How do you optimize your sales funnel and improve your sales conversions?

Running a successful eCommerce website can prove intimidating. Whether you are balancing orders, managing advertising analytics, or listing new products, it can be overwhelming. One way to help simplify this process is to optimize your sales funnel and improve your conversion ratio. 

Online sales will only become more important in the future. Morgan-Stanley predicts that US eCommerce could reach 31% of sales by 2026. In this article, we’ll look at some simple steps you can take to help optimize your website’s sales funnel and boost your sales conversions.

Improve the Checkout Process

One excellent way to improve conversions is to improve the checkout process. One way to improve the checkout process is to reduce the number of steps it takes to check out. For example, minimizing the number of fields required for guest checkout can help improve sales.

If you’re struggling to decide how to optimize the checkout experience, consider trialing different versions and see how they perform against different customers. Tweaking separate checkouts will allow you to maximize the benefits of a strongly performing checkout.

Another way to improve the checkout process is to reduce clutter. Remember, the goal of checkout is to maximize funnel performance. When buttons clutter up the checkout process, it can result in abandoned carts. In short, minimize steps, reduce clutter, and experiment with optimizations to improve your checkout process.

Utilize High-Quality Images and Videos

Picking the highest quality images and including sample videos is another important consideration for improving the sales funnel. A selection of different views can help customers decide whether they want to purchase the item. Video, especially of clothing, can significantly impact conversions. Some websites also combine videos with testimonials. When your product benefits from an explanation or demonstration, these types of media can be especially beneficial.

When planning images and videos be sure to pick media that resonates with your audience and brand image. Remember, the key is getting customers to add the item to their cart and then have them proceed with a successful checkout. By enhancing the shopping experience with visual aids, you help increase the likelihood of a successful checkout.

Optimize the Experience With Test Pages and Experiments

Earlier, we mentioned the possibility of testing multiple checkouts. However, you can expand your experimentation to other functions of your website. For example, websites can utilize different landing pages for different segments of traffic. By testing different landing pages, you can tweak your landing pages over time to find the perfect conversion formula.

Similarly, you can also experiment with different button layouts and shopping experiences. If you wanted to test different photo sets and their effect on conversion you could set up different pages, as well. Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, which have a limited amount of space and cannot be readily reconfigured, websites can quickly be changed and adapted to customer trends. By capitalizing on the ease of testing different pages your sales funnel will be vastly improved.

Understand the Customer Journey

Understanding how customers navigate your website is essential to improving your sales funnel and enhancing your conversion rate. One way to improve the process is to reverse-engineer your customers’ journey by starting with the checkout process and working your way backward. By working backward you can find hiccups or ways to streamline the sales funnel process. 

For example, sometimes it can be a hassle to pay with a bank account. Customers often look for a business bank account that comes with features such as mobile banking, and a free debit card. Ensuring customers can pay the way they want is essential.

This process should be a regular process, too. In order to maximize the benefits, regularly analyze your sales pipeline and minimize pain points that you find. Once you find a place where the website runs slow, or it becomes confusing, eliminate that barrier. By removing these barriers you can easily improve your sales.

Leverage Testimonials

The value of reviews, testimonials, and other authentic social proof cannot be understated. Amazon, a well-known eCommerce innovator, recently announced plans to kill the barcode. Amazon’s innovations also include a robust testimonial and review system. Testimonials are invaluable when making a purchase decision. When faced with skepticism about a purchase, proof that a product works, from someone else, can instantly turn that skepticism into a purchase.

Importantly, including negative reviews can also be helpful. Shoppers can see through a website that only pushes high reviews to the forefront. Including those negative reviews can actually help because it will give shoppers a way to contextualize their expectations. 76% of mobile shoppers have changed their minds about which retailer to buy after conducting a search via Google. Finally, star ratings can also help shoppers with an at-a-glance way of deciding how popular an item is.