You may already know about a sales funnel. But what about a dropshipping sales funnel? And how to enhance your dropshipping sales funnel to increase your profit and grow your business? Beside getting good products from a good supplier or a reliable sourcing agent, you will need to do more to entice your customers to buy. In this article, we will discuss all those questions. Let’s get started!
The basics of a sales funnel
Sales funnel is a process we would go through before making a purchase decision from awareness to action. Basically, a sales funnel would consist of 4 stages:
Awareness
At this stage, you will be aware that there is a particular product sold on the market that could solve your problem or make your life better. You get this information from many sources like ads on social media or through a reference and so on.
Interest
To this stage, once you already know about that product, you may get interested in it or not. You may think it seems perfect for your life for many reasons. And then, you start thinking about buying that product but will forget all of that thing very quickly.
Decision
Let’s say you are interested in the product and actually think of getting it. You will then begin to take one step further: looking for all information about that product considering if it’s worth buying and where you can buy it.
Action
After searching the product’s details, you feel good. You feel happy. You think you need the product. The product is great. Then you decide to make a purchase.
This is the process according to a sales funnel. It turns a person from knowing nothing to a buyer. But the question is: How to lead your customer through this process? Let’s take a look at dropshipping sales funnel first.
Is dropshipping sales funnel the same?
The two have something in common. Dropshipping sales funnel still consists of 4 stages. But the difference is that in dropshipping, a customer will spend less time through the process to the action stage. Your goal as a dropshipper is to trigger impulse buying as much as possible. You want your customers to love your products right away when they see them and then buy them instantly.
But imagine that they are disturbed by other things, they will soon forget about you and let other stores jump in. They might buy the products from other competitors. So, speeding up the buying process is critical. Let’s move to the next part to see more about how to enhance your dropshipping sales funnel to boost your sales!
How to enhance your dropshipping sales funnel
#1 Raise your customers’ awareness
It’s the first stage. If you want your customer to go through the sales funnel, no way you want to miss out on the awareness stage. There are some ways you can do to raise awareness about your products as below:
Make the store SEO-friendly
If you want more people to know about you, you need to get your store ranking on top search on Google. Every day, there are millions of people use Google to search for what they are concerned about. The higher ranking your store gets, the more chance people will find you when they are typing a related query on Google.
There are many tools to help you do that. There are plugins, themes, apps, and so on which make your site look good and perform SEO well and which boost your site position on Google, etc.
Create engaging content
Don’t fill up your page with all about telling your customers to buy from you. On the contrary, create engaging content which is entertaining and informative to your customers. Your regularly updated content will attract your customers’ attention and build a relationship with them. It helps to create and improve your reputation in your industry as well as raise awareness about your brand among people. You can do that by writing a blog and updating your social media accounts with topics related to your products or your industry.
Post on social media
Likewise, regularly updating your social media account is also a good way to interest your customers and build a relationship with them. You will have the chance to interact with your followers and reach a wide potential customer group.
So, remember to create your business social media account and keep posting regularly. Like, comment, and answer your follower comment and queries. Try to make them feel close to you and trust you.
Run ads on social networks
Apart from writing a blog and posting on your social media, there’s nothing that will bring direct and big results in less time like advertising. While building a reputation among people is a long journey, you can make much more people know about you by paid ads.
You can run ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, or Youtube, and so on. There are many platforms you can use.
Use Google Shopping
if you want to target Google users, you can use Google shopping ads. This is a powerful tool for e-commerce. If your store ranking is high in Google Shopping, there will be more chance that people will click on the link and visit your page. You can also show your products on the Google search results page when people are searching for something related to your store.
#2 Interest your store visitors
At this stage of a sales funnel, you need to keep your visitors interested in your products. There are thousands of reasons that do and do not make people get interested. But you can do something about that to make them stay on your site your change their opinion about your products and your store.
You may get a clear store layout with quick page loading and make your store more mobile-friendly. Getting a lovely product page with catchy and appealing item details like titles, descriptions, and images may do a good job in interesting your potential customers. This will give your customer a better experience when they visit your page.
#3 Speed up the decision-making process
So, at this stage of a sales funnel, your store visitors already know about you, get interested in your page and your products. They would collect more information about your products in your store. The product page should give your potential customers enough details of the items such as features, designs, measures, material, etc.
But is there anything you can do to urge them to place an order? Let’s move to the next part and find out!
Use the power of social proof
There is a big chance that your visitors would not buy from you even they find your page really interesting. They just know you for the first time and not sure that they can trust you. Advertising can tell a lot about you. But nothing is more powerful than word-of-mouth marketing. They tend to trust other customers who have purchased from you and gave feedback about your products.
This is when social proof should be in place. There should be a review section on your page. And you can encourage your customers to leave their comments after they buy from you. There might be both negative and positive comments even when your products are good. But don’t worry. Your customers would not expect a perfect product with 100% five-star reviews. A good overall review rate will be good enough.
Create a sense of urgency
We have talked a lot about this in our recent articles. To urge your visitors to make a purchase, creating a sense of urgency is a must-do. People are always afraid that they might miss out on something interesting. If they find that the products they want are low in stock, or in limited orders, or on sale for just a period of time, they would hurry to grab the chance and make a purchase.
So, you can speed up the decision-making process by making your offer irresistible and giving your customers reasons to buy your products.
#4 Make it easy to take the action
Successfully prompting the decision does not ensure visitors would make a purchase from you. You need to lead them to the final stage: take the action. There are still chances that you may lose them before they place an order. In the next part, we would discuss how we can do that to keep your potential customers at the last stage of the dropshipping sales funnel.
Allow effortless payments
Your visitors may add some products into their cart, try to check out but leave it at the very last minute. The reason might be the payment method you offer. You’d better provide easy and understandable in-store navigation and the widest range of payment gateways so that your customers will have a satisfying shopping experience in your store.
They would not be patient to proceed with their orders if the checking out process in your store takes time or the action buttons are not catchy or the check out page is not easy to understand. You could also lose your customers if they really like your products but your store payment gateways don’t accept their bank cards.
So at this stage of the sales funnel, try to make things easy and simple for your customers to complete their checkout and payment.
Streamline the checkout process
No one will have the patience to fill up a long checkout form to make a purchase. So if you don’t want to scare away your customers at this stage, try to set up a user-friendly checkout form. Only strictly necessary information is required. Always think of the best solution to save time and simplify the process for your customers. You have led a visitor to this point, so don’t waste the chance to make a profit here.
Private Agent for Dropshipping Success