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Shopping cart abandon rate is undoubtedly a great indicator of whether we are doing the things right or not in our online store.

Having an optimized after shopping cart abandonment management process to handle the situation and re-inviting customers to complete the purchase has proven to increase conversion rates. You can start with these five simple tips:

1. Simplicity: Conversion rate is affected directly by the complexity of the buying process. Both, the buying and the checkout process must be as short as possible to avoid abandonment. We have mentioned in previous posts that every online shop should allow customer to buy without registration.

2. Collect data: Although you must allow customers to buy without registering, you should collect email address (and possibly also the phone number) in the first step of your checkout process so you will be able to contact them if they do not complete the process. Consumers would not mind providing their names and emails, above all, because they appreciate receiving a ‘purchase confirmation email’.

3. Immediacy: Send a reminder email to a customer who has abandoned the shopping cart within 24 hours. If you do not contact this prospective client soon, it will be less likely that she/he remembers why she/he started the buying process in the first place.

In this message, include a link that will take the customer back to the abandoned cart with the item or items already added and as much information pre-populated in the order form as possible.

4. Show interest: Price is not always the reason why a customer leaves the shopping cart. Therefore, when contacting a client that just abandon the shopping cart, express concern about whether a technical error in your system prevented her/him to convert. Other usual reasons that drive online shoppers to abandon the purchase process can also be: uncomfortable buying process, lack of different payment options or not having time enough in that moment.

5. Offer incentives: Prepare a second reminder email including an offer or incentive to encourage the customer to come back to the shopping cart and finalize the purchase.

You have to remain positive despite the fact that an abandoned shopping cart often occurs; – it is also a strong indicator of interest on your products. Study the reasons why customers leave the cart and keep in mind that the sales process is not finished at that point. With a good shopping cart abandon management, you can recover many ‘lost’ sales. Use this opportunity to highlight an additional competitive advantage: good customer service.

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Attractive and, above all, efficient websites is the great challenge for every online merchant. Being efficient means to sell more and improving the user experience will definitely help. In this post, we will give some keys points to improve customer experience for software, digital goods and games online merchants. The main peculiarity of the digital product industry selling online is that there is no physical products so certain parameters that are important to the retailing sector, such as stock availability, shipping charges or payment on delivery, do not need to be considered. Nevertheless, the tips listed below can and should be applied to any online store:

1. Optimize your website. Optimize the more technical aspects of the site: Improve accessibility, site-speed and create a simple, attractive and well-organized website structure. Bear in mind that clear and clean navigation is critical.

2. User oriented design. Keep it simple! Online consumers like simple and short processes. Users do not want to learn to use your site; they want your site to be adapted to their mental structure. Add clarity to simplicity and do not make the mistake of, for instance, labelling call-to-action buttons with confusing words like “submit” if what you mean is “buy now.”

3. Product display and information. Accurate, complete and clear information about your products is essential. You cannot allow your users to find the information needed to finalize the purchase elsewhere. Create your own product descriptions and never just copy the description given by the manufacturer. When selling digital products online, you do not really need to include 360-degree view of the products, but be imaginative and include, for example, a demo or an explanatory video of your digital goods.

4. Social Shopping. People like to know what other people have bought, which the best-sellers are or what the online community thinks on a given item. Bear in mind that personal recommendations are a major influence on purchase decisions and build trust. So include the options to rate products, post comments, and show these references to future buyers and you will improve significantly the user experience. Additionally, combine users-ratings with cross-selling options, which will be very effective if you display “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed…”

Do not forget to include social media sharing buttons to every product, this will allow your clients to recommend your products, inform their contacts about their latest acquisition or ask for advice to their network.

5. Price policy. Price is one of the first things consumers watch and one of the main reasons to purchase, so display it clearly. Your users will appreciate not having to do extra clicks to find the price and remember that your competitors are also one click away. On the other hand, do not hide additional charges revealed only at the checkout; nobody likes to be taken for a fool.

6. Checkout process. The checkout process MUST be as short and quick as possible. Users will also appreciate if you inform about how many steps the purchasing process is going to take and at which point they are.  Allow checkout without registration. Registration is a useless burden and a major cause of cart abandonment for first time clients (most of the users do not want to reveal personal information when is not really necessary) but also for returning clients, since they might have forgotten their password.

7. Payment options. Provide a great variety of payment options to boost your sales, markets and conversions. Do not assume that everyone has a PayPal account, that everyone has a credit card or that everybody can pay in dollars. It is best to offer the greatest possible number of credit and debit cards from as many countries as possible and to accept payments in different currencies.

8. Keep in touch. Cultivate the relation with your customers. Once customers have finished the purchase, it is time to ask them to subscribe to your newsletter or any other personalized alert system. Find out which are their interests and keep in touch accordingly (e.g. or accumulative points, extra discount for frequent users, etc.)

