The top B2C marketing KPIs explained
A good B2C marketer tries to win over customers. But a great one wins over customers while hitting company goals, aka marketing KPIs (key performance indicators).
Setting targets and strategies that support a company’s long and short-term objectives is the most important part of a B2C marketer's job. In this blog, we'll cover the key KPIs every B2C marketer should know to boost their business.
Understanding the marketing funnel
Marketing KPIs exist within the marketing funnel. To understand any KPI, one needs to be familiar with the marketing funnel as a whole. This is essentially a model that visualizes the path customers take from brand awareness to conversion (purchase).
While there is no single marketing funnel that everyone agrees on, there are some basic stages that remain the same.
- Awareness: Introducing consumers to your brand and keeping it top of mind.
- Consideration: Educating consumers about your brand and its unique value proposition.
- Conversion: Convincing consumers to make a purchase decision.
- Loyalty: Building long-term relationships and turning customers into advocates.
Within the B2C sphere, the marketing funnel can also be referred to as the Purchase Funnel. Essentially this outlines the buyer's journey within a website, from the product page to adding items to the cart, and ultimately checkout.
Conversion rate
This is probably the most important metric or marketing KPI for measuring performance. Conversion rate records the percentage of users who have completed a desired action.
It helps assess if a certain action or campaign was successful or not and indicates what actions need to be taken accordingly.
Marketers or growth specialists can define their own different conversion rates; For example - one could measure the traffic to cart conversion rate (customers that arrived at a site and placed a product in the cart), or the level of traffic to a newsletter signup (the amount of visitors that ended up subscribing to a newsletter).
Traffic to Cart Conversion Rate: This measures the percentage of website visitors who add items to their shopping cart. It helps assess the effectiveness of product visibility, website design, and the ease of adding items to the cart.
Cart to Purchase Conversion Rate: This metric indicates the percentage of visitors who complete a purchase after adding items to their cart. It reflects the persuasiveness of product descriptions, pricing, checkout process, and overall user experience.
Traffic to Newsletter Signup Conversion Rate: This measures the percentage of website visitors who subscribe to the company's newsletter. It gauges the appeal of the content, incentives offered for signing up, and the placement and visibility of newsletter signup prompts.
Conversion rates are calculated by taking the total number of users who 'convert' (for example, by clicking on an advertisement), dividing it by the overall size of the audience and converting that figure into a percentage.
For example, to calculate conversion rate of visitors > free trial, you need to divide the number of free trial signups by the total number of visitors. So , if you have 500 visitors to a free trial campaign landing page, and 45 of those visitors subscribe to a free trial, you have a conversion rate of 45/500, or 9%.
Checkout conversion rate
A subsection of conversion rate, and a major component in e-commerce businesses, this B2C KPI marketing metric refers to how many leads ‘convert’ into actual paying customers. This can also be referred to as macro-conversion, whereas a micro-conversion can refer to general engagement with the business (as mentioned above.)
Return on Investment (ROI)
While there are creative ways to cut costs and stay resourceful, marketing campaigns cost money, especially large ones aimed at attracting a lot of eyeballs. This is why ROI (return on investment) is crucial to your overall marketing costs and budget. ROI is the biggest determinant of cost allocation, with the goal being to get the most revenue possible with the least amount of investment.
Calculate ROI: Divide Net Profit by Cost of Investment, then multiply by 100%.
For example, if you invest $10,000 and generate $15,000 in revenue, with a net profit of $5,000, you would need to divide 5,000 by 10,000 and turn it into percentage - 50%.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total expense of marketing to get a single customer. It covers the costs of marketing campaigns and other related expenses necessary to attract new customers, needless to say, it's important.
The CAC formula is calculated by dividing the total marketing costs by the number of customers acquired during the period.
For instance, if your monthly marketing expenditure amounts to $5000 and you acquire 1000 new customers, your CAC would be $5.
AOV (Average Order Value)
A crucial metric within the e-commerce industry, the average order value (AOV) measures the average total of every order placed with a merchant over a defined period of time and is a key factor in business decisions for online stores. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the total number of orders.
To find the Average Order Value (AOV), you divide the total revenue by the number of orders placed. For example, if you made $4000 from 160 orders this month, your AOV is $25.
