Discover How to Optimize Your E-Commerce Conversion Funnel

TL;DR:

• The e-commerce conversion funnel is an e-commerce marketing technique that makes it easy to visualize each step of the customer journey — and the possible pain points along the way.
• It’s made up of four stages from top to bottom: awareness, consideration, conversion, and post-purchase.
• Essential best practices for optimizing a conversion funnel include conducting a funnel analysis, leaning into email marketing, and improving your store’s user experience.
• You can avoid common problems and further improve your conversion funnel by marketing to the right target audience, balancing marketing efforts between customer acquisition and customer retention, and ensuring that product pages contain accurate, granular detail.

In an e-commerce business, your biggest goal is to bring up your conversion rate. There are lots of techniques, tips, and tricks that can help you do that — but not all of them will provide you with a comprehensive overview of the entire customer journey and the spots where drop-off may be happening.

That’s what the e-commerce conversion funnel is all about. It’s a tool you can use to visualize the stages of your customer journey so that it’s easier to spot the potential roadblocks that may be preventing customers from actually converting. We’re going to show you how it works — and then we’ll show you some solid strategies to help you optimize your conversion funnel. 

What Is an E-Commerce Conversion Funnel?

As a marketer, you’ve probably heard a lot about funnels. Digital marketing funnels, sales funnels, lead funnels — what does it all mean?

A “funnel,” when used in a marketing context, categorizes customers according to their progress along the customer journey that you’ve laid out for them. So a lead funnel, for example, categorizes customers at the various stages between discovering your brand and the point at which they provide you with their contact information, thus becoming a lead.

Following this logic, an e-commerce conversion funnel works the same way: It categorizes your customers according to the stages they’ve taken along the path you’ve created for them. It encompasses everything from the time they discover your brand and online store (the top of the funnel) to the actual conversion itself (the bottom of the funnel).

What Are the Stages of an E-Commerce Conversion Funnel?

The typical e-commerce sales funnel is a simple one, made up of three to four different stages. Although if you want a more granular look at your buyer’s journey, you can add stages to represent different touch points along the way. Below, we’ll cover the basic stages that every online business should follow.

Awareness

Everything starts with the awareness stage, which is sometimes also referred to as the “upper funnel,” “top of funnel,” or “ToFu” for short. This is where prospective customers first become aware of your brand and its offerings. 

People can enter the awareness stage in a variety of ways:

• Social media, either through posts or paid ads
• Word of mouth from existing customers
• Via influencers or affiliate marketing
• Search results, either organically or through paid ads
• TV commercials, billboards, signage, and other traditional advertising methods

Consideration

Customers who have discovered your brand — and who have a need or desire for a product like yours — will move from the awareness stage directly to the next stage, which is the consideration stage (also referred to as the “mid of funnel” or “MoFu”). This is where things start to get tricky. 

Now that you’ve caught the customer’s attention, you need to show them why they must have your product. What’s more, you need to show them why they should choose your product over a competitor’s offering.

During the consideration phase, customers will be doing research on you and your competitors. You can win out over the competition with things like:

• Descriptive product pages with attractive images and clear pricing information
• Tutorials and other types of video content showcasing your product in use
• Blogs featuring how-tos, behind-the-scenes looks, and information related to your niche
• Paid search engine and social media retargeting ads for people who have visited your e-commerce site
• Newsletter content for email list subscribers
• Influencer content that features your product
• Social proof in the form of positive customer reviews or testimonials

Conversion

The conversion stage (“bottom of funnel” or “BoFu”) can be a little bit confusing. You might assume that in this context, “conversion” means that you’ve made a sale, right?

Actually, no. Customers who have moved into the conversion stage have decided to make a purchase, but they haven’t actually made that purchase yet. Instead of considering whether or not they want a product, they’re considering the implications of the purchase itself:

• Do I need this right now, or should I wait for a sale or an updated version?
• Can I get a better deal on shipping?
• Can I get faster shipping?

At this stage of the funnel, the name of the game is to provide the right value to customers to get them past these hurdles. For example, based on what you know about the customer, you can offer free shipping promotions, which will entice people who are concerned about shipping costs; or limited-time promotions, which encourage people not to wait but to buy now, before the promotion ends.

Post-Purchase

You’ve made a sale, which means your customer has reached the end of the funnel, right? Theoretically, this could be true — but smart marketers add a final post-purchase stage to their conversion funnel.