We take this opportunity to share with you this video about Tesco Homeplus Virtual Subway Store in South Korea. Although we want to focus our post on the virtual goods sector, it is a great example of how to eliminate boundaries and frustration and fascinate consumers:

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One of the most important elements for the success of your digital marketing plan are landing pages, especially if you are using paid traffic campaigns such as PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. A Landing Page is a page created for users to carry out a very specific action (an email subscription, a sale, etc.), which –well designed- helps to greatly increase your conversion rate.

Designing a landing page is pretty much as designing an ad. And to design landing pages that convert is your responsibility. Here you have the opportunity to tell your customers why your product is awesome and why they must convert.

There are some key elements that will help you to design killing landing pages as a Marketing or Ad expert:

1. Unique call to action: Make sure the landing page does not have competing call-to-actions. Focus your landing page in a single and clear action on the top of the page –avoid scrolling down-. Keep it simple for customer and drive them to take the action you want without overwhelming them trying to sell many things at the same time. This is not the moment to confuse customers with too much information. Communicate clearly what you want them to do and why.

2. Give the customer an enticing reason to convert, now: Incorporate a unique and convincing selling proposition (USP) that clearly communicates why the customer must convert.

3. Avoid links that may distract the customer: You are bringing traffic to the landing page with a very clear objective. Do not distract your customer with links that might drive them to other sites. Not even to your home site. Although the visitor might not be familiar with your brand and/or products, you have to design the landing page ready to convince the visitor to convert in a single shot.

4. Consistent message. The selling proposition message of the landing page must match the text of the PPC, ad, tweet, email or wherever is the traffic source from which visitors will come from. What you say in your ad must match what customers see in the landing page. So if you ad is offering “Save up to 10% on every antivirus software”, make sure that your customers will land in a page with the same offer. In the case you have different campaigns or offers running at the same time, create a unique landing page for each of them.

5. Reinforce trust. Include elements that communicate and reinforce trust and safety to consumers. In this sense, it is strongly recommended to incorporate trust buttons like Verified by Visa logo, BBB badge, antivirus logos or any other industry certifications or awards near the conversion form. Build even more trust by including customers’ testimonials and reviews. Genuine testimonials from respected people in your industry can boost your conversion rate.

Trust buttons

6. Don’t forget SEO: Create unique landing pages only accessible from its coming PPC ad or email campaign and include a custom and descriptive URL using your hottest keywords.

7. Plan a tracking method and test. We always insist on the importance of testing all your digital marketing actions. You must test your landing pages specially those coming for a PPC campaign. You are creating landing pages because you want them to convert plus you are paying for this traffic. As you create custom and individual URLs for each landing page inaccessible from your main site, you can easily track its efficiency in terms of views and conversions. Google Analytics and Google AdWords give you valuable data about consumer behaviour that you can use to modify and adjust your campaigns. If you are not sure about which design or selling proposition will convert the most, create different landing pages for the same campaign and modify texts, pictures, composition, colours, etc.; Google will tell you which model is selling more.

A/B test

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Unless you are constantly innovating and upgrading your products, it is difficult to sell the same products to the same customer several times. Besides, the more a client buys from a vendor, the higher the switching cost is.

The goal for every merchant is to sell more, and we know this is a difficult task. In order to improve your online conversion and client loyalty rates, you must implement many different promotional strategies. Recently we discussed How to Structure an Online Coupon Profitably, and today we will focus on cross-selling techniques.

Cross selling is a merchandising tool consisting of offering similar or complementary products to what the shopper is looking at. Cross selling allows vendors to bundle products, or offer any combinable accessory enhancing the value of the purchase. It gives the vendor the ability to suggest to the buyer more products at the right time. While in the offline world this could sounds rather obvious, this technique can really make a difference for online merchants because cross selling will allow them to imitate a sales person or a personal shopper assistant.

The main objectives of cross-selling are to enhance order completion as well as increase average sale spend due to customers adding accessories or extra products to their original selection. Moreover, many merchants use cross selling capabilities to promote popular items, target high margin products, show to the customers a wider range of goods and as a result trigger impulse purchases.

The benefits of putting in practice cross-selling techniques are clear:

1. You can substantially increase your revenue by selling complimentary products in addition to the initial purchase,
2. You can increase the lifetime value as well as the average order size,
3. You can guide customers throughout your e-store adding value to their purchase,
4. You increase your customers’ purchase experience

Suggest to the buyer the right product at the right time.

There are many places in your website to displays cross-selling options: home page, product page, shopping cart view, checkout page or even after the order is done. There are also many different forms to do it: under the product page, in a side banner, as a pop-up, in an extra page before/after the check-out. The best placement will depend on your website design the length of the product page and your customers’ behavior.

