Most business owners are familiar with the concept of the marketing funnel, a model which illustrates consumers’ ‘buying journey’ from awareness to opinion forming, consideration, preference, and finally purchase of the product. Fewer consumers progress to each stage of the funnel.
In e-commerce, the marketing funnel is often called the ‘conversion funnel’ and has two extra steps – traffic sources at the start of the funnel, and re-engagement at the end.
The marketing funnel is an efficient way to structure your online sales strategy and can help to quickly identify areas for improvement.
Directing traffic
The basis of any great marketing funnel is a great website. Put simply, your strategy won’t lead to sales conversions if your website is not designed to attract users or rank highly in search engine results.
For this reason, traffic sources – the first stage of the funnel – are largely based on search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay- per-click advertising.
There have been many articles on improving your website’s SEO, so this one will focus on the next stages – starting with connecting your products to various shopping ‘feeds’.
This roughly correlates with the ‘awareness’ stage of the traditional marketing funnel.
Feeding awareness
Shopping feeds allow your website visitors to browse your jewellery products on sites like Facebook or Google’s Shopping tab. These feeds then direct users to your website.
Another example is setting up an Instagram Shop through your business account.
It is a particularly useful channel for jewellery retailers as many people enjoy browsing and brainstorming different ideas on the app – especially engagement rings. Similar principles apply to Pinterest.
Connecting your business to Google Shopping and e-commerce-enabled social media apps helps potential customers find and engage with your brand. Once customers click through to your website, they enter the middle of the funnel, or ‘consideration’ stage.
Encouraging purchase
Optimising your website for e-commerce is critical at the consideration stage, when potential customers are weighing the pros and cons of your product.
To progress customers to the next stage – preference – websites should make purchasing as easy as possible, with few distractions.
Shoppers must be able to find products quickly, whether through direct linking from a social media app, fast page load times, or website navigation and search.
Once a potential customer has landed on the product page, they are a single step away from purchase.
Some of the most powerful tools to encourage conversion at this point are positive, genuine reviews and accurate, detailed product descriptions and photos.
The actual process of purchase – filling in details and clicking ‘place order’ – is the penultimate stage of the e-commerce funnel; it goes without saying that this should be as fast and simple as possible.
While the traditional marketing funnel ends once a purchase has been made, the e-commerce funnel continues to a final step of re-engagement,, which includes techniques to recover lost sales through re- targeting and email marketing.
Automating the funnel
Of course, all of these steps sound like a huge digital marketing undertaking on top of your existing to-do list – but not to worry.
Much of the process can be automated to increase both the volume of people entering the funnel and moving through it, focusing on the first stage (traffic sources) and final stage (re-engagement):
Leverage paid search-engine advertising – Google Ads and Google Shopping Campaigns increase the number of people entering your funnel.
Install a tracking pixel on your website – A tracking pixel allows Google and Facebook to show users the same products they were viewing on shopping feeds on your website.
The pixel also allows for ‘dynamic re- targeting’ – that is, showing ads for the products users were viewing on your site when they visit other sites.
Use Facebook Business more efficiently – Improve your sales conversion by re- targeting receptive potential customers.
Once you have an audience generated on Facebook, create a Lookalike Audience that matches the same buying patterns as the users on your re-targeting list...
Set up automated email campaigns – Encourage visitors who are browsing your website for the first time to sign up to your email list and use apps and services to create targeted campaigns.
Of course, all of these tips take time to set up, but once complete, you can utilise them again and again to increase the effectiveness of your funnel.
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