Category: E-commerce

For a business to develop progressively and be effective, it is necessary to find weaknesses on time and identify shortcomings in the sales scheme; this will help you study the consumer journey by sales stages and draw up a special model based on it.

A sales funnel for e-commerce is a marketing model that illustrates the theoretical journey of a customer from getting to know a product to completing a deal; this is a tactical scheme, conditional and extremely simplified, which is a formalization of the step-by-step path of the ideal consumer (Consumer Journey).

In reality, buyers go to the sale in a non-linear way – they can return to previous stages, lose an opportunity or desire. However, a sales funnel is a must-have for any marketing concept, as it allows you to find problematic stages of sales and eliminate them.

The first model to describe the customer journey was developed in 1898 by E. Saint-Elmo Lewis. It is built according to the AIDA scheme; this is an abbreviation for the names of the stages that the client goes through:

• Attention. The consumer learns about the product through some source of information.
• Interest. The person becomes interested in the product; they are looking for additional information.
• Desire. A potential client has a desire to purchase a product.
• Action. A deal is made.

If a customer funnel describes the e-commerce customer journey, then a sales funnel describes the actions of a businessman:

• To convey information to a potential consumer.
• Make contact with the person who makes the decision.
• Hold a meeting and agree.
• Deliver the product and get paid.

E-commerce Funnels Types

The following funnels are distinguished by type:

1. “From attraction to closing a deal” – shows the stages of primary interest, preliminary work, and the actual sale.
2. “Sales only” – displays only the cycle of the transaction. May have quantitative or qualitative indicators. For example, count the number of visitors who have moved to the next stage or assess the quality of staff work at a particular stage.
3. “Sale + service” – includes the stages that follow after the sale (delivery, warranty, assembly, etc.).
4. “Cross-selling and additional sales” – after passing the sales stage, the funnel continues with overlapping and additional sales (consumables, service).

The sales funnel cannot be universal for all forms of business. It varies depending on the specifics of the product, the sales scheme, distribution channels, and the size of the business.

Here is what a B2B funnel might look like:

• cold calls – informing potential customers;
• presentation – the choice of a specific product;
• commercial offer – a desire to purchase a product or service;
• contract and invoicing – conclusion of the transaction;
• payment and shipment – closing the deal;
• repeat purchase – additional sales.

If a business works for ordinary people and has no competitors, then the chain is short: information – visit – payment. But marketing funnel for e-commerce would look like this:

1. Internet advertising.
2. Go to the site.
3. Product selection.
4. Adding to cart.
5. Checkout.
6. Payment.
7. Receiving.

Best E-commerce Sales Funnel Guidelines

While funnels differ from one business segment to another, they are all built according to specific rules:

• If you are using multiple acquisition channels, create a funnel for each one; this is important since the consumer’s path in such cases will always be different, while the main “body” will contain the same stages.
• Funnel stages can coincide with business processes, or they can combine several. For example, billing by accountant and manager can be combined.
• Be clear about the boundaries of each step; this will clarify the e-commerce consumer journey.
• The same action can be placed at different stages of the funnel only if the goal has changed, for example, a cold commercial offer and an individual offer for a specific product.
• Note that the consumer can move along the funnel non-linearly: both forward and backward.
• Use CRM systems to automate work with e-commerce funnels.

So, the general strategy for phasing through marketing funnel for e-commerce can be summarized in five main points:

1. Attract users who are not yet familiar with your business.
2. Engage visitors who already know about the product’s existence.
3. Provide information for those interested in buying.
4. Convert interested users into buyers.
5. Re-engage the core of the audience, those who have already become a client.

Let’s take a closer look at each step in the funnel, and along with it, the marketing techniques that lead to increased sales.

Step 1: Engage Your Audience

The consumer cannot purchase your product without knowing about its existence and will not want to buy it if they do not have trust. Therefore, you need to create a name for your brand, to strengthen it as an industry leader. Where to start building your best e-commerce sales funnel?

Blog. Using a blog on a site selling goods or services, you can inform the consumer about your products, as well as touch on topics that are indirectly related to your business. For example, when offering sports equipment, tell the reader about the protein diet or the allowable stress on the body.

Social networks. Consumers turn to social media for reviews, recommendations, reviews. They expect the business to be available for questions on Facebook, open to feedback. Video tutorials on Youtube sometimes help to quickly solve the most difficult problems. A photo review on Instagram reveals the company’s life from the inside, allowing you to “bring” a potential client closer to the brand.

Advertising. At first, business is often limited to the first two points. But in a competitive environment, where it takes more time to reach the TOP of search engines, sites use PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns for the first step in the sales funnel; this is where you pay per click on your ad, banner on other sites, or Google.

