Do you have plenty of ‘likes’ and followers, but your sales are still skeleton-thin?
By now, most savvy marketers should be fully aware of the benefits of using social media for the purposes of attracting customers to their brand. Strategically using content to lure in potential buyers should be enough, right? Wrong!
If you’re not fully aware of your customers’ journey from social media to completed purchase, you may be setting yourself up for dreadful social media conversion.
Everyone is eager to invest in the golden goose of content production, but how many marketers actually see a return on their investments?
According to the Baymard Institute, 68.81% is the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate. While this statistic may be scary, there are three key steps you can take to vanquish shopping cart abandonment for good.
Be Upfront with Customers – Treat, Don’t Trick
Transparency is highly valued by many consumers. If you advertise a certain price, don’t unintentionally construct a sleazy salesman persona for yourself by adding fees that magically appear in the shopping cart stage.
The price attached to the item should be the final price. Think about it from a psychological perspective. Customers were interested enough in your product to place it in their shopping cart. They read the description, ogled the accompanying images, and weighed the value with the proposed cost.
When you surprise them with additional fees during the check-out phase, you’re ruining the balance of that value/cost consideration with what will feel like a trick to the customer. From that moment on, you’ve broken their trust and devalued your product.
Make Your Website Easy to Navigate
One of the most convenient aspects of social media (and part of what makes it so powerful) is that the structure of the content is taken care of for you. Attractive interfaces and simple usage go hand-in-hand with platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
When customers leave your well-curated Instagram profile, they will understandably expect a similar ease of use from the page they land on. Don’t scare them off with a complicated spider's web of pages or purchasing instructions that will ultimately dissuade them from buying.
Your website should be easy to navigate, as simple as possible, and quickly loadable. Show customers you value their time, and they’ll reward you with improved sales.
Have an Option to Check-Out as a Guest
Security and simplicity reign in the world of e-commerce. By enabling customers to check-out as a guest, you provide them with the reassurance that they don’t have to provide excess personal information in order to make a purchase.
Forcing new customers to go through the rigmarole of becoming a registered user is analogous to asking trick-or-treaters to provide a phone number before handing out candy. It comes across as too much commitment from the outset, and some customers will even find it a bit unsettling or creepy.
Here’s the question you need to ask yourself: In your haste to develop return customers, are you creating barriers for new ones?
Take a deeper look into why your customers are creeping in for a sale, but then getting spooked. Social media is useful for brand awareness, legitimacy, and developing consumer interest, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all of success.
If your e-commerce site looks like a ghost-town of abandoned carts, it might be time to give these three changes a good look. If you do, you may soon find yourself haunted by more customers than you can handle.