It is the most irritating of results in email marketing. The customer clicks through to the further information page, spends some time on it, presumably assessing the technical details, and then goes through to the landing page. We think it's all over.
But then they abandon the purchase.
The reason can be difficult to fathom. They are obviously interested in the product and even the technical details enthused them, but when it came to actually paying for it, they opted out.
One possibility, at least going by my reaction, is where the price is not revealed until the landing page or, much worse, is where the price quoted is not that promised in the marketing email. In the same vein, there is the minuscule headline price which is only available to the first person to buy all your stock.
On the assumption that you are playing fair with your subscribers, the reasons for abandoning the purchase are varied and often obscure. This gives us the problem of what to change for testing purposes.
Find out which type of customer is abandoning at such a later stage in the process. You will have sent slightly different emails to segmented email marketing lists, so compare the rates of abandonment at the landing page. If one group was higher than the others, there may well be a clue as to what to try. Perhaps the youngest ground would prefer something a bit brighter in the design.
One way of checking the user’s point of view is to become a user yourself. Read your email, go to further details, then click through to the landing page and see if you are in any way put off by the experience.
Ask yourself if an intended purchaser might have been confused by the landing page. Was there a sudden disconnect from the gentle support for your product on the email to a sudden form with no text.
There are arguments that customers prefer a simple ‘pay here’ design. There is a chance that anything you include might put people off. Others suggest that what might work is an identical layout to the email, even as far as using similar or identical images.
The simple way of discovering which is best for you is to test both.
Other variables include tone. Do you hype a sale, using the words and phrases of the email, or should you build on the fact that they’ve all but made the decision to buy so give the impression that all is calm.
One aspect has been proved time and again, and that is to make the experience as pain free as possible. No one likes parting with money and the higher the number of processes they have to go through, the more chances they have to opt out.
Accept though that you have done something wrong if you have more than the occasional lack of conversion once the customer has clicked through to the landing page. The reasons behind the lack of conversions is probably the one most difficult to solve. So stick with the testing.
