Is Your Ecommerce Funnel Optimized for Conversion?

Do your customers buy your product the very first time they read or hear about it? Probably not — information on competing products is readily available and easy to research on the internet, and savvy consumers do just that before ultimately making a purchase. From the moment a potential customer becomes aware of your product/service until the time they buy it, it is a multi-stage journey known as an ecommerce conversion funnel. Read on to learn how to better optimize these stages for higher conversion rates.

Stages of the funnel and the average conversion rate for ecommerce

The stages of the ecommerce conversion funnel can be described as below:

Awareness — Total number of visitors reaching the landing page.
Consideration — Total number of visitors reaching checkout cart.
Purchase — Total number of people executing transactions.
Re-engagement/Post-purchase — Total number of people involved in loyalty/rewards programs.

According to Smart Insights, out of the total number of visitors coming into the average ecommerce site, 50% make it to product pages, 15% add products to their cart, yet only 3% make the purchase. That drop-off in the number of people executing each action is why optimizing your ecommerce funnel to improve the ecommerce conversion rate is crucial. If any portion of your funnel is operating below average, then your website's ultimate conversion rate will be far less than the 3% average conversion rate for ecommerce sites.

Optimizing ecommerce funnels for conversion

If you’re looking to improve your conversion rate, it’s important to examine every stage of the ecommerce funnel to identify what is working and what is not. From there, you can identify ways to optimize and prioritize implementing them with the rest of your team.

Here are a few of the top optimizations to keep in mind.

Stage 1: Awareness

At this stage, prospects recognize your product as a probable solution to a problem they have but they need more educational content from you to arouse increased interest in your products. If the visitors are interested in your brand and have reached your product page, it is time to create a desire to buy your product. For instance, talk about how your product’s benefits can help make your prospective customer's life easier.

Recommendation: Optimize your landing pages

Your landing pages include your homepage, product pages and category pages. Consider focusing on your flagship products and optimizing them first, taking into account SEO and user experience. You can optimize the page load time for a better user experience — if the page load time is over 5 seconds, the probability of a bounce increases by 100%. You can get your website architecture reviewed by expert consultants to improve page load speed, UX and more.

Stage 2: Consideration

After reading all the information about your product, your prospective buyer considers purchasing your product. At this stage, you need to continue to give them value so they remain interested in your product.

Recommendation: Build and place your CTAs strategically

The placement and content of your CTA play a crucial role. For example:

Instead of saying: “Buy XYZ travel bag with extra pockets and thicker shoulder straps.”
Write something like: “Choose an XYZ travel bag for extra storage and ergonomic straps to reduce stress on back and shoulders.”

The second CTA creates more desire because the reader can relate to the benefits. This is also where an ecommerce platform with personalization capabilities can provide a huge amount of value, as it allows you to further tailor these CTAs and offer your potential customers more products they may also be interested in purchasing.

Stage 3: Purchase

At this stage, your prospects have decided to buy your product. But, if your payment process doesn’t communicate trustworthiness or there are too many steps to get to the checkout, you could lose them. If you’re seeing high rates of abandoned carts paired with a low conversion rate, this stage should be the first portion of your ecommerce funnel to optimize. Do not let them leave the website because of any site-related hindrance/roadblock in the purchasing process.

Recommendation: Reduce cart abandonment

This can be achieved by optimizing your checkout flows to minimize the effort a customer must put in while buying your product. Like your landing pages, all checkout pages should load quickly. You can also leverage personalization here by allowing users to create accounts or use cookies to auto-populate their information. Above all, a modern ecommerce checkout flow enables customers to buy quickly. This is crucial to keep in mind when determining what plugins or features your checkout flow should incorporate (and having too many may be the root cause of your high abandon cart rates!).

Stage 4: Re-engagement/Post-purchase

Most conversion funnels are missing this step, but it is a crucial one, since it pulls highly targeted customers back in the funnel, making them repeat purchasers and increasing the average lifetime value of your customers.

Recommendation: Seamless email capture and loyalty program incentive

After your new customers have made the purchase, ask them to sign up for your email newsletter or loyalty programs. Since you’ve likely already collected their email during the purchase phase, this should allow you to make these signups as seamless and easy as possible. Then, build out email flows that entice your customers to come back to your website again with coupons and other rewards programs.

The right strategy for increased conversions

Though there are widely accepted best practices for each stage of the customer journey, optimizing your ecommerce funnel is an iterative process. Having a partner experienced in engineered ecommerce like Acro Commerce can be an invaluable part of the optimization process. Are you ready to look under the hood of your business to understand how you can improve your funnel and boost conversion rates? Reach out for a consultation today!

_{Miles J. Adrian is writing a PH.D. thesis on corporate blogging. He has been enabling sales of IT/technology products and services for almost a decade. He has a keen interest in ecommerce technologies, including CMS— front-end and back-end. Miles has written extensively on emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, Internet of Things, Cloud, DevOps; and microservices}