Depressing Metric - Abandonment Rate

How likely are you to take a bus which stops at every corner of the road and takes a very long time to reach the destination ?

Very unlikely right.... !!! Same is the visitors mentality when it comes to buying your product. 

Is the trip to buy your product a very lengthy and boring one? If yes, then you surely are facing a very high abandonment rate. 

So what's abandonment rate and what's so depressing about it?

Abandonment rate - It is the percentage of customers who abandon the application form or shopping cart or any process of buying a product. If your application form is a lengthy and tedious process, a lot of visitors who start applying get irritated half way through and abandon the process thus decreasing your sales.

The depressing part about abandonment rate is that all the efforts you have put in to attract visitors to your website and to make them start filling the application form just went waste, because you couldn't keep the application process simple. 

Abandonment Rate = 1 - (Applications Submitted/Application Starts)

For an normal website, the abandonment rate should be nothing more than 40%. Keep an eye on this metric, because all the money you are spending on getting visitors to your website might just go waste if your application abandonment rate is high.



How to keep a this depressing metric an all time low?

There is no single solution to this question or probably any question when it comes to web analytics. The answer will vary for every domain and every segment of customer being targeted. The best solution is to Test, Test and Test. Something which works for an online clothing store might not work for a loans website and some strategy which might work in India might not work in USA. So let the customers themselves tell you what they like and what they don't. 

Here are some idea which have been proven successful many a times and could be tested on your website if relevant. 

• Break the application process into groups. Follow an order in which the application form requests for data and group them into segments. For example Personal Information - Name, phone number address etc, Professional Information - company name, address and role etc., Financial Information - Annual salary, other income etc. Follow a logical Sequence.

• Have a lead generation form before the application form - Lead generation form is the small form which requests for the visitors name, phone  number and email ID. Post submitting this lead generation form you can direct the visitor to the main application form. This is a very nice practice if you do no want to lose any visitor who starts the application form. Imagine if the visitor abandons the form at second or third step you still have the contact information and you  can do your sales on call or through email.

• Help visitor fill the form - Make the form easier by providing drop down, suggestion etc. In case the visitor starts filling the form, quits it in between and comes back, auto-populate the information they had previously filled in. It makes the visitor feel soo happy and he/she will surely finish remaining part of the form this time before they leave. 

• Fall-out report - Adobe Site Catalyst provides this wonderful report called the fall-out report which reports the number of unique visitors/visits at every step of the application process and also the fall-out at every step. Identify the pain point page and try to make it as simple as possible for the visitor. Lets get into this report in detail

This is the funnel report created from a 5 step application process excluding the lead generation form. You have paid omniture a lot, so they have made the report fancy and very easy to read and understand.  

(Serialization was set up for this site Catalyst Suite thus any to and for movement in this 5 step process would be considered as only 1 visit.)

Step 1 : ~29M visits filled in your lead generation form page for a particular product in a month and landed on the application step 1. 

That's nice to see, but keep trying hard to increase this number as much a possible. Remember, not every one who starts the application process completes. And in case the application is related to Finance then your risk team might reject their application.

Step 2 : Around 11% people quit the application process just after looking at the first page of the application form. Not a very bad number, but if there is a scope for improvement then every percent is worth trying. 

Step 3 : With 89% moving ahead from Step 1 to Step 2, step 2 made 72% of those 89% quit the application process. 

Bad !! Very Bad!!! We just lost around 75% of people who started the application form !!! This page needs serious improvement. 

Step 4 : OMG !!! We lost another 15% of the people who started application process !! Another bad page. 

Step 5 : Name says its a Thankyou page but we only have 10% of all the people who started the application process coming here. 

Such a depressing report. We could have got around ~29M customers but we got mere ~3M !!! This means the application process needs a serious revamp.  How? 

Answer : Test, Test and Test. Make changes to the pages and see the results. 

If you see improvement then be happy because you found the solution to acquiring more customers online, and in case you see that it gets even worse, then atleast you know what's not working for you and you can test something new. 

To test you don't need rocket science. Be human and think like a customer and test. Here are a few simple recommendations and tests. 

• Remove unnecessary pages - People get bored with lengthy application process, we already know that. If there are multiple pages which visitors have to complete, then at every step you will see atleast a little fallout, fact of life. So lets reduce the number of steps, reducing the probability of fallout.  Identify if there are any unnecessary or small pages, if possible remove them from the application process or club them into another page.

• Motivate the applicant - You know your process is lengthy and boring and you can do nothing about it, so atleast keep the applicant motivated by showing him/her the application completion percentage. If a person is getting frustrated filling the application form pages and doesn't even know how many more questions he/she has to answer, then you are literally testing his patience. Showing the completion percentage atleast makes him feel good that he is close to completion (in case he is, atleast you will not lose a lot of visitors when they are close to completion)

• Don't get too Greedy - Yes, you might have spent a lot to get visitors to your website and start your application process, but that doesn't mean you have to squeeze as much as you can from the visitor as soon as he starts filling the application form. Do not try to cross sell any other product before the visitor completes his application process. If the cross sell product is an add-on product, you can keep it at the end of the application process. But first let the visitor establish atleast one relationship with your company.

• Do not lead visitor out of the application process - You might want the visitor to opt for the offers you provide or probably some club membership etc. as a part of the package during the application process and in such instances you might provide a link giving details for the same. Keep external links as less as possible as they distract the customers from application filling process and if you feel its necessary then see to it that the link opens in a new tab so that the visitor doesn't stop filling the application form. 

• Back and Forth Navigation options - Keep free back and forth navigation option in the application form. Visitors might want to verify or change what they have filled in the previous pages of the application form. You don't want them to abandon the form every time and start anew every time they make a mistake. Right!!

• Forms Abandonment - Now you know the pages which are making people fall off the application process, but if you don't understand what is making them leave the application form page then Adobe Site Catalyst provides another awesome functionality called the forms abandonment. This report tells you from which point on the form did the visitor quit the form. Choose the top questions where the visitor drops off and see if you can simplify it or better remove it from the application process.

These are some tips on reducing the abandonment rate of the application process. You can think of some tips yourselves when you start filling the application form all by yourselves.