We started talking about how disruptive cart abandonment is for merchants but there is a much broader issue. Site-wide abandonments occurs across the customer journey, it’s not just about cart abandonment. You will see improved results if you look at all the user activity from the landing page through search and browsing up to the user purchasing. If you focus on the journey and where users can abandon you will be able to start fighting abandonments head on.
Let’s look at the retail experience until e-commerce came on the scene to see the experience users should be having and how we can combat site-wide abandonments
A customer goes into a store, interested in buying something, they see a product they like and they go to take a look. As they start looking at the product a salesperson sees they’re interested and asks if they need help. The customer has some questions about the product and the sales person provides clear answers. The customer’s interest grows so they carry on looking, they’re not sure how the product works but the sales person is able to demonstrate how these features work easily. Impressed, they go to pay after a pain-free, interesting and engaging conversation.
Your e-commerce store needs to create a similar personal environment
When a user comes to a store, they’re met with a selection of different products most of them irrelevant, and from the start that personal touch is lost. They’re looking at a product but they don’t have enough information to decide. The visitor wants to form an opinion so they look for more information but they don’t find the supporting content. The user doesn’t feel comfortable about their choice. It’s really frustrating. They want to leave but they decide to give it one more try and look for the customer services section. Between content on the page and customer services, the visitor can’t get the information they need. They really wanted to buy the product, because of the doubts about their selected product they abandon the product and look somewhere else. We lost them on user experience and easy to fix elements.
Let’s start at the beginning and see what it takes to create that amazing experience and combat abandonments.
ENGAGEMENT
Posting information in the right locations, in an easy-to-use format can be the beginning of the really valuable engagement and great experience that you’re looking to provide. You will then see a reduction in abandonments.
Jeff Bezos said: “We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
HOW ARE THEY MAKING A DECISION
How are users making decisions today? Most decisions your customer are making are happening online, using content in various forms to arrive at a decision. That decision process and the customer journey is made up of a lot of different types of content which users consume at a lightning speed. Recently Google indicated that people use 12 pieces of content to come to a decision. Written content, pictures and video and the most used mediums to convey an engaging and interesting message and you can mix and match to great effect. User-generated content like reviews and discussion groups on Facebook and LinkedIn can increase engagement and move users along towards shopping on a site. You need to be fired on all cylinders to provide the abundance of content to your audience and be present on all those platforms that shape your customers’ decision.
THE JOURNEY OF AN INDEPENDENT CONSUMER
Social media along with the ability to share and hear feedback from friends quickly and easily have created an extremely independent consumer. They have high expectation and you need deliver on those initial expectations with your content. Delivering valuable data will make the impact you’re looking for as they browse online. They enjoy being in control and respond (eventually) via the content when it suits them, they’re the one deciding what their journey should look like. Their journey could end after a great engaging product picture that sends them straight to a site to purchase or their journey could last days as they view, research and discuss everything about your product before they decide to visit your site.You can attempt to shape their journey with links to products on your site with a great offer or to additional content on other platforms but there is no guarantee it will influence their journey.
Media platforms have excelled at presenting and delivering the content to your customers. A lot of your content will also end up on your own site, so you need to make sure how it’s presented and if it’s easy to read and share.
ENGAGEMENT .V. ABANDONMENTS
Is the content you’re putting on Social Media and on your own website increasing engagement? Are your audience and potential customers engaged at all? What is important is, as they move freely from one piece to another that they don’t miss the call to actions similar to missing the bright flashing arrows pointing to your products. There is nothing worse than creating an environment where they remain at the engagement stage and not heading on to convert at the checkout. You should view traffic and engagement from a conversion point of view because you can celebrate great traffic and content but if it doesn’t combat abandonments by increasing engagement then you need to rethink what you’re doing.
WEBSITE DESIGN
Once potential customers come to y the ur site to start shopping you want the user experience (UX) to be amazing that will keep them engaged, lead them to purchase and check out and away from any type of abandonment.You should check how your customers respond to your website. You need to think in terms of clicks or interaction and mental effort that’s needed before users find what they are looking for and move to check out. You want to minimize the number of interactions and make sure that clicking and scrolling is kept to a minimum. The more clicks, scrolls and typing they need to do can increase the likelihood of your users abandoning. The mental effort involved in finding what you want can become too much, quickly. It’s related to how each page is designed and arranged can keep that effort to a minimum
Your website is never finished. Sounds a bit cliche buts its true. You should always check how your customers respond to your website. You need to think in terms of clicks or interaction and mental effort that’s needed before your users find what they are looking for and move to check out. You want to minimize the number of interactions and make sure that clicking and scrolling are kept to a minimum. The more clicks, scrolls, and typing can increase the mental effort your visitors will experience and increase the possibility of them abandoning the site.
WHITE SPACE
White space incorporated as part of the page design is very effective in creating the illusion of space. If you keep that in mind you can position amazing pictures, simple explanations and supporting information in a way that promotes browsing and a reduction in abandonments.
INCORPORATE ADDITIONAL CONTENT
Content in its various forms is so important to the decision process, it’s vital that linked content is featured as part of the page’s design. The content on the page connects the journey and reminds your visitors why they came to the page.
EASY NAVIGATION
Visitors to a site should always know where they are on a site at any point during browsing designing pages with navigation in mind will help them find what they are looking for quickly and reduce the possibility of an abandonment. Product pages should show buttons decision options clearly. So you can go to check out or back to another part of the website with ease.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
There is no doubt that customer support in various forms needs to be developed not just to provide the answers but to transform the online retail experience to become more personal and ensure that users have all the information they need. Making 1000% certain they have the support they need will lower abandonment rates on the product page and increase sales.
You can see from the design below that attempting to display everything on the landing page doesn’t catch anyone’s eye its just confuses and irritates visitors and will definitely cause an increase abandonments.
Here, Nike does a fantastic job of laying out an engaging product page that incorporates all the content necessary to sell the shoes without the page being unorganized.
Personalization
Personalization on your site develops what content is displayed the same way enhancing the design of your website will improve how content is displayed. Cookie-cutter stores are popping up everywhere but without personalization, the site will show the same products to everyone visiting even if they’re not interested. A boring impersonal user experience is likely to cause abandonments and all that engagement is lost if they see irrelevant products. Originally these options weren’t available and technology was limited. Now, solutions use visitor data to change the products that are displayed to only show products that are relevant and interesting to a customer. Displaying relevant products develops engagement and decreases the possibility of a browser abandonment. Activating personalization on your store won’t just deliver a user experience all your customers are searching for, it will also allow you to beat those simple websites competing for sales.
Omnichannel
Your audience wants a unified message across all platforms, so content selling a dress should be same across all platforms and browsing experience between desktop and mobile. Shopping now is not occurring at one store, it’s an experience that transcends any one medium or platform. The impact of a well developed omnichannel experience across the various platforms can preserve customer engagement, promotes conversions and decrease abandonments. Viewing each platform as a part of a whole e-commerce experience will allow you to increase conversions and reduce revenue loss from unnecessary miscommunication.
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