Yet, despite the increasing traffic online, 74% of small businesses still don’t have an ecommerce site. Of the businesses that do, very few have a streamlined checkout process and order pages that steadily convert.

If you are ready to take the leap and make ecommerce a part of your business strategy, there are several best practices you’ll want to consider before you get started. We’ve compiled a list of five proven strategies that successful small businesses and entrepreneurs utilize to optimize sales processes online so you can successfully begin converting more leads into customers. 

1. Offer a guarantee 

One of the easiest ways to mitigate your customers’ biggest fears about buying your product is to address them with a guarantee right on your sales and order pages.

The goal is to promise your customers something that will take away their excuse not to buy right at that moment. Quell their fears by promising to make it right should you fail to deliver on your promise. For example: “If you don’t absolutely love our product, we’ll give you a full refund – 100% money back guaranteed.” Trust is essential in this exchange; ensuring it in your order pages will go a long way.

2. Provide reviews

Customer product reviews are some of the most impactful elements you can include on an ecommerce product page. Not only do reviews show that your product is legit and that customers find value in your product, but they act as powerful social validators that have a direct impact on the amount of sales you make.

In fact, 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Reviews have become an integral part of an online shopper’s experience, so much that it might come across as sketchy if your website doesn’t include any.

The North Face provides a great example of incorporating customer reviews on their product pages. They provide the ratings in two places — right underneath the product in the form of a star rating and then more in depth reviews as customers visit the individual product page.

3. Include social proof 

Similar to product reviews, social proof is both highly effective and necessary. Social proof is another way to build your online reputation and convince your customers to purchase. It can take multiple forms, including:

• Media logos: Recognizable media outlets that have featured your product
• Trust seals and certifications: Security certifications and authorizations
• Testimonials:  Positive remarks from people who have already purchased your product
• Social sharing: Icons that make it easy for customers to share your product and see who has shared it in the past
• Privacy policy and terms and conditions: Create credibility for your site
• Influencer reviews: A quote from or link to video reviewers and journalists who have given your product a run through

Pro tip: Generate your own privacy policy for free here.

4. Be mobile responsive 

Being mobile-responsive is essential. Mobile purchases account for over 40% of ecommerce transactions in 2019, and by 2021, mobile purchases are expected to comprise 54% of all U.S. retail ecommerce.  While you might design your ecommerce website with a desktop or laptop in mind, it’s important to optimize it for mobile as well.

An alarming 84% of users have experienced difficulties completing a mobile transaction, so streamlining your mobile experience is an important way to win over customers. Most web page builders, such as Ontraport Pages, make it easy by automatically generating fully responsive mobile pages.

An easy way to test your web page’s mobile responsiveness is to simply toggle on the mobile view on the top right corner of the screen inside of Ontraport Pages.

5. Have a streamlined checkout process 

With the litany of web pages and products that are on the internet, consumers have the option to be extraordinarily picky. If your business has a confusing or cluttered checkout process, your customers can easily move on to a different page or even a different business.

Simplify the order process as much as possible: Reduce the number of steps customers need to take; minimize the questions or information you’re asking of your visitors, and test your order pages thoroughly before you push them live.

Use these guidelines to ensure your user checkout experience is intuitive and easy:

• Use as few form fields as possible: The more you ask of your leads, the more you risk them not converting into customers. Stick to the required form fields such as name, email, credit card and shipping address. Include only what you need to get your product to your customers.
• Keep it free of clutter: Make sure your order page is void of outbound links or unnecessary copy that will distract them from completing their purchases.
• Provide clarity: Consider the questions your customers will potentially have during check out, and answer them.
• Offer great customer service: Provide the phone number or email for your customers to contact you if they have questions.
• Avoid surprises: Make sure you’ve communicated clearly throughout the sales process and that your promises are confirmed on the order page to avoid last-minute cart abandonment.

The post Five Steps to Creating High-Converting Order Pages appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

It’s a simple example but one that can be applied to any business. Speaking to people as specifically as possible based on their interests is what’s going to capture and keep their attention. In today’s crowded market, one-size-fits-all messaging that aims to be “everything to everyone” simply doesn’t cut it. In fact, a study by Accenture revealed that 91% of consumers would rather do business with brands that make their shopping experience more relevant.

There are a few proven ways you can split up your market that will allow you to stay relevant with your audience, and it starts with understanding your audience’s core needs and how your business solves them. Once you’ve determined your segments, you can use Ontraport to automatically place people who come into contact with your business on the campaign that best fits them so they receive a personalized experience.

Why you shouldn’t segment by persona

Many marketers develop “avatars” — imaginary characters created based on the common demographics, behavior patterns and goals of a company’s ideal customers — and use those avatars as the basis of their segmentation. 

Businesses determine a few avatars that encompass the varying types of customers they serve. For example, a dentist might have an avatar named Lisa, a 40-year-old middle-class soccer mom who is always on the go, lives in the suburbs, and cares about getting her kids’ teeth checked every six months. The dentist might also have an avatar named Taylor, a 30-year-old single female professional who is self-conscious about her smile, as well as an avatar of an 18-year-old who wants to get his or her teeth straightened before heading off to college.

Marketers often use these avatars as the foundation for their outreach — tailoring messaging and entire campaigns around which persona they’re aiming to reach. Sales teams often categorize their leads by avatar after their first phone conversation and determine their follow-up based on it.

This kind of segmentation can be helpful; having real-life personalities to pretend you’re speaking to can help teams narrow their focus and better serve their audiences, but it doesn’t quite go deep enough. What about the 30-year-old male professional who’s self-conscious about his smile? Or the 40-year-old woman who never could afford braces and now wants them? Or the 60-year-old man whose teeth have become yellow from smoking and wants to whiten his teeth?

The point is, their age, gender, occupation, marital status and other demographic information doesn’t quite matter; what everyone who comes to your business has in common is a specific interest or need — a pain point — that you can solve. 

Those pain points are how you can and should segment your audience. In the case of the dentist, he’d have a segment for those interested in teeth whitening, a segment for those interested in teeth straightening, and a segment for those simply wanting a reliable check-up every six months. 

“Talk to leads about their problems, and make a compelling argument for how you’re going to improve their life,” Ontraport CEO Landon Ray said. 

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. If you can show prospects that you’re able and willing to solve their problems, that’s far more compelling than speaking to them as if they fit into a specific stereotype that you’ve created.

The better route: segmenting by pain point

The first step to segmenting based on pain points is to step back and consider the true outcomes your customers experience from each of your products or services. What problem are you solving for them, and how are you making their lives better? What are their goals with each product or service?

It’s important to get specific. You may solve similar problems across a variety of products, and it would be tempting to bunch many products under one pain point, but going a level deeper will garner better results. 

Going back to the example of the dentist, even though many people in his audience experience the pain point of feeling self-conscious about their smile, the source of their self-consciousness is different for each. The teeth whitening group doesn’t like their yellow teeth, while the other group doesn’t want crooked teeth. Although the dentist could kill two birds with one stone by speaking to both audiences about improving their smile, he’d have a much better chance of resonating with people if he separated them. His messaging, images, offers and positioning would all be precisely related to what the people in each audience can relate to — the first step in building a relationship with a new prospect.

In the case of the dentist as well as with many other businesses, often the easiest way to find your segments is to align them with the products you offer — your products become your segments.

Putting your segments to work

Once you’ve determined your segments based on pain points you solve or products you offer, you can incorporate them into your marketing strategy by creating campaigns for each one. 

