Increasing the Conversion Rate of Your E-commerce Business Stage by Stage
Imagining that you are running an E-commerce business and I want to buy something from you. It can be any product, let us assume it is a coffee grinder. Firstly, I do not know your brand so I need to do some research online. Then I see your ads on the result page and some features catch my eyes so I click the ad. By reviewing the product introduction, I add it to my shopping cart. But I still want to see more options so I keep reviewing the coffee grinder of other brands. In the end, I make my final decision and pay for your coffee grinder and wait for its arrival.
In the professional term, this process is the Purchase Funnel which contains sequential stages of my behavior.
Awareness — I see the ads and know your brand
Interest — I click your ad for further information
Consideration — I review the product introduction to see whether it meets my requirement
Intent — I add it into my cart
Evaluation — I compare your coffee grinder with other brands
Purchase — I make the final decision and pay
These are the basic stages of a traditional purchase funnel, the new purchase funnel contains two more stages which are:
Loyalty — I become a loyal customer of your brand.
Advocacy — I start to recommend your brand to my surroundings.
From the standpoint of a marketer, you can use this funnel to understand my purchase behaviors in different stages so that you could figure out how to increase the possibility for me to go from the top of this funnel to the bottom. However, as the E-commerce business owner, you can also use this funnel to evaluate the performance of your business by tracking how many visitors would go to the bottom of the purchase funnel which refers to an important E-commerce metrics — Conversion Rate.
Conversion Rate simply is the number of conversions divided by the total number of site visitors. In the E-commerce world, the conversion rate is usually used to measure the performance of the website design and app design (Optimizely). A high conversion rate with the same number of visitors indicates the high profitability of your business. If your conversion rate is low, it means there must be some problems with your site design or marketing strategies. In this case, you can breakdown the customer purchase funnel and determine what you could do in each stage from the standpoint of an E-commerce business owner.
Awareness — how many people know your brand and search your name directly?
In this stage, either you should have a long history of your brand or you should develop effective marketing strategies to make me aware of your brand. You need to make reasonable distributions of your media mix based on the customer segmentation, like which media platform I use the most frequently and where I live.
Interest — how many visitors does your ads bring to your websites?
The performance of your business in this stage relies on the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and Advertising strategy, especially on the SERP [Search Engine Result Page]. The SEO strategy whether it is easy or not for me to find your website. The Advertising strategy decides whether I will have interests in your website.
Consideration — how many customers desire your products due to your website design?
The website design matters. You should have a customer-centric strategy when developing your website and consider the most about user experience. The elements like the readability of content, navigation of content, page responding speed all have influences on user experience. Good user experience is the key to make me stay for a longer time.
Intent — how many customers add your product to their shopping cart?
You should showcase the most benefits instead of features that I could get from your product or service to convince me so that I will have more motivation to add your products into the cart. Besides, extra offerings like discounts could also enlarge the possibility of adding into the cart.
Evaluation — how many customers consider your brand as a special one in the market?
To differentiate your brand among all the competitors, you should have branding strategies. However, although a good branding strategy helps you to be outstanding, the key factor is still the quality of your product or service. If I find the product I purchased does not match what I hear from you, I will never be your customer again.
Purchase — how many customers pay for your product in the end?
Finally, you still cannot lose your attention because I might abandon this order due to a terrible check-out experience. To reduce the cart abandonment rate, which is the ratio of orders stay in the shopping cart without checking out, you should try to simplify the check-out process and improve the payment system. Besides, sending an email to notify me about unpaid orders is a good idea to take me back.
If you want to increase your conversion rate, you should focus on the stages near the bottom like make more customers add your product to their shopping cart and check out as much as possible. It is a simple math question that the bigger numerator you have the bigger the fraction/ratio you get. Therefore, the key is to make more customers take final actions if you already have an acceptable traffic number.
Considering how to make me finish the payment of that coffee grinder and do not bring me to your website and lose me before I take out my credit card.
