If you’re looking for the best ways to see increases in your conversions and profits for your e-commerce sight, this article will shed some light on some of the most common methods.

Many of these methods focus on your site design as a whole rather than the individual elements. At the end of the day, your customers are looking for a complete package.

Before you can optimize your conversion funnel and increase site sales, first you need a good understanding of what it is.

What is the conversion funnel?

A conversion funnel refers to any pathway or route a customer takes while on a site before reaching the end stage of completing the purchase. Typically, the funnel is comprised of 4 stages:

1) The Landing Page
This is where most customers begin when visiting your site, and ironically where most customers leave the page. It’s important to optimize your site to push them to the next stage of the funnel.

2) The Product Page
The page where all your products are found. Simple really. At this stage, you’ve made your site visitors curious but it’s down to you to make sure your products are appealing to keep customers intrigued. Keep the page informative and clearly layed out.

3) The Shopping Cart

Once customers have made the all important decision to purchase a product from your page, but before they commit, they leave the product floating in the liminal space known as the shopping cart. It’s not uncommon for customers to abandon the shopping cart and never return so it’s important to make this stage an equally interesting experience to the other pages on your e-commerce site.

4) Purchase

The final and most crucial stage. Everything has lead up to this stage in the funnel.

This is where customers checkout their shopping cart items and make the purchase. Make the experience transparent and easy to understand to ensure customers are likely to return to your site.

Now you understand the structure of the pathway customers take on your site to purchase a product you can begin to consider conversion funnel optimization methods.

Here’s how you can optimize each stage of the funnel for maximum profit.

Use social media to bring customers to your site

Social media marketing offers some of the greatest exposure for site compared to traditional advertising methods. If you haven’t already, you should create social accounts on all platforms for your products or brand. Not only can this create strong brand awareness but it’ll drive traffic to your landing page.

Also, consider advertising on social media to attract customers. A majority of marketers are seeing the value of ads on social media sites in bringing in new customers who hadn’t considered the brand before. It’s an easy way for a customer to click on a product they like the look of and be guided to your landind page.

Improve the content on your landing page

Once you’ve brought customers to the landing page, it’s important to keep them there and ideally direct them to your product page. To do this, you’ll need to implement a number of content improvements on the landing page to peak the interest of customers.

Blog content is a great way to engage site visitors, create intrigue around a particular product. The overall design and content on offer will make all the difference in engaging visitors.

Here are some simple elements you can add to your own landing page:

● ‘How it works’ section
● ‘About’ section
● Interactive content
● Reviews and testimonials
● Employee profiles
● FAQs

Optimizing your product page using social proof

Once customers are curious enough about the products your site offers, they’ll need some kind of reassurance of quality and value. It’s not enough to present a well-polished product with impressive images and reasonable prices. Customers need some type of proof that the product is right for them.

Social proof, i.e reviews, comments or posts, are some of the best conversion funnel optimization services to push customers to make that purchase.

People rely on opinions and reviews from others to help them determine the true value of a product. Consider how often you check reviews before making a purchase and think of ways you can improve this element of your own product page.

Make the shopping cart simple

We’ve all abandoned a full and brimming shopping cart last-minute. Unable to commit to the purchase and having a sudden burning desire to save money.

Making the shopping cart stage of your conversion funnel as simple as possible is crucial in ensuring that purchase.

One of the best ways to do this is implementing pop-messages, specifically, exit-intent triggers, to encourage customers to stay on the page.

Some other ways to increase sales at this stage is to reduce the possibility for any confusion. For example, make it clear how much shipping costs are included, make sure to offer the price in all currencies local to the customer, and don’t push customers to register before purchasing.

The final stage of hte conversion funnel

The last stop on the journey to a customer’s purchase is actually making the purchase. Not only do we want visitors of our site to reach this important stage, we also want them to return to the site in the future.

One effective method is to offer a loyalty program to reward returning customers. This creates long-term customers in some by offering them consistent discounts or stamps to collect.

More and more brands are implementing improved loyalty programs to ensure returning customers.

The conversion funnel is the structure that exists to bring sales to your e-commerce site. In order to support this structure and achieve conversion rate optimization, you need to pay attention to each stage equally, so they can support the function of each other. Hopefully this short guide provides inspiration for steps you can take to optimize your conversion funnel and with a bit of luck you’ll be watching the sales flood through to that all-important purchase.