Step 2: Engage Visitors

Once the user is familiar with your business, proceed to the second stage of building a sales funnel. Encourage them to perform simple actions on the site even before they make a purchase decision.

A good idea is to use a CTA. For each page, select the purpose for which it was created. What should a visitor do on this page? Download the app or watch the video? Fill out the contact form? Place some Call-to-Action buttons on the page that will lead to this goal.

Landing pages are pages that solve one problem. Traffic from other pages of the site is redirected here. Landing page creation is the top priority for launching a sales funnel. Such a landing page can be both an intermediate stage of the funnel and the final one.

Step 3: Product Selection, Decision-making Stage

So, you have drawn attention to your product, created communication channels with the consumer. Now what?

The next stage of the e-commerce purchase funnel is to educate the consumer and give them knowledge about your product or service. Users have questions, and your task is to answer them.

The ultimate goal of this stage is to assess the prospects for interaction. You help potential clients understand if your product is right for them. At the same time, you want to know if the user is right for you.

What Methods Will Help Here?

• E-mail newsletters. If you have collected a sufficient number of e-mail addresses on the site and created a database, you can start building a dialogue via e-mail. Submit training articles through this channel, answers to the most common questions. Also, e-mail newsletters are suitable for sending commercial offers, price lists, documents, presentations, etc.
• WhatsApp mailings. This communication method is used for a well-developed customer base, where telephone numbers are collected. As a rule, the user shares their contact number when ordering, after purchasing, and when they have a sufficient level of trust in the company. Therefore, WhatsApp mailings are more often used to stimulate repeat purchases with service notifications, last-minute offers, and urgent messages.

Step 4: Purchase

On average, customers should be offered a product 7 times before they are ready to buy! Therefore, give the potential customer a clear opportunity to make a purchase and do it more often.

How? Follow these tips: 

• It is important for e-commerce to offer a product consistently at every stage of visiting the pages of the site. Do not expect the customer to find the product in the online store and deal with the order. Simplify the lives of your visitors. Make it as easy as possible for their journey to purchase, streamline the checkout process. Give easy access to an online chat to quickly resolve issues.
• Choose the best time for your mailings. A timely message about a sale or promotional offer often results in a quick purchase; this is especially true when changing seasons, before holidays, or on important dates.
• Highlight those users who have already gone through all the planned steps in the sales funnel but have not yet made a purchase. Develop your system of markers and signals for this through a CRM system, using tags on the site. For example, you can conduct triggered mailings for those who abandoned the cart without payment.

Creating traffic is easy. Converting that traffic into sales is a challenge. To efficiently manage your store marketing you should have the time to accomplish e-commerce store owners’ day-to-day tasks such as creating advertising campaigns, analyzing data, crunching numbers, implementing informed decisions.

But what if you could automate these profitable yet overlooked tasks? It’s not a secret that all the big Shopify players know that using automated marketing solutions, is the only way to leverage your store’s success; to reach more customers and boost store performance. So we gathered for you Shopify apps that can automate your e-commerce store marketing and scale your business.

AdScale: 100% Automated Advertising for Google & Facebook

First up is AdScale – an automated advertising platform that is built to drive more sales within any adverting budget. This app will sync and automate your work across just about every advertising channel you can hope for. By using one easy-to-use platform, users can quickly create, manage, and optimize ads, but then still make it to lunch on time.

If that wasn’t enough, AdScale uses its AI to analyze and optimize your store data against thousands of similar stores. That means you’ll be able to create and automate budget-friendly and highly impactful advertising campaigns that actually convert.

OmniSend: E-mail Marketing Automation

Have you considered automating your customer e-mailing? This is the best way to maintain consistent contact with potential and returning customers. OmniSend offers a fully automated e-mail solution to stay connected with your audience. It features customizable e-mail templates for welcoming customers, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase communication, and more. Use OmniSend to reactivate customers at every step of the sales funnel without using too much of your valuable time.

LimeSpot: AI Upsell & Cross-Sell Personalizer

Want to sell more with each customer visit? Well, that’s what LimeSpot AI’s does for you. LimeSpot is an e-commerce Conversion AI. This powerful platform recommends products based on your clients’ searches and purchase history. By personalizing the shopping experience with automation, LimeSpot helps increase revenue by 28% on average. Automatically customize how your customers see your products, easily suggest products that sell well together, and promote add-on opportunities that will increase overall store earnings

Rise.ai: Branded Currency Solution

Rise.ai is an automated branded currency solution for gift cards, rewards, store credit, and incentive programs. They’ll create your very own in-store currency proven to return more customers known to convert to your store while increasing their average spend per visit. As Shopify’s #1 Gift Card App, they have proven that their system effectively automates the pairing of behavioral triggers with holidays, and other calendar-based personal events to create a comprehensive rewards system. Simply put, this app is a must-have for building customer buy-in and brand awareness.