Every asset within each campaign will be tailored to that segment: Your ads that draw them to your opt-in pages, the content and offers on your opt-in pages, the offer email sequences you send, the sales pages where you encourage them to purchase, the follow-up upsell offers you send, and even the referral requests you make will all be written, designed, and positioned in a way that speaks directly to the interests of that segment only.

Remember, it doesn’t matter that you also offer numerous other products — this audience only cares about one of them, and your chances of selling that one product to them is much better if you hyperfocus on it. Once you resolve the pain point they came to you with, you can introduce them to other, related products and services.

Filling your segments with the right contacts

Splitting up your leads based on their problems is a great way to enhance your customer relationships, but how do you know which segment each contact belongs in? 

You can make sure contacts get added to the appropriate campaign for their specific interests early on with a variety of forms and tracked custom URLs that capture information. Because the information from your forms and custom URLs sync with your CRM database, and the information in your CRM is what triggers automated follow-up, these tools are your conduit to segmenting your customers and placing them on the right automated customer journey.

Collecting the exact data you need is easier than ever with custom form fields and UTM variables. With CRMs such as Ontraport, you have the flexibility to create your own fields which can then be used as a tool for segmenting your contact list. Likewise, custom tracked URLs allow you to segment site viewers by a variety of behaviors and interests that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

Here are just six examples of how you can gather valuable information about your leads from the start, depending on the strategies you use during the attract and convert stages of your campaigns so that you can segment them appropriately.

1. UTMs on ads

When leads click on your ads, you can learn a lot about them: what overall topic they’re interested in, the platform they clicked on your ad from, which ad within your campaign piqued their interest, and more. Including UTM variables at the end of the URLs in your ads allows you to capture that information so that you can continue targeting these new leads with the most relevant info and offers.

For example, a catering company might handle weddings, business events and birthday celebrations. To account for the differences between each type of customer, the caterer might create separate campaigns for each and segment his new leads by campaign — one of the many variables in the UTM. This way, anyone who clicks on a link with a UTM variable corresponding to the weddings campaign would become part of the weddings segment for retargeting. 

The catering company could also create segments based on leads who came in from a particular platform or who viewed a particular article, both of which are also variables detectable by UTMs. All you need to do is make sure every ad you launch has a UTM at the end of its linked URL.

2. Blog visit category

If you’re like many modern business owners, you’ve likely spent time creating free blog content to attract leads to your brand. As a veterinarian might cater separately to cat, dog and bird owners, your blog is probably broken into categories based on your company’s different products or services.

When leads click on an article in one of your categories, it tells you important information about them: They’re interested enough in that topic to read an article about it. You can segment unknown leads based on the category of the page they visit and retarget them with related content, similar to how you would with the UTM information from ad clicks.

Another way to segment based on blog visits is to use a pop-up form that displays after the visitor has been viewing an article for a certain period of time. The form might be an offer to opt in for your weekly email newsletter or a free guide on the topic. Once the visitor submits the form, the information creates a new contact record in your CRM with an automatic tag denoting the person’s category interest. Using the vet example, a reader who fills out a pop-up form while reading an article about cats will be tagged with an interest in cats. The tag and form fill-out serve as the trigger for the lead to be added to the corresponding campaign and onto the automated follow-up path you’ve created.

3. Landing page visits using wildcard tracking

Beyond segmenting based on blog page visit, you can segment based on any landing page visit using wildcard characters and rules in Ontraport. A wildcard character is simply a character such as an asterisk (*) that you add to a URL to capture all visits to any subdomain related to the URL. 

For example, if a used car dealership segments customers based on which car brand they’re interested in, they could set up a rule so that anyone visiting any of the company’s URLs including cardealer.com/honda/* are added to the Honda campaign and anyone visiting URLs with cardealer.com/audi/* are added to the Audi campaign, and so on. 

4. Qualifying question on opt-in form

When leads fill out an opt-in form to access your gated content, consultations, webinars and more, you gain important information about their interests depending on which page they’re on. However, you can hone in on their exact interests or problems using a qualifying question.

Qualifying questions are usually framed around the biggest challenge leads are trying to solve. A physical therapist, for example, might make her question, “What are you trying to treat?” The drop-down answers could include back/neck pain, muscle strains, sciatica, knee or ankle sprains, and overuse injuries. By gathering this qualifying information about potential patients, the physical therapist can accurately segment new leads and send them relevant offers.

The same can be applied in your business. All you have to do is come up with a question and answers that would effectively match up with your segments, and create a drop-down field in your opt-in page for them. Leads’ selection and form submission triggers them being added to the appropriate campaign.

5. Internal forms for sales and customer service teams

If you have a live sales team who does phone or video consultations with clients, much of the information they learn about leads is discovered “offline.” Rather than asking your prospects to fill out a webform repeating the same information they just told you verbally, your sales team can recap the call using internal forms you create in Ontraport.

Once your reps enter the information from the call, it automatically updates that contact’s record in your CRM (or creates a record if one doesn’t exist yet). For example, let’s say a car salesperson just got off the phone with a lead. This particular lead stated on the phone that he is interested in buying a brand new car. He wants to keep the price under $40,000; it needs to be a black or white SUV, and he is available next week to see the top candidates in person. 

From there, the salesperson can fill out an internal form that has custom fields for the lead’s level of interest (cold, lukewarm, hot), new vs. used car, price range, specs about the car (make, model, color, etc.), and whether an invitation should be sent to the lead for a showing. This allows automation to be triggered based on data fields in the same way any form fill-out would. If the car dealership segments by new vs. used cars, the contact would be placed on the new car campaign. 

6. Referral source

Earning referral is a sure sign that you’ve found and impressed the right type of brand advocates for your target market. By giving each referrer unique referral IDs to add to links they share to promote your brand, you can determine the referrers each new lead came from and segment the leads accordingly. 

For example, the caterer might have multiple wedding planners who refer brides, multiple corporate event planners who refer companies, and multiple event planners who refer parents for kids’ birthdays. You could automatically add leads to the appropriate campaign — for wedding, corporate event, or birthday catering — based on the referral code associated with the link the lead came from. Anyone coming from the referral IDs matching your wedding planner partners would be added to the wedding catering campaign, for example.

Regardless of the strategy you use to place contacts into the right segments, you can rest assured that once they’re on the appropriate campaign, they’ll be sent on a dynamic path that continues to show that you understand their needs. After all, you wouldn’t send your cat-loving friend a 15-second clip of a sandy pup struggling to stay awake after a trip to the beach. Read the room, and your audience will feel much more understood by you, form a significantly stronger attraction to your products, and gain a higher level of trust in you than if you were to speak to them in a one-size-fits-all manner.

The post The Right Way to Segment Your List appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Every day more people worldwide gain internet access, and even those in the most seemingly remote areas are doing their shopping online. It should come as no surprise then, that ecommerce sales are predicted to be at $3.3 trillion this year, and $5.5 trillion in 2022.

Many small businesses have already claimed a stake in these high-potential overseas markets — and with an airtight entry plan, you can be among them. Whether you’re selling hand-crocheted winter beanies or one-on-one investment advice, if you’re a small business selling online, you’re sitting on a potential gold mine.

A word of caution, however: Catering to customers around the world brings with it a new set of hurdles to clear and strategies to master. In this post, we’ll go over the preliminary steps you’ll need to take to sell abroad.

First Local, Then Global

If you’re a relatively small (or one-person) operation, there’s good reason to limit your international marketing efforts to a few select countries at first. Not only will it allow you to really get a handle on your overseas markets, but it can help you establish a competitive pricing structure.