Calculation:
$4000 / 160 = $25
Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV) is a metric that represents the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship. It's a crucial measure for understanding the long-term value that each customer brings to a business. CLV takes into account not only the initial purchase but also the potential for repeat purchases and the overall loyalty of the customer. The customer lifetime value formula is:
Customer Lifetime Value = Customer Value x Average Customer Lifespan.
This gives you the revenue expected from an average customer over their time spent with your business.
Churn Rate and Retention Rate:
This time a pair of crucial B2C marketing KPIS: Churn Rate and Retention Rate are two key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure customer loyalty and engagement.
Churn Rate:
This metric represents the percentage of customers who discontinue using a product or service within a specific period of time. It reflects the rate at which customers "churn out" from a business.
The formula to calculate churn rate is as follows: Lost Customers ÷ Total Customers at the Start of Time Period x 100.
For instance, if your business had 250 customers at the beginning of the month and lost 10 customers by the end, you would divide 10 by 250. The result is 0.04. Then, multiply 0.04 by 100, which equals a 4% monthly churn rate.
Retention Rate:
This metric indicates the percentage of customers who continue to use a product or service over a certain period of time. It measures the ability of a business to retain its existing customers and prevent them from churning.
The formula for calculating retention rate is: ((Number of Customers at the End of a Period - Number of New Customers Acquired During that Period) ÷ Number of Customers at the Start of the Period)) x 100.
For example, if your business started with 500 customers, acquired 100 new customers, and ended after a certain period of time with 550 customers, the retention rate would be: (550 - 100) ÷ 500) x 100 = (450 ÷ 500) x 100 = 90%.
Tracking traffic source and volume
Web traffic sources are the various ways people arrive at a website.They give us clues about where our visitors come from, the volume of traffic, and how they discovered the content. Monitoring these sources and assessing the amount of traffic helps manage your online presence and decide where to invest resources wisely.
Typically, these sources include:
- Direct Traffic: Folks who type our website URL directly into their browser or use a bookmark.
- Organic Search: Those who stumble upon our site through search engine results after typing in relevant keywords.
- Referral Traffic: Visitors who click on links from other websites, blogs, or social media platforms.
- Social Media Traffic: People who find our site via links shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
- Paid Search: Visitors who click on ads displayed in search engine results.
- Paid social: Users who click on ads or promoted content on social media platforms.
- Email Marketing: People who click on links in emails or newsletters sent by us or our affiliates.
- Display Advertising: Visitors who click on banner ads or display ads placed on other websites.
An example taken from hubspot traffic sources report
Click-through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate refers to the marketing metric that measures how often people click on a link, ad, email, or any piece of content in general. This tells us how successful the piece of content was in capturing a person's attention. The higher the click-through rate, the more successful the ad has been in generating interest.
It's important to keep in mind that these numbers are typically low when referring to ads, as many internet users today have developed ad fatigue (the average American sees somewhere in the region of 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day.) A typical click-through rate may be only about two users per 1,000 views (or impressions), or 0.2%.
Email Open Rate
If your strategy involves email marketing, understanding your Email Open Rate KPI is crucial. This tells you how well your email marketing is working as it indicates the percentage of people who open the emails you send. Many digital marketers love to focus on the size of their email list, but what use is a huge list if no one's clicking? A higher open rate means your subject lines are grabbing attention, while a lower one might mean they need some tweaking.
Which KPIs do I establish?
When establishing which marketing KPIs for you are most important to your ecommerce store or B2C company, it's essential to look at the bigger picture and consider how different KPIs interact with each other. For example, while a high conversion rate may seem great, if the customer acquisition cost is too high, it could significantly impact your overall ROI. In this instance, you would ask yourself why the CAC is higher than usual or why your top line is low while conversion rates seem to remain stable.
By analyzing multiple KPIs together, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the performance of your marketing efforts and make better decisions.
The KPIs measured can be adjusted periodically based on your marketing priorities and the current challenges in your sales funnel. For instance, after launching a service or product, you may prioritize driving traffic to it. Once you achieve this, you can then shift your focus to converting the generated traffic. After successfully converting leads, you can redirect your focus to metrics like Lifetime Value (LTV) or the percentage of repeat customers, and so forth.
In conclusion, investing time and resources into understanding and leveraging B2C KPIs is essential for staying ahead in the dynamic realm of marketing and achieving sustainable success in today's B2C landscape.
