“I have tried every trick and tip to boost sales on my Shopify store. However, my sales aren’t turning out well. What am I doing wrong?”
Like many other entrepreneurs, have you ever wondered why your Shopify store’s sales aren’t booming as per your expectations, or visitors do not convert into your customers?
If your answer is YES, perhaps it’s time for you to divert your focus to your Shopify store’s eCommerce sales funnel design.
A sales funnel is an important tool to visualize the position of your prospective customers in their buying journey.
There are usually four stages of the buyer in his purchasing journey:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Preference
- Purchase
A sales funnel is wide at the top as many targeted audiences enter it. The funnel gets narrower, and the prospects who reach the bottom stage are turned into customers or recurring buyers.
Even though you have designed a remarkable website that attracts many visitors, you are sometimes unable to convert them into buyers; this is where the eCommerce sales funnel will help you increase your conversions and revenue.
Did you know that out of 43.8% of visitors, only 3.3% of them enter the purchasing zone?
The rest of the visitors only view the product page and exit the website.
Building a smart eCommerce sales funnel for your Shopify store will help you map out and understand the needs and requirements of your consumers. If a person has heard about your brand or visited your website, it doesn’t mean he’ll become your customer.
To convert a visitor into a buyer, you need to customize your sales conversion strategy to cater to customers’ needs at every sale funnel stage.
In today’s post, we have created a guide that will help you optimize your Shopify eCommerce sales funnel in ten steps.
Ten Proven Steps To Optimize Your Shopify Sales Funnel
Steps For Optimizing Awareness Stage
People can never become your customers if they are unaware of your existence in the market. Your prospective audience will enter the sales funnel when they know about you or have heard about your brand.
The first step to optimizing your Shopify sales funnel is to increase your brand awareness and attract more people to your website.
Below are a few tactics to increase awareness and attract the prospective audience to the brand.
1. Blogging
Creating and publishing informative and helpful blog posts can help your website improve its visibility and ranking on search engine result pages.
Google receives 3.8 million search queries every single day. If your content is optimized for your targeted audience and well-integrated with keywords, people might end up visiting your website if it secures a good ranking on the result page.
Make sure to create unique, interesting, and helpful content for your audience that convinces them that you are an expert in your field.
Post consistently to keep the people hooked to your content. However, your blog posts should not be promotional, or else the visitor will exit the website. Your goal is to share the information with your visitors and keep them interested in your website.
2. Social Networking
To survive in the highly competitive market where thousands of businesses emerge daily, a business must make its presence on social networking sites.
Social media websites have millions of users. It allows the brands to market themselves to a massive audience that might turn into loyal customers.
Create your business’s profile on popular social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Grow your followers, post amazing content, engage with your followers, and stay active on your profiles to market your brand to a large crowd and entice them to learn more about your brand.
The best part about social networking sites is they are completely free. So, even if you are short on resources for marketing your brand, no need to worry! Social networking sites enable you to market your business for free.
3. Paid Advertisements
Running paid ads is a great way to catch the users’ attention and make them aware of your brand’s existence.
You can use Google ads or Facebook ads to run your campaigns and reach the targeted audience. Don’t worry; you don’t have to break the bank for paid advertisements. Your business will only pay when a user clicks on the ad and lands on your webpage.
Steps For Optimizing Consideration/Interest Stage
The next stage of the sales funnel after awareness is the consideration stage. Once you have succeeded in bringing the users’ attention to your brand, you will now have to keep them interested in your brand to convert them into customers.
In this stage, you have two objectives:
- To make your customers learn about your products.
- To collect their contact information such as email addresses and contact numbers to remind them about your products and offers.
You can design a landing page to make your customers learn more about your product or service. Visitors’ contact information can be collected by using lead magnets. You can offer a free product, an eBook, free printable material, or even a discount code to lure them into sharing their contact information.
The following steps will help you to make your customer learn more about your brand and collect their contact details.
4. Landing Pages
Design an effective landing page that focuses on one problem. It should only talk and provide information about one particular product or service. For instance, a hotel reservation website can have a landing page that displays the form for booking the room, or a website that sells different kinds of bags can have a landing page that displays its bestselling handbag and has a buy now option.
A landing page is clear and has minimum elements to limit the distraction for your visitors.