Start by conquering your home country or niche several months before. Work out the kinks in your customer experience, and allow ample time for gathering feedback. After that, following your market research (below), strategically focus your efforts on one country or region in which you’re projected to succeed, and scale as needed to meet the demand. Master selling to that market before moving on.

Find Your Global Market

Before launching a product or business abroad, do your homework. Conduct some market research into any country/region to which you wish to expand. Three important questions you’ll need to answer are:

1. Will my product appeal to citizens of that country/region?
2. Is there a hole in the market I’m able to fill?
3. What’s my competitive advantage in their economy?

Just as you’ve likely done your due diligence in gauging your local customers’ wants and needs, so must you acquaint yourself with your international customers — country by country. Avoid dumping time and resources into places where your product won’t resonate with people or could fail to catch on.

If you’ve noticed that customers abroad are already buying from you, do your best to figure out where the majority of your international sales hail from. Which country outside your homeland is buying up the bulk of your products worldwide? From there, do a quick risk assessment. Take into account cultural and economic standing as well as likelihood of fraud.

Finally, you’ll need to calculate and allocate a budget for marketing your products and services to your new international market segment.

Check out these resources to help you conduct international market research in an area you’re targeting.

1. U.S. Small Business Administration
2. TradePort

Consider Each Market’s Preferred Payment Method

Many business owners assume that all international online payments are handled via credit card as they are in North America, Australia or Canada, but the variance is far greater. For instance, 50% of Germans use bank transfers as their preferred payment method while China almost exclusively uses Alipay, an international online payment platform akin to PayPal.

When selling internationally, you’ll do well to offer a variety of payment options. Here are the preferred payment methods by country:

• UK: Debit card
• France: Debit card
• Germany: Online bank transfer
• Finland: Online bank transfer
• Netherlands: iDeal
• Portugal: Multibanco
• Russia: E-wallet
• Switzerland: Open invoice (RatePay)
• Belgium: Debit card
• Japan: Credit card
• China: Alipay
• South Korea: Korean credit cards
• Indonesia: ATM payments
• Mexico: Oxxo
• Malaysia: Online bank transfer

Consider this: If you were purchasing an international product, would you be less inclined to buy if your preferred payment method weren’t an option? Not only would it be inconvenient, but you’d question the security of your transaction. Instilling trust and comfort is a must when appealing to foreign customers. Checkout is the number one point at which international shoppers abandoned a purchase.

Keep Tabs on International Regulations

Perhaps the most arduous part of selling online is staying up to date on the latest trade regulations. International trade regulations may vary greatly from country to country, so once you’ve decided on a particular country to focus your efforts on, it’s important to do some digging on the following:

• Tariffs
• Duties and taxes
• Customs
• Free-trade agreements
• Banned products
• Customer privacy regulations

Check out the resources below to research accurate and up-to-date regulations that may affect doing business abroad.

• Department of Commerce (US)
• Canadian Chamber of Commerce (Canada)
• NSW Fair Trading (AUS)
  

TIP: If you’re a U.S.-based business, consider branching out to regions such as Central America. Free trade agreements such as the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) make international business safer and easier than ever.

Make Your Site International-Friendly

It may seem like a no-brainer, but to deliver a remarkable experience — the essence of any emerging business — you need to accommodate internationals on your website.

Allow your shoppers to browse your site in their native language or a language familiar to them. The more comfortable they are in their shopping experience, the more likely they are to buy from you.

Use localization services (below) to implement some important functionality into your website. Simply adding a language dropdown makes a world of difference. Be sure to choose one that not only auto-translates everything on your page, but one which converts date formats and addresses. The best services factor in cultural variations and currency.

Localization Services:

1. Rev
2. One Link
3. Acclaro

Another thing to keep in mind when making your site international-friendly is cultural nuances and differences. Being aware can help you to avoid any taboos or faux pas in your website copy and imagery. 

Every facet of your global site must be focused on making your customers’ experience as simple and pleasurable as possible. 

Procure a Global Payment Gateway and Support International Currency

If you’re going to take payments from international customers, you need a global payment gateway.

Designed for handling high-volume sales, payment gateways are cost-effective solutions designed to handle all international purchases and the majority of world currencies. Most integrate easily with any CRM or ecommerce platform. They also offer safeguards against fraud and purchase disputes.

Here are some common gateways:

• Authorize.net
• Stripe
• 2Checkout

Allowing customers from different countries to pay in their native currency makes it more convenient for them and, therefore, makes them more likely to purchase because they don’t need to do the math or research the current exchange rate. Thankfully, currency exchange can be handled completely by procuring a global payment gateway.

Capitalize on Global Marketing Opportunities

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two biggest North American shopping days of the year. What if you weren’t limited to those two national holidays for a spike in sales?

Branching out to an international market opens up tremendous holiday sales opportunities for your business. In India for instance, Diwali trumps all other shopping days. The Hindu celebration draws millions in sales of jewelry, electronics, and confectionery every year. Meanwhile Singles Day in China — a celebration of being single and spoiling oneself for the day — continues to break annual sales records each year in electronics and consumer goods. China-based Alibaba netted $5.99 million in sales in 2017 as a result of smart marketing.

Familiarizing yourself with the markets in the countries you’re targeting will serve your bottom line well.

Sort Out International Shipping (If Selling Physical Goods)

For businesses selling physical products (as opposed to digital products), you’ll want to investigate the cost, speed and reliability of shipping services to any countries or regions you’re targeting.

For a list of reliable international carriers to choose from, as well as their rates, visit this page. A shipping calculator such as this will help you estimate your shipping costs to any given country.

As an international vendor you must set clear delivery expectations. Keep in mind the shipping duration for international packages is longer, and list delivery estimates on your website to avoid customer confusion.

Above all else, be sure that your profit margin from selling abroad covers your “landed cost.” That’s the total cost it will take for your product to reach its final destination: the customer’s doorstep.

The post Expand Your Local Business by Selling Internationally appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

According to Statista, 74.2% of online orders are abandoned —meaning potential customers are adding your product to their shopping cart but not completing the purchase. Marketing Land estimates that companies lose $18 billion in yearly revenue to cart abandonment, contributing to over $4 trillion in unpurchased merchandise in a single year.

All the while, subscription businesses and recurring payments risk losing over 7% of subscribers every month due to credit card declines and failed payments. Imagine you have $5,000 of recurring monthly revenue. Keeping in mind the average credit card decline rate, you can estimate $850 of that revenue has the potential to get declined. That brings your net monthly revenue down to $4,150, which is a large dent in your bottom line.

To combat these common forms of revenue loss, many ecommerce platforms such as Ontraport have built-in features and functionality that allow you to automatically manage declined credit cards, payment collections, subscription plans and abandoned shopping carts. Following these strategies will help you not only prevent, but recapture that loss of revenue.

Automating Your Credit Card Decline Process

Because declined credit cards for payment plans or subscription products are a common occurrence, having to deal with each one manually is realistically out of the question. Rather than chasing down people whose payments failed, you can streamline your follow-up through automation. This will save you time and will allow you to collect revenue for payments that would otherwise go unpaid.

In Ontraport, you can automate your credit card decline process through Recharge Settings which allow you to manage when and how often attempts will be made to rerun a declined customer’s card. You can specify (in days) how often you would like to attempt recharging a card for a previously failed transaction.

For example, you could specify that you want Ontraport to retry your client’s credit cards every three days for a total of 90 days. At the end of this recharge cycle, the item’s payment status would automatically be changed to “Write Off” in accordance with standard accounting principles.

Within that 90-day recharge period, you could further automate your correspondence reminding the customers to update their card information using emails, SMS messages, or even Task prompts to give them a phone call — all triggered from the moment their credit card is declined.