A good B2C marketer tries to win over customers. But a great one wins over customers while hitting company goals, aka marketing KPIs (key performance indicators).
Setting targets and strategies that support a company’s long and short-term objectives is the most important part of a B2C marketer's job. In this blog, we'll cover the key KPIs every B2C marketer should know to boost their business.
Understanding the marketing funnel
Marketing KPIs exist within the marketing funnel. To understand any KPI, one needs to be familiar with the marketing funnel as a whole. This is essentially a model that visualizes the path customers take from brand awareness to conversion (purchase).
While there is no single marketing funnel that everyone agrees on, there are some basic stages that remain the same.
- Awareness: Introducing consumers to your brand and keeping it top of mind.
- Consideration: Educating consumers about your brand and its unique value proposition.
- Conversion: Convincing consumers to make a purchase decision.
- Loyalty: Building long-term relationships and turning customers into advocates.
Within the B2C sphere, the marketing funnel can also be referred to as the Purchase Funnel. Essentially this outlines the buyer's journey within a website, from the product page to adding items to the cart, and ultimately checkout.
Conversion rate
This is probably the most important metric or marketing KPI for measuring performance. Conversion rate records the percentage of users who have completed a desired action.
It helps assess if a certain action or campaign was successful or not and indicates what actions need to be taken accordingly.
Marketers or growth specialists can define their own different conversion rates; For example - one could measure the traffic to cart conversion rate (customers that arrived at a site and placed a product in the cart), or the level of traffic to a newsletter signup (the amount of visitors that ended up subscribing to a newsletter).
Traffic to Cart Conversion Rate: This measures the percentage of website visitors who add items to their shopping cart. It helps assess the effectiveness of product visibility, website design, and the ease of adding items to the cart.
Cart to Purchase Conversion Rate: This metric indicates the percentage of visitors who complete a purchase after adding items to their cart. It reflects the persuasiveness of product descriptions, pricing, checkout process, and overall user experience.
Traffic to Newsletter Signup Conversion Rate: This measures the percentage of website visitors who subscribe to the company's newsletter. It gauges the appeal of the content, incentives offered for signing up, and the placement and visibility of newsletter signup prompts.
Conversion rates are calculated by taking the total number of users who 'convert' (for example, by clicking on an advertisement), dividing it by the overall size of the audience and converting that figure into a percentage.
For example, to calculate conversion rate of visitors > free trial, you need to divide the number of free trial signups by the total number of visitors. So , if you have 500 visitors to a free trial campaign landing page, and 45 of those visitors subscribe to a free trial, you have a conversion rate of 45/500, or 9%.
Checkout conversion rate
A subsection of conversion rate, and a major component in e-commerce businesses, this B2C KPI marketing metric refers to how many leads ‘convert’ into actual paying customers. This can also be referred to as macro-conversion, whereas a micro-conversion can refer to general engagement with the business (as mentioned above.)
Return on Investment (ROI)
While there are creative ways to cut costs and stay resourceful, marketing campaigns cost money, especially large ones aimed at attracting a lot of eyeballs. This is why ROI (return on investment) is crucial to your overall marketing costs and budget. ROI is the biggest determinant of cost allocation, with the goal being to get the most revenue possible with the least amount of investment.
Calculate ROI: Divide Net Profit by Cost of Investment, then multiply by 100%.
For example, if you invest $10,000 and generate $15,000 in revenue, with a net profit of $5,000, you would need to divide 5,000 by 10,000 and turn it into percentage - 50%.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total expense of marketing to get a single customer. It covers the costs of marketing campaigns and other related expenses necessary to attract new customers, needless to say, it's important.
The CAC formula is calculated by dividing the total marketing costs by the number of customers acquired during the period.
For instance, if your monthly marketing expenditure amounts to $5000 and you acquire 1000 new customers, your CAC would be $5.
AOV (Average Order Value)
A crucial metric within the e-commerce industry, the average order value (AOV) measures the average total of every order placed with a merchant over a defined period of time and is a key factor in business decisions for online stores. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the total number of orders.
To find the Average Order Value (AOV), you divide the total revenue by the number of orders placed. For example, if you made $4000 from 160 orders this month, your AOV is $25.
Calculation:
$4000 / 160 = $25
Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV) is a metric that represents the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship. It's a crucial measure for understanding the long-term value that each customer brings to a business. CLV takes into account not only the initial purchase but also the potential for repeat purchases and the overall loyalty of the customer. The customer lifetime value formula is:
Customer Lifetime Value = Customer Value x Average Customer Lifespan.
