Sales Alignment
How to Nudge Customers to Buy from Your Site

How to Nudge Customers to Buy from Your Site

July 13, 2021
3 min read

It happens all too often: a person is shopping on your site. They’ve picked out a product or two, added them to their cart, created an account, and might have even put in their credit card information, but all of a sudden just stopped. They don’t finish the purchase, never come back, and you don’t know what happened.

Does that scenario sound familiar for your eCommerce business? Do potential customers get cold feet at the last second and bail on your site? Here are some ways to identify potential problems and solutions to get more people to go through with that purchase:

Is There a Specific Page on Which They Leave?

Turn to your Google Analytics to start hunting for why people are leaving. Is there a specific page in the buying process that have an extremely high exit rate? That is a good place to start your investigation.

Analyze high-exit rate pages that customers leave your site after viewing prior to making a purchase and try to find what is pushing them away. Especially when it comes to giving up sensitive information like credit cards, smart consumers analyze everything on the page. Things that push people include: grammatical errors, strange formatting on the page, the page not loading properly, or being redirected to a new URL.

Run through the purchase process multiple times, in different browsers and devices. Something that works on a PC might not look or function correctly on a smartphone. If anything crops up that gives you a problem, fix it in hopes it won’t happen to other people in the future.

Building Trust

A major reason people might not go through with a purchase, especially if they aren’t on a site like Amazon or eBay, is trust. There are so many scams online that people are extremely cautious to give away any kind of information, especially financial information.

If any part of your site seems sketchy or scammy, people won’t trust it. This is particularly true once people get into the purchasing process. Purchasing pages need to match the branding of the rest of the site and provide a seamless experience.

It’s important to prove to customers that you are trustworthy. One major tool is showing them what kind of securities you utilize to protect their information. Many data and site security companies allow their clients to utilize a badge or their logo to signify that their website is secured by professionals. If you use a major security software, including these forms of security proof on pages where people surrender personal information can go a long way.

Another tactic to build trust is to include social proof from social media and other customers. This can include reviews of products, pictures of people buying/using your product, or testimonials of your business. Showing that other people trust your business and have had positive experiences with your product or service can build trust.

Ease of Purchase

People like when it’s easy to buy something. The more hoops a person has to jump through, the less likely they will go through with a purchase.

The basics to making a purchase easy is accepting all major forms of payment. That includes credit cards, PayPal, and even possibly Bitcoin. If you restrict what people can use to pay, you’ll lose customers the moment they find that out.

It’s also important to make it easy to sign up for an account and keep the shopping progress they’ve already done. Nothing is as frustrating as putting multiple things into a cart, signing up for an account and having to do all of that work again.

Following Up on Abandoned Carts

If somebody created an account with your site, then it’s likely you have their email. Clearly, they are interested in getting something if they created an account and potentially added something to a cart, but something happened.

Sometimes, life just gets in the way, or maybe they are waiting on a better deal. Either way, since you have a means to contact them, why not send them an email reminding them that they have items in a cart?

To start, a basic, “Hey, did you forget about this item?” email can do a lot to bring people back. Maybe they just got busy and all they require is a soft reminder. Then, if people don’t come back, you could go further and sweeten the deal. Offer things like free shipping, a small discount, freebies, or a free trial if they purchase what’s in their cart.

More Sales, Reliable Income

Developing tactics to convert people who have halted in the buying process needs to be something more eCommerce businesses take into consideration. A lot of the marketing focus is getting people to product pages and clicking the add to cart option, but not a lot after that.

Doing this can help secure your business’ cash flow and allow you to catch these “almost customers” before they are gone forever. It just requires some general improvements to the actual buying process on your site and staying on top of people with items in their carts.

Do you run an eCommerce site and have a problem with people leaving your site after putting items in a cart for purchase? What are you doing to try and improve it? Let us know in the comments below.

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Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is an international keynote speaker, author of "Mean People Suck" and "The Content Formula", and Founder of Marketing Insider Group. Recognized as a Top Content Marketing expert and Digital Marketing Leader, Michael leverages his experience from roles in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as his leadership in leading teams and driving growth for thriving startups. Today, Michael delivers empowering keynotes on marketing and leadership, and facilitates actionable workshops on content marketing strategy. Connect with Michael today.

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