If that 90-day recharge period passes without any action on your clients’ part to update their credit card information, you can also automate the process of removing their access to your product. If you have a WordPress membership site, you can use Ontraport to automatically assign or remove access to certain levels of your site or revoke site access entirely. Set the lockout triggers for whatever time frame fits your business model. Whether that  goes into effect right when your customers’ payment declines the first time or at the end of your recharge period, Ontraport gives you the flexibility to choose.

To add a pre-built subscription expiration campaign to your Ontraport account now, search “Membership Site: Remove Access When Subscription Is Declined” in the Marketplace.

Preventing Credit Card Decline

As a rule of thumb, it’s easier to capture funds from a customer who has already purchased from you before. According to Small Business Trends, the success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%. So using automation to prevent declined payments for the cards that you know are about to expire can save you a lot of potential lost revenue and increase your customer retention.

On a simple expired card prevention campaign, your customers can be pulled onto a campaign 30 days before their credit card is set to expire. Through a series of automated emails, SMS messages, or the correspondence of your choice, your customers will receive notification before their cards expire. This will give them plenty of notice and allow them to update their card information before it becomes a problem.

Ontraport provides a few different ways for your customers’ credit card information to be updated:

1. WordPress PilotPress Customer Center: If you have integrated your WordPress site with Ontraport’s PilotPress plugin, it’s very easy for your customers to update their credit card information via the Customer Center. You can add an email step to your expired card prevention campaign that merges their Customer Center login information and a URL to the login page. This allows them to update their information in one simple step.
2. Order Form: Depending on the payment gateway you have integrated with Ontraport, you can send your customers a “$0 transaction” order form to update their credit card information. You would simply create an order form with a $0 product named “Credit Authorization” and email the link as a step in your expired card prevention campaign. Your customers will be able to see that there will be no charge on the card, so there will be little resistance to filling it out.  
3. Manually: If your customers have multiple credit cards on file, you can manually select which card to charge. Simply visit their individual contact record and go to the Purchases tab. From there, select any active card associated with the account.

Recapturing Abandoned Carts

Cart abandons could be due to doubt, indecision, hidden costs, a slow website, distractions or a litany of other things. Regardless of the reason, assuming that they will return to your order page and complete the purchase on their own accord is a dangerous gamble. Most of those visitors are not going to return — that is unless you remind them to.

A cart abandonment campaign is a highly effective tactic that could help you recover up to 21% of those lost sales. Those who visit your order page are among the hottest leads you have, so a quick follow-up urging them to buy could mean a significant revenue increase for you.

In Ontraport, you can easily monitor your prospects’ activity on your order pages. Through automation, if you have contacts who visit your order page but don’t purchase, they will be triggered onto your cart abandonment campaign. From there, you can employ multiple tactics to nudge them towards a purchase, such as sending a series of automated emails that remind them that their product is still waiting for them.

Within those emails, you could also offer a personalized coupon code to make the buying decision easier or a downsell to a less expensive product. If you have a product that is at a high price point, you could try to sway them towards a purchase by offering a payment plan as opposed to paying in full. Setting up a payment plan is easy in Ontraport, as you can add multiple payment options to each product right on your order form.

The post Recover and Prevent Lost Online Revenue appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

With so many Americans shopping online, it’s hard to ignore the impact your ecommerce activity can have on your business’s success.

With competition increasing at an extreme rate and so many buying options at consumers’ fingertips, it’s crucial for your business to stand out from the rest. But how do you know what adjustments to make with your site to accomplish your sales goals?

Solid ecommerce strategies can help you reach a wider audience, define brand identity, and retain customers. To get there, you don’t just need to know which strategies will push you toward success — you also need to understand what mistakes you might be making that are holding you back. Factors such as product pricing, customer reviews, communication, trust, shipping prices, and customer engagement can be tricky to navigate, but they have the power to make or break your ecommerce conversions.

Here are five elements of ecommerce strategy to consider to encourage more clicks on the “buy” button:

1.  Pricing Your Product

Product pricing is tricky in ecommerce. You might assume that lower pricing on a sales page will always have a positive effect on conversions but, surprisingly, it can have the opposite effect.

While low pricing seems tempting, research shows that profitability increases with value-based pricing strategies and higher prices; low prices can actually have a negative impact on profit.

The big issue with low pricing is that it establishes your customers’ perception of the product’s value, so even a high-quality item will be seen as lower quality if it has a low price. For example, would you rather invest in a $15 pair of jeans or a $50 pair? Your customers want good quality and long-lasting products, so your pricing should reflect the value you want customers to perceive in your product while still keeping it affordable.

This effect is especially pronounced when selling products where the quality of the product is not immediately apparent. For example, with wine: Most wine aficionados would rather buy a $50 bottle of wine than a $10 bottle, even if they know nothing about the quality of either. This is because the price establishes their perception and expectation of the quality.

One of the best examples of how higher pricing can affect conversions is found in Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence. In it, he describes a scenario where a local jeweler accidentally doubled all her prices for turquoise jewelry. Although she had meant to discount the jewelry by 50% because it was not selling, her mistake actually resulted in her selling out of all turquoise jewelry. With the inflated price, her customers’ perceptions of the turquoise changed — they assumed it had a higher intrinsic value because of the higher price.

If you are hesitant to raise your prices, there’s no need to do it all at once. Run a split test on your sales page with a higher price for a single item and see what effect it has on conversions and your overall profitability. You might be pleasantly surprised to see demand increase, while enjoying a higher profit per item sold.

Do:

• Use your pricing to reflect good quality and long-lasting products.
• Try split tests on price increases to test conversions.
• Increase prices on products where the quality is not immediately apparent.

Don’t:

• Decrease prices and portray a cheap or low-quality product.
• Dramatically raise prices all at once.
• Lead customers to assume a product is of poor quality based on a low price.

2. Using Reviews Strategically

Product reviews play a key role in conversions. In fact, research shows that 90% of consumers read online reviews and 88% of them trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

So you might think it’s safe to assume that the more five-star reviews the better, right? Not so fast. Smart Insights posits that positive and negative reviews help a brand look more authentic. If potential customers see only five-star reviews on your product, they’re going to be suspicious. Customers know that it is nearly impossible to have a perfect product or service; therefore, it is actually better for a business to stay between a 4.2 to 4.5 rating. It’s also not uncommon for deceptive business owners to pay for fake product reviews that are overwhelmingly positive.

In fact, there is some evidence that a few polite, but negative, reviews can actually increase your prospects’ positive opinion of your product. The “blemishing effect” explains how when a customer receives small doses of mildly negative information, it can actually result in more positive feelings overall toward a product or service. Baba Shiv, professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says, “We find that as long as the negative information about a product is minor, your pitch [to a consumer] might be more persuasive when it calls attention to that negative, especially if consumers have already learned some positive things.”  It’s still important that this information is presented after positive information and that it is only mildly negative.

This strategy encourages customers to purchase from you, and it improves the reputation of your brand. Potential customers who glance over your reviews will see that you take the time to fix your mistakes promptly and effectively. This will lead them to view your brand as honest and reputable.

So, don’t remove or hide all negative reviews from your sales pages. Having some variance in the ratings that customers share can really increase your conversions. Encourage reviewers to share their honest opinions.

Do:

• Encourage customers to leave honest reviews of their experiences.
• Respond to negative reviews in a timely and considerate manner.
• Take advantage of the blemishing effect and let negative reviews show that you’re honest about your flaws.

