Unfortunately, there's not a single tactic for attracting new visitors to your site and converting them into loyal customers. Although paid advertising helps, spending thousands of dollars alone to increase traffic doesn't always lead to sales.
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Instead, we suggest developing a specific and comprehensive marketing strategy that is based on the eCommerce conversion funnel. It will allow you to optimize the buyer journey and increase your return on investment.
What Is The eCommerce Conversion Funnel?
The eCommerce conversion funnel guides potential customers through the buyer's journey. It maps out everything from initial contact with a visitor to how to best utilize brand ambassadors. Optimizing this process through a personalized experience at every touch point will make for a seamless journey and can increase conversion rates.
In order for shoppers to move through the buyer's journey, your brand must go through the different stages of the eCommerce conversion funnel:
- Reach
- Engage
- Convert
- Delight
1. Reach
The first stage of the eCommerce conversion funnel is to expand a brand’s reach through pull marketing strategies. Target and personalize your efforts to offer the right content at the right time and to the appropriate audience. Research and analyze buyer personas, demographics, behavior patterns, motivations and goals to help to accomplish this.
Additionally, first impressions have a lasting impact on brand perception, so be sure that your potential leads have a positive experience during their very first encounter with your brand; this will establish the foundation for a long-term customer relationship.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Great strategies to increase brand awareness and site traffic and introduce potential leads to your brand include:
By demonstrating your expertise through relevant, high-quality content, you'll become a valuable resource to the consumer. Cohesively integrating all of your content across each technique will also help in developing a well-rounded marketing experience.
In this stage, it's important to focus on cultivating a relationship and instilling trust among your brand rather than making a hard sell. Expand your reach by improving the way that individuals engage with your content.
Optimize product and content pages, engage with individuals on social media, utilize landing pages and create promotional content to ensure that your improve the customer experience.
We recommend using Google Analytics to confirm whether or not you're effectively reaching your target market. Audience and acquisition metrics allow you to quantify how much new site traffic your marketing efforts are attracting.
2. Engage
To continue building trust with prospective customers and increase their investment in your brand, the next step in the eCommerce conversion funnel is engagement.
Creating an emotional connection with a visitor is vital to developing a long-term relationship. We recommend engaging with potential leads on social media - whether it be through a poll, Q&A session, live stream, contest or giveaway.
Prompting visitors to fill out a form allows you to capture their email and continue marketing to them over time. When developing your email strategy, don't forget to follow email marketing best practices.
Analyzing metrics such as bounce rate, pages per session and average session duration is beneficial in measuring the success of your marketing strategy. You'll get a sense of how often and for how long visitors are engaging with your site.
3. Convert
Once you earn a potential customer's interest, it's time to provide them with all the right reasons to make a purchase. Influence purchasing decisions by highlighting products or services relevant to a customer's needs.
Create pages with a clear call-to-action to increase conversion rates, reduce cart abandonment and make the purchase process as simple as possible. Catalog optimization, welcome offers, product questions, live chats and free shipping are a few of the many ways that you can simplify the purchasing process.
If you find that potential customers are not quite ready to convert, try offering them a free trial. Ultimately, you should strive to eliminate poor on-site experiences, low user quality and technical errors.
Measure and evaluate metrics such as number of transactions, revenue and conversation rates to determine how many customers your marketing strategy is bringing in. Then, analyze how they influence your ROI.
Don't forget to note your top-converting landing pages so that you know which pages are attracting the most qualified leads.
4. Delight
After obtaining a new customer, you've arrived at the last stage of the eCommerce conversion funnel. It's time to delight and retain that customer.
To keep them coming back, enable customers to stay engaged, share their feedback and refer their friends. In doing so, you'll heighten their brand loyalty, increase brand exposure and improve your brand's reputation.
Already have a loyal customer base? Treat them like royalty with special promotions, birthday offers and product reviews. Rewarding loyal customers goes a long way towards maintaining relationships and increasing your ROI.
Conclusion
Expanding your reach, engaging leads, converting leads into customers and retaining customers by delighting them can drastically increase the success of your marketing strategy and your scalability.
Remember that the eCommerce conversion funnel is a customer-centric approach with a focus on efficiency. As your business continues to adapt to the dynamic eCommerce environment, your conversion funnel will also continue evolving.
Are you interested in learning more about inbound marketing for eCommerce? Contact us through the form below with any questions or concerns, and our marketing strategists will be happy to help!