Fera: Social Proof

Fera is your one-stop shop for improving Social Proof, an essential trust-building principle for driving conversions. They’ve made it their business to develop tools to make your cold-traffic warm-up to hitting that oh-so-important “Buy Now” button. With over 10,000 e-commerce stores and $1 billion dollars of merchant revenue influenced by Fera, it’s hard to argue their effectiveness!

You’ll create a more inclusive shopping experience that guides your customers to the content they are most likely to want. That’s right! All your customer movements will be tracked in real-time, providing you with the details you need to further optimize your customer journey. A real must-have for improving conversion rates!

Get Automated!

It’s time to stop doing it all yourself and let a computer do the heavy lifting! As more stores become automated, and the market becomes more data-driven, there is no time like the present to invest in your store’s future. And hey, maybe make it home on time, knowing your store is in the right hands.

Here at AdScale, we have created a platform that allows you to customize and then automate processes for cross channel and platform advertising, synchronization, as well as bid and budget automatons. The marketplace is changing, and, by using AI, you’ll know you won’t be left behind.

Automate your paid marketing campaigns  START NOW!

Regardless of where your e-commerce business is on the path to growth, every business at one point or another reaches a point where they “plateau” and struggle to see more growth. This is a tell-tale sign that businesses need to experiment with new strategies and leverage technology to ramp up their growth strategies.

However, before you double your marketing budget or sales efforts, start small with the 10% strategy. The 10% strategy involves growing your e-commerce business by making small changes to your processes. As an established e-commerce business owner, entrepreneur, or marketer, you likely have a number of ideas on how to do this, but here are some tips on how to grow and scale your business by tracking the right key metrics.

Improve Visitor Engagement

There are several methods to increasing store visitor engagement, which include reworking your funnel, SEO strategy, or producing and offering valuable content to your audiences to share on your website, blog, or social media. The key here is to provide enticing content, resources, or other media to increase your visitor engagement rate.

Increase Conversion Rates

The next step is to convert those visitors into customers. The rate at which you do this is known as your “conversion rate”, and it is a key metric that all e-commerce businesses should track. One of the best strategies for e-commerce businesses to increase conversion rates is through social proof. Many consumers will research products or services on social media, and ask friends and family or others within their own networks before making a purchase decision. Therefore, if your brand or store has a healthy presence on social media, a large social media following, and key influencers that validate your products, this is a tried and true way to ensure that the leads who find you on social media will convert to customers.

Increase Average Order Value (AOV)

If you aren’t tracking your AOV as a key metric, now is the time to start. Your AOV tells you the average dollar amount that each customer spends when placing their orders. By increasing your AOV, you are on the right path to growth. One tried and true method for increasing AOV is to show similar or relevant products when customers select products they want to purchase. If customers see other relevant products or accessories, they are more likely to add them to their carts, ultimately increasing your AOV.

Increase Repeat Customers And Orders

It is significantly more costly to acquire new customers than it is to retarget or upsell to existing customers. One of the best methods for increasing repeat customers and orders is to develop a customer loyalty program. With a customer loyalty program, a customer is “rewarded” for each purchase he or she makes. This could be in the form of points, cash back, or receiving perks or other rewards.

Leverage Technology

Technology can help you reach your growth goals. There are many tools, software, and systems available today that are designed to help e-commerce businesses reach their goals or boost their numbers in each of the points above. For example, AdScale is an AI-powered platform for e-commerce businesses that automates the creation and optimization of ad campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and Google. AdScale has proven to boost to an average ROI of 1000%!

Grow Your E-commerce Business With The 10% Strategy

Knowing your numbers is crucial to the future growth and success of your e-commerce business. By leveraging the right tools, technology, and tracking the right key metrics, you will discover that growth is within reach.

It’s no secret that the B2C buyer’s journey has changed drastically in 2020. In an effort to avoid long lines and empty shelves of many struggling brick-and-mortar retail businesses, more consumers are shopping online than ever before. In fact, a report published by eMarketer concluded that e-commerce will reach an all-time high of 14.5% of total retail sales in the United States in 2020. In this article, we will share some surprising statistics about the modern B2C buyer’s journey that you need to know for your e-commerce business.

What Does The Modern B2C Buyer Journey Look Like?

