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Screencast: Guarantee Holiday Sales
One of the most important — and often overlooked — ways to boost your conversion rate while improving the experience for your customers is to focus on point-of-action assurances. Basically, these are the messages that smart e-commerce sites give us, just as we’re ready to check out. Point-of-action reassurances help us overcome that one last moment of doubt (”I think she hinted at this one, but can I exchange it if she wants that other digital camera instead?”). These types of messages are especially important when dealing with customers who are buying gifts online.
Offline, returns and exchanges are less of a concern to shoppers. They can simply take their purchases back to the store they bought them from. Many retailers even offer gift receipts so recipients can take the merchandise back and exchange it.
Online, the gift exchange/return process looms more ominously in shoppers’ minds. What if shoppers want to return or exchange orders? What do gift receivers do? How about gift givers? Where do they go? How fast will they get a refund? Return-shipping costs, shipping hassles, price-matching concerns, and other questions hover like conversion-rate-chomping gremlins, threatening to devour your sales. Online retailers must resolve these questions, manage expectations, and inject confidence into their visitors, or their “buy now” buttons will look like black holes threatening to suck shoppers’ cash into the ether.
In this screencast, I’ll show you how big online retailers like LandsEnd.com, WalMart.com & BestBuy.com handle these concerns during the holiday crunch. You’ll see how adapting these techniques to your own checkout process can help close the sale and keep them coming back — not just to return things, but to buy from you year-round.
About the author
Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark and Always Be Testing. Bryan is available as a professional speaker. You can friend him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter (@TheGrok).
More articles from Bryan Eisenberg
- Nobody wants to read your sh**!September 21st, 2009
- Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!September 18th, 2009
- Cross-post: How to Improve a Product Page, Part 1September 15th, 2009
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November 19th, 2007
2:57 am
Interesting that Best Buy has already changed that slogan to reflect guaranteed Christmas deliveries.
November 20th, 2007
12:52 pm
[...] Lack of trust. This can be remedied with assurances (‘guaranteed returns’, ‘secure transactions’, ‘privacy protection’ [...]
November 22nd, 2007
9:13 pm
[...] Grokdotcom – Screencast: Guarantee Holiday Sales [...]
January 17th, 2008
3:13 pm
[...] Offer reassurances when asking for personal information. Your visitors are concerned about privacy and security [...]
January 18th, 2008
9:51 am
Great article. Brayan. I would include these when I start using customizable shopping cart.
January 25th, 2008
12:27 pm
[...] reassurances when asking for personal information. Your visitors are concerned about privacy and security [...]
February 26th, 2008
5:46 pm
[...] blued to a rectangular button with the "Add to Shopping Cart" message. Notice how many point-of-action assurances there are ("you can always remove it later" on the button, and the lock icon with [...]
March 21st, 2008
7:00 pm
It’s interestig as always. Stumbled it.
May 27th, 2008
6:55 pm
Geez all these tricks marketers have.
I don’t even realize if im being “called to action” but I guess it happens at a subconscious level.
Thanks.
November 24th, 2008
8:31 am
[...] Watch this video and take a hard look at how you can improve your websites with holiday focused Point-of-Action assurances. [...]
August 9th, 2009
7:30 am
[...] left, blued to a rectangular button with the “Add to Shopping Cart” message. Notice how many point-of-action assurances there are (”you can always remove it later” on the button, and the lock icon with “Shopping [...]
October 6th, 2009
9:21 am
[...] of payment options, BUT are your customers seeing them at the point of concern? We call these Point of Action Assurances. When the prospect is in your cart, and wondering about their payment options, are you reassuring [...]
October 18th, 2009
11:00 pm
Hi Brayan.
It’s great article.
I has interesting about it.
October 19th, 2009
9:01 am
[...] Another approach is to focus solely on the checkout process from now until the end of the Holidays. This means leaving the homepage, landing pages, content pages, etc. alone until 2010, and just test and optimize the cart pages to squeeze every last conversion out of those folks you’ve persuaded. [...]