Follow These Steps to Optimize Your Ecommerce Sales Funnel

Every sale has a story.

After all, it’s not like people just appear on your site out of nowhere. There are many different motivations and connections that could lead someone to your online storefront. And if any of these visitors end up making a purchase, it won’t be due to just random chance. From needs to budget to pure gut instinct, there are myriad factors that play into any given visitor’s decision to buy a product or not.

Together, all these interactions and relationships with potential customers are known as the ecommerce sales funnel. Understanding and improving your store’s funnel will help you increase your conversion rate, retain more customers, and generate more sales.

In order to help you reach those goals, this guide provides a highly detailed breakdown of every aspect of the ecommerce sales funnel, including:

• Stages of the Funnel
• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase Intention
• Completed Purchase 
• Confirmation 
• Re-Engagement 

Stages of the Funnel

The ecommerce sales funnel consists of the following six stages:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Purchase Intention
4. Completed Purchase
5. Confirmation
6. Re-engagement

It’s called a funnel because, in terms of the number of sales prospects involved, it’s largest at the top (Awareness) and then gets narrower and narrower as you work your way down. Only a fraction of the prospects in the Awareness stage will make it to the Consideration stage, and only a fraction of those prospects will then display a Purchase Intention, etc.

Also, it’s important to note that the end of the funnel isn’t when someone makes a purchase, as there are still two stages remaining at that point (Confirmation and Re-engagement). This is a good mindset for every online merchant to have, as repeat customers are much more valuable than one-time customers. Even once you’ve successfully converted a visitor into a customer, your work is far from over.

Below, we’ll provide you with a definition, examples of associated customer actions and merchant practices, and a couple optimization techniques for each stage of the ecommerce sales funnel.

Awareness

Definition

The Awareness stage of the ecommerce sales funnel describes when prospects hear about your brand for the first time. 

Awareness may very well be the most important stage of the entire funnel, as no one would be able to buy from your store if they never heard about it in the first place. In most cases, the more the general public is aware of you, the better. The logic here is simple — since only a small fraction of the people who enter your sales funnel will actually become customers, it helps to make the number of people who enter your funnel as big as possible.

Essentially, all of the activities related to generating more traffic to your store also help optimize the Awareness stage of the ecommerce sales funnel.

Examples

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing (SEM)
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Ways to Optimize

• Prioritize organic traffic: There’s only so much time and money that you can dedicate to your online marketing efforts, which means you’ll need to set priorities — and while paid advertising campaigns have their place, organic traffic (visits that are not the result of direct advertising) should be your main focus. Research shows that 53% of web traffic comes from organic search, and another 5% comes from organic social. And in addition to making up the bulk of your traffic, these organic visits more often lead to sales.
• Focus on the right kind of visitors: Not all visits are equal. Some people are such a perfect match for your product offerings and brand values that they’re almost guaranteed to make a purchase, while others will be nearly impossible to convert. What age groups, income levels, geographic locations, etc. are most likely to buy from your store? This is who you should be targeting with your inbound marketing strategy (i.e., a brand with a relatively older audience shouldn’t bother with TikTok or Snapchat). Otherwise, you’re just wasting time and throwing your money away.
• Create content constantly: Quality is king, of course. If your content isn’t genuinely interesting or informative, no one’s going to bother reading or sharing it. But you shouldn’t forget about quantity, either. One recent study found that there’s a strong positive correlation between how frequently a website publishes content and the amount of traffic the website receives. While not every blog post, how-to guide, or infographic will catch on, taking a diversified approach will improve the odds that at least something will get a lot of shares, rise up the search rankings, and ultimately bring in a lot of traffic. 

Consideration

Definition

Once a prospect has been exposed to your brand, they might decide to actually click through to your site and check out what you have to offer — this is the Consideration phase. 

Examples

• Being directed to a landing page
• Browsing collection and product pages

Ways to Optimize

• Use mobile-first design principles: A whopping 76% of traffic to ecommerce sites comes from mobile devices. So, it only makes sense that you should have the small screens of smartphones foremost in mind when designing your site. Navigational elements like menu options and CTA buttons should be large enough and spaced far enough apart to easily tap on a touchscreen. Also, you must make sure that any text you may have isn’t too small, and there should be a fair amount of contrast between the color of the text and the background color of the page.
• Continuously experiment with changes: If a page has a low conversion rate, then how are you going to figure out what the problem is? And even if the conversion rate seems fine, how do you know it couldn’t be better? An app like Shogun A/B Testing will allow you to find the answers to these questions. A/B testing involves directing some visitors to a version of a page with changes (different layout, alternative product photos, etc.) while sending other visitors to the original version of the page, allowing you to compare the performance of both versions and make a highly informed decision on whether the changes are worth sticking with.