Don’t:

• Limit your ratings to 5-star reviews and glowing recommendations.
• Hide negative reviews or allow customers to remain dissatisfied.
• Present any kind of negative response or fail to fix customers’ issues.

3. Keeping Your Customers in the Loop

Even if potential customers are ready to try your product, they might still be worried that they’ll be up the creek without a paddle if something goes wrong. What if you don’t follow through on delivering their order on time, it arrives in less-than-perfect condition, they need to exchange it, or they just don’t like it after giving it a try?

Leaving potential customers in the dark about what to expect if they need help can really limit your conversions, which is why it’s so important to add a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section to your site. In addition to boosting your sales conversions, an FAQ page can also reduce the volume of support requests since your customers will know where to look first. In fact, Zendesk found that 91% of customers say they would use a knowledge base (like an FAQ page) if it met their needs, rather than calling in for support.

To create your own FAQs, look through past support requests and questions from potential customers about the product, return policy, and shipping information.

Cody Ferrel, Ontraport’s director of Customer Support, offers some tips on finding the best questions to include in your FAQs: “If you can help it, don’t guess. Do a little bit of research ahead of time and create FAQs that are actually coming from your customers. It can be easy for us in customer service roles to guess what questions someone will have based on your experience, but guess what? It is very likely that you interact with your product in a different way, day in and day out.”

Adding product information that addresses FAQs can have a major impact on conversions. When your customers are unsure about your product or your policies and can’t find the answer, they are far more likely to give up and look elsewhere.

Do:

• Provide an FAQ page to keep your customers feeling in control.
• Include the most relevant and sought-after information in your FAQ page.
• Add product information that addresses FAQs.

Don’t:

• Allow your customers to feel lost due to a lack of information.
• Leave out common information that customers often look for.
• Make it difficult for customers to find answers.

4. Protecting Your Customers’ Data

Your customers are worried about having their identity stolen online or being duped into paying for a scam product. According to research by PWC, 92% of consumers feel that companies must be proactive about data protection and 85% will not do business with a company if they have concerns about its security practices.  The bottom line is, security matters to your customers, and you need to show them that it matters to you too.

One way to do this is by placing trust seals on your order pages to reassure customers that their information is safe with you. Trust seals matter to buyers more than professional design, personal recommendations or well-known branding, which is surprising. In fact, some surveys found that as many as 61% of participants said they had decided not to purchase a product because it was missing a trust seal.

A/B tests have also revealed that the simple addition of a trust seal can have a large impact on conversions. In one test, Blue Fountain Media was able to achieve a 42% increase in conversions just by adding a VeriSign seal to its form.

To get a trust seal for your ecommerce site, you’ll need to get an SSL certificate from a provider such as Norton or Verisign. According to a 2017 study, a whopping 94% of consumers consider protection against cybercrime (fraud, theft, forgery, etc.) and protection of data privacy to be very important to their online purchase decisions. With this in mind, the increase you’ll see in conversions after solidifying security on your site should be well worth the investment.

Do:

• Show your customers that their security matters to you.
• Place trust seals on your order pages so your customers feel secure.
• Invest in an SSL certificate.

Don’t:

• Leave your customers wondering if their private information is safe.
• Prioritize design, reputation or branding over security.
• Try to save money by bypassing the option to get a trust seal.

5. Negotiating Shipping Charges

Do you always charge for shipping? If so, you might want to reconsider that strategy. Free shipping and returns are incredibly important to online shoppers. Business Insider found that 88% of consumers say that they value free shipping over fast shipping, which gives you an idea of what to prioritize in your delivery process. If the peaked customer interest in free shipping isn’t enough to convince you, you may want to consider that a lack of free shipping may be hurting your sales as well. Baymard Institute found that 60% of respondents abandoned their cart at checkout due to extra costs such as shipping.

Although large online retailers like Nordstrom and Zappos have had success with free shipping, you may be wondering if it’s really viable for your business, especially if you’re considerably smaller.

Free shipping can be costly for your business if you aren’t careful, but there are many case studies which prove that it can increase not only your conversion rates, but also your overall profitability. Orders with free shipping encourage customers to buy more. One of the most successful free shipping strategies is Amazon’s booming Prime program. Amazon users with a Prime account spend an average of $1,400 each year on the platform, compared to the $700 average yearly spending of non-Prime members. While your success may not be as dramatic as the biggest ecommerce corporation around, you can still expect a significant sales increase after making the switch to free shipping. As long as you keep your shipping costs beneath your increased sales, you’re coming out on top.

The free shipping offer doesn’t have to apply to every order on your site to increase conversions. For instance, Leaders RPM created a strategic free shipping offer that has a checkout rate of 21.72%. On orders from $30-$50, they provide a free shipping code that is only valid for ten minutes, which creates a sense of urgency and drives customers to purchase right away. By limiting your free shipping to orders that meet a minimum threshold or only apply to specific products, you can boost your conversions and increase overall profitability without risking a big increase in shipping costs for low-profit orders.

If you do have to charge for shipping, be sure to let customers know upfront so they don’t receive a nasty surprise when they go to check out. Unexpected shipping charges at checkout is the number one reason customers abandon their purchases. To avoid losing potential conversions, it’s important to make sure you and your customers are on the same page.

Do:

• Provide free shipping where you can afford it.
• Limit your free shipping to orders that meet a minimum threshold or apply to specific products.
• Communicate with your customers about shipping cost expectations.

Don’t:

• Cling to shipping charges in fear of losing profit.
• Don’t: offer free shipping on items below a certain price threshold
• Surprise your customers with an unexpected shipping charge at checkout.

The post Boost Your Ecommerce Rates With These 5 Do’s and Don’ts appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Bridging the gap between your website and your customers’ wallets is something you want to get right the first time. The pitfalls of getting it wrong are too great, often causing lost revenue, angry customers or even having your income frozen (which always happens at the worst possible moment). If you make good decisions from the start, you’ll be able to deliver a smooth experience to your customers and maintain flexibility for future growth and promotional ideas.

In this article, we’re going to outline the players involved in taking payments online, the process of getting from credit card to bank deposit, and the specific things you should consider as you choose providers for this crucial part of your business.

The Players

Traditionally, taking payments online requires you to choose three providers who all work together to allow you to capture credit card information and get paid. Here’s what you need to know.

The Card Issuers

These are Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and all the debit card providers. Their job consists of either approving or denying the consumer’s attempted payments by checking his or her credit. If the consumer’s credit is approved, the card issuer will send the money to the merchant account that requested the charge. Then, they collect that money from the consumers via their monthly credit card bills or by deducting it from their bank accounts.

The Merchant Account

Merchant account providers are the banks that have direct relationships with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. Before a merchant is accepted by the bank for the processing of sales, the bank will verify the merchant’s credit worthiness. Because merchants are the ones who take the loss when there is fraud, they have to be careful who they give merchant accounts to. They are also the ones that get the money from the card issuers and deliver it to your bank account.

Merchant account providers are fundamentally responsible for any credit card fraud that happens.  If, for example, you charged a bunch of customers’ cards and never delivered the product, those customers are going to want their money back. You can expect them to call up their credit card issuers and “charge back” those fees. The issuers will then look to the merchant account provider to get that money back.

Because merchant account providers hate losing money, they take all sorts of precautionary measures to make sure that never happens. This includes running credit checks on you, making sure you’re a real business, looking at your website, holding back a portion of your revenue as a sort of insurance policy, and they can even withhold all your income if they get nervous about your activities. So, maintaining a good relationship with your merchant account provider is important. It’s also wise to have a backup plan in case things go south.

