For most e-commerce sites, the main purpose of a website is to get sales. When we ask the question: “What are some key metrics you are interested in for your website?,” we have heard answers such as hits, page views, unique visitors. These are reasonable metrics, however, they all focus on the same thing — getting people to your website. In the past, this was sufficient. For the more entrepreneurial, these metrics led to an advertising opportunity and a way to generate income.
In today’s e-commerce world, these metrics are not enough. A business should give more attention to turning unique visitors into actual sales revenue. There are sales strategies and processes you can implement (based on price, sales cycle, etc.), but there are more efficient tactics. You can implement these tactics on your website to engage visitors, identify warm leads, and then turn them into customers. The tactic I’m referring to is called a Sales Funnel. The concept of the sales funnel is nothing new, but the popularity has grown over the last few years.
Converting visitors
To turn visitors on an e-commerce site to actual buyers, we have to look at which visitors are more likely to make a purchase and cater to their needs. A Sales Funnel helps identify those visitors, pays attention to their actions and adjusts marketing efforts to those identified visitors. Why do they get more attention? They have shown interest, and they are more likely to become customers.
Why is it called a funnel?
Just like a funnel is wide at the top and tapers down to the final step, this process monitors many users (visitors to your site) and identifies those who who have interacted with the site. Examples of these interactions are: filling out a form, downloading a free offer, and so on. During this engagement, you can have something in place that pops up a chat window offering to answer any questions. You can also send this user an email, or contact them in another way. The bottom line is the large number of visitors you started with are funneled down to end up as engaged shoppers. Those engaged shoppers have a higher tendency to become customers and repeat customers.
Why should you should consider this?
If your website is trying to collect information or sell a product, just focusing on number of visitors isn’t going to be enough to be successful. Spend your time and budget on converting those visitors into customers. For more information, a consultation to develop a Sales Funnel strategy prepared for you or ongoing support for an existing strategy, let us help.