Give Clients An Easy Path For Payment

December 10, 2009

As Internet marketers, we spend a great deal of time and effort trying to seduce people to enter our sales funnel by one way or another. We are always looking for ways to streamline this process and to make it as natural as possible, so that we overcome the resistance and attain a new customer, hopefully for life. All of the details which we learn during this process are specifically designed to bypass as many uncertainties as possible and to make it a “obvious choice” for the prospect or soon-to-be customer. Quite surprisingly however, for many large organizations this process can “run into a wall” when it comes to the actual payment methodology, which often leaves a great deal to be desired!

While you may have done your job famously to attract prospects into that sales funnel in the first place and they may be more than ready to consummate an association with you, the process of payment is still to be completed. This point can be a fairly traumatic experience for many individuals, and it’s certainly the most critical spot in the whole process – and when at this position, more people will bailout here than anywhere else. You certainly need to ensure that all elements of security are addressed here for obvious reasons, but you must remove any obstacles and streamline this process as much as possible.

If you are dealing with a first-time client, you should never put too many steps in front of them in the overall transaction. While you must adequately describe your product or service within the body of the site and cover shipping and other questions prior to checkout, do not make prospects jump through any unnecessary hoops. This includes the need for them to register and sign up for an account with you before they can go any further. By all means ask them to do this after they have committed to giving you money, but it has been proven time and again that the more steps you put in the process the higher the likelihood that you are going to get bailouts.

Look at your entire checkout process from a neutral point of view and get someone who you trust, who is not directly involved with your site, to go through the process and give you adequate feedback. The whole thing should flow nicely and it should be possible for the transaction to be completed in an almost subconscious manner. The consumer has generally got a good idea of how these things should work and if your operation has an unexpected hiccup they will not like it.

You put too much effort into the attraction of a potential client to let him or her disappear due to a cumbersome payment process. If you check your analytics program and see people leaving your site before they get to the confirmation page you need to ask yourself why and find out the reason pretty quickly!

Adam Toren, Co-Founder of Young Entrepreneur, specializes in maximising the profitability of failing businesses with his own unique ‘bottom line’ method. Adam, along with his brother, have established, bought and then sold on an assortment of companies in recent years. At present, they own and operate a very successful publishing company and variety of online businesses.

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