Some customers really enjoy cross-selling options because they feel a personal shopper is helping them. However, these techniques –above all the use of pop-ups or forcing your customers to view the cross selling suggestions- can be perceived as an obstacle to finalize the buying process.

Make your add-ons valuable for the customer by:

-          Showing relevant products

-          Providing enough information (picture, price and description)

-          Keeping customers in the shopping path

-          Using direct and emotional language

-          Not cluttering the page

See an example here:

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Coupons are widely used in the offline world, but they also are a great ecommerce promotional tool that can boost conversions in your online store.

There are many good reasons to use online coupons. You can use them to:

• Capture or maintain clients
• Clear stagnant inventory
• Seduce customers with accessories or complimentary products
• Introduce a new product
• Open a new territorial e-store or
• Target a new segment or boost sales in a specific period.

However, be careful to avoid common coupon pitfalls…

Shopping cart abandonment is a challenge that all digital ecommerce merchants face. In many cases, the problem stems from the checkout page itself. A coupon code box in the checkout page often invites the customer to search for a better deal. When this happens, in the best scenario, the customer will come back with the discount code – so he/she won’t pay full-price, but you still make the sale. Additionally, if the customer found the coupon through one of your affiliates, you will have to share your profit. In the worst case, the customer you invited to abandon your e-store will never be back.

There are, however, good solutions to avoid this problem and create an effective coupon campaign. First, consider removing the coupon code box from your ecommerce site. Instead, create a specific landing page for each coupon where the offer is automatically applied. This way, you will boost the natural flow from coupon to checkout page instead of vice versa. Landing pages also offer great options for customization of message and call to action, as well as targeted conversion tracking.

Coupon Code Box

If you still want to keep the coupon code field on the checkout page, but want to prevent the off-page hunt for the coupon, consider including a “How can I get this?” link that leads to a voucher page on your site. Such a page can provide the essential coupon code info and quickly send the shopper back to the checkout page. This will reduce transactional friction for your visitor, keep them on your site, and let you avoid affiliate fees.

Time to plan your campaign:

The final purpose of the coupon has to be to generate traffic to your ecommerce store and convert, convert, convert. As with any other marketing tool, you need do some homework first:

• Does the coupon campaign fit your general marketing strategy? Coupons can be associated with low-quality products. Discount hunters have a low brand loyalty. Remember, a coupon campaign is a short-term tactic! If you train your customers to always expect discounts, it is very hard to untrain them. Your full price could be gone forever.

• Define your clients profile based on accurate data. Do not make assumptions and conduct tests to understand your consumers’ behavior to make sure whether they will respond to a coupon campaign. For example, we were very surprised when we read this survey and found out that coupon lovers are more likely to be high household incomes and college-educated. If you know what your customers want, you can match it up! Specify an objective: increasing sales, getting customers to spend more than the average, building an email list, attract followers to your Facebook page, boost the sale of a software product before launching the next version. Goals set upfront will help you determine the campaign’s success post mortem.

• Decide on your target. You have basically three options: private, public and group coupons. If your aim is to get new customers or build an email list, you’d rather target a massive public through public or group coupons. But if you want to gratify the customer, get followers or improve affiliates’ loyalty, private promo codes –-distributed directly — is the smartest choice.

• Do the math. Set your budget (and stay there!). A coupon campaign will cost you some money (designing the coupons + landing pages, distribution and promotional costs, human resources, discount offered, etc.) The goal is to earn money so if you don’t carefully calculate costs, the campaign will quickly eat your profits.

• Measure the results of the campaign. It is essential to confirm the success or failure of your campaign and learn to improve future ones. Some indicators of success are: ROI, conversion rates, number of new consumers, web and social media traffic and interaction, emails collected, etc.

“Ok, I’ve prepared the strategy, I’ve checkout the things-to-do-before-launching-a-coupon list above, but what can I offer?” Of course, you want to offer those deals that convert best, for example:

• Money or percentage off coupons (Discount must be tied to a minimum number of items acquired or to the minimum amount spent which should be higher than the average).

• “New customers save X$ on any order over Y$ if you place your order now” or “Save X$ if you buy now” (evoke a sense of urgency).

• “Deal of the Day Promo” (Must be a real bargain to be effective).

• “Exclusive Coupons to Selected Affiliates” (exclusivity will attract your affiliates and motivate them to distribute your coupon).It is important that you set some redemption requirements, like ensuring that the customer spends more money than the average.

However, the holy grail of your coupon campaign will be returning customers. Craft a customer retention strategy integrated to your coupon campaign by following-up and having more products worthy to return for.

By the way, don´t forget to test your coupons and make sure that the links work and the promise is applied!