The idea behind this stage is simple. You want loyal customers who have made a purchase to do the following:

• Come back to make additional purchases in the future
• Leave positive reviews or write testimonials
• Spread the word about your brand to their friends, family, and colleagues

Providing a great product and a fantastic customer experience will do a lot to help you achieve the goals above. However, you can also take extra steps — like sending out a post-purchase email that gently encourages customers to leave a review while reminding them that you’re available if they need assistance getting the most out of their recent purchase.

Best Practices for Optimizing Your E-Commerce Conversion Funnel

Now that you’ve got a handle on how the e-commerce conversion funnel works, it’s time to think about funnel optimization. In digital marketing, there is always room for improvement — and the following tips and tricks will help you move more people from the top of the funnel to the bottom.

Start With a Funnel Analysis

Before you do anything else, a funnel analysis is essential. This will help you zero in on the stages of the conversion funnel most in need of attention. To do this analysis, break your customer journey down into the funnel stages outlined above — then look at the engagement numbers for each stage.

For the awareness stage, look at your ads, social media posts, and other discoverable pieces of content, and analyze the following metrics:

• Impressions, which is the number of times ads are displayed to users
• Reach, which tallies the number of individuals who have seen your ads
• Clicks, which counts the number of people who clicked ads, affiliate links, or links in social posts
• Click-through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of impressions that result in clicks

In both the consideration and conversion stages, clicks and CTR will be important, and you should also add the following to the list:

• Number of website visits
• Bounce rate
• Time spent on page
• Traffic sources

While there are many more metrics that you can track — like your Net Promoter Score — these are the basics that will get you started. As you progress through your funnel analysis, look for indicators that hint at pain points or obstacles that prevent customers from progressing further into the conversion funnel. 

For example, if your reach seems low and your ads just aren’t getting many clicks, then you may need to make changes to the search terms you’re targeting, or something about the ad itself may need a redesign to make it more enticing. 

Farther into the funnel, metrics like your CTR or bounce rate can indicate that you have plenty of traffic coming in to landing pages — but maybe visitors aren’t clicking through the call to action (CTA) because it isn’t compelling enough, or maybe they are clicking the CTA but bouncing away quickly because something about your product pages needs improvement.

Bring Your Email Marketing “A” Game

In this day and age, it’s tough to compete with things like SEO or social media marketing — and that’s why email marketing is experiencing something of a renaissance. In fact, where the email marketing market had a value of $7.5 billion in 2020, it’s projected to grow to $17.9 billion by 2027. And yet, only 31% of marketers in 2023 were using email marketing.

Many marketers fear that sending out too many emails can come across as spammy or annoying — but the truth is, if you’re sending the emails that people want to see, they’ll find value in it. Even better, unlike marketing strategies such as SEO or paid advertising, you will be marketing directly to a target audience that confirmed their interest in your offerings when they signed up to be a part of your email list.

So what emails should you be sending? Here are some ideas:

• A warm welcome when people sign up for your email list or when they create an account for your e-commerce store.
• If you have a loyalty program, send out monthly emails reminding members of the rewards or incentives that they’ve earned.
• Keep track of website browsing data and purchase history (with consent, of course) — then use that data for upsell or cross-sell opportunities.
• Send out abandoned shopping cart emails not only to remind customers of the items they were considering but also to let them know that you’re making the user experience easy by not forcing customers to re-add products later on.

And what metrics should you track to gauge the success of your email marketing efforts? Here are a few essentials:

• Email open rates and CTRs, which will tell you how well your emails are performing overall
• New subscriber rates and unsubscribe rates, both of which can indicate customer interest in your brand
• Average order value, which can help you measure the success of cross-sells and upsells made through email marketing initiatives

Make the Checkout User Experience Easy

In the rush to create buzzworthy marketing, some marketers forget that the user experience is just as important as the messaging you put out. The truth is, the money you invest in marketing could be for naught if there are aspects of your website or checkout process that are putting people off.

Fortunately, the funnel analysis that we detailed above will help you catch many of the problems that can occur at the top and middle of the conversion funnel. However, there are still a couple of things that you can do to make life easier for potential customers.

