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Ecommerce Funnel: Learn the Stages of the Ecommerce Conversion Funnel

Ecommerce Funnel

Look at the last time you bought something online. Did you buy it the moment you heard about it? Maybe but probably not. According to the traditional saying, most customers must listen to or see a brand seven times before purchasing.

More likely, you heard about it a while ago, looked it up on its website, considered it, possibly read some reviews and looked into some alternatives, and then returned to the website and purchased it. You may not have noticed it then, but you passed through an ecommerce funnel (also known as an ecommerce sales funnel).

What is An Ecommerce Funnel?

In marketing, the “funnel” refers to the many stages of the customer journey. It is not a specific course of action or a marketing strategy. It’s a technique to group all of the people in your marketing ecosystem. This can apply to any firm, therefore an ecommerce funnel describes how those steps normally appear on an ecommerce funnel website.

Marketers use the word “funnel” to show the amount of people in each step. Say one million individuals are aware of your brand. These are the various diameters of Ecommerce funnel stages.

Thinking about a funnel can help marketers design their marketing approach. By considering their potential customer demands and needs at various stages, companies may design the best strategies to approach them and advance them to the next level.

Stages of an Ecommerce Funnel

A funnel often contains three or four phases. When it comes to marketing Ecommerce funnels, each brand has a unique approach. For example, one brand might depend on social media for awareness and user-generated content (UGC) for conversion, while another may rely on UGC for awareness and social media for conversion.

Awareness Stage

People at the awareness stage also known as the “upper funnel” or “top of funnel” (or “ToFu”) have heard of your business but have not made any action to buy. This is usually the easiest one for marketers to understand the majority of the advertising you see, unless it’s for a product you recently looked at online, is awareness-driven.

TV ads, social media ads aimed at people who haven’t heard of you (e.g., haven’t visited your site or followed you on social media), search engine marketing ads for generic product terms (e.g., searches for “natural soap” if you sell natural soap), affiliate marketing plans, and viral social media content are all examples of awareness-driven marketing.

Great awareness marketing does two things:

Reaching prospective customers.

Engaging customers with a hook that provides a compelling incentive to take additional action, such as clicking an ad or sharing content. Once they have completed one of these steps, they are regarded to be in the consideration phase, and the awareness marketing has been effective.

Consideration Stage

When someone takes a step toward purchasing a product, like perusing a product description, they enter the consideration stage, sometimes known as the “mid of funnel” (or MoFu). During this stage, the potential buyer asks themself a few questions:

Do I need this kind of product?
Is this brand the perfect one for me?
Is this set of features and benefits suitable for me?

At this step, you want to demonstrate to the customer that you understand their problem and have the appropriate solution. The idea is to get them to do more in-depth research on your goods. “Marketing” in this stage refers to more than just advertising.

This can include upgrading your product page with descriptive photographs or features, requesting feedback from devoted customers to provide social proof, or creating content marketing through comparative articles (for example, “How our natural soap is different from leading non-natural soap brands”). It can also be campaign-based. Consideration-focused marketing initiatives include retargeting website visitors through social media ads, sending newsletters to existing subscribers, and offering free products to influencers for review.

Conversion Stage

Someone at the conversion stage, also known as the “bottom of the funnel” (BoFu), is close to making a purchase but still has a few internal hurdles to overcome. Consider someone with a metaphorical (or physical) credit card in hand, sweating and wondering if purchasing is the correct decision.

At this point, the purpose is no longer to attract customers or motivate them to conduct research. The idea is to motivate people to stop thinking about it and buy it now! At this point in the Ecommerce funnel, potential customers may have the following objections:

There are multiple strategies to overcome these objections. Conversion-focused marketing initiatives include time-sensitive offers, free shipping promos, abandoned cart email series, chat widgets that allow users to speak with a live person and limited-edition releases.

Post Purchase

Many individuals think the Ecommerce funnel ends after the customer makes a purchase. However, experienced marketers understand that purchasers are also part of the funnel. These customers are extremely valuable since they can repurchase, offer feedback, or refer a friend to buy. Planning marketing techniques for convincing these individuals might be one of your most profitable marketing efforts.

