Saving Orders Your Never Knew You Lost

You would probably be surprised how many people are persuaded to order your product or service, only to turn back at the last second and not complete their order.

If you look at the stats logs for your order page, you will realize that quite a few people get as far as your order page... only to change their mind and not order from you.

Some Customers Have A Hard Time Deciding To Order

They might not have ordered for a variety of reasons:

• They might be having second thoughts
• Perhaps they were interrupted
• They might have misplaced their credit card for the moment

The only thing for sure is that they were so very close to "closing the deal" with you.

How You Can Save Some Of These "Lost Orders"

The secret to recovering some of these lost orders is to find out who these "close but not quite" visitors are.

This can be done by putting up a "preorder catcher" technique in place.

Preorder Catcher

When someone attempts to subscribe, they are not taken straight to the order page.

Instead they land on a preorder page.

This preorder page informs them the site is not free but by joining they are going to have full access to everything. It then asks for their first name and email address of where their membership information is to be sent.

Once they put in their name and email address, they are then sent to the credit card information screen to finish the order.

Meanwhile Behind The Scenes...

The preorder page sends their name and email address to an autoresponder which is programmed with one message only.

This message is a "prewelcome" message about their membership. This email does the following:

• Reinforces their good decision to order
• Offers assistance in the event they tried to order but it didn't make it through
• Restates some of the benefits of ordering
• Includes a testimonial or two
• Includes the order link again in case they need it

Note: this is the only message that is sent out to these people. They are not put in a autoresponder sequence of any kind.

Here is a sample of what the preorder email looks like. The email is personalized with their first name automatically (in this case Patricia):

(The hyperlinks in the email are formatted better than they are in this sample text box).

For those that order, the email simply welcomes them aboard and reinforces their smart decision to join. Anyone who doesn't order gets the same email. For them, the email acts as a another opportunity to order from you.

The Bottom Line

This preorder page has proven to be very effective on some sites.

You may want to see if you can apply this technique to your site. As always, track your results. I bet you may be pleasantly surprised.