The process of a customer’s journey from identifying a product to completing an order is called a Sales Funnel. For an eCommerce store, a sales funnel is the user’s journey of how customers search for a product, find it in a store, and complete an order.
The four main stages of an eCommerce sales funnel include awareness, consideration, purchase, and retention. A company must make evident efforts to influence the customer’s purchase decisions by offering them a service that fulfills their demand or needs.
It includes those customers who aren’t frequent buyers but still look for one-time deals because of stiff price competition.
To create an effective sales funnel, the marketing team needs to understand the customers’ journey and the stages they go through to devise relevant strategies to pull customers towards becoming regular paying clients.
To become a paying customer, buyers must see the value they can derive from their purchase. However, even with digital tools and AI availability, some companies fail to optimize the sales funnel experience for a customer. It is usually because of catering to the wrong audience, which involves selling products or services that aren’t offering value.
With that said, let’s explore some other common mistakes to avoid in your eCommerce sales funnel.
Not Having a Seamless Checkout System
Many companies face the problem of customers leaving their items in their cart and abandoning them without confirming their orders. It could be due to the absence of payment options, high shipping costs, or longer delivery times.
Ecommerce businesses must include digital banking features, such as those offered by DigitalSupermarket, which include multicurrency management, card freezing options for cyber security, and other financial planning tools.
Therefore, even if a customer purchases from another country, they can view the price in their currency and pay from their local bank’s credit card with secure checkout. It also eliminates the need for manually checking each online transaction to confirm the order.
Not Following Up With Leads
Even if a customer did not convert into a paying client, your marketing efforts still brought them to your website, which means they are your potential leads. Some companies fail to recognize this and only follow up with someone who has already made a purchase.
Even though following up with paying customers is a good strategy for customer retention, checking on new leads is essential to draw new customers to your business. Every business needs to capture new clients to grow. Therefore, do not forget to follow up on them.
Not Tracking Results
Many eCommerce businesses run several campaigns and ads at a time that they forget to track their progress. Tracking the progress of your marketing efforts is essential to ensure optimized results no matter how experienced you are.
You cannot build an effective sales funnel for your business without tracking your progress. You can use digital tools such as Google Analytics and funnel analytics to follow your ad performance. They provide detailed reports of the campaigns that worked, the kind of audience you reached, and who responded to your campaign.
Such analytics are essential to help you devise new plans to approach customers with reinforcement techniques to influence their purchase decision.
Not Creating Compelling Content
If your content is not attractive enough, it will fail to attract customers to your business as paying clients. You must devise content relevant to the audience and their interest, and most importantly, it must provide value.
If you create content to sell without a sound content plan, it will fail to attract the right audience. Attractive content must be engaging, informative, and enjoyable.
Build interactive content like surveys, polls, quizzes, and assessments to incorporate into your sales funnel. It also lets you know if your audience is enjoying your content or not, based on the response you get, in addition to an opportunity to gather customer data.
Not Conducting Split Test
The split test lets you try different sales funnel options to see which fits your business model best. Many eCommerce businesses fail because they use a single sales funnel tool and keep experimenting with it without exploring other options.
It is an essential step as it helps maximize your conversion rates. Without performing a split test, you never really know what is working for your business and what isn’t.
Selling on Features and not Solutions
An example of ineffective sales funnel for an eCommerce business is bad copywriting. If you are selling a mattress, sell a good night’s sleep, not just the mattress. Your product or service must be able to offer intuitive solutions.
Selling a product on features is a marketing technique of the past. It will seldom work for your eCommerce business unless it depends on features. Instead of the product itself, underline the value your customers will derive by solving a particular problem.
Using the Wrong CRM Tool
Selecting the wrong CRM tool can jeopardize your sales funnel if you are not getting desired results. Marketers typically go after the latest or the hottest tool available in the market, which may not be in line with your sales funnel strategy.
Selecting the right CRM software to manage your customer database to drive sales is crucial. It will help if you search for a flexible tool that allows data tracking and order tracking, making the onboarding process seamless.
Your Sales and Marketing Teams are not Working Together
Gone are the days when different departments used to work separately. Although sales and marketing functions might differ, both teams must be on the same track by devising plans and then working on them by collaborating.
Therefore, maintain constant collaboration among your sales and marketing teams. Follow a process of devising marketing plans, discussing with your sales team, and developing selling strategies in alliance with the marketing plans. This way, both the departments’ jobs will become much more apparent.
Conclusion
Your eCommerce business’s sales funnel must operate by using the right tools in the right way to save resources and marketing efforts.
Some common mistakes by eCommerce businesses include not having a seamless checkout system, not following up with leads, not tracking results, not creating compelling content, not conducting a split test, selling on features rather than solutions, and lack of communication between marketing and sales teams.
Avoid these mistakes to ensure a smooth flow of operations and have an effective sales funnel for your eCommerce business.