Have you ever ordered something online, and not got confirmation straight away?
Happens every now and then, but my mind always jumps to “have I just been scammed” when it is a new business I have never dealt with before. Regardless of whether I get that product in time and the quality is great, there is still a niggling doubt that can stop any future orders.
Most businesses we speak to aren’t nationally established businesses, and to many people completely unknown. Our job is to get them seen by new people that may be interested in their services and products, but that can be made difficult when the first impression is poor.
It’s a cliché, but you get one chance for a first impression.
Subconsciously, most people look for a reason to not buy something or not use a service. It’s the aversion to spending money that is engrained in most people that prompts this, but at that initial step it is higher than ever. The customer has yet to be convinced to buy from you, so first impressions really count.
More importantly, that first impression can then prevent them responding to any future marketing which is a critical part of any retargeting campaign.
This can be anything, from a slow, unresponsive website, a difficult buying experience, delays in replying to communication, or walking into a storefront that is dirty and has rude staff. All of this is important, but critically it is really tough to see where you are losing customers. You can ask the ones that become customers, but you aren’t in the mind of those you lost, and won’t know every time that happens. Hell, I’d say you probably don’t know about 90% of your lost customers.
What to do about it?
Feedback is useful, getting people going through as secret shoppers is a great way to find holes in your process and go some way to plugging them. And as many of them as possible is better, because one demographic might find something a lot easier than another. As a generalisation, older people struggle more with technology, but are also more patient going through a buying process, whereas younger customers will have an expectation of speed and convenience (Apple and Google Pay are great examples of this).
Vitally, constantly revisiting the process as things change will help. The online landscape is changing all the time, and developing, and you only need to miss something for a small amount of time to be well behind your competition.
Finally, if there is something lowering your conversion rates, find time to fix it. People think that taking a conversion rate from 0.5% to 1% would be a small change because it looks like it would be, so the priority to change it is usually not as high as it should be. But going from 0.5% to 1% will literally double your online revenue. If that isn’t worth your time, I genuinely don’t know what is.