A sales funnel illustrates the system or process of how a volume of targeted and prospective traffic and leads came to finally purchase a product or service. Usually, the top of the funnel represents all the traffic that has entered into an ecommerce website which contains those who will become leads and those who will not.
Where does this traffic come from?
An ecommerce website has a lot of strategies to capture the traffic or audience that they want. To name a few, PPC Ads, Organic Search, Banner Ads, Email-generated traffic, promotional coupons or codes, RSS subscribers, Link Ads, and Social Media presence are considered to be doorway passages for the traffic to come in. However, not all the traffic that comes from these doorway passages will successfully end up in a sale.
What factors affect the flow of the sales funnel?
Relevance of Website to Intent of inquiry –
Users often perceive a specific quality of information that they want as they click on your website through SERP, Social Media links, promotional codes, etc. When they arrive to a website where it doesn’t answer their questions in lesser than four seconds or less, they automatically fall out of the funnel system and go elsewhere. Other factors such as website design and loading speed can also contribute to the bounce rate of each site visitor. Therefore, it is very important to make a very good impact at the first impression.
Website Engagement and Navigation –
The challenge ecommerce websites face today is the ability to create a website that is both engaging and entertaining in order to push them towards using the call-to-action buttons and links and lead them to purchasing a product or make an inquiry through email, contract form, or phone call. When developers fail to provide an organized and smooth flow of the website, most especially the checkout process, chances are a lot of the potential leads will then fall off the funnel.
Payment Gateways and Price –
It’s no secret to ecommerce website owners that a lot of people are into getting products and services for free which makes it very hard to convert leads into a sale. Also, stiff payment gateways (not allowing credit card transactions and other payment methods) will eventually turn-off a lot of possible prospect customers into buying a product or service. The price of products and services also becomes a bottleneck to lead conversion as not everyone will be happy and convinced with your pricing.
Low Trust to Website’s Security System –
There are actually a lot of individuals who looks at how secure or tight a website’s shopping security system is. SSL Certificates can be bought by ecommerce website owners to secure all data and transactions that are going on in the website. This should be a high priority.
What are the goals of any sales funnel system?
Aside from converting traffic into a lead, and converting a lead into a sale, ecommerce website owners would want to offer subscriptions and memberships to their customers to encourage repeat purchases in the future. Strategies such as sending away email newsletters or thank you notes will encourage repeat visits, repeat orders, and most importantly, loyalty. The end of the sales funnel ends with repeat orders and loyalty.
Lastly, the goal of any sales funnel system is to understand the flow of the traffic as it enters into the funnel. Identification of bottlenecks in the sales funnel system is very important as this will lead to improvement of strategies in order to not waste the quantity of visitors that goes into the funnel system. Gaining insights from the actionable data provided by tools like Google Analytics is very important as this will surely make the sales funnel system a more successful one.
This is a guest post by Glen from NetiDnow. If you would like to write for ShoutMeLoud, check our guest submission guidelines.
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