6 Strategies for Building a Better Ecommerce Conversion Funnel

Converting a prospect to a customer is no easy task—especially for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. According to a research from growcode, the average conversion rate for ecommerce brands around the world is 2 – 3%. That means you need to work really hard to attract customers to your site, but, once they’re there, it’s more difficult to convert them into paying customers.

Think about it: for someone who’s just become aware of your product, the path to their eventual purchase spans a number of different touch points across multiple channels.

But when you understand how people move through the ecommerce conversion funnel, it’s much easier to provide the type of experience that motivates them to convert. Optimizing your conversion funnel is the key to creating a better overall experience for potential customers. And that all starts by understanding how the ecommerce conversion funnel works.

1. Break Down Your Ecommerce Conversion Funnel

Understanding the current state of your company’s funnel is the first step toward creating a more seamless experience for potential customers. Tracking how people move through each stage of the funnel helps you target potential customers with specific types of content.

Here are the four stages of ecommerce conversion:

• Awareness: Where a prospect becomes aware of your product or service
• Interest: Where that prospect shows an interest in learning more about your brand
• Consideration: Where prospects are actively thinking about whether or not to buy
• Purchase: Where a customer actually completes their purchase.

Each stage can span multiple marketing channels, from social media to your product landing pages and beyond.

That’s why it’s so important to dig into your existing customer data to identify areas of opportunity. Whether you want to increase your Instagram followers to open up the top of the funnel, or you want to build out a better landing page experience to drive potential customers further into the site, you need to know where prospects tend to drop off. That makes it easier to address issues in your conversion funnel and proactively make changes to resolve them.

It’s also a good idea to use customer data to calculate your company’s ecommerce conversion rate. This gives your team a baseline to test on and helps you create more targeted experiments.

2. Create A/B Tests for Your Landing Pages

The landing page is one of the first interactions a prospect has with your brand. If you’ve identified this as a point in the ecommerce conversion funnel where customers tend to leave, testing various aspects of your landing page can help ease the path from landing page to further down the funnel.

As with any A/B test, the first step is to identify what specific aspects of the page you want to test. We can break these down into two main categories:

• Written copy: The words you use, including your value proposition, product testimonials, and social proof
• Page design: What the page looks like, including your CTA placement and product images

Remember, every test you create should change only one of these elements at a time. When you’re looking for ways to improve conversion rates on your site, testing more than one thing at a time won’t provide an accurate picture of the results.

Take this example from CXL Institute. Both landing pages follow a similar design, but one does a much better job of positioning their value proposition.

Value proposition examples via CXL Institute

The one on the left doesn’t include their value proposition above the fold on their landing page; the one on the right does. “Handkerchiefs And Linens For Special Occasions” gives website visitors a clear sense of how the product is valuable immediately, which can make interested prospects click through to other pages on the site.

If you’re tracking how different customer cohorts interact with your site, target them with an A/B test. These tailored experiments help you increase the overall ecommerce conversion rate for specific prospects on the market by speaking directly to their needs.

But landing pages aren’t the only place where it makes sense to test different variations of your content, it’s important for your product pages as well.

3. Create A/B Tests for Your Product Pages

Once prospects reach the interest and consideration stages of your ecommerce conversion funnel, the content of your product page can be what seals the deal. But helping a prospect move past consideration into making the purchase is one of the most difficult areas of the funnel. Your product page not only needs to communicate the value your product provides but also has to convince the potential customer to part with their hard-earned cash.

As with your landing pages, testing the written copy and design elements of your product pages is a great idea. Find ways to double down on the value proposition, add in relevant product reviews, and tweak the language of your CTA.

It’s also a great opportunity to try A/B testing your on-page SEO. Targeting specific keywords is a great way to improve rankings for your product pages. Take these results for Allbirds, a sustainable clothing and footwear company, when searching for men’s wool shoes on Google:

Each of the arrows points to one of the words a potential customer might use in their search for Allbirds’ products. Clicking through either of the results will take potential customers to a product landing page specifically targeted with product recommendations based on these keywords.

Notice how Google also included sneakers, a semantic variation of shoes, and highlighted it in the results. As you test your product pages, make sure you’re using language that matches up with potential customers’ search intent.

