My Sales are Slow. Why?
Let's say that you are running an e-commerce business and sales are just not reaching the numbers you are hoping. You want to increase sales, but there are so many things you could change, you just don't know where to start. Here's how we would approach this problem here at Dedicated:
Introducing the Funnel
The "Marketing Funnel" is a concept that you're probably familiar with, and it looks like this:
In order to build a reliable customer base that is loyal to your brand, you need to guide the customers through four stages: Awareness (they need to know you exist), Consideration (they need to know you are the best), Conversion (they buy something from you), and Loyalty (they keep coming back for more). This is also a helpful diagnostic tool for pinpointing where in the funnel you are losing customers so you can apply the right fixes.
What Does This Have to Do With my Website?
While marketing usually makes us think about emails, social media, and SEO, the style and content of your website is important for succeeding on each level of this funnel! If your e-commerce business has underperforming sales, improving the website can make a big difference. However, the changes you need to make to your site depend on what part of the funnel is causing you to lose customers:
Low Traffic = Awareness Problem: This would be like working at a store all day and having very few people come in and look around. Even if every person buys something, you don't have enough visitors to cover your expenses! If this is the problem, then you should focus on SEO, advertising, and brand-building to increase awareness.
Low Conversion Rate = Consideration & Conversion Problem: This would be like having lots of people visit the store, but they rarely buy anything. If this is the problem, you should focus on improving site design to facilitate the customer journey, adding more convincing marketing content to the site, or updating prices to be more competitive.
Few Repeat Buyers = Loyalty Problem: This would be like having a store where people come and buy something once, but never come back. This can depend on the product and how often someone would replace it or buy something similar, but ideally customers will love your product so much that they will keep coming back for more! If this is the problem, you should check the quality of the products, look at reviews for more information, and reach out to customers directly to encourage them to revisit the site.
By investigating a few simple metrics, you can get much closer to identifying the cause of sluggish sales and start getting things back on track!
Bennett
