Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment = Increase In Revenue

There’s always a focus on getting traffic and converting that traffic in order to increase your revenue. And that makes perfect sense. If you get 1000 visitors and convert them on your sales page at 1%, then you’ve made ten sales. If you can increase that to 3% then you’ve made 30 sales from the same traffic. Now you increase the traffic and start to see purchases flying in.

But… we should also be checking to see why we only get 1% or 3%. Where are the other 97% or more of our prospective purchasers dropping off.

Are they leaving at the beginning of your sales copy, in which case you need to get it checked quickly, or are they leaving at some other point.

Tracking this will give you an insight into your prospective customers that will tell you exactly what you should be looking at changing.

And, one of the biggest drop-off points is…

…your order form!

On average 70% of people who click on your Buy button will not go through with the payment.

That’s a huge amount.

For every 10 people that decide they want to purchase, seven will change their minds when they have to enter their payment details in.

What makes this such a significant piece of information, is that these prospects WANT to buy your product.

They’ve just had a sudden change of mind at the last minute due to the price, but you know that the only barrier to purchase still left is cost. Which means that we know exactly what we have to tackle with these prospects to get them to purchase.

First of all, we need to check that we aren’t putting anything in place that’s causing shopping cart abandonment.

Go through your check out pages for all of these factors which are proven to increase your abandonment rate:

• Don’t force customers to register before purchasing
• Don’t hide shipping costs until they hit the payment page
• Don’t display a coupon code space to everyone, otherwise they’ll leave your site to try and find a coupon

Those are the three biggest causes of shopping cart abandonment. But, you can also increase the conversion on your order form by:

• Showing a progress indicator
• Provide calls to action so it’s clear exactly what needs to be done next
• Make sure your contact details are easily available if they have any last minute questions
• Have a wide range of payment methods available
• Add customer testimonials to your payment pages

Adding in security logos if you have them, such as Verisign, is also a good way of providing confidence to your customer.

Doing all that will see a decrease in your abandonment rate, but…

…there are still going to be people abandoning.

So, we want to make sure that we can get in touch with them in order to follow up and try to make the sale.

Above I said that one of the elements you should put on your page is:

Showing a progress indicator

And the first step of this progress should be their Name and Email Address.

Once they’ve entered their name and email address you can put them onto a list of hot prospects who’ve gone through to the order form. If they purchase then you remove them from this list. Most auto-responder companies allow you to do this automatically.

But, if they haven’t purchased within twenty four hours you can now follow them up to remove the concern over the price point.

42% of the people who abandon your shopping cart are doing so because they aren’t yet ready to purchase, which means that we now have a list that we know 42% simply need to be given the extra confidence that purchasing is the right thing to do.

If you could convert that 42% through a follow-up sequence how much difference is that going to make to your bottom line?

Going back to our previous example, if you have 1000 people visiting your sales page and 3% converting. Then you’re making 30 sales. But, we know that 70% of the prospects who went to the order form left without purchasing, which means that 100 people actually visited our payment page.

There are 70 hot prospects who left before purchasing. As we’ve implemented the contact details as stage one of the payment process, we now have the ability to contact them.

If we can convert another 7% of our hot prospects, and you should be able to do much higher than that, then you’ll have made another 5 sales.

That means you have increased your sales by 17% and your conversion rate by 0.5% by simply adding a name and email capture form as the first step of the order process!