Optimising the Whole of the Customer Conversion Funnel
Background
We can all get carried away with the latest shiny technologies, which can be great when added to a CRO programme that is founded on rock-solid foundations. Taking a long, hard look at those foundations may be the single best next step to improving your CRO practice.
In this article, I plan to go back to basics and cover the conversion funnel —a powerful framework that guides marketeers through their optimisation efforts. Optimisation teams have a great track record of curating some stages of this process but can fall into the trap of neglecting others.
In a competitive digital landscape, mastering the e-commerce funnel is paramount. In essence, this represents the user journey from initial discovery ending with a completed action, like making a purchase or signing up for a service. By understanding user needs and behaviours at each stage, you can better enhance the user experience and guide them through your journey to boost sales.
Mastering the funnel stages for site optimisation success
A typical conversion funnel flow follows four key steps: Awareness, Consideration, Decision and Retention. While optimisation efforts often focus on the middle stages, overlooking awareness and retention can leave significant sales opportunities untapped.
Awareness: Capturing Attention and Driving Traffic
Prospective customers are becoming aware of your brand. The goal? To attract as much relevant traffic as possible and establish an immediate connection and progress down the conversion funnel.
A seamless journey is critical here, especially since visitors are prone to forming snap judgments about your site. Page load speed is a crucial, sometimes overlooked factor. So much so, that Google found that shaving off just one second can lead to a whopping +27% increase in mobile conversion rates.
Traffic source matters too. With 53% of online experiences beginning with Organic Search, you should aim to make your first impression impactful, focusing on capturing a user’s attention, and focusing on the new user experience. BluTV revamped its mobile homepage, gearing content towards new visitors. By removing distractions, promoting popular content and adding FAQs, they boosted sign-ups by more than +42%.
Awareness: Checking the foundations
- Run your site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights: any scores below 90 might be a red flag
- Are you fishing where the fish are: are you spending effort and resources on your top-performing channels?
- Are you setting a killer first impression: Are you asking people who have never been to your site? Observe their experience and see where they struggle
Consideration: Evaluating the Product or Service
Here, potential buyers are interested but need more information before actually committing. Comparing options can be mentally taxing, and making sure users have easy access to all vital information will be key to conversion funnel progress. Provide vital information near the top of the page. Research shows that users spend 74% of their time above the first two screenfuls of a page.
Social proof is invaluable at this stage. Your product is amazing. You know that, but your considering audience does not. WikiJob, for instance, increased purchases by 34% simply by adding honest testimonials to their site. Interestingly, they avoided overly enthusiastic reviews, instead opting for more credible, straightforward feedback.
Look to engagement metrics to determine how well your site performs at this stage. Bounce rate, time on site and pages per session give important insight into how much your audience is engaging with content. Combine this with a session replay or heat mapping tool to see where users spend their time (and doing what).
Consideration: Checking the foundations
- Do you make customers hunt for information: is all the important content towards the top of the page?
- Are visitors engaged or bouncing: do you have a high bounce rate, are users exploring and engaging with your page content?
- Are users interacting: do customers scroll to critical content? Are they clicking on primary CTAs?
- Let your customers do the talking: are you showcasing authentic reviews and ratings on key pages?
Decision: Completing a Desired Action
Now comes the critical moment in the conversion funnel; we are on the brink of converting interest into action. Unfortunately, cart abandonments are exceedingly common. Just over 70% of shopping carts are left behind. Key reasons included unexpected extra costs, being forced to create an account, and lack of trust.
Offering free delivery over a defined threshold has increased revenue per session by +2% and checkout starts by +5%. Likewise, consider whether there is user value in creating an account before forcing them down this route pre-purchase. If not, move this to after the transaction, and if so tell them!
Exit intent pop-ups are another effective tactic. Users might show signs of leaving to search for promo codes or may have got distracted. Turn these into moments of delight, by reminding them of their cart contents or showing a secret offer when someone shows this behaviour to prevent accidental exits and increase transactions by up to 15%.
Decision: Checking the foundations
- Plug holes in your checkout: are there any common points of drop-off in the checkout process?
- Check for roadblocks: are there any steps that are not completely essential to purchase, if so consider moving or removing
- The comparison test: visitors prefer that your website works the same as all the other sites they know. Is your checkout flow following the norm?
Retention: Building Long-Term Relationships
Retention focuses on building long-term relationships and repeat purchases. It is often the most overlooked part of the conversion funnel in an optimisation strategy, but it can be vital for sustained and efficient growth.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to focus on this stage is that increasing retention rates by just 5% can produce more than a 25% increase in profits (Bain & Company).
Measuring how well you perform for this audience is all about repeated actions and we tend here to use a longer frame of reference. We move away from metrics like revenue per session and more towards monthly, annual or even lifetime values. In the same vein, sales per user over raw sales. Feedback surveys also provide invaluable insights. A study by LSE determined that for a 7-point increase in net promoter score, you can expect a +1% revenue growth.
Personalisation is a key driver of loyalty. Personalisation is more effective the more you know about a user, and fortunately, we know a lot about our existing customers. Did you know that 35% of what people buy on Amazon, and a massive 75% of what we watch on Netflix comes from customer-centric, algorithm-driven suggestions?
Loyalty programmes can also be a game-changer. They make us feel valued, and if they are well-executed, they can be a massive success. Starbucks Rewards is a prime example. Contributing 40% of total sales, their rewards program has been responsible for a 7% year-on-year growth in company revenue, by incentivising repeat visits through points and personalised offers.
Retention: Checking the foundations
- Are you focussing too much on new customers: Do you know your customer retention rate, and how does this compare to the industry average?
- Feedback is a gift: when did you last collect post-purchase feedback? Regularly monitor and improve your NPS
- Make customers feel special: are you creating bespoke experiences for existing customers to build long-term relationships?
Conclusion
Understanding and optimising the entire conversion funnel is essential for any successful CRO strategy. By analysing your users’ behaviours and key metrics at each stage, businesses can craft targeted, data-driven strategies that reduce drop-offs and support customers through their journey. Holding their hand through initial discovery with a seamless and impactful first impression, through to making product evaluations as simple as possible. Once consumers have all the facts, we can support them through decision-making by removing all distractions and any barriers to purchase. And then comes building and protecting long-term relationships to truly maximise profits.
At Station10, we specialise in applying our data prowess to develop holistic optimisation strategies which curate meaningful experiences. Why not get in touch and find out more about how we can help realise your full potential?