Increment sales, redesign your checkout.
I’m not reinventing the wheel at all. I’m just stating the obvious.
Let the customer solve the need for which they first visited your site. Fast and frictionless.
That’s it. You can pretty much stop reading.
If you’re interested in the impact this had in our company and want some tips on how you can apply that to yours, then read on.
- Really know what your customer needs.
Don’t oversell things for the “what if”. The other day I bought plane tickets and one of their many add-ons was to buy discounted cinema tickets…WTF?
Our base product: name badges. Secondary ones: lanyards, on-site print sheets, plastic holders. That’s it.
We don’t sell snacks in case you get hungry while in a conference. It is very likely it will happen, but it’s got nothing to do with our core.
I do get the idea behind this though, like Airbnb selling Experiences. But air tickets and cheap movie tickets… I don’t know.
For years you could only buy name badges and lanyards at the checkout. We now added on-site print sheets and soon plastic holders.
We’re certain these will be a hit, because we we’ve been processing these purchases by email for years and we also recently did a survey and found that current customers were, indeed, interested.
2. Design a checkout screen that makes sense for the user.
In the past, not all customers found the option to add blanks, most customers didn’t know about our on-site print kits, when they did they had to send us an email to request them, they had to pay an invoice, we needed to prepare the order, etc.
It wasn’t ideal.
We needed to rethink the checkout and put ourselves in the shoes of the customer.
This is the result.
It wasn’t only adding a product to the checkout, some great functionality was incorporated, like pre-formatting PDF badges to fit our on-site print kits size when printing or automatically letting you create X amount of badges without getting charged.
All that was manually done, mistakes happened.
You could try A/B testing with a few flows to see which one converts the most.
3. State the value of the add-ons.
Briefly explain why you’re offering these last-minute items, it has to make sense. If not, we’re back to my plane ticket example.
In our case, we know most events always get last-minute attendees or typos on badges. Therefore we give our users a couple of options to solve this issue.
4. Measure the impact.
The only way to know if an action had results is to measure. Metrics are crucial for an online business.
We use Google Analytics to keep track of our data. And it’s really great to see the effort of developing new functionality actually turn into dollars.
Before this, we didn’t know how much was sold of blank badges and we left money on the table by not offering on-site kits at the checkout.
Not anymore.
