The Sales Funnel: Why the Stage your Audience is at Matters
Your e-commerce sales funnel starts with desire and, ideally, ends with lasting client retention.
At the beginning of the customer journey – or the widest part of the funnel -, we are dealing with a large mass of people that merely knows about the existence of your product. These people may have seen a web ad, social media post or a catchy blog featuring the product, which gave them ‘awareness’. However, by no means will everyone who saw the post click on a link or sign up to a mailing list.
In fact, the post will only speak to a certain subset of our now-aware potential customers. Let’s say our product is a facial cream that speaks to women in their 20s or 30s, you will want to engineer your initial hook (our awareness post) to speak to this specific demographic. The funnel has begun to narrow into the more limited number of people, who can now relate to and express actual ‘interest’ in your product.
For the marketeer, capturing, maintaining and converting this initial interest into action – a purchase – means laying out several tactics. This may include a link from the social media post to their website’s landing page, or a limited-period offer for first-time customers if they sign up with their email (think “receive a code with 15% off if you sign up for our newsletter today”).
While it’s important to keep these incentives in mind, it’s also crucial to take stock of potential inhibitors that can prevent otherwise-motivated leads to go through with their purchase. Particularly in e-commerce where ease-of-transaction, speed and simplicity matter, we may accidentally narrow our funnel more than necessary because the check-out page has too many fields to fill out or it takes too long to load the page. Something as simple as an intuitive and straightforward web setup can make all the difference.
Of course, there are also our indecisive customers, who browse, make it to check-out, but then leave their cart and our high promises behind. In fact, ca. 96% of first-time website visitors are usually not ready to buy quite yet. In these situations – thinking back to our email sign up from earlier –, we may still have a chance to harpoon them back in with a well-timed “you forgot something in your cart” follow-up email.
What remains is our next layer of the funnel, leaving us with the leads we have now successfully converted into paying customers. This number will strongly depend on the success of the marketing strategies that were laid out at each step of the funnel.
Keeping in mind that you have a 60-70% chance of making a sale to a returning customer, compared to only 5%-20% for new customers, we need to ensure that the customer journey doesn’t abruptly end once they click ‘pay’.
Creating ‘retention’ through a loyal customer base that not only returns to your website but brings in new leads through word of mouth may be at the bottom of the funnel, but it should be on top of our priority list.
As it stands, close to 80% of marketing leads are never converted into sales because of a faulty, or entirely missing, marketing funnel. With years of experience and a proven portfolio of successful lead conversions, Voke Design can boost your efficacy and help you drive significant business with an expertly constructed sales funnel that addresses your unique business needs.
[1] 40+ Mind-Blowing Stats About SalesFunnels - AutoGrow
[2] 13 Interesting Sales Funnel Statistics & Facts(2022) (markinblog.com)
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