This gives you the revenue expected from an average customer over their time spent with your business.
Churn Rate and Retention Rate:
This time a pair of crucial B2C marketing KPIS: Churn Rate and Retention Rate are two key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure customer loyalty and engagement.
Churn Rate:
This metric represents the percentage of customers who discontinue using a product or service within a specific period of time. It reflects the rate at which customers "churn out" from a business.
The formula to calculate churn rate is as follows: Lost Customers ÷ Total Customers at the Start of Time Period x 100.
For instance, if your business had 250 customers at the beginning of the month and lost 10 customers by the end, you would divide 10 by 250. The result is 0.04. Then, multiply 0.04 by 100, which equals a 4% monthly churn rate.
Retention Rate:
This metric indicates the percentage of customers who continue to use a product or service over a certain period of time. It measures the ability of a business to retain its existing customers and prevent them from churning.
The formula for calculating retention rate is: ((Number of Customers at the End of a Period - Number of New Customers Acquired During that Period) ÷ Number of Customers at the Start of the Period)) x 100.
For example, if your business started with 500 customers, acquired 100 new customers, and ended after a certain period of time with 550 customers, the retention rate would be: (550 - 100) ÷ 500) x 100 = (450 ÷ 500) x 100 = 90%.
Tracking traffic source and volume
Web traffic sources are the various ways people arrive at a website.They give us clues about where our visitors come from, the volume of traffic, and how they discovered the content. Monitoring these sources and assessing the amount of traffic helps manage your online presence and decide where to invest resources wisely.
Typically, these sources include:
- Direct Traffic: Folks who type our website URL directly into their browser or use a bookmark.
- Organic Search: Those who stumble upon our site through search engine results after typing in relevant keywords.
- Referral Traffic: Visitors who click on links from other websites, blogs, or social media platforms.
- Social Media Traffic: People who find our site via links shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
- Paid Search: Visitors who click on ads displayed in search engine results.
- Paid social: Users who click on ads or promoted content on social media platforms.
- Email Marketing: People who click on links in emails or newsletters sent by us or our affiliates.
- Display Advertising: Visitors who click on banner ads or display ads placed on other websites.
An example taken from hubspot traffic sources report
Click-through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate refers to the marketing metric that measures how often people click on a link, ad, email, or any piece of content in general. This tells us how successful the piece of content was in capturing a person's attention. The higher the click-through rate, the more successful the ad has been in generating interest.
It's important to keep in mind that these numbers are typically low when referring to ads, as many internet users today have developed ad fatigue (the average American sees somewhere in the region of 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day.) A typical click-through rate may be only about two users per 1,000 views (or impressions), or 0.2%.
Email Open Rate
If your strategy involves email marketing, understanding your Email Open Rate KPI is crucial. This tells you how well your email marketing is working as it indicates the percentage of people who open the emails you send. Many digital marketers love to focus on the size of their email list, but what use is a huge list if no one's clicking? A higher open rate means your subject lines are grabbing attention, while a lower one might mean they need some tweaking.
Which KPIs do I establish?
When establishing which marketing KPIs for you are most important to your ecommerce store or B2C company, it's essential to look at the bigger picture and consider how different KPIs interact with each other. For example, while a high conversion rate may seem great, if the customer acquisition cost is too high, it could significantly impact your overall ROI. In this instance, you would ask yourself why the CAC is higher than usual or why your top line is low while conversion rates seem to remain stable.
By analyzing multiple KPIs together, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the performance of your marketing efforts and make better decisions.
The KPIs measured can be adjusted periodically based on your marketing priorities and the current challenges in your sales funnel. For instance, after launching a service or product, you may prioritize driving traffic to it. Once you achieve this, you can then shift your focus to converting the generated traffic. After successfully converting leads, you can redirect your focus to metrics like Lifetime Value (LTV) or the percentage of repeat customers, and so forth.
In conclusion, investing time and resources into understanding and leveraging B2C KPIs is essential for staying ahead in the dynamic realm of marketing and achieving sustainable success in today's B2C landscape.
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Further reading
Ever wondered why your online shoppers are ditching their carts at checkout? If you answered yes, you might be in the middle of a checkout conversion problem.