5. Clear Call To Action for Signing Up
Without proper call-to-action (CTAs), your visitors will not be able to engage on your site. You must tell them about their next step.
If you want your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, provide a clear sign-up button and a little information about what the person will get in exchange for his email or contact number. Make sure to keep the information short and preferably in bullet points. The users do not read long blocks of textual information.
Offer a valuable bribe, i.e., a lead magnet to your visitors to entice them to share their contact information with you.
Steps For Optimizing Preference Stage
If you have succeeded in getting the contact information of your prospects, they have entered the preference stage of the sales funnel.
You have to educate your prospects about your products or services and clear their queries and concerns at this stage.
This is the stage where you can induce the visitor to become your customer by finalizing his purchasing decision in your favor. You have to make your customers believe that your brand and products are an excellent choice and a solution to their problems.
Educate your customers about your products and brands in the following ways:
6. Email Marketing
Do not collect the email addresses to grow your subscriber list longer. Email marketing is a powerful channel to remind customers about your brand and the products that piqued your targeted audience’s interest.
Divide your email addresses into different segments to create an effective strategy for each group. For instance, a business can divide its email list according to gender, age, interests, location, etc.
Segmenting the list will enable you to curate effective messages that will tempt your prospects to come back to your website. For example, an eCommerce store selling apparel for both genders can create two separate email lists to target its customers. In addition, the store can subdivide its lists according to the age group to make its messages and offers more targeted.
7. SMS Marketing
Another effective way to optimize the preference stage is through SMS marketing. Use the contact numbers of the visitors that they have willingly shared with you.
Send out short yet persuasive messages to remind the prospects about your store and products. SMS marketing is highly effective as your messages land directly in the person’s inbox and have a good chance of being opened by him.
If your potential customers have reached this stage, do not annoy them and scare them away from your brand. Refrain from sending unimportant or frequent messages. Constant messages from a brand irritate the customer, and he will unsubscribe from your SMS list.
Steps For Optimizing Purchase Stage
This is the action stage for the business, where it will convert the visitors into customers by making sales.
At this stage, present your customers with frequent opportunities to buy from you and become your customers.
The following steps will help you to secure sales from your customers:
8. Optimize Product Pages
The way you present your products can play a pivotal role in luring your customers to add products to their shopping carts.
Use a clean layout for your product pages. Use high-resolution images from different angles to help your customers get a better view of the product from numerous angles. Moreover, provide a clear and scannable product description. Do not brag about the product’s quality; instead, focus on its key features necessary for a customer to know.
Mention the size, weight, length, and color of your products. Do not forget to place the call to action (CTAs) of adding to the cart, or buy now below each product.
To provide instant help to your customer and answer his queries, integrate a live chat feature on your website. Helping the visitors promptly and answering their queries will leave a good impression about the business, and people will love to shop from a business that addresses their issues quickly.
9. Display Customer Testimonials
If your customers are generous enough to share their feedback with you, don’t keep them to yourself. Share customer feedback on your social media profiles and website.
Customer reviews work as an effective tool to attract the prospective audience and win their trust. Around 84% of online buyers read customer reviews before purchasing from a website.
When your prospects see that your customers are satisfied with your products and services, they find it easy to trust your brand and order the products.
Hence, strategically display your customers’ testimonials or your website to induce your prospect to add products to his cart.
10. Create Seamless Checkout Process
Checkout is the last stage where the customer finalizes his order and shares his credit card details with the business. Ensure that you do not irritate the prospect at this stage, or else all your sales conversion strategies will be rendered useless.
Your checkout process should be smooth, seamless, and quick for the customer. Keep your confirmation forms short, provide multiple payment channels, and ensure the privacy of your customers by displaying the security badges on your checkout page.
Wrapping Up
It is important to remember that the eCommerce sales funnel for the Shopify store is a continuous process. The process is ongoing, and it is different for each customer.
It doesn’t matter what product you sell or what niche you deal in; the average visitors of your store will go through the four stages mentioned above. Some people might become your customers on their first visit, while others may take a reasonable time to purchase something from your store.
For optimizing your sales conversion strategy, it is crucial to understand the movement of your visitors in the sales funnel. Use the information and analytics of your user’s buying journey to optimize all the stages of the eCommerce sales funnel and widen your customer base.
