If your blog promotions are boosting traffic to your e-commerce site and your podcast marketing is producing the subscribers you were anticipating, why aren’t all those customers who are - according to your analytics - engaged in and using your content, adding to your bottom line? It would be comparable to your brick and mortar store always having aisles full of browsing customers who, somehow, never make it to your cash register.

Online this is known as shopping cart abandonment and it’s going to take some work on your part to determine why it is happening.

“Shopping cart abandonment is a reality of today’s e-commerce. It is a concept that denominates the ratio between the number of people who go through all the steps of online purchasing and the number of the prospects who leave the e-tailers’ sites at some point, without checking out. Sadly, the abandonment rate, as shown by many specialists in the field, is somewhere close to 60%.”

It might seem a silly question, but have you shopped your own site? If not, do a little role playing and become your own customer. Whatever frustrates or irritates you will, more than likely, have irritated your customer.

One of the complaints you hear most frequently usually concerns the registration process. You can’t ask for too much, too soon. In fact, you need not ask for registration at all.

“Many e-tailers lose at this game because they make their customers register before allowing them to place an order. Try to use the information they enter during the ordering process to register them. They don’t even have to know it until the end, when they’ll be prompted to enter an e-mail address and a password.
You can even allow them to make purchases without registering, but do point out the benefits of spending some time to register: order tracking, personalized notifications for special discounts or preferred products, incentives, etc.”
(Source)

Other considerations are a consistent theme for your format, no distractions or attempts to sell “one more thing”, make it evident what step they are on in the purchase process, and have your contact info easy to find.

Tags: blog-promotions, bottom_line, brick_and_mortar, podcast-marketing, shopping_cart-abandonment

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Blog Promotion, Content Promotion Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.