In other words, visitors come to your website to make a purchase, but leave before completing their purchase. This phenomenon is all too common in e-commerce, with abandoned cart rates having skyrocketed to 70% in 2023.
Fortunately, there are several effective tactics businesses can employ to tackle this problem head-on and reclaim your potential customers. In this blog, we'll delve into the top ways you can boost checkout conversion rates and up your revenue.
But first, why are people dropping out?
There are many reasons why people visit your online store, make their way through a purchase process and then at the last minute totally change their minds. Here's a list of the typical reasons why you’re not getting those wins.
- Complicated checkout process: A lengthy or convoluted checkout process with too many steps or form fields can discourage customers from completing their purchase.
- Account creation walls: Requiring users to register or create an account before checkout can be a barrier, especially for first-time visitors.
- Lack of preferred payment option: If your store doesn't offer the payment method preferred by a customer, they may abandon their cart rather than compromise on payment security or convenience.
- Lack of trust in website security: Concerns about the security of personal and financial information can cause customers to abandon their carts if they don't trust the website's security measures.
- Unable to save the items for later: Some customers might wish to save items for future purchase or comparison, leading them to abandon their carts temporarily.
- Website errors: Technical glitches or slow loading times can frustrate visitors and lead them to abandon their carts.
Top ways to improve your checkout conversions rate
1. Simplify the checkout process
People appreciate a clear and intuitive buying process. However, many businesses fail to deliver on this. To increase conversion rates, aim to make the journey to checkout as simple as possible without unnecessary steps, forms, or pop-ups. To create a simplest checkout process: be mindful of general design and layout, and keep the journey as quick (and painless) as possible.
2. Offer guest checkout
As mentioned above, there should be minimal steps before checkout. A great technique to achieve this is by offering Guest Checkout options. This allows potential shoppers to bypass account creation and purchase items directly, thereby potentially preventing a 35% drop in transactions. Shoppers provide their information for their order, such as their name, shipping address, and payment details, without wasting their precious time creating an account on your website.
3. Optimize for mobile
Most folks these days shop on their mobile phones - 76% of adults (US), to be exact. If you're running an ecommerce store, you'd best make sure that you adjust mobile navigation so that your online store is fully optimized for the mobile experience. Key actions you can take include ensuring a highly responsive design, providing an optimal mobile view, and integrating payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal, allowing users to complete their purchases with a single touch or click.
4. Display clear shipping fees
If you have global customers shopping from your online store, they probably want to see shipping costs before they click the pay button. Shipping costs can significantly affect prices, and purchasing an item without shipping costs can appear quite different at checkout. To avoid misleading customers, it's best to display clear shipping costs and available payment methods clearly on the checkout page. Doing this helps shoppers make better-informed decisions, ensures transparent pricing, and even boosts trust.
5. Communicate trust
Customers want to feel safe and secure when making purchases online. This includes having a reputable-looking website and displaying various badges for payment security, data protection, and purchase policies. Creating a trustworthy relationship with your customers boosts conversion rates. In fact, statistics show that 35% of potential buyers abandon a site without a security badge. These trust signals reassure customers that their information is safe and their purchase is protected.
6. Offer multiple payment options
Different customers have various preferences when it comes to payment methods. The Baymard Institute found that 6% of cart abandonments occur due to a lack of preferred payment methods. With more options, paying becomes more convenient, increasing the likelihood of completing a purchase. By offering multiple payment options, you make it easier for customers to pay in a way that suits their preferences and needs.
7. Use abandoned cart emails
Implementing an abandoned cart marketing strategy is crucial. A great way to do this is by re-engaging customers through "abandoned cart emails." Setting up emails gently reminds customers about their abandoned carts, highlights the items left behind, and utilizes personalized tactics tailored to reflect their buyer interests. Additionally, offering exclusive discounts or special offers can entice customers to return and seal the deal.
8. Reduce card decline rates
Having your customer click on the "pay" button can still turn out to be a lost conversion. Countless good deals are lost due to card declines - in fact, an average of 10% of checkout purchases get thrown out right at this very last conversion stage. This problem often goes unnoticed by merchants, but it can lead to millions of dollars lost for your business, not to mention the wasted marketing costs. With Bounce, your ecommerce business can identify false card declines and recover over 30% of them in real time, ensuring you capture valuable revenue opportunities and minimize losses effectively.