You can also split-test product images to highlight specific aspects of the product and learn what types of images convert better.

Allbirds uses images to highlight the various colors available for their product as well as show how the flagship grey looks as a part of an outfit. This helps potential customers visualize the product better, which makes it easier for them to consider a purchase.

4. Experiment with Sign Up Form Design

Getting someone to provide you with their valuable personal identifying information (PII) isn’t easy. A great sign up form can be what entices someone to go from a passive interest in your product to an email subscriber you can nurture.

When someone provides you with their name and email address it’s because they understand that you’ll provide them with something of value in return. Whether that’s additional information about your product, a potential discount, or the opportunity to speak directly with your team—your sign up forms need to showcase this value immediately to increase conversion.

Creating an A/B test for your sign up for is all about understanding what makes customers want to sign up, and that can be broken down into two main categories:

• Sign up form content: The language you use to tell customers what they’ll receive in return for entering their PII into the form. Think about this as your value proposition.
• Sign up form design: What the form looks like and how it engages them on the page. It could be a static sidebar, pop-up, or inline CTA.

Take this form from ecommerce apparel brand Bombas:

As soon as you land on their website, this form appears over the home page banner, offering a 20% discount for new orders. The value of signing up is easy to understanding immediately and Bombas lets the potential customer know exactly what will happen when they enter their email.

Asking for only their email is a great way to get basic information from people early on in the relationship. If Bombas wanted to test this form, they could experiment with adding inputs for first name, changing the discount percentage, or displaying it on different pages on their site. Each new version would need to run for 7 to 14 days to gather actionable data on conversion rates, and is a great way to increase engagement with top-of-funnel customers.

4. Test Discount and Reengagement Notifications

When you identify places where customers tend to leave your site before purchase, use push notifications to keep them engaged. There are many types of offers you can use to entice the customer to complete their purchase and reinforce the value they’ll receive from your product.

The goal is to move potential customers further down the ecommerce conversion funnel as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Testing out the types of notifications you use is a great way to nail down the type of messaging that converts best for certain customers. There are a number of different ways to entice a website visitor to take action:

• Discount offers
• Product demos
• Upcoming sales

Each of these can appeal to a different type of customer. And, using Taplytics, you can target specific people who’ve previously interacted with your site. 

Example sale push notification.

Push notifications can also be a great way to drive potential customers back to the page they dropped off of, like saying, “Hey, are you still interested in this product?” with a link to the specific product page. Sometimes a quick reminder is all you need to coax someone back.

Getting a prospect to decide to make a purchase is arguably the most difficult moment in your ecommerce conversion funnel, so reinforcing value at every contact is really powerful.

5. Create and Send Abandoned Cart Campaigns

We know that 77% of customers abandon products in their cart. When you see this happen as a part of your ecommerce conversion funnel, setting up an abandoned cart campaign to reach out over the next few days is a great way to bring people back to your site. And it’s a great way to stay connected with customers who’ve previously shown interest in your product.

Using Taplytics, you can target these specific customers with relevant messaging based on this past engagement. It’s important to let the customer know you’re paying attention to their browsing. Just make sure you test out different written copy and design for these email series. Tailoring the outreach experience to different customer types is the key to better conversion.

Take a look at these abandoned cart emails from Society6 and Uniqlo:

Example abandoned cart emails via ReallyGoodEmails

Each reminds the customer of the product they left in their cart and speaks to how it can provide value to the potential customer. Society6 also includes a discount, which can be a great way to entice someone back to the site, but it should be used only as a last resort: you don’t want to lose money on a sale just to get one customer to convert.

Uniqlo includes product recommendations at the bottom of their email. This can be a great way to showcase additional value for customers based on their past behavior on your site.

These automated emails are also a great way to communicate with customers on a one-to-one basis and make the relationship feel more personal.

Use the Ecommerce Conversion Funnel to Build Stronger Relationships

Optimizing the B2C ecommerce conversion funnel is a great way to start off your customer relationships on the right foot. Get it right and you set your brand up to retain customers longer and increase the potential for additional purchases. Just keep in mind that every customer is different; to truly optimize the ecommerce conversion funnel, you need to find ways to communicate your product’s value in a specific way for each customer.