Use the Sales Funnel to Design a Great E-Commerce Website

“Sales funnel” is an interesting term. If you Google it, you’ll see many images that look like miniature tornadoes. Essentially, the sales funnel is the pathway that customers take with your business, from the initial contact to the eventual purchase of your products or services.

The funnel is wider at the top, or the initial contact point This happens because you may reach many potential customers, but only a certain percentage will become repeat customers. Your e-commerce website should support your customers at all stages of the sales funnel.

The 3 A’s of the Sales Funnel
In general, the sales funnel can be thought of in three phases, or 3 A’s: attract, acquire and absorb.

• Attract. The Attract phase involves increasing brand awareness and helping customers to recognize your business. You can measure how well your Attraction strategies are working by measuring both the number of searches that customers make for your business name, and the volume of direct traffic to your website.
• Acquire. During the Acquire phase, you get the sale. You’ll want to push customers toward making a purchase, and you can measure conversion rates to see how well you’re doing.
• Absorb. Ideally, you want to absorb the people that purchase from you and make them part of your customer base. You want increased customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and customer purchases. Social media mentions and churn rate are good measurements for how well you are absorbing customers into your base.

What Flaws Drive Customers Away From Websites?
Your e-commerce site comes into serious play during the Acquire phase, but it also matters during the Attract and Absorb phases. Before you think about the perfect website design for acquiring customers, think about why customers might navigate away from your site.

• Slow loading. If you design your site with a lot of slow-loading animations and other problem components, then your customers are going to click away to a faster-loading website. According to Radware, 57 percent of customers will leave a slow-loading website after three seconds. Also, 80 percent of those customers will not come back.
• No relevance. Your website needs to let customers know that it has what they are looking for at first glance, or they will navigate away.
• Terrible navigation. Who wastes time on a website that is tough to navigate? The cardinal sin is a website that makes checkout confusing.
• Clutter. Some websites are visually overwhelming. A site that looks cluttered will not help you to acquire customers.
• Poor security. Your website should look secure so that people are comfortable giving their payment information.
• Disagreement. Customers may not like your prices, your payment systems or your terms and conditions. The design of your website probably won’t affect customers that leave for these reasons.

Design Considerations for Each Phase of the Sales Funnel
When you’re designing your e-commerce website or working with a designer, assemble your site with the sales funnel in mind.

• Attract. What do potential customers see when they first click on your website? This content, called the “above the fold” content, is crucial for keeping customers on your site. Incoming links should take your customers to a well-designed home page. Other options include linking to blog articles or to specific products and services.
• Acquire. Go back to the listed reasons for why customers often leave websites. Then, design a website that doesn’t fall into these traps.
• Absorb. Focus on elements of great customer service. Keep contact phone numbers, Web contact forms, chat and social media in a prominent position so that your customers can reach you through multiple channels.

Trust Infintech to help you design the perfect website. Call (504) 717-4837 for a free consultation and quote.