The Gateway

The gateway provider offers another service, which is mainly for your benefit as the seller. They take the card information from the checkout software provider (below) and send it over to the merchant account, get a response, and send that back to the checkout software provider. They also keep track of all your transaction history, so this is where you log in to get your accounting information. Often, the gateway provider syncs with Quickbooks or Xero or whatever accounting software you choose. In addition, they store your customers’ credit card information and can process future charges or refunds for you.

Alternatives to Merchant Accounts and Gateways

The credit card processing business is a big and lucrative one, so there are many options available on the market. Today, there is a relatively new breed of payment provider that is doing a good job solving some of the key frustrations that merchants have had with the traditional model: unexpected fees, complexity and onerous contracts. Providers like Stripe and Paypal have made accepting payments online easier for merchants by acting as both the merchant account provider and the gateway, while doing away with the monthly fees and long-term contracts that traditional providers have always required. In exchange for their service, though, their ‘flat-fee’ pricing isn’t the cheapest, and most sellers will find the traditional providers to be more cost effective when their monthly sales volume grows beyond $10k or $20k per month. Still, some merchants find the convenience to be worth it.

For most sellers, whatever you choose is going to work fine. If you sell “high risk” products or services (think: guns, porn, pills) or have an unusual business model (for example, spiky sales from running product launches) there are providers who specialize in serving you, so seek them out. For the rest of us, just about any provider of the above services will do.

The Checkout Software

Selecting a checkout software provider is a crucial decision that will make a big difference for you as a seller and for your customers who use this software to check out online.

The checkout software handles a lot for you: It creates the page on which customers enter their credit card information and check out. It helps calculate whatever taxes and shipping costs might be due so you charge the right amount. The checkout software is where you set up your products, set your pricing, and create offers such as a free trial. It lets you know when it’s time to deliver a product and often helps deliver it. It keeps track of what’s been sold, who is buying what, and even allows you to issue refunds when necessary.

But those are just the basics. Beyond that, there’s a wide variety of features and bells and whistles that vary based on the provider.

Some providers, like Shopify, help you create an entire website with a shopping cart and checkout process. Others, like Ontraport, make it easy to integrate checkout on your own site and allow you to offer free or paid trials, payment plans, manage discounts, short-term sales, coupon codes, one-click upsells and much more.

There are so many providers, and so many features on different systems, that making a decision on checkout software can be overwhelming. Adding to the challenge is that once you choose and get started with a provider, it can be really time consuming and expensive to switch to a different provider down the road if your business changes or you discover you need a feature that you don’t have. So, you really want to get this right the first time if possible.

To help you make the best decision, here is a checklist of things to consider as you compare checkout software providers:

1. Shopping Cart Vs. Order Forms

Some systems offer a checkout process like Amazon, where customers add multiple products to a cart and then check out when they’re ready. If you are an ecommerce store with a bunch of products, then this functionality is crucial. Shopify is hard to beat in this category, though there are many other options.

However, many businesses typically sell one product at a time: You simply choose a product and buy. If that’s how your business works, then you’ll be better served by skipping the complexity of the shopping cart which creates drag in the checkout process for your buyers. Instead, opt for a system which offers a simple order form for checkout.

2. Stay Flexible

You don’t always know what the future holds, but you want to be ready for it. As your business grows and your ecommerce skills advance, you will want to experiment with different strategies for increasing sales, and you don’t want your checkout software to limit your options. Even if you’re not going to use them today, look for features that enable subscription management, optional payment plans, paid and free trials, delayed billing, and coupon codes so you can offer discounts and special offers. Here’s what you need to know about each payment type:

• Subscription management: This allows you to offer a product with continuous recurring payments (per day, week, month, quarter or year). With subscription products, you can also delay billing.

• Optional payment plans: This option is great for products with a high price point — it allows you to break up one payment of $300, for example, to three payments of $100 per month.
• Paid and free trials: This gives customers the option to try your product with less (or no) risk by offering a trial period.
• Coupon codes: These offer your customers personal or group coupons to reward them with a discount or free gift.

3. Control the Card

Most new sellers don’t think of this, but it’s a big one: You want to consider who is holding your clients’ credit card information. Because of the expensive security measures required to securely and legally store card data, most checkout software providers don’t do it. Instead, they simply pass the card information to the gateway (Stripe or Paypal), and let them store it. That may work for a while, but as your business grows and your needs change, you may want to change merchant account or gateway providers. Too often, sellers find themselves in trouble with their providers for things as simple as selling too much, too quickly. Suddenly, their merchant accounts are frozen and business grinds to a halt.

In any of these scenarios, if you don’t have your customers’ credit card information (to run future charges, refunds, subscription payments, payment plan payments, etc.), you are up a creek without a paddle. If you do, then you’re in luck: Simply open a different merchant account and continue business as usual.

Holding your clients’ card information is the cheapest business insurance you can buy. Don’t leave home without it. (Of course, you won’t keep the information yourself — it’ll be stored with your checkout software provider who can afford to manage the security issues. That’s another reason to pick your checkout provider wisely!)

4. Deal With Dunning

If you run, or expect you might run, a subscription business or you offer payment plans for goods or services that are delivered prior to receiving complete payment, then you have an additional challenge to deal with: What happens when a card bounces or expires? The process for managing this is called “dunning,” and you want to make sure your checkout software provider deals with this well. At the very least, there should be settings for automatic retries, a notification system for failures, and a way for buyers to update their card information by themselves, without requiring them to call in. Ideally, the system should integrate with your product delivery process so that you can limit access or stop future shipments until the account is up to date.

5. Create a Customer-friendly Refund Policy

Having a customer-friendly refund policy builds good rapport, instills trust, and ultimately can land you with more loyal customers. In order to make this easy for your business, make sure that your ecommerce platform makes the process hands-free and cost-free. It will give your customers piece of mind and save you the headache of dealing with poor refund experiences.

6. Follow Up for the Win

In order to compete in today’s marketplace, it’s important to make the most of every prospect interaction. That means strong lead capture and follow-up, especially after a prospect has visited a checkout page but failed to complete the transaction. A solid “cart abandon” process is a no-brainer way to increase sales, and your checkout software provider needs to offer that functionality.

7.  Be Ready for Advanced Marketing Tactics

Once you’ve got the basics in place, there will be an unlimited number of new ideas, strategies and tactics that you’ll want to test as you improve your online presence over time. While you may not use them now, features like split testing, detailed prospect tracking and deep integration with your CRM and marketing tools, will allow systematic control over how your checkout pages look and are all important to consider to ensure your business is future-proof.

8. Partner Programs Work

Consider the possibility that you’ll want to be able to track who is sending you referrals and be able to reward those partners. That functionality requires, at the very minimum, a solid integration with your checkout software. To avoid a lot of headaches that come with tracking across sites and devices, it’s best to have a partner program functionality built into your checkout platform. Being able to append data in order to better understand your consumers through checkout software will allow you to efficiently market to their individual needs.

9. Support Matters

Finally, as you compare providers, remember that your checkout software really is at the heart of your ecommerce operation. The company providing it should be reliable, stable, and be there when you need them. While we appreciate (and have devoted our company to supporting) the spirit of entrepreneurship and startups of all kinds, there are some areas where experience counts. When it’s time for brain surgery, you don’t want the new guy. And when it comes to managing the security, scalability and reliability required to support the core of your financial operation, it’s worth considering who’s standing behind you.

By spending the time to compare and evaluate your choice in checkout software, you’ll save yourself the enormous cost of undoing a poor decision down the road. Take your time, choose wisely, and you’ll end up with a better-converting sales process, more revenue, fewer problems, and a business that supports your growth well into the future.

