One of the biggest problems facing online businesses today is customers abandoning the sales process while they're midway through the checkout. So how do you complete those conversions and turn scepticism into sales? We believe the best way is through conversational commerce.
The online checkout is one of the most frustrating parts of the sales process for both shoppers and business owners alike for numerous reasons. According to Statista, the fourth quarter of 2017 alone saw a global abandonment rate of 77%; the most affected industries were travel and finance.
The reasons vary, but the most common are form-related. People get tired of the checkout process when they have to fill out what feels like an unreasonable number of form fields, and head to a competitor instead. And that's not the only reason for abandonment; a lack of shipping options, price spikes at checkout, lack of mobile-friendliness and other factors also contribute.
If you're selling products and services to B2B or B2C prospects, having a high checkout abandonment rate can, obviously, be detrimental to business growth.
Your business may be moving along quite nicely, but just imagine the incredible rate of growth you could experience if you could convert, say, 70% of abandoned sales every quarter. One way of clawing those sales back is through a cart recovery strategy, which is where inbound marketing can help.
This is especially true if you invest in a CRM platform such as HubSpot. Using creative automation techniques through the platform, many businesses are able to email prospects who have abandoned a shopping cart, nurturing those leads and encouraging them back to complete a sale at a later date.
Software such as HubSpot can also go a long way to reducing checkout abandonment rates if you build a strong inbound strategy. We believe part of that strategy should be to introduce conversational marketing for ecommerce to your sales process; using the Drift platform, for example, which can be integrated with HubSpot for powerful conversational commerce campaigns.
Read more: Our guide to chatbots and conversational marketing
As the UK's first Drift partner, we've seen first-hand what a powerful combination Drift and ecommerce can be for business growth, especially when it comes to reducing checkout abandonment.
We think there simply isn't any software out there at the moment as powerful as Drift when it comes to conversational commerce and marketing. Drift allows businesses to better qualify leads in minutes through real and scripted conversations without prospects getting turned off by lengthy forms, sales calls and a lack of information.
From a conversational commerce point of view, especially when paired with a CRM like HubSpot, Drift's chatbots can be used in a variety of creative ways to give shoppers the information they need to make a purchase across desktop computers, tablets, smartphones and more in engaging ways.
Bots can be used for shoppers to make repeat orders, to confirm product and delivery information, to book meetings with people within the company and much more besides. What takes painful minutes for shoppers to do with lengthy forms can take seconds with a solid inbound strategy focused on conversational marketing and commerce.
Find out more about unlocking your business' sales potential and improving your checkout process with conversations by speaking to Six & Flow today.