketing campaigns.

There are steps users take leading up to a sale. All of these are micro-conversions you can track as well. Things like visits to and bounces from product pages, adds-to-cart, and initiated checkouts can tell you how smooth the purchasing process on your website is and where people drop off.

The formula: number of conversion / number of total visitors x 100
Click conversion rate:
Whereas your conversion rate tells you how many conversions you get, your click conversion rate tells you how many of your website visitors actually convert. If you get a lot of traffic but not a lot of sales, that’s an issue.

The formula: number of visitors who convert / total number of visitors x 100 = percentage of unique visitors that convert.
Cart abandonment rate
Likewise, if a lot of people add products to their carts but not a lot of shoppers complete the purchasing process, there may be something wrong with your checkout flow, or perhaps you’re scaring shoppers away by suddenly adding on a high shipping fee or asking for loads of personal information.

The formula: 1 – (total number of completed purchases / number of created shopping carts) x 100
Retention rate
To know whether customers come back for more and become loyal to your brand you need to calculate your retention rate.

The formula: number of customers who make multiple purchases / number of customers who only make one purchase x 100
Returns
If you sell a lot, but shoppers also return a lot, there might be something wrong with your marketing and/or the quality of your products. That’s why it’s important to also track your returns.

Survey visitors and customers

You can use a tool such as Hotjar to survey website visitors and customers in the different stages of your ecommerce funnel to figure out what works and to try and spot trends. Here are a few questions you can ask and the stage to ask them in:

Awareness: How did you find our website?
Consideration: Did this answer your question? (on a FAQ page, for example)
Intent: Not exactly what you’re looking for? (as an exit-intent pop-up on a cart page)
Decision: On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy was the ordering process?
Loyalty: On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends?

Use Google Analytics

In Google Analytics, you can track events such as downloads and purchases to evaluate your ecommerce funnel’s performance. You can also evaluate the journey of visitors through your website and analyze which pages are most often visited before customers add a product to their cart. Don’t forget to track how many people abandon their carts either.

Google Analytics even has an Ecommerce Tracking feature that allows you to track things like your conversion rate, your average revenue, and how much you’ve sold of each of your products. You can find all of this information and more by clicking “Conversion” in the left sidebar and then selecting “Ecommerce”.

Record user behavior

Make use of heatmap and session recording tools such as CrazyEgg to see how individual customers use your website. View how they scroll, where they click, and which parts of your product pages they spend most of their time on.

9 Conversion Funnel Optimization Strategies

As creating brand awareness and generating leads should be part of your marketing funnel, the strategies below focus solely on improving your ecommerce conversion funnel from the moment a potential customer has been turned into a lead.

Let’s dive in!

1. Ensure a smooth on-site user experience

When someone is considering making a purchase from you, you still need to earn their trust. If you have a buggy website with unintuitive navigation and slow-loading product pages, chances are high people will leave and go to a competitor who can offer them a smooth user experience.

After all, what is the customer experience going to be like once they’ve ordered from you if you’re website isn’t even working properly?

Go through all of the steps a potential customer on your site would go through and make sure there are no barriers to purchasing.

Are your site elements visible and easily clickable on all types of devices?
Do you have clear call-to-actions on your product pages?
How easy is it to add a product to the cart?
Do you highlight secure payment options?
How seamless is the checkout process?

All of these things matter in ensuring a pleasant user experience.

2. Establish brand authority

Whether it’s through blog posts, a detailed FAQ page, or how-to guides for your products, there are many things you can do to show potential customers that you’re there to support them and will answer any questions they may have.

This isn’t something that should be exclusive to your website either. Other ways to grow brand authority and trust include:

responding timely to comments on social media and questions you get via email.
showing social proof across your channels: testimonials, user-generated content, …
asking for reviews on the platforms where your ideal customers hang out.
sharing helpful content in your newsletter.

3. Catch browse abandonment

Someone who’s just browsing around your website might not be ready to make a purchase yet, but if they allow cookies, you can easily target them with remarketing ads when they visit other websites or social media platforms. And if you’re great at getting potential customers to sign up for your email list, you can even send them smart browse abandonment emails.

4. Send cart abandonment emails

The kid dropped the hamster in the toilet, your shipping fee is higher than they’d like, or they’re simply not sure yet: there are many reasons a customer may abandon their cart. Depending on which study you read, between 57% and 85% of carts get abandoned. That’s a lot!

Abandoned cart campaigns are a great tool to bring people back to their carts. You can simply remind them they forgot something or offer a limited-time discount on the item in their cart to create a sense of urgency.

Don’t have their email address yet? Then this is another situation in which you can set up a paid remarketing campaign. Combining both strategies should really help with your conversion rate optimization.

5. Offer a guest checkout option

As much as you want every customer to create an account and sign up for your email list, those two actions can form a block for people who’ve never bought from you before. Give them the chance to buy as a guest during the checkout process. You can always add an incentive to create an account once they’ve finalized the checkout process or in your order confirmation email, but keep your checkout page as barrier-free as possible.

6. Keep customers engaged

Once you concerted a site visitor into a customer, it’s crucial to keep them engaged and coming back. After all, it’s easier – and cheaper – to hold on to existing customers than to try and win new ones over and over again.

The best way to stay top of mind is by having access to your customers’ inboxes. Create onboarding drip campaigns, send out a regular newsletter, and offer them targeted discounts and promotions based on their customer profile and buying behavior.

If your customers tend to hang out on social media a lot, you might want to put some effort into getting them to follow your social media channels so you can pop up in their feed and invite them to interact with you there.

7. Set up a loyalty program

You can even take it a step further and create separate campaigns for customers who sign up for your loyalty program. A loyalty program offers benefits and/or rewards in exchange for repeat purchases. Having one is a great way to increase the chance that customers will keep buying from you, and not from your competitors.
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8. Create win-back campaigns

You won’t be able to hold onto everyone all of the time. When someone cancels their subscription or doesn’t purchase for a while, try sending them a win-back campaign. Remind them of what they’re missing out on, send them personalized product recommendations, or show them how much value you can bring to their lives. There are different strategies you can employ to get a customer back to your online store.

9. Research what your competitors are doing

Know of a brand that’s great at winning customers? Need a bit more inspiration for your funnel optimization project? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Research the strategies your competitors are using to convert customers and keep them engaged.

When you sign up for MailCharts, you get access to the email campaigns of hundreds of ecommerce brands. See exactly what they’re sending and when they’re sending it to move leads through their conversion funnel.

This article was originally published at Mailcharts.com, by author Sofie Couwenbergh.
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