Optimize checkout for success
Whether it’s confusing web design, or false card declines, improving your checkout process is vital for ecommerce success. With many factors leading to cart abandonment, streamlining the online checkout is crucial for retaining customers, building loyalty, and boosting revenue. By prioritizing checkout optimization, businesses can seamlessly guide customers through the buying journey and resolve common pain points that maximize value from your shoppers.
Consider how visitors navigate through your website before making a purchase. They typically start on the homepage, browse between the different products, add items to their cart, and then proceed to complete the purchase at checkout. However, this journey is rarely smooth. In this blog post, you'll discover exactly where and how to eliminate any potential or existing marketing funnel friction for your B2C and B2Ds all the way to checkout.
Limit landing page distractions
The first point in both B2C and B2D marketing funnel friction is the landing page experience. A single issue on the landing page can cause visitors to leave prematurely. In fact 53% of visitors will abandon a page after only three seconds. This happens if visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, the loading time is too slow, or if the site has functional or usability problems.
Ensuring a seamless and user-friendly landing page experience is crucial to keeping customers engaged.
5 fundamentals of a spot-on landing page:
- Create a headline that demands attention: Craft a headline that resonates with the target audience's needs and desires, using powerful action words and emotionally charged language.
- Use a hero image to bring your offers to life: Incorporate a visually appealing hero image that grabs visitors' attention and encourages engagement, while ensuring fast loading speeds.
- Create calls to action that inspire action: Design clear and persuasive calls to action (CTAs) that represent the conversion goal, personalized to the audience and campaign objectives.
- Provide form fields that make conversion easy: Simplify the conversion process by minimizing form fields to only essential information, ensuring a user-friendly
- Offer social proofs to build trust: Utilize social proofs such as customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials to establish credibility and trust with potential customers, ultimately boosting conversion rates.
Simplify product navigation:
How you present and organize the products and offerings on your site can make-or-break your business. If your website has poor navigation, limited search functionality, or a cluttered layout, customers may struggle to discover the products that interest them, thus causing a whole lot of friction during the product discovery process. This can lead to frustration and abandonment of the shopping process, and of course a failure to arrive at checkout.
Good design, coupled with intelligent and robust catalog search capabilities, hold the power to eliminate a major friction or pain point from the marketing funnel.
5 key product discovery strategies to improve navigation
- High-quality images/videos: Provide multiple images/videos for each product to showcase its features.
- Advanced filtering/sorting: Offer robust options to narrow down searches by price, size, color, etc.
- Personalized recommendations: Use AI for tailored product suggestions based on user behavior.
- Improved search: Implement features like autocomplete and predictive search for quicker results.
- Interactive previews: Allow users to view essential product details without leaving the page.
Make trust an absolute must
The inability to convey trust just might be costing you a lot of revenue. Communicating trust or adding "trust elements" is crucial in online transactions, especially in the realm of online shopping where you're betting on the fact that a person will have a good enough experience that they'll gladly go to checkout, hand you their credit card details, and pay you money.
While it is especially important at the payment stage, if a potential customer does not feel a sense of trust, this can create major friction in the marketing funnel, it will be very hard to reel them back in again.
3 key elements to boost trust
- Secure payment options: Offering secure payment methods such as credit card processing, PayPal, or other trusted payment gateways instills confidence in customers that their financial information will be protected.
- Customer reviews and testimonials: Displaying genuine customer reviews and testimonials provides social proof of the quality and reliability of your products or services, helping to build trust with potential customers.
- Clear return and refund policies: Transparent and easy-to-understand return and refund policies reassure customers that they can shop with confidence, knowing that they have options in case they are not satisfied with their purchase.
Ensure product information accuracy
Providing clear and detailed product information is essential for guiding customers through the purchasing decision. If customers can't find necessary information such as product specifications, pricing, or availability, they may hesitate to complete their purchase. High-quality images, product reviews, and comparison tools can help customers feel confident in their decision.
3 strategies to maintain product information accuracy
- Regular updates: Ensure that product details such as pricing, availability, and specifications are regularly updated to reflect any changes accurately.
- Quality control measures: Implement processes to verify the accuracy of product information before it is published on your website or presented to customers.
- Customer feedback: Solicit feedback from customers regarding the accuracy and completeness of product information. This can help identify any discrepancies or areas for improvement.
