Visitors To Customers: Understanding The Website Sales Funnel
March 12, 2025
Everyone who visits your website has the potential to become a loyal customer. To turn them into loyal customers, they must pass through the website sales funnel. This is made up of 4 stages: visitors, shoppers, customers and loyal customers. Each stage of the funnel gets narrower - not every visitor is going to become a shopper, and not every shopper is going to become a customer. However, by optimizing each stage, you can maximise the amount of visitors that make it to the end of this funnel. This post delves more into the 4 stages of the website sales funnel.
Key Takeaways on Website Sales Funnels
- Website Sales Funnel Stages: The funnel includes four stages — visitors, shoppers, customers, and loyal customers — with each stage narrowing as fewer people progress.
- Attracting Visitors: Effective strategies include advertising (ideal for B2C businesses) and SEO (better suited for B2B businesses), both of which are valuable for generating traffic.
- Reducing Bounce Rates: Speed up your site’s loading time, use high-quality visuals, and provide detailed product or service information to retain visitors.
- Converting Shoppers into Customers: Streamline your checkout process, offer multiple payment options, and consider payment plans for high-value products.
- Reducing Cart Abandonment: Simplify forms, provide fast shipping options, and ensure pricing is transparent to improve purchase completion rates.
- Encouraging Loyalty: Introduce account creation incentives, loyalty points, and exclusive perks to retain customers and increase repeat business.
- Subscription Retention Strategies: Reward loyal subscribers with renewal perks or surprise gifts to maintain long-term engagement.
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START NOWVisitors
The first stage involves getting people to visit your website. There are so many ways in which you can attract visitors to a site from cold emails to QR codes. However, the most popular ways to attract visitors include advertising and SEO.
Advertising on social media and through search engines like Google can help to build brand awareness and generate traffic. Just make sure to target your adverts at the right demographic and make these adverts visually enticing. B2C businesses and product-based businesses can benefit from advertising the most.
SEO involves targeting people who are already searching for your business. This involves tapping into certain keywords, as well as making other improvements on your website, which an SEO consultant can advise you on. B2B businesses and service-based businesses may benefit more from SEO than advertising - however both are worth investing in.
Shoppers
Once people arrive on your website, you need to encourage them to stick around and become shoppers. Most websites have a bounce rate of 40% to 55%. This means that about 40% to 50% of visitors leave after viewing only one page.
One of the biggest things that can impact your website’s bounce rate is loading speed. Many people don’t have the patience to deal with a slow website. Start by considering some of these tricks to help speed up your site.
Using high quality visuals and providing detailed product/service information can further help encourage people to browse and consider making a purchase. It’s vital that you use original high quality photographs and informative product descriptions to win over the trust of shoppers.
Customers
The next stage is turning shoppers into customers. Did you know that 70% of shoppers abandon their carts? This means that even if you get someone to start the purchase process, you may not encourage them to commit.
Of course, you can reduce card abandonment by making the purchase process simple. Avoid lengthy forms consisting of multiple pages - try to create a quick checkout process. When it comes to payment options, allow customers to choose from an array of options such as credit card and crypto payments.
The price can often be a turnoff for many customers. With high value products, consider offering payment plans. When it comes to services, consider offering different priced plans.
Slow shipping can also put off some customers from buying products. If some customers currently have to wait weeks to receive their product, consider offering a fast shipping option - even if it means charging them more.
Loyal customers
How do you get customers to become loyal customers? One solution is to get customers to create an account during the checkout process. This could entitle customers to exclusive discounts if they make repeat purchases (such as loyalty points) or access to other perks like fast shipping.
When it comes to maintaining loyal subscribers for services, you can similarly offer perks for renewing each year or send gifts at times when you’re most likely to experience people unsubscribing.