1. Research And Recommendations

Before a consumer makes a purchase, he or she heads to the Web or social media to research. In fact, 97% of consumers research products and services online. Most consumers research product reviews, which significantly influence consumers’ purchase decisions.

2. Content Is Still King

In today’s digital age, with more consumers shopping and buying online than ever before, content is still important to any marketing and sales strategy. In fact, 47% of consumers review at least three to five pieces of content prior to making a purchase or contacting a sales representative. Furthermore, consumers spend an average of five hours per day researching and consuming content on their smart devices

3. Social Selling Is In

Established e-commerce businesses and marketers use social media to promote and sell their products. Facebook is still in the lead as the top social media platform used by companies to attract consumers.

4. Product Category Growth

Although e-commerce sales have increased significantly in 2020 across the board, there are several product categories that have seen immense growth. These categories include household products and essentials; food and beverage (58.5% ); and health, beauty, and personal care (32.4%). Above all, books, music, and video has seen the most growth at 62.7%.

5. The Trust Factor

It’s all about the trust factor for consumers today. Consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand they already trust. In fact, 61% of customers will make a purchase decision after reading or receiving a recommendation from a brand, source, blog, or someone they trust.

6. E-commerce Customer Conversions

On average, 2.72% of e-commerce website visitors convert into customers. e-commerce businesses can boost their conversion rates by leveraging AI. AdScale is an AI-powered advertising platform that allows e-commerce businesses to automate their advertising campaigns and spend across Google, Facebook, and Instagram in a single platform. AdScale helps e-commerce businesses see more sales for every dollar they spend on advertising.

The Modern B2C Buyer Journey Has Changed

All in all, the modern B2C buyer journey has changed. This means your business needs to as well. E-commerce businesses need to shift their sales strategies accordingly in order to appeal to today’s modern buyers to cultivate relationships, boost sales, and grow and scale through 2020 and beyond.

Do you advertise your e-commerce business on Facebook or Google, or both? Are you tracking ROAS as a key metric? If you answered “yes” to both, then you likely aren’t measuring ROAS accurately. The biggest issue with online paid advertising via Google and Facebook is tracking duplicate conversions. In fact, most e-commerce businesses and users are unaware of it. Google and Facebook falsely count the same order more than once, thus giving users the wrong idea and a less-than-accurate picture of what their real Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) looks like. In this article, we will identify some common measuring mistakes related to ROAS that most e-commerce businesses make and how to avoid them.

4 Reasons Why E-commerce Stores Fail to Accurately Measure ROAS

1. Duplicate Conversions On Facebook And Google

If your business has active paid ads running on Facebook and Google, then you are likely watching conversion rates on both channels. However, if buyers interact with or click on a Facebook or Google ad, and then land on the checkout page, this can result in a duplicate conversion. For example, if buyers’ scripts crash or if they refresh their checkout pages, then this means that both Facebook and Google count the same order twice, which can seriously skew conversion results. Furthermore, if the same buyer with the same IP address or device clicks on a Google ad and also a Facebook ad, and then later places an order, then this appears on conversion reports as two separate orders when it in fact is only one order from the same buyer.

2. ROAS Measures Revenue, Not Profit

Many e-commerce businesses are under the false impression that ROAS measures profit, when in fact it only measures revenue.  For example, discounted campaigns often show healthy conversions, however, profits aren’t always up to par.

3. ROAS Only Counts Ad Spend

Of course, hence its name, ROAS only measures ad spend and cannot measure, integrate or count shipping expenses, cost of goods sold, or overhead sources. As a result, if your e-commerce business uses ROAS as a primary KPI, then this can seriously skew the perceived profitability of any digital marketing campaign. In reality, advertising campaigns can cost a lot more than what most e-commerce businesses realize and much more than other distribution costs, such as copywriting, content creators, design, and technology.

4. ROAS Is Not Measured On Omnichannel Campaigns

ROAS also cannot be used to accurately measure revenue or sales from multiple channels, other than paid social or organic search. So, if your e-commerce business uses other marketing channels or mediums, such as email, text, direct mail, or direct messages, then ROAS isn’t picking up results from these channels.

How To Accurately Measure ROAS: The Solution

If you are feeling discouraged or worried about what your accurate ROAS and ROI actually look like, the good news is that there is a solution. The best way to avoid recording duplicate conversions from both Facebook and Google is to track order identification numbers. Unfortunately, Facebook nor Google offers such a feature. However, AdScale provides an Orders Report that can match conversions on Google and Facebook with e-commerce store order identification numbers, which not only helps avoid counting duplicate orders and mismatched conversions, but also provides a complete, full, and accurate view of your advertising performance so you know exactly where your e-commerce business stands.

