Power of sales funnel for an ecommerce store
category analytics
One of the problem that I have seen in a category management role is that in retail environment, you have sales number, you have transaction data at product level and at a store level but it’s very difficult to know what’s happening at customer end.
And ultimately everything boils down to customers.
You have a great product sell but customers are not buying it. What’s happening?
For instance, if you own a retail store, you will capture the customer details only when they bought something from you. Otherwise it is just intrusive. Even if your retail KPIs are in place like footfalls, basket size etc. it’s hard to imagine about the whole customer journey.
At that’s where sales funnel / conversion funnel come into the picture.
If you own an ecommerce store (also mobile store), things become really easy for you.
There are tools like Clevertap (mobile marketing funnel tool), google analytics, Hubspot that can help to set up a conversion funnel. The important thing is to have a centralized database to get the full benefits of the conversion funnel.
So what is sales funnel? Sales funnel is basically visualization of how customers make a purchase. The steps to complete the purchase.
Wikipedia defines it as :
The purchase funnel, or purchasing funnel, is a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the theoretical customer journey toward the purchase of a good or service.
Basically there are 4 stages that are defined in this model (there are tweaks , variations and all of that). but from data point of view, I will divide into these
Awareness
Consideration / evaluation
Purchase / conversion
Re-engagement (retention )
Sales funnel will depend on the business you are in. For example, B2B business your sales funnel have deal won, case study downloaded etc. For e-commerce, you can go as micro as possible like payment page visited, added to cart etc.
Before coming to strategies to improve conversion rate in all the stages, let me take through you an example to see how this works in real-world scenario.
This is the aggregate data that you got from your store :
This is how your sales funnel would look :
This means that your conversion rate is 5%.
You can compare this to your competitors, other categories, or overall business to get make sense of the funnel.
There are other articles that you can refer to :
https://www.shopify.com/blog/analyzing-shopify-reports
For now, that’s about it. Sales funnel is a long road that will wander in upcoming posts. Wish you all readers a very happy new year 🎁 🎉 🎉 🥳