In recent years, both large companies and small businesses have seen the Internet as an opportunity for their business, due to the large amount of traffic that the Internet generates on a daily basis. For this reason, developing an online marketing campaign is more difficult than ever if you are looking to differentiate yourself from the rest of the companies or agencies.
The market is open to everyone with all the benefits that this entails. But you have to know how to move in it. Start by asking yourself how to convert contacts into sales. Lead marketing with the purchase funnel as the centre, are your allies.
what is the purchase funnel?
Capturing and retaining customers is the most important objective of any online marketing campaign, so we need to capture the consumer and indoctrinate them through the purchase funnel or conversion funnel.
The purchase funnel is a tool used in marketing to define and illustrate the buying process of users from the moment they learn about our company until they become customers.
The purchase funnel is a very important tool for our ecommerce as it will help us to generate a very concrete vision of the behaviour of our customers and identify the percentage of losses in each of the steps that the user takes to meet the objective.
Advantages of the sales funnel
The objective is to 'catch' new customers and that these, at the same time, become users of the product, that is to say, that they generate opinion of them and, if the work used has been fruitful, that they become loyal customers to our product or service. Some of the advantages of using a purchase funnel are:
- We will obtain a highly qualified lead: this means that once we have gone through the whole process of our sales funnel, the final customer we will obtain will be one who is very convinced of our brand and the services and products we can offer, so it will be very easy for us to get a purchase from them.
- The effectiveness of our sales will increase: although you have to have an initial marketing cost that you did not count on when creating the funnel, afterwards it will be easier to obtain sales, so the costs will be reduced as there will be many more purchases.
- The process of obtaining customers is streamlined: this means that for each sale you will not have to follow up the customer manually, but by creating the sales funnel this whole process will be automated and there will not be a process of attrition in the sales of your brand.
- What you also get with this type of funnel is that although at the beginning there may be an economic effort to carry it out, from a more global point of view you get to lower costs at the level of customer acquisition. What you end up getting is a constant source of new customers and in a much simpler way.
do you want to know the advantages of having your funnel well defined? Click here .
how to optimise the purchase funnel?
The optimisation efforts of our purchase funnel will be aimed at detecting points of improvement in the process, for example:
- Shopping cart: Shopping cart abandonment is one of the main problems for ecommerces, which is why we must pay special attention to discovering what it is that prevents our customers from completing the purchase.
- Forms: To structure the Purchase Funnel, we must collect information about our customers. At this point we must logically structure the amount of data that we are going to ask them, we know that users have a special aversion to fill in data forms, our maxim is to register only the strictly necessary data.
- Payment systems: The time to pay is the most critical moment of the whole purchase process. There are many reasons why users decide to abandon the shopping cart, from technical blockages to blackouts. All these reasons are quite difficult to avoid, but what we can do is to offer all available payment systems to 'facilitate', in this way, the user's shopping experience.
- Shipping costs: One of the main reasons why many customers do not repeat the shopping experience in our ecommerce is the lack of information or price change at the end of the purchase derived from the cost of shipping costs. To solve this we must specify very well and clearly how much it will cost and who will bear it.
The most suitable funnel for your business
Not all conversion funnels are the same. To find out which funnel is the most suitable for you, we recommend you to:
- Analyse how you capture traffic to the web and track your social media and see what results you get once users have viewed your content. Most current web analytics services, such as Google Analytics, offer the option to configure the different phases of the conversion funnel so you can analyse them in detail. Make sure it is correctly configured and give it a once-over to detect any weak points.
- It is also very important to know who your buyer personas are. Creating a database to segment your users into different profiles will help you define the characteristics of these buyers and thus adjust to their needs throughout the funnel.
- Make sure that your website visitors can easily find what they are looking for and that the different steps of the funnel are clear.
- Do a keyword study so that you can work your content according to the most relevant searches according to users.
- On many occasions, visitors may have doubts throughout the purchase process. If they do not find a quick answer, they may abandon your page. To prevent this from happening, you can include a FAQ page or a chatbot to solve their doubts.
As you have seen, the purchase funnel is a powerful tool to detect shortcomings and take advantage of opportunities that help improve both the conversion rate of your online shop and the user experience.
In short, the conversion funnel plays a very important role on websites to meet business objectives.
