You’ve done the research and made the comparisons. You’ve selected your product and you’re all fired up in anticipation of your purchase. Then, you reach the store and the salesman tells you they have run out of order forms.
I know how deflated you must be feeling. I had this experience when I recently tried to buy a Tata Indicom Plug2Surf USB modem for my laptop 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 power is 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 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 showed a 25% “abandonment” rate.
However, web-based businesses are not so lucky with their average visitor profile and suffer higher abandonment rates.
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 three types of responses from e-tailers, B2B marketers and other website owners.
- They immediately realize how badly abandonment affects their revenues and brand image, and want to do something to reduce it.
- They bury their head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich and discount the abandonment data altogether.
- They say their visitors are not tech-savvy enough to buy online. With that condescending attitude, I wonder whom they created their online stores in the first place. Did they really expect to be able to survive on the basis of captive orders placed by their techies, webmasters and web designers?
Friction has traditionally been attributed to security, freight costs, and unstable websites. However, as the aforementioned examples clearly show, internal factors play an equally important role in creating abandonment and low conversions. To overcome friction and boost sales, etailers and other online companies can implement a slew of Conversion Rate Optimization techniques such as guest registrations, microsites, remarketing, and so on.