The post How to Take Payments Online appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Upselling doesn’t have to be reserved for huge companies with hundreds of thousands of products to push at their customers. In fact, you get upsold (or cross-sold) every time you say yes to the smiling waiter who offers you dessert at the end of your meal or to the phone company who convinces you to add additional data to your monthly plan.

Selling more products to existing customers is often overlooked in favor of seeking sales from new leads, but that’s a mistake. On average, the probability of successfully selling to a new lead is 5-20%; that number triples when selling to existing customers. In fact, 70-95% of a company’s revenue comes from upsells rather than acquisition of new leads. These revenue-generating sales boost your ROI, increase the value of each customer, and usher your customers into becoming advocates of your company who refer new customers.

All it takes to outfit your ecommerce site with effective upsell and cross-sell offers is a thorough understanding of your customers’ needs combined with the ability to offer the upsell at the right time using automation software.

Establish an Ongoing Relationship With Your Customer

Your relationship with your customers shouldn’t end the moment they click “BUY.” You should look at this as the start of your relationship with them — as ongoing relationships have been shown to be much more valuable. So how can you identity effective products to sell to existing customers? It’s simpler than it sounds: First, find the product orbit.

The what? Keith Perhac, the co-founder of Summit Evergreen, defines the product orbit as “a sales strategy in which your product offerings naturally lead into one another,” essentially leveraging the natural synergy between two products to move an existing customer from one product to another. Ask yourself what would be in the orbit of each product so you can map out the customer path to provide more value to your customer while making more money.

For example, if you were offering online beginner French classes, items in the product orbit might include a French grammar workbook or an advanced version of French classes for those who have graduated from your first class. What products would your customers naturally gravitate toward once they’ve already expressed interest in one product?

Consider this example from Virgin America. With the basic flight itself as the base offer, they leveraged seats with more legroom and better amenities. Customers can choose to make their flight more comfortable or luxurious, depending on how much they’re willing to spend.

Determine How to Provide More Value to Your Customers

There are many ways you can use a product’s orbit to your advantage. The most popular, as outlined in the example above, is the upsell. By definition, an upsell is a strategy or technique in which a company promotes a more expensive product, upgrade or add-on in an attempt to prompt the customer to make a more profitable purchase.

Netflix does an excellent job of upselling its subscription-based video streaming services, as they offer a $7.99, $10.99, and $13.99 option. The prices of the service also contribute to the allure of the upsell, as they are all within a decent range of each other. A price increase of $3 is by no means a big leap for the added services provided in the upgrade.

In addition to upselling, there’s cross-selling, which involves recommending relevant products or services in addition to the one that’s already in their shopping cart. While upselling is offering a pricier version, cross-selling is offering an item that would complement the product or service being purchased. For example, a wine retailer could upsell by suggesting an older, pricier wine or make a cross-sell by suggesting purchasing a wine opener as well.

Amazon utilizes these techniques as evidenced by their “Frequently bought together” section where the products recommended are intuitively related to the original product. Using their customer data to discover what a customer generally buys after purchasing the original product, Amazon offers relevant suggestions to create a bundle. This benefits the customer in two ways: by exposing customers to products they might not be aware that they need and by saving them time from research.
If those items are frequently bought together, then the customer can safely assume that the memory card and rechargeable battery will work with their GoPro. It’s not just one product recommendation, but rather two or three options that work well with the product. This creates an easy and time-saving buying decision for the customer.

Alternatively, there’s the downsell. If a customer does not want the product you want to sell, you can suggest a cheaper alternative. In an upsell, you would market a product that costs more than the original purchase; for the downsell, you would promote something less expensive than the original. Think of the last time you were at a car dealership. The car salesman might have presented the luxury car first. If you hesitated, he showed you the economy car.

This also works for subscription-based services. It’s a great way to capture a sale for customers who aren’t quite ready to buy the full price option or commit to an extended period of time. Check out how BarkBox gives consumers the option of choosing a cheaper subscription depending on their commitment level. They also display the “Most Popular” option so visitors can quickly see the most common choice.

The post Upsells and Cross-Sells appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Selling is about a lot more than getting people to buy products — it can help you build relationships with your clients, get your business featured in the media, expand your audience, or even sign a strategic partnership with another company.

If you’re interested in developing your sales skills, here are five secret methods to keep in your back pocket for the next time you need to turn a hesitant “no” into a confident “yes!”

1. Overcome Your Fear With Knowledge

Does the thought of chatting with a potential customer on the phone make you sweat? Does the prospect of pitching your idea to an audience of potential investors or partners give you stage fright?

There’s a trick to overcoming fear. Keith Yackey, who teaches Real Estate investors how to raise private money, says that “the one thing that holds us back for sure more than anything is fear. Fear is from the unknown, and I believe that fear ultimately stems from not knowing. The way to overcome fear in its entirety is through knowledge, is through understanding. That’s how you conquer fear.”

Arming yourself with knowledge can really help make your next phone call with a hot lead or presentation for important decision-makers feel a lot less intimidating. Do your homework before the call. Know the product you’re selling inside and out; research the company your lead works for; familiarize yourself with your customers’ most common pain points. The more you know, the less you’ll have to be afraid of when you’re on the spot.

2. Build Your Audience

Once you have the confidence to talk to your customers, it is important to continuously expand your audience. Indeed, the more people you have in your CRM, the more sales you will make.Referral marketing expert Michael Griffiths says, “Sales is easy when you have a hungry audience that wants what it is that you solve. Using your wider networks and partnerships is a very cost-effective way to build your audience.” Your existing audience can refer people they know to your business, helping you increase your audience size with ease.

3.  Create Referral Relationships

When it comes to building referral relationships, Griffiths breaks it down into four simple steps:

• Identify the possible referral partners in your network.
• Ask if they are open to creating a referral relationship.
• Have a conversation to make sure there is a good fit and you can actually help one another.
• Create an action plan to start doing things for one another and creating new opportunities for each other.

It’s important to reach out to as many people as possible, including those outside your industry’s usual demographic, in an attempt to have a vast number of referral relationships. Practice makes perfect; as you reach out to more and more people, you will be able to optimize your referral relationship process and tailor it to your company’s needs.

4. Choose the Right Moment, Then Ask for Permission to Help

Do you worry that you’re being overly pushy when talking to potential customers? It turns out, there’s actually a great way you can avoid that – get their permission to make your pitch.

It’s easier than you’d think. Startup founder and digital strategist Nathalie Lussier suggests this tactic: “Ask if they’d like to know how you can help. This is the magic question, because it allows you to talk about what you offer without it feeling like a sleazy sales pitch. If they say yes, you can talk about how you can help and how they can work with you. Otherwise, no problem, you can end the conversation.”

Want to say goodbye for good to that icky feeling associated with sales? Get the timing right, then ask them if they want to know what you bring to the table.

5. Be Prepared to Handle Objections

Nothing kills a deal faster than flubbing your response when a potential buyer brings up an objection for which you don’t have an answer. To avoid the awkwardness of this situation, start getting familiar with the most common objections out there, and practice answering them.

Here’s Nathalie Lussier’s method for handling objections: “After you tell someone your price or ask for the sale, you might hear, “Yes, but…” The trick to handling objections is to be prepared. Most people have the same objections: time, money, and is it going to work for me? Come up with answers for these common objections, and write down any new ones you uncover.”

