How to Streamline Your Site’s Conversion Funnel

Regardless of whether you sell a product or service online, you’ll need to get familiar with the conversion funnel concept. As you’ll soon see, knowledge of how it works could help you stimulate customers to buy. Read below to learn about the basics — and, more importantly, how to improve the chances customers will leave your site after purchasing something, instead of leaving before you make the sale.

What is the Conversion Funnel Concept?

A conversion funnel can best be explained as the number of steps a website visitor goes through, from the time they enter your site until the moment a sale is made. It’s important that your process be as streamlined as possible. With each additional step a person goes through, the chances to make a sale or generate a lead go down.

Understand Visitor Needs

Your first order of business involves understanding the areas of your site users are most likely to click on. Once these are identified, you can remove pages or links that are characteristically ignored, making it more efficient for customers to buy things or get desired information. Fortunately, tools like Google Analytics can give percentages about click rates for links. Other analysis resources can offer insight about which things users click on, even if they aren’t links.

Retool Your Sales Copy

After you have a more in-depth understanding of how customers interact with your site, it’s a good idea to use it to rewrite some of your sales materials. Make them more closely reflect the kinds of people who usually visit, and how they behave while browsing. By segmenting the market, you may find certain kinds of visitors have precise needs, and be able to create a different conversion funnel for each market sector.

It may seem counterintuitive at first. However, by creating specialized methods to suit unique target audiences you may find they feel more compelled to buy. This could even be due to something as simple as using language that appeals to them to describe your products more accurately.

Ease the Evaluation Process

One part of the conversion funnel involves customers evaluating whether or not a product is suitable. Try to build search features in intuitive ways so users can filter search results to match characteristics like price ranges, colors and relevancy. Also, if you already have a product description in place, think about supplementing it with user reviews.

When information is easily accessible, people will be able to sort through it more efficiently and enjoy a speedier purchase process. Being able to find what they need quickly causes customers to form good impressions about your company and products. Those positive emotions often make a first-time purchaser become loyal for life.

Make Incentives More Obvious

If you’re going to offer a perk, like free shipping or a gift with any purchase over a certain dollar amount, make sure those advantages are clearly visible. That cuts down on unnecessary clicks and can help transform casual browsers into interested buyers.

Even if you’re not necessarily catering to online shoppers who’re going to buy something immediately, make it easy for customers to contact you to get more details. This webpage selling piezoelectric transducers does that particularly well by putting a “Request Quote” button near the website’s header. That significantly reduces the steps in that retailer’s conversion funnel. Visitors can immediately see how to get further assistance rather than being required to wander through the site.

Now that you understand the conversion funnel, and have some actionable tips about how to improve yours to boost sales, you can look forward to a greater number of users who respond favorably to your offerings and become repeat buyers.