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Reducing Customer Friction, Building Customer Relationships

When it comes to online interactions, reducing customer friction – making it easier for people to buy from you, or do business with you – will make for a quicker sale and less frustration, improving your relationship from the outset, and most important, lowering visitor drop-off and abandoned carts.

PayPal recently announced deeper integration provided through Facebook and Messenger, making it that bit easier for Facebook users to purchase. Removing steps and barriers to completion is vital for ecommerce and other transactional business platforms. This is an example of small (from the end-user perspective) adjustments in the user experience, which can have a big impact on the number of completed sales through Facebook using PayPal.

Next time you’re considering a new feature for your website, ask yourself “could this be easier? Clearer? Are there any frustration points that would make a user give up before completing the transaction?” If there are, then consider how to eliminate them – feel free to call us to discuss. This is a discipline of digital marketing called “Conversion Rate Optimisation” or CRO. Amazon rationalised their checkout down to a “One Click Checkout” by removing as many barriers as possible, which has been pivotal to their success.

However, just making a quick sale doesn’t build a relationship. So for most businesses your efforts to make it easy need to have a counterpoint of working out ways to relate to your customers, provide further value, and ensure you deliver more than just a transaction. Let’s look at an example.

Case Study: Kool Kidz Childcare – Safe Kidz Program

We have recently assisted Kool Kidz Childcare to run their Safe Kidz program designed to provide free community service – ensuring that child seats are fitted correctly into their vehicle – whilst at the same time having the opportunity to give potential customers a guided tour of their unique childcare centres.

Contactpoint designed and built the landing page for this service, including writing the copy to engage with the audience in a way that was open and honest about the opportunity. Rather than spend the marketing budget on gimmicks and discounts, Kool Kidz is providing a free service in order to get the word out about their centres. In doing so, they build their reputation in the community and provide a point of difference from their competition. We built-in functionality to make it very easy for parents to register and book into available car seat fitting appointment times.

Contactpoint also designed and implemented a pay-per-click campaign through Google Ads and Facebook to present geographically and demographically targeted ads to potential customers. The ads point to the landing page, the content of which is beautiful on both desktop and mobile, and keeps very much to the point of the interaction – understand why the service is being run, how you can take up the offer, and book in. Of course, there’s a little bit about why Kool Kidz Childcare is great for your children as well, to start to educate the potential customer. Customers don’t mind marketing when receiving a product or service for free.

Google are masters of providing useful services in return for access to all your online data, which they programmatically sell to the highest bidder. You don’t mind as you are getting free email and search functionality (amongst other services) that is useful to you. Even the ads you are shown are customised as to be as relevant to your specific data as possible, making you more likely to want to click on them.

We designed the Safekidz sign up process to both reduce barriers to conversion and build relationships through the initiative. Together with all the finer details of the process – confirmation messaging, email follow-ups, delivery of the experience – the process was seamless and gently promotes the Kool Kidz brand and values at each touchpoint. Ensuring the process is quick, logical and avoids user frustration was crucial to the success of the project.

The Safe Kidz initiative was piloted in Brighton, and based on initial success, we were able to quickly scale the platform to other locations of the childcare franchise with customised appointments, and appointment follow-ups, per location. The program is delivering a great flow of engaged new parents to the participating childcare centres.

Need Help?

Our Contactpoint Digital Marketing team is at the ready to help you reduce customer friction, but not at the expense of your customer relationship. We look forward to hearing from you when you are considering a new digital marketing campaign, new website functionality, or even a brand new website.

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