When prospects abandon your shopping cart or fail to complete other desired actions, you need to implement strategies to turn prospects into customers.

You have an aesthetically pleasing website, a user-friendly navigation, impactful imagery, and compelling content. Still, you are not convert prospects as expected. Why?

How To Turn Prospects Into Customers

It is not always just about the website. There are times when visitors are simply not ready to convert because they are busy. Nurturing the lead until they make a purchase is essential. Selling online is very competitive, so it is important that your brand proposition is clearly defined so that your prospects can easily identify the benefits they will receive from using your brand over your competitors.

Developing an impressive website for your small business and reaching out to your buyers appropriately is a step in the right direction. Today, we bring you 3 tips to turn prospects into customers.

[1] Use Exit Intent Tools

The correct use of exit intent tools can be useful in driving conversions. They provide you a last opportunity to convert your prospects and make them give final consideration to buying products or services from your website.

These tools are messages that appear when a user hits the back button or close button. For example: a user landed on your website, browsed through a few pages and then decides to leave the site. When he presses the back button, your popup message appears asking the user if he really wants to leave or even provide an easy signup form to receive alerts, and so on.

Since these messages are your final call-to-action to convert customers, they need to be interesting, short, impactful and grab the prospect’s attention so that they rethink their decision before leaving your website without taking the desired action.

[2] Appeal To The Prospect’s Emotions

If you are creative enough you can play on the emotions of your prospective buyers. To help revitalize their interest while they are still on your website, just serve them what they want. For example: providing them suggestions about socks in various colors while they are busy buying sneakers is a way to engage them further. Being able to anticipate what they need, appealing to their emotions by telling them what they want is a good way to impress them or appear helpful.

[3] Implement Post Exit Follow-ups

There is some cause for concern when a prospective buyer visits your website, began purchasing a product, and then abandoned the shopping cart. As a small business owner, you should under the what, when, and why this happened. Cart abandonment is not unique to small business ecommerce websites, it happens to businesses of all sizes that sell online. But not all businesses do anything about it, and you should!

We recommend sending a series of cart abandonment emails:

Email #1 – Offer The Customer Support

The prospective buyer could have abandoned the shopping cart for any number of reasons such as: the phone rang and he forgot to finish the checkout process, he was having Internet connection issues, etc. Whatever the reason, you should send your first email within 15 minutes of cart abandonment and email should accomplish a couple of things:

1. Did the customer have a problem at checkout? Ask them.
2. Inform the customer you want their business and it’s still time to complete the order.
3. Return the customer to the cart by providing a nice color call-to-action button.
4. Let them know they can call your customer support team at 000-000-0000.
5. Tell them to contact your customer service using email by replying to the message you sent to them.
6. Advise the customer that their cart will be saved at least a week, and they can return to complete the checkout anytime.

Email #2 – Send A Reminder Email Within 24 Hours

The focus of this email is to remind prospective buyers why they should buy from your brand.

Do you offer:

 Free shipping even on sale products?
 A no hassle returns policy?
 Minimal cost extended warranties?

You should also include the call-to-action button to direct them back to their shopping cart and state that they can complete their purchase at anytime. Also, reiterate that you still want their business.

Email #3 – 1 Week Final Recovery Attempt

The purpose of this email is to let the customer know stock is getting low or that his cart won’t be saved indefinitely. There’s no need to exaggerate, just be honest. The objective is prompt them to take action today. Using a coupon in this final email is perfectly acceptable, if you’re so inclined.

What To Do Next

It’s time to get started! By following the tips above, including putting in a little effort to develop a shopping cart abandonment strategy, you should be able to turn prospects into customers, thereby boosting your conversion rate.

You may also enjoy reading: 5 Business Types That Benefit The Most From Local SEO

Hazel Burgess

Hazel Burgess
FOUNDER/SEO DIRECTOR

Hazel is the Founder & SEO Director at Envisager Studio, a premier website design agency specializing in WordPress website design, development and internet marketing. In her spare time, she writes about search engine optimization, website design, and internet marketing.