With the substantial rise in e-commerce, there are a number of platforms available to help established e-commerce businesses for increasing sales, boost Average Order Value (AOV), extend their advertising budgets, and more. One relatively new item to add to the list is product recommendations. Product recommendations are an Ecommerce feature that not only improves the shopper experience but also keeps customers coming back for more, leading to more sales. In this article, we look at the benefits of product recommendations for e-commerce businesses, specifically by Magento based, and how artificial intelligence can substantially improve their performance.

The Benefits Of Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are just what they seem: they recommend similar or relevant products to customers. With the power of AI, product recommendations can be based on buyer behavior, such as products relevant to a customer’s purchase or products they have in their shopping carts, or even based on purchase or order history. In addition to increasing sales, AOV, and repeat customers, here are some other benefits of making product recommendations work for your e-commerce business.

More Engaging Shopping Experiences

By simply personalizing the shopping experience according to their needs, customers spend approximately 40 percent more time shopping on your site. Magento is one AI-powered platform that allows e-commerce businesses to do just that. Magento allows you to create personalized content, promotions, product recommendations, and more. By creating more engaging shopping experiences, helps pave the way to purchase.

Increase The Impact Of Digital Merchandising

Magento is also designed to increase the impact of your digital merchandising efforts. By understanding performance—and what is working and what isn’t—you can make adjustments accordingly to maximize your budgets further while reducing the manual work necessary to discover meaningful or relevant products for customers.

Reduce Manual Work

There was a time when e-commerce businesses had to manually research and seek out relevant or similar products to recommend to customers, or manually build back-end tools to perform these tasks. However, both approaches were inefficient and oftentimes inaccurate. However, by leveraging product recommendations powered by AI, you can reduce the amount of manual work, increase efficiency and accuracy, and increase sales. Magento automatically analyzes shopper behavior to provide a set of recommendation types e-commerce businesses can use across various storefront pages. Product recommendations can be individual shopper-based, item-based, and contextual popularity-based.

Boost Your E-commerce Experience with AI

All in all, AI is more than just a buzz term today. Most SaaS tools and platforms today are designed with some AI capabilities. In regards to e-commerce, AI fuels a collection of algorithms that automatically analyze shopper behavior to provide shoppers with the best possible and most personal experiences. Additionally, AdScale is another AI-powered tool that can help better allocate ad spend budgets and monitor and optimize campaigns across all channels, unlike any human.

Take your shopping experience one step further, and boost your e-commerce business to another level.

Writing product descriptions can be tricky. Depending on your e-commerce platform or website layout template, you might only have a few lines to write a product description that provides the information the customer is looking for and that is captivating enough to grab their attention. In this article, we will provide some tips on how to write product descriptions that effectively inform and persuade customers.

Understand Your Target Audience

The first, and perhaps the most important step in the product description writing process is understanding your audience. And by this, we mean understanding your audience persona down the tiniest characteristic. For example, some common characteristics and demographics include gender, age range, income level, geographic region or country, family size, job title, education level, and more. Whichever demographics are most important to your e-Commerce business, be sure that your product description is written in such a way that “speaks” to them.

Focus On Feelings, Not Features

You might want to show that your product has the best features that your customers are looking for. This is important, however, customers are more interested in how your product can benefit them and improve their lives. Keeping this in mind will allow you to write a product description that will convert.

Use Power Words

No, we aren’t talking about using overly-salesly language. Rather, we are talking about using powerful action words and language. Using words like wondrous, mind-blowing, devoted, fulfill, miracle, or staggering to describe your products’ benefits are great examples you can use to improve your product descriptions.

Keep It Short And Sweet

Product descriptions should be easy for potential buyers to skim, allowing them to pull out benefits, features, and notice those “power” words. If you have the space available, then you can also include bullet points, lists, and short paragraphs and sentences. The easier you make it for the buyer to scan your product description, the more likely they will be able to pull out the information they are looking for and buy your product.

Don’t Forget About Your Ads

One thing to keep in mind is that if you update your product descriptions on your e-Commerce platform or product pages on your website, you will need to update any ads you might be running as well. AdScale can help you do this easily with their Store-to-Ad sync feature. Any updates you make on your product pages will automatically reflect on your ads. This can save a ton of time from manually updating product descriptions on all your products and then also updating all your ads.

Make Your Product Descriptions Count

Finally, as we mentioned above, depending on your e-Commerce platform and website template and layout, you may have plenty of room to write out product descriptions or you may only have a few lines. By following the tips above, you can write effective product descriptions that not only fit your product pages, but that also inform and persuade customers to boost sales.