From Browsers to Buyers With Payment Technology
There are many payment technologies and functionalities that exist to make consumers' lives easy and encourage them to trust your brand. Make sure you are using these to increase your conversions.
There are many payment technologies and functionalities that exist to make consumers' lives easy and encourage them to trust your brand. Make sure you are using these to increase your conversions.
The optimization of the path to purchase has always been, and always will be, a defining element of the marketer’s challenge. In addition to the task of even attracting a potential customer’s attention in the first place amid all the noise and brand complexity in the modern consumer landscape, the last thing you want is for a poorly managed path to purchase to lose that traction you’ve fought so hard to gain.
It’s really important that every aspect of customers’ brand journey with you toward the checkout is smooth, engaging, enjoyable, quick, and easy – at no point must a clunky, tiresome, or unreliable element get in the way of discovery and purchase. You also need to ensure that the journey is secure and you’re constantly reinforcing brand confidence with your customer, especially as they move toward actual payment. Trust around payments continues to be a topic that dominates people’s minds in the environment we are all operating in.
So what can you do? Firstly, make sure that the user experience is consistent across all your platforms – if people are used to buying off you on one device, they need to feel you’ve integrated the same back-end reliability across any other points of contact. Having to enter different details, or re-enter existing ones on one platform, but not another, will only disconcert your customer.
Secondly, make it simple – no one has the time to take multiple steps to enter details, add information, or give away important data; it’s also unsettling. People are wary today about their data, where it’s used, stored, and accessed – don’t let such anxiety escalate through overly complex payment systems.
Thirdly, make the easy to find the end point. If you think about your experience in a physical store, the checkout isn’t hidden away in a back office, or stuck behind a cupboard door – why make it so online? A, one-click exit route where people can buy what they’ve found quickly and easily makes it painless and reassuring. These customers will come back sooner rather than later.
Finally, consider how you need to adapt your discovery-to-purchase model for your ever changing consumers’ behavior, based on the platforms and devices they’re using to find and buy. Mobile commerce remains on the rise, as expected, but increasing numbers of people are browsing through apps, rather than simply mobile browsers, so checkout functionality needs to be embedded into every digital and mobile asset where there are transactional elements.
The payment technologies and functionalities exist to make the customer’s life easy – use them.