Why Is My Ecommerce Site Not Making More Money?

Through my years of consulting and building ecommerce businesses, the most common problem I see is a lack of understanding of “The Funnel.”

The Funnel is the name for the different levels of customers that eventually result with some percentage purchasing.

There are 3 levels to the funnel – IMPRESSIONS – LEADS – CUSTOMERS

Step 1 – Impressions

Impressions are the top of your funnel.  These are all of the people who have seen or engaged with your brand in any way.  There are many ways to get impressions to your brand:

1. Advertising – Advertising in any way can increase your brand exposure and therefore your impressions a ton, but it usually comes with a cost.  Advertising refers to any channel in which you are pushing your brand in front of people.  This can be online sponsorships, media buying (banner ads, billboards, tv, radio etc), really any channel to just blast your brand out there.  Keep in mind, even though this costs, it can really help push the rest of your “top of the funnel” strategy.
2. Word of Mouth – This would be any form of people talking about your brand.  You can incentivize this by creating referral programs and other rewards for talking about your brand.  There are arguments on both sides though, that incentivizing can create less of a brand loyalty as they become motivated by the incentives, instead of just sharing your brand organically.
3. Publicity – Getting high level influencers such as publications, blogs and even influential individuals to notice and share your brand.  This is an incredible source of impressions because it comes with brand validation and trust.  Most people trust the reputation of the editorials they read and therefore trust what is written.  If TechCrunch writes about how amazing your new product is, most of their readers tend to at least gain some level of trust.  There are not many better ways to help push someone through your funnel.

Remember, if you miss this step, you will constantly just be retargeting your existing customers and never building your customer base.

Step 2 – Leads

Once you have this impression and interaction, the next step is converting that person to a “Lead.”  Someone who you can validate and retarget to push through your funnel.  There are a couple ways to generate leads:

1. Contact Information – One way to generate leads is to get their contact information.  With ecommerce, the most important piece is their email address.  Nothing converts Leads to Customers more than an email address.  The idea is to entice an individual when they receive impressions from you, whether through advertising, word of mouth or publicity, to give you some level of personal information so that you may continue to contact them on your on accord.
2. Cookie Placement – A great advantage to being a website is that when someone visits your site, you have the ability to place a “cookie” on their computer.  There are several technologies to then retarget these specific people with unique ads.  These ads can be focused on converting a Lead into a Customer, instead of an Impression into a Lead.  A simple strategy like this turns a website visitor from an impression to a lead.

Remember, without creating leads, you will constantly have to drive new traffic to sell and will be missing out on building a recurring customer base.

Step 3 – Customers

This is where you make your money.  You now have tons of impressions, some percentage of leads and now you need to convert.  Using banner retargeting from your cookie placement and email retargeting from all of the emails you collected will help drive traffic, you should be consistently converting leads that had not initially purchased.

Now that you have all of these customers, it’s time to increase your “Life Time Value” or in other words, the total amount a person spends with you in their lifetime as a customer.

You can do this by consistently (but not so much as to annoy them) contacting them and providing value above and beyond what they had purchased.  If it’s something they need more than once, contact them regularly reminding.  If by purchasing your product, it indicates they would like other products as well, show them those.  You can also offer discounts and other incentives, but tread VERY CAREFULLY as this can really hurt your brand and cause you to constantly have to discount to bring back consumers.

Follow these steps and you will see a much higher return on your web traffic and a faster growing business.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me at erik@hawkemedia.com