Earlier this week, Jon wrote about E-commerce R.O.I. and mentioned that 60% of users will abandon a shopping cart before finishing the checkout process.
I was one of them yesterday.
Let me explain — I received a catalog in the mail from a company called IDville.com, which sells employee identification tags and such. We’ve been contemplating enacting a security policy at our building where all visitors must sign in/out. So, I started the order process for a Visitor Log Book at IDville.
However, during the checkout process for this $17.95 item, I realized they wanted another $8.00 to ship the item to me. This made me change my mind and convinced me that I might be able to buy a similar item locally.
Now the important part of the story. IDville impressed me by sending the following email this morning:
As you can see, they noticed that I never completed the order yesterday. Since I had started the checkout process they had already captured my email. Instead of just forgetting about me and losing the sale, they then sent me an email with a link to “proceed to checkout now.”
This is very smart.
Not only did it remind me about their company, but it gave me yet another option to complete the transaction I had already started. If they can get just 20% of the people to come back and complete an order by using this method, it could mean an increase in revenue of 50% or more. Great idea.
Several years ago when I first started selling some software-on-a-cd, I manually emailed customers who had abandoned their carts, asking them if there were any problems when they ordered and offered them a small coupon to complete the order.
The results were very good: it helped me refine the checkout process based on their feedback and resulted in several sales that I would have otherwise lost.
The example you used here is a great example of customer service that easy to implement but often ignored by online business owners.
Good heaven…..
Neat article. I’m sure it’s not difficult to implement that technology. My guess is they recover at least 20% of their lost sales just because people are impressed with the follow up.rgzhjuop
Hi
it is a very nice and good post and I like it.