Examples of ways to do this are broken down by goal:

Repurchase

This can be performed through various methods, including social media/display retargeting, cross-selling email marketing series, thank you page upsells, loyalty programs, and more.

Leave a Review

This can be done through automated customer service, product inserts in mailing boxes, or social media contests.

Refer a Friend

Similar to reviews, there are multiple automated referral methods to encourage customers to share, and social network or product-specific prompts can help you take it a step further.

How Is the Ecommerce Funnel Tracked?

When people see the Ecommerce funnel graphic, they may picture a linear downward flow. The reality is that the customer journey isn’t easy at all. In reality, it’s typically quite poorly organized. Website visitors may have engaged with your goods or brand dozens of times before making a purchase.

Some customers will need to see five separate adverts over two weeks before visiting your website. Some shoppers will learn about the goods via a friend and proceed to the website’s checkout page to make a purchase right away.

There are a million different paths, and the stages are more conceptual than concrete, measurable activities. Some marketers concentrate on a single source of data, such as Google Analytics, while others combine many data sources (such as Facebook or TikTok) in a spreadsheet or dashboard.

Given this, there are three typical techniques that marketers use to measure their ecommerce Ecommerce funnel:

KPI-Based Measurement

In this methodology, marketers define KPIs for each stage of the Ecommerce funnel. Their marketing efforts are evaluated on how well they move these important parameters. An example of KPI-based measurement might look like:

Awareness

Reach, new users, and product page visits.

Consideration

Returning users, customer feedback, and trips to comparison landing pages

Conversion

Adds to carts, the average conversion rate from checkout to purchase, abandoned cart recovery.

Post-purchase

Revenue from returning customers and customer referrals

In this paradigm, total revenue is used as the “overall” KPI for marketing because it is affected by all other KPIs. This is the most basic way, although it might be difficult to track particular projects.

Campaign-Based Measurement

Individual campaigns are assigned an Ecommerce funnel stage in this method, and marketers use campaign-specific analytics to analyze them.

For example, a specific quantity of advertising and email campaigns would be designated “awareness.” Marketers would establish the metrics that are important for those campaigns, which may include reach, adds to cart, and revenue. Then they would classify a new series of advertising and email initiatives as “consideration,” and so on.

This methodology makes it much easier to track and compare specific marketing campaigns to one another. However, because each project may have a unique set of indicators (for example, clicks on advertising differ from clicks on emails), establishing “north star” performance measures for each stage of the Ecommerce funnel may be more difficult.

Attribution/Journey-Based

In this model, marketers continue to organize campaigns by stage, but instead of measuring a variety of KPIs, they simply measure one: contribution to revenue. Then they divide all of their current customers by their history with each channel and assign varying levels of value to each touchpoint.

For example, an ecommerce funnel measuring tool may inform you of the following regarding a customer’s trip through your sales funnel:

  • First, the customer saw an ad on Facebook.
  • Then she went to your website.
  • She put something in her cart and then abandoned it.
  • Then she received and opened an abandoned cart email.
  • Finally, she bought your products.

Purchase was affected by both the Facebook ad and the abandoned cart email. In the journey-based model, purchases would be allocated to Facebook and other factors. A simple, typical model would share the revenue ascribed to Facebook.

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The Last Conclusion

The Ecommerce funnel conversion is an important paradigm for reviewing and improving the customer’s journey in an online store. Businesses that systematically guide potential consumers through the stages of awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention can greatly increase their chances of converting visitors into loyal customers. Each stage necessitates specific ideas and actions, ranging from successful marketing.

Interesting content to smooth checkout processes and exceptional post-purchase assistance. Mastering these stages not only increases revenue but also develops long-term customer relationships, guaranteeing that the Ecommerce business funnel grows sustainably. Continuously monitoring and optimizing each level of the Ecommerce funnel will result in higher performance and a more successful online presence.