The post Close More Sales With These 5 Secrets From the Pros appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Your summer holiday is coming up, and that means it’s time for a new summer wardrobe! You find a sundress that you really like, and put it in your online shopping cart…but you’re not sure if you’re ready to buy it. You haven’t explored all your options yet, and you think you may be able to get a similar item for a better price. So you close the tab, leaving your shopping cart abandoned. You may forget the dress altogether, even though you initially loved it. We’ve all experienced online shopping cart abandonment in one way or another and, as a business owner, it can sometimes be difficult to bring customers back to their carts.

There is, however, a way to woo them back: A well-designed abandoned cart email campaign will re-engage potential customers, returning them to their shopping cart and closing seemingly lost sales.  The email campaign involves a series of three emails that remind visitors of their full cart and encourage them to complete their purchase. According to Omnisend, three is the magic number — marketers who send three cart abandonment emails see 69% more orders on average than those sending only one. Using your marketing automation platform, the campaign can be triggered to begin immediately after someone leaves your website with items left in the shopping cart.

Here are details on exactly how to position each email to turn cart abandons into sales:

EMAIL 1: THE HELPFUL REMINDER

When to send: One hour after cart abandonment

This email draws many users back in right away: According to Moosend, 45% of cart abandonment emails are opened and, of the opened emails, 50% received click-throughs.It’s important to send this email as quickly as possible in hopes of reaching the abandoner during the same internet session. However, it’s imperative that you do not attempt a hard sell. The first email should simply remind and assist the abandoners. Anything more, and you risk annoying or scaring off potential customers.

In this email, defuse any of their objections by including a note saying, “If you had trouble checking out or found something confusing, please contact our helpful customer support department. Click here to finish shopping.”

The first email:

• Lists or displays the items left in the shopping cart
• Includes a link back to the shopping cart or checkout process
• Offers support and answers any questions the abandoner may have

Example:

EMAIL 2: THE FRIENDLY NUDGE

When to send: One day after cart abandonment

The second email reminds abandoners of their existing shopping cart and should create a small sense of urgency. It’s been a day since they left your website, and they have already received an email from you; at this point a hard sell would still be a turnoff. Instead, subtly nudge the abandoner in the right direction.

Easy ways to generate urgency include informing customers their carts will soon expire or that the items in their cart are popular and may sell out shortly (if that’s the truth).

The second email:

• Creates subtle urgency
• Doesn’t attempt a hard-sell
• Gives a deadline

Example:

EMAIL 3: THE HAIL MARY

When to send: Three days after cart abandonment

Up to this point, you’ve been nudging and encouraging. In the third email, it’s time to get into selling mode with a tantalizing offer, such as free shipping or a discount on their order. This is your final chance to make the sale, so focus on tailoring the language of the email to be as persuasive as possible. Coupled with an exciting offer, you have a better chance of closing the sale.

The third email:

• Is the final sell
• Offers discounts and/or free shipping
• Will drive customers to the checkout process

Example:

If you’re an Ontraport user, this email campaign is already built for you; simply add it to your account from the Campaigns Marketplace (it’s called “Simple Abandoned Cart Follow Up”), plug in your email content, and Ontraport automation will take it from there.

Cart abandonment is so common that launching a campaign like this shouldn’t be considered an add-on; it should be incorporated as part of your everyday sales process. Those who abandon their carts are your hottest leads. They clearly have already seen your marketing and are interested in your offer; now it’s just a matter of closing the deal.

The post Bring Customers Back to Their Online Shopping Cart appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

The good news is that there are ways to lower your processing rates for ecommerce transactions. All it takes is a bit of industry know-how when it comes to security best practices, provider selection, and account set-up.

Here are four ways you can lower your rates on ecommerce transactions and keep more of your hard-earned money in your bank account.

Run AVS on Every Transaction

Address Verification System (AVS) is a common best practice for any card-not-present transaction. It’s the simple process of asking the customer for his or her billing address and matching it to bank records. It costs only $0.01 per transaction to run AVS, and it’s money well spent. AVS is a unique security tool because using it actually lowers your processing rates.

Interchange is the wholesale cost of running a transaction, and it increases with transaction risk or credit card rewards. By implementing AVS to mitigate risk, the interchange rate falls. In a comparison of two keyed-in transactions, interchange increased by up to 64 percent when AVS was not collected.

Card Verification Value (CVV) is another common security protocol that ensures that the customer is in possession of the physical card; however, implementing CVV does not result in decreased rates.

Streamline Your Providers

As previously mentioned, you need a merchant account provider and a payment gateway to accept online payments. Why? A merchant account works as an intermediary account between your business’s bank account and the merchant account provider for all deposits and debits. A payment gateway facilitates the transfer of information from a payment portal to a processor, enabling efficient transaction processing.

Most payment providers are either merchant account providers or payment gateways. However, some all-in-one options exist. The benefits of streamlining your providers are twofold. First, consolidating your patchwork of providers eliminates an entire bill you receive monthly. Now, we all like getting fewer bills, but the real benefit is that one bill makes it much easier to for you to understand your effective processing rate. If you don’t streamline, you’ll have two providers charging you for the same batch of transactions each month.

Second, support is much easier to navigate with a single, inclusive provider that can answer all of your technical and payment-related questions.

Demand Ethical Billing

It’s important to be careful when selecting a merchant account provider. Some merchant statements can be designed to cover up hidden fees and padded rates. By knowing what to look for, however, you can become a better advocate for your business.

If you spot any of the following fees, it’s worth a call to your provider to negotiate your merchant service fees and request the removal of unwarranted fees. The following fees do not cover service costs and only serve to pad your provider’s bank account.

• Inflated AVS: AVS should never exceed $0.01 per transaction, but this fee is often marked up to between $0.05 and $0.10 per transaction.
• PCI Fee: This fee can be assessed monthly, quarterly or annually depending on the provider. However, your provider should aid you in your Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, rather than penalize you.
• Self-Assessment Questionnaire Fee: Similar to the PCI compliance fee, this fee is charged when businesses don’t submit a self-assessment questionnaire verifying their compliance. This is an optional self-assessment, so no fee should be charged.
• Non-Qualified Interchange: This is a fake fee that borrows the terminology of one rate plan and applies it to another.
• Padded Dues and Assessments: Dues and assessments are charged by the card brands (Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Amex) and are passed down to you. These rates are currently set at between 0.11% and 0.13% for Visa, MasterCard and Discover, and 0.15% for Amex. Anything higher reflects an unfair markup.

All of these fees are easy enough to spot with an untrained eye but may indicate that other, more difficult-to-spot markups — such as padded interchange or hidden volume fees — could be lurking in your statements as well. A candid conversation with your provider will help you determine whether your provider is forthright or whether it’s time to look for a new one.

Confirm Your Set-up

If you’re on tiered pricing, there’s another aspect of your merchant account set-up to verify. A mail order telephone order (MOTO) account is preferable for businesses that predominantly accept card-not-present transactions. In contrast, businesses with more card-present transactions should be on a retail tiered account.

Why is proper set-up important? For retail businesses, the drawback of being on a MOTO plan is that the check qualified tier is missing. This is the lowest cost transaction type for debit cards. Likewise, ecommerce businesses on retail pricing will find all their transactions downgraded to a higher rate tier due to them being keyed in instead of swiped or inserted with a chip. This is an easy aspect of merchant account set-up to verify, and both retail and ecommerce businesses benefit from proper configuration.

By taking the time to evaluate your merchant statements, considering all-in-one providers, verifying your account set-up and always using security best practices when accepting payments, you’ll be in a good position to lock in the best processing rates for your ecommerce business.

The post Tips for Getting the Best Processing Rates on Ecommerce Transactions appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.