I just received an email from a company on whose website I started a purchase last week. The email subject line read: "Is there anything that we can do to help?" They noticed that I had begun the purchase process but did not finish it. The email was an attempt to find out if they could help me with the purchase or if I had additional questions. Sending an email like that is a great way to kick-start sales and to diagnose if something can be improved in a lead generation, sales, or checkout process.

Are You Optimizing Your Checkout Process?

There a many factors that can be tested on a checkout process. And there is no one "right" sales process for online purchasing. Rather, you need to experiment and create tests specific to your company and industry. Here are a few things we have tested recently:

1) Number of fields. By decreasing the number of fields that needed to be filled in by a customer, we were able to increase the lead generation rate of a manufacturing company by an astounding 513%.

2) Reducing pages. By reducing the number of pages in the checkout process from 3 to 1, our client, an ebook seller, was able to increase its sales rate by 38%.

3) Anxiety reducing images. This is one of our favorites - a simple change that made a dramatic impact on the bottom line. We designed a test for a company that sells mp3 downloads. The test was simple. One page had a logo that read: "Safe Shopping 100% Guaranteed" (see the logo above). The other page did not. The page with the logo outsold the original by 180%.

Those are just a few examples of testing options. Your mileage may vary. Contact us for options that might work for your situation.

- Ryan

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