Purchase Intention

Definition

The Purchase Intention stage describes when, after researching what you have to offer, the prospect takes some action that indicates they are truly close to buying.

Examples

• Taking a product quiz
• Enrolling in an email newsletter
• Adding items to the cart

Ways to Optimize

• Send abandoned cart notifications: It’s easy to get distracted. Someone might add an item to their cart fully intending to follow through with a purchase, only to get pulled away by a work deadline, family obligations, or any one of the many other things that might be going on in their lives. When this happens, sending the prospect a gentle reminder that they left items in their cart will help ensure that they don’t completely forget about the order. Some platforms, like Shopify and BigCommerce, have a built-in feature for this purpose, and there are countless apps available as well.
• Set up in-cart product recommendations: Once you know what someone has added to their cart, you can use this information to your advantage by promoting complementary items directly on the shopping cart page (i.e., if the cart contains a cell phone, you could promote compatible chargers, cases, screen protectors, etc.). This technique is highly effective at increasing average order value.

Completed Purchase

Definition

This is the exact point when you have successfully converted the visitor into a customer.

Examples

• Purchasing an item
• Signing up for a subscription 

Ways to Optimize

• Acknowledge purchases with an animated element: In addition to a points-based reward system, you could also gamify the purchasing process by adding some animation (such as a burst of confetti) that plays whenever someone places an order. Such an animation should trigger a dopamine response that subtly incentivizes the customer to make additional purchases in the future.
• Reward your customers: As mentioned above, whenever you turn a visitor into a one-time customer, your next goal should be turning them into a repeat customer. You can encourage this behavior by setting up a loyalty program. For example, many stores give customers “points” that correspond to the dollar amount of each order, and customers can then exchange these points for perks such as steep discounts or free gifts. 51% of shoppers say that they have made at least one purchasing decision in the past three months based on a loyalty program offering.

Confirmation

Definition

There are still a few processes that need to play out in the days and weeks after an order has been placed. The Confirmation stage covers what happens while the customer is waiting on their order to arrive as well as the period immediately after they receive it.

Examples

• Confirmation emails
• Delivery status updates
• Return policies

Ways to Optimize

• Keep customers in the loop: Customers can get anxious when their order is still in transit, especially if it’s time-sensitive. Sending over tracking information as well as email updates as the order progresses from confirmed to shipped to delivered will help put their minds at ease, and it will also make them more comfortable with ordering from your store again in the future.
• Make the return process painless: It’s remarkable when you think about it — people spend trillions of dollars on ecommerce each year, handing over all that money without ever getting a chance to look at what they’re buying in person. The key is that most online stores make it easy for customers to get a refund if they’re not satisfied. You would be wise to do so as well, given that 83% of consumers say that the ease of returning products is important to them during the purchasing process. If you make it difficult to return items, then a lot of the people who eventually place their first order on your store will probably never bother to place a second.

Re-Engagement

Definition

The final stage of the sales funnel involves efforts to persuade people who have placed an order on your store before to now place an order again. It doesn’t matter if it’s been months or even years since someone last visited your site — it’s never too late to win them back.

Examples

• Email campaigns targeting previous customers
• SMS campaigns targeting previous customers

Ways to Optimize

• Trumpet your new product launches: Whenever you launch a product, be sure to blast this message out to everyone on your marketing lists. This is a great excuse to reach out to those who may have forgotten about you, and they just might be intrigued enough by your new offerings to become a customer once more.
• Offer exclusive deals for dormant customers: Everyone loves a great deal. To coax your long-lost customers out of hiding, it helps to offer something like a steep discount, buy-one-get-one-free special, etc. Then, once they get back into the habit of using your store, there’s a good chance that they’ll continue to do so without needing any extra incentive. 
• Personalize your storefront: Shogun Personalization will allow you to set up an alternative version of your store that is only seen by people who haven’t visited in a long time. For example, in this personalized experience you could add a banner to the top of your site that speaks directly to the previous customers you’re targeting, making it impossible to ignore whatever great deal you’re offering as part of your win-back campaign (and those who aren’t included in the personalized experience won’t see the banner at all, so they won’t be confused by some offer that doesn’t apply to them).