The checkout process represents perhaps the most important step in your consumers purchase journey and in order to ensure that your customers complete this step, you need to tackle the issue of basket abandonment and use it as an opportunity for improving your overall customer experience.
According to a study by the Baymard Institute, the average online basket abandonment rate is as high as 68.63%, which suggests that a lot of online businesses are struggling with retaining their customers and getting them to complete their purchases. If you’re one of those businesses, then read below what you can do to reduce your basket abandonment rate considerably.
Step 1 – Avoid surprise costs
One of the main causes for basket abandonment is represented by surprise costs. Thus, you need to ensure that all your prices (including the delivery costs!) are visible early on for your customers to take into account before they reach the checkout stage. This way, they know exactly what they’re expected to pay.
Offering competitively priced products and showcasing these attractive prices can be the main reason why your customers choose your business in the first place, so if they go to the checkout and see extra costs, there’s a good chance that they’ll just move on to one of your competitors. If you want to go the extra mile, then you might even offer a special discount code or free delivery at the checkout stage, to give them yet another reason to buy from you.
Step 2 – Be mobile-friendly
As mobile devices continue to rise in popularity when it comes to online shopping, clever retailers need to take advantage of this medium and ensure that their websites, and especially the checkout page, are optimised for mobile. This way you can offer your customers a seamless buying process across all devices and avoid basket abandoners who might go away because of poor navigation on mobile.
Step 3 – Keep it quick and easy
Offering a time-efficient checkout process is crucial when it comes to keeping your customers and reducing the number of basket abandoners. If you’re checkout process is clunky and it requires filling in a lengthy form, a lot of people will not have the patience to spend the time to complete every step and just leave. Keep it short and sharp and if possible, try to add in a guest checkout option and aim to achieve registrations in different ways, not just at the checkout stage.
Whilst implementing these recommendations can help you reduce your basket abandonment rate, there are also ways in which you can try to bring back your basket abandoners and get them to complete their purchase journey. Email marketing is one way in which you can target your basket abandoners, whilst Paid Search can also be used to implement Remarketing campaigns that target this particular audience. By simply reminding them of your products or in some instances considering a carefully targeted discount code through remarketing, once you’ve improved your checkout process, you can look at tactics to bring them back to your website and turn those basket abandonments into successful sales.
If you want to learn more about what you can do to cut your basket abandonment rate and how you can make your basket abandoners convert, contact our conversion rate marketing specialists on 0116 326 1116.