Simplify the checkout process
A lengthy and intricate checkout process often leads to customers abandoning their payment. Each extra step and form field prolongs the payment procedure and adds to the difficulty. Since customers prefer a straightforward and convenient process, any additional steps can negatively impact your user experience.
Once customers have selected their desired products, the next marketing funnel friction point can occur when trying to add items to their cart. Complicated checkout processes, unexpected fees, or technical issues can deter customers from completing their purchase. It's important to streamline the process of adding items to the cart and provide transparency in pricing to minimize friction.
- Streamline form fields: Reduce the number of required fields to only essential information, such as name, shipping address, and payment details.
- Implement guest checkout: Allow customers to complete their purchase without creating an account, reducing friction for first-time buyers.
- Offer multiple payment options: Provide various payment methods, including credit/debit cards, digital wallets, and alternative payment solutions, catering to diverse customer preferences.
- Auto-fill and save information: Enable auto-fill features to populate form fields with saved information and offer the option to save details for future purchases, saving time and effort for returning customers.
For more tips, check out this article where we explore the different ways you can improve your checkout conversion rate.
Make sure the payment was completed
Even after your customer clicks the "pay" button, you’re still in danger of a lost deal. Many promising transactions fail due to card declines, with an average of 10% of checkout purchases failing at this crucial stage. Merchants often overlook this issue, but it can result in significant revenue loss and wasted marketing expenses.
Bounce helps you detect false card declines and recover over 30% of them seamlessly and in real time, ensuring you maximize revenue and minimize losses.
End of a free trial charges and their effect on your KPIs
In today's subscription economy, numerous businesses offer free trial subscriptions to convert potential leads into paying customers. Companies offer users a free trial of their service or product, and in exchange, the user provides their credit card details.
By capturing the user's payment information at registration, the company can ensure their users are high-intent, with a valid means of payment.
Yet despite this precaution, less than 50% of those free trial users are shown to convert to paying customers. According to our data, 20% of free trial churn is, in fact, due to payment decline. Of those end-of-trial payment declines, a significant part are, in fact, valid subscribers who experienced a false failed transaction. These are exactly the customers you are trying to onboard who enjoyed your free trial and wanted to move forward.
When recovered, they can also help your business growth soar!
Growth impact: Free-to-paid user business impact
End-of-trial transaction failures have an enormous negative impact on business revenue. And not just top-of-the-line revenue due to the user's final failure to convert.
The impact of failed free trial conversions trickles down to just about every marketing KPI.
Let's have a look:
- Top-line Impact: Failed free-to-paid user conversion transactions directly impact your total revenue, leading to a loss of potential deals after the free trial.
- Cost of Acquisition (CAC): Despite investing time and resources to get customers on board for their free trial, and having the customer reach the payment phase without canceling, a failed payment transaction means restarting this very challenging customer acquisition process, as well as an increased CAC for those customers you did convert.
- Reacquisition Costs: When you are not able to charge your customers after they complete the free trial, you will need to work hard at getting them back to using your service, in many cases by offering them a significant discount or additional free trial.
- LTV: The denied payment process will affect the rate of your recurring customers and the total LTV, as these customers will stop the subscription cycle and not reach the next renewal phase, which is when you are actually starting to benefit from their payment.
- Conversion-to-paid Rate / Monetization rate: Customer loss post-free trial due to payment issues has a direct impact on your most important KPI - conversion! You want to see as many of your free trial customers converting into paying ones, demonstrating that they like your p[product or service and are willing to pay for it.
So how can you turn those conversion fails into absolute revenue wins?
Bouncing up free-to-paid customer conversions
Bounce helps grow business revenue by recovering failed trial conversions.
Our AI machine learning algorithms analyze millions of data points to identify valid transactions that were wrongly flagged and approve them. The transactions are saved, and the customer can use your service just like before, enjoying a smooth payment experience. All in real-time, with zero risk for the seller.
Bounce can also increase end-of-free trial conversions by helping companies identify users that you will not be able to convert due to payment issues right at registration.
Bounce Effect: 4% top-line revenue uplift
Our data reveals that customers who implemented Bounce to optimize end-of-free trial conversions benefited from an immediate 4% increase in top-line revenue. CAC, LTV, and funnel conversion rates - also drastically improved as well.
Here’s how Bounce helps customers capture lost free-to-paid conversion revenue and how it impacts their business.