Case – How Can the Sales Funnel Be Optimized?
Thorough research was conducted to optimize the sales funnel for a particular .com company. The company’s management team was curious about order abandonment rates and whether it was possible to categorize different consumer groups by their online browsing behavior. After the discovery and data wrangling stage was completed it wad estimated that the customer churn rate may rise by 5.8% when the sales funnel is optimized in accordance with the (summary) analysis below.
(Note the data below has been modified to uphold the company’s anonymity.)
How Many Visitors and Orders Does the Website Generate?
It was discovered that the company’s email marketing campaigns contributed to an overall increase in visitors in 2022, however over the past three years, the percentage of unique visitors stayed largely unchanged. Both the number of visits and the number of orders rose, but the average quantity of products per order fell short of their expectations.
Traffic Source and Yearly Revenue
I determined the steps a visitor must take before making a purchase alongside the online store. I was able to track which visitors came to the website and what steps they took using Google Analytics along with the company’s internal systems.
More than 70% of visitors arrive at the website from organic search, meaning they found it using a search engine. In-browser visits account for 11% of traffic, which is followed by e-mail 7%, social media 5%, referrals 4% and other 3%.
When users arrived at the website, I discovered three points in the ordering process where customers frequently abandoned their orders. I considered how I could make this better in each circumstance.
- Even while people add items to their shopping carts, they fail to check the contents of their entire basket (a 3.4% loss in visits). The icon for the shopping cart should be displayed more clearly and if there are at least two products in the cart show a pop-up so that you may access your shopping cart’s total.
- During the process of logging in or creating an account, 3.3% of visitors abandon the website after viewing their complete shopping basket. As an alternative to registering an account, customers can also pay as guests.
- After seeing the complete order amount, 2% of visitors abandon the ordering process. Unexpected expenses (shipping costs) or rejected coupon codes are the two most frequent causes.
The best course of action is to make clear mention of delivery prices on the website and provide a phone number in case a promo code is not honored.
The aforementioned changes if implemented can result in an increase in orders of no more than 6.1%.
Most Lucrative Traffic Source
After deeper research i soon realized that more orders were completed successfully when the source originated from email. This is partially due to the simple ease of the user already being logged into their account thus removing a step in the order funnel.
After making this discovery I moved toward creating a proper email marketing strategy with the company. I also used multivariate testing to set up a visually appealing call to action section on the company website to attract more customers into the sales funnel.
Traffic Source and Number of Items Per Order
I further was curious to see if there was a correlation between traffic source and number of items within each order to communicate how to also increase number of items to the business stakeholders.
The organic search produced the highest number of items per order signaling web advertisement would increase number of items per order sold.
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