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Ecommerce Performance Enhancements with the Aheadworks Extensions

When utilized properly, sales funels help to improve the whole analytical process.

In our previous article, we explained an approach to ecommerce performance tracking based on sales funnel models. Today, we'll discuss how sales funnels help to improve ecommerce business performance. Additionally, we'll consider the Aheadworks extensions able to produce a positive effect on your KPI’s.

The Indirect Impact Zone and the Area of Direct Influence


By the levels of influence, each sales funnel has two areas: the so-called ‘Indirect Impact Zone’ and the area of direct influence.

The first one can be influenced only indirectly since most of the traffic sources do not really belong to a company.

The second one is entirely formed on our side where the success is significantly determined by our actions.

The indirect and direct influence areas of a sales funnel

The indirect and direct influence areas of a sales funnel


Also, any funnel has its own diameter and flow rate determining its potential throughput. For the ecommerce sector, the limitations of diameter are mostly determined by server capabilities, which can be easily expanded if necessary.



Meanwhile, the flow rate depends on many factors and can be improved by an online seller, especially within the area of our direct influence.

Performance Enhancements with the Aheadworks Extensions

 

Smart One Step Checkout


So, if the levels of direct influence look more promising for sales improvements, how exactly can we use this chance?

The options are really numerous, but today, we’ll focus on some really fruitful ones. And, we start with the checkout.

The number of potential customers can be really impressive, but it doesn’t mean that all of them will convert into real ones due to, for example, some checkout issues.

Unexpected shipping costs, the need to create new accounts, security concerns, confusing process, or the lack of discounts - all these issues lead to checkout abandonment, which still can be easily avoided with the Smart One Step Checkout extension by Aheadworks.

Besides, the module serves great as a funnel flow rate accelerator as soon as the provided Checkout Behavior Report allows detecting and demolishing possible process bottlenecks knowingly.

The Checkout Behavior Report

The Checkout Behavior Report


As you can see, the report shows the number of customers who passed one or another checkout step. This way, we can determine the areas with the greatest exit rates and remove the hurdles preventing customers from purchases.

Additionally, we can track the abandonment in dynamics and determine whether current results are good or bad compared to the previous performance indicators.

The Abandoned Checkout Statistics page

The Abandoned Checkout Statistics page


Finally, we’d like to show you the One Step Checkout page.

The One Step Checkout page

The One Step Checkout page


Here, we tried to avoid any possible reasons able to take customers away from purchases. So, it’s convenient, contains a lot of automations, makes it possible to use additional payment means (including coupons, reward points, gift cards, store credits), and highlights security seals -  all the reasons able to prevent the issues mentioned above.

Follow Up Email


When it comes to repeat sales, proper email marketing may become a great tool to remind customers about your company and convince them to make new purchases.

The Follow Up Email extension creates a new circle flow of visitors guiding customers directly to website pages without the necessity to engage with the top level of the funnel with new impressions.

As you can see in the picture below, the extension allows reaching your current customers and the ones who, for some reason, refused to make a purchase and take them once again to the circle of sales.

The Campaigns page

 

The Campaigns page


The more convincing your emails are, the better the customer lifetime value parameter is. Contributing to the general funnel flow rate, it has its rotation speed and effectiveness, which depends particularly on email chain schedules and messages themselves.

Email chains are obviously more efficient than individual emails, and if you set their timing properly, they can motivate and convert many more customers.

The use of the extension is especially beneficial due to the provided A/B testing functionality, where you can always check and improve the effectiveness of your emails.

So, the Follow Up Email extension either allows you to take customers out of their passive stance or re-engage them, this way, accelerating both the Conversion and Repeat Sales levels of the funnel.

Subscription & Recurring Payments


As we have already told you, the area of direct influence is very promising as soon as we can improve it on our own. For example, we can even put a lifetime value accelerator inside the funnel and guarantee repeat sales.

How we can do this? The answer is subscriptions. Using subscriptions, customers agree to make purchases regularly during a particular time period.

And no reminders are necessary as purchases are being made according to subscription schedules. However, the process requires automation since manual subscription processing is really irritating.

The Subscriptions & Recurring Payments extension is indispensable in this case, as it allows creating and processing subscription products massively without any manual intervention from Magento admins.

Review Reminder


The final stage of the sales process is customer feedback. It allows both understand the satisfaction with our products and services and generate new sales.

We all know that positive reviews work well for this purpose. Just imagine that astonishing 92% of customers read online reviews and 85% trust reviews as much as personal recommendations.

However, happy customers are not usually inclined to leave reviews rather than the angry ones.

Still, you should not give up that easily, especially if there are a lot of great tools that allow you to ask customers about online reviews. The Review Reminder extension, for example, is among those options.

Online reviews bring new customers, and new customers leave more reviews. That’s how it works, and it’s definitely one more customer flow circle within our funnel.