Frictionless Buying
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You’ve done the research and made the comparisons. You’ve selected the product and you’re fired up in anticipation of your purchase. Then, when you reach the store, the salesman tells you he has run out of order forms. I know how deflated you must be feeling for I had exactly this experience when I recently tried to buy a Tata Indicom Plug2Surf USB modem for my notebook PC last week.
A few days ago, I was trying to order a new battery for the inverter at my home (for the uninitiated, an inverter is a UPS-like device that supplies standby power to electrical appliances when the mains are off). My two calls to the supplier’s salesperson did not suffice. I had to call up its owner before I got a response.
Having been in sales and marketing for much of my career, I’m shocked to find salespersons who are indifferent to business handed over to them virtually on a silver platter.
Around two weeks ago, I wanted to send out an email to inform all my contacts about the launch of GTM360, and I decided to subscribe to some email marketing service. I handily located one called Benchmark Email and took up their offer for a free one-month trial subscription. Even though their website clearly stated that my trial permitted me to send 250 emails, I kept getting a message that I could add only 50 email addresses to a list. When I called them for help, I was told by an extremely rude customer support executive that this limit applied only to the trial subscription to prevent spamming. Though this made no sense, I had no choice but to copy the same text five times over and create five lists of fewer than 50 emails each in order to reach out to around 240 contacts. Every time I edited something, I had to repeat it four more times. Then, thanks to a massive bungle at their side which they flatly refused to admit to, I was told to upgrade to a paid subscription if I wanted my 240-odd emails sent out. Not one of the best of ways to acquire new customers, I remarked to myself, but I let it pass. But, even after taking up a paid plan, I noticed that the 50 email limit continued to apply, contrary to what I was told before. When I called them again, the same customer support executive now told me a different story, namely that I should use another method of uploading emails to sidestep this constraint, though there was no mention of this on the website. Turned out that even the trial subscription permitted this alternative method, so my efforts of doing everything five times could have been avoided if only they’d advised me correctly at the time.
Hope you’re getting my drift. Let me just give one more example.
After reading about Mom’s Kitchen, a lunch / dinner delivery service in Pune, which is the city in India where I live, I was keen on trying it out. Their website conveniently offered a free trial. When I landed on that page, instead of converting my lead to a deal, it completely put me off with an inane and unfriendly registration-required message. I gave up right then and sent out a friendly email to the owners of the company giving them suggestions on how they can coax the required information from their visitors and convert them to customers without making them abandon their transaction. I especially like the way websites like FixYa and ClearTrip do this.
These are all examples of friction in the buying process. I braved the friction and completed my purchase in three out of the four cases above. In other words, I demonstrated a 25% “abandonment” rate.
However, web-based businesses may not be so lucky with their average visitor profile.
According to SeeWhy, a leading abandonment tracking firm, “website abandonment is a persistent problem affecting every website, losing you valuable opportunities. Up to 70% of shopping carts, registrations, quotes and online forms are abandoned before they complete.” (italics mine)
When faced with such data, I’ve noticed two types of responses from e-tailers, B2B marketers and other website owners.
Some of them immediately realize how badly abandonment affects their revenues and brand image, and want to do something to reduce it.
Others hide their head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. If they fail in discounting the abandonment data completely, they tend to dismiss visitors to their websites as not being Internet-savvy enough to buy online. Well, with such a condescending view, one wonders for whom they created their websites in the first place. Did they expect their company’s techies, webmasters and web designers to generate enough transaction volumes for their businesses?
While security concerns, freight costs and unstable websites have traditionally been seen as the culprits, the above examples show that there are many other sources of friction in a buying process. Some of them are admittedly related to human aspects. But, to overcome many others and provide a frictionless buying experience, web-based companies can implement registration-free websites, focused landing pages and microsites, abandonment re-marketing and other next generation solutions in order to drastically reduce website abandonment and significantly boost conversion rates from leads to deals.
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