First up, consider optimizing the checkout page. Start with the metrics. In addition to bounce rates and other website KPIs, take a look at your cart abandonment rate. If it’s too high, then investigate further:

• Are pricing, shipping options, and shipping times all made clear prior to the checkout, or are you hitting customers with an unpleasant surprise on the checkout page?
• Are you offering plenty of payment options so that people can pay with cards plus popular payment systems like PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay?
• Does your checkout system allow repeat customers to store billing and shipping information for future purchases, or do they have to type it in all over again?
• Does your shopping cart make it easy to update quantities, remove items, or save items for later?

As you can see, where the checkout process is concerned, it’s all about making everything as clear and convenient as possible.

Help Your Customers Do Their Shopping 

This is another way to make the user experience better — and with modern technology, it’s an easy feat to pull off. One of the most basic ways to help customers with their shopping is to lean on data, including purchase histories and browsing information, so that you can place personalized product recommendations on your homepage or on product pages. Give customers a look at products related to the things they love, and they may make additional purchases. You can also use chatbots to make it easy for customers to get recommendations.

But one of the best ways to streamline the shopping process? Use a platform like Jebbit to create a product finder quiz.

That’s what Samsonite did when they used Jebbit to create a product finder quiz. In just a few clicks, this experience helps customers discover what kind of traveler they are — then points them to products suited to their travel style. It’s the kind of experience that saves a lot of time for shoppers by helping them quickly find exactly what they’re looking for among the large number of items in the average e-commerce store.

Even better, this experience netted fantastic results in terms of conversions. Fifty-eight percent of Samsonite’s website visitors who clicked on the product finder engaged with it — and 60% of those users went on to complete it. Of those who completed the experience, 50% went on to shop their recommended products. Along the way, Samsonite got to collect valuable zero- and first-party data that they can use to further refine their conversion funnel.

3 Common Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

You know what to do now — but do you know what not to do? Read below to find out where you could be going wrong and how to fix the problem.

1. Casting Your Net Too Wide

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make with their sales funnel happens right at the start. It goes like this: In an effort to get the word out, marketers make huge investments in top-of-funnel marketing strategies, hoping to lure as many people as possible into the mid-funnel stages of the conversion process. 

The problem is, this plan proves expensive — and while people may hear about the brand, it doesn’t mean they’re the right people (i.e., the ones who might actually be interested in purchasing the product). 

The Fix

Prioritize investments in first-party data. Learn everything you can about your customers — then use those details to create buyer personas and to segment your audience. Once you’ve narrowed things down from an ultra-wide audience to smaller segments, you can more effectively target not just potential customers, but the right potential customers with messages that resonate.

2. Forgetting About Customer Retention

In all the talk about bringing new customers into your conversion funnel, it’s easy to forget about a very important group of people: your existing customers. The thing is, customers never truly leave your conversion funnel — and it’s generally more cost-effective to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.

The Fix

Strike a balance between customer acquisition and customer retention so that you can keep a steady influx of new prospects while reducing churn. In particular, leverage things like email marketing, personalized recommendations, and loyalty programs to keep your current crop of customers coming back for more.

3. Skimping on the Details in Your Product Descriptions

Have you ever seen the “what I ordered versus what I got” memes? They started with the e-commerce store Wish — and for a while, they were so popular that even Wish itself got in on the joke. 

Amusement aside, the rise of this meme was a direct result of product descriptions that didn’t accurately describe the actual product. It also caused a lot of mistrust among consumers who started skeptically eyeballing product pages, wondering if the descriptions and photos were accurate. No one wants to order a great-looking new shirt only to eventually open the package and find that it’s sized for a doll.

The Fix

Be thorough in your product descriptions. Dimensions, weight, colors, ingredients — whatever details you have for the product, provide them on the product page so that customers can make sure it fits their needs. 

For that matter, skip the deceptive product photography too. Make sure to showcase items so that people can get a good sense of scale, color, fit, and other important factors.

Make Experiences a Part of Your E-Commerce Conversion Funnel

Experiences by Jebbit can prove helpful at every stage of an e-commerce conversion funnel. Create quizzes to post on social media or to include on landing pages to capture customers in the awareness phase. In the consideration and conversion stages, product finders, lookbooks, and other interactive experiences can help your customers choose a product and make the purchase. And with engaging branded experiences like fun games, polls, or other activities, you can build loyalty and keep your existing customers coming back for more.

Through it all, these experiences will help you collect first-party data — and that is information you can use to make even more refinements to your conversion funnel.

Want to learn more? We’ve got you. Just schedule a strategy call with one of our Experience Experts to see how we can help you boost your e-commerce conversion rate.