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Chris Badgett discusses six useful and very successful methods for improving the online course and membership website checkout process in this LMScast episode.

According to him, checkout optimization is one of the most effective ways to boost income without boosting marketing expenditures because around 70% of visitors who reach the checkout page never finish their transaction. Chris starts off by emphasizing the effectiveness of cart abandonment recovery and demonstrating how automated follow-up emails may entice prospective buyers to finish their purchase. Based on LifterLMS’s personal experience, he discloses that this tactic has recovered almost $319,000 in lost revenue, illustrating how even a minor increase in checkout conversions may have a big effect on business expansion.

Chris also highlights how crucial it is to create a frictionless checkout process by eliminating extraneous form fields and requesting that clients just enter the information necessary to finish their transaction. He discusses how eliminating unnecessary steps makes it simpler for customers to complete the checkout process while still enabling companies to use customisable options to gather more data as needed. He suggests including testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof straight on the checkout page to further boost consumer confidence and convince them that they are making the correct choice.

To further improve customer confidence and persuade them that they are making the right decision, he recommends including testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof directly on the checkout page.He suggests putting testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof right on the checkout page to boost client confidence and convince them they are making the correct choice.

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You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and today we’re gonna go into how to optimize your checkout for courses and memberships regardless of which tool you’re using, because the surprising statistic is that nearly seven out of 10 people abandon your checkout And never return. So today, I wanna show you six ways on how to fix that.

So if seven out of ten people reach your checkout and never finish, that’s a huge missed opportunity. The things that most people don’t realize about conversion optimization is in certain places, if you can just make a little bit of improvement, it can literally double your business or have a dramatic impact.

The checkout is one of those places, so just having a slight increase could cause a lot of new revenue for you, particularly if your course or membership is a high value or a high price point course or membership. So definitely pay attention in this em- episode. I’m gonna go over six tactical specific ways to improve your checkout so that you can uncover lost revenue that’s literally just sitting there.

You just gotta pull a few levers, and I’m gonna go over six of those levers today. The first is that you wanna recover lost checkouts. A lot of people don’t think about this, but if seven out of ten people abandon your checkout, those seven people, or 70%, could come back and buy from you. You’re not gonna get all seven, but even just getting one or two of them has a dramatic impact of your business.

So the checkout page is the highest leverage page where your prospect has already raised their hand. They said, “I’m interested in their product.” They know what the price is, and they’re all the way at the checkout, and then they leave. So how do you do cart abandonment recovery? This is something that we’ve been doing for a very long time.

We’ve done cart abandonment recovery at LifterLMS for about seven years now. And just for our software sales site, we have recovered $319,000 just through implementing the same cart abandonment recovery system that I’m gonna describe to you here today. I’m not just gonna describe it to you, I’m also gonna show you exactly how you can do it and just install an add-on, click to activate, and it’s on if you’re using LifterLMS for your courses and memberships.

So basically, the way cart abandonment works is when somebody leaves your checkout Cart abandonment needs them to take an action like entering their email address to actually know who they are. So a lot of cart abandonment actually doesn’t happen when they first visit the cart. They often enter their name, enter their email, maybe the phone rings, maybe they’re having second thoughts, maybe another screen goes off with something else and they lose focus and they just abandon your cart.

But the way cart abandonment works, once you have their email. Is it gets dropped into a cart abandonment recovery system, which I’m gonna describe for you here today. But before I do, just so you know, LifterLMS recently released a new add-on into our Infinity bundle. Or I’m sorry, it’s actually in all bundles, so it’s also included in the Earth bundle. Which is our lowest price bundle that has our payment gateways and all the e-commerce stuff in it, and it is included in all plans.

So that is a new add-on, and everything I’m gonna describe to you here, all you have to do is install the add-on, activate it, turn it on, and it’s gonna start working right away. And just in case you missed it when I said it earlier, the system that we use at LifterLMS on our software sales site, we use a very similar methodology for the LifterLMS add-on.

So basically, the way it works, somebody enters their email address, and then they abandon your cart, and then they’re gone. But what does the cart abandonment recovery system do in the background? The key thing is it’s gonna send three strategic emails and each email does a different job. So basically what it does is the first email fires one hour later and says, “Hey, it looks like you abandoned your cart.

Do you wanna complete your checkout? Did something go wrong?” And there’s a big button that says, “Return to my cart. Return to my checkout.” And so when somebody clicks on that, they’re not just going back to your website, they’re actually going to the cart they had loaded up, and all they have to do is complete the form that they already started and complete their checkout The next email fires 24 hours later.

So this is really important, like the cadence. So basically, email one is one hour later, email two is one day later, and email three is three days later. So email one is “Hey, did something go wrong? Come back.” Email two follows up and is “Hey, we noticed you didn’t complete your checkout.

These are the benefits of the product. Are you sure you’re not interested in moving forward with our product?” Again, there’s a big button, Return to Checkout. Then what happens at email three is that there is a different system which basically gives you an opportunity to apply a limited time offer or expiring coupon code that’s good for seventy-two hours for somebody to not only complete their checkout, but also get a discount.

So this is your last shot, your Hail Mary last chance to close that sale. We’re not gonna follow up with this person forever. Cart abandonment is like a period in time over three days, and that final email basically with the LifterLMS cart abandonment recovery add-on, what it does is it automatically generates that unique, expiring coupon code that’s just good for that user, creates the custom email, sends it to them.

In our experience, the majority of cart abandonment recovery that happen with that first email. But the other two emails, the one day later or the seventy-two hours later also adds revenue. But even just that first email contributed… in our case, out of the three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, it contributed two hundred thousand dollars of that three hundred and twenty thousand dollars in terms of recovery.

The other cool thing about cart abandonment recovery, once you turn it on, you kinda forget about it, and you just keep track of your sales and everything. But we actually have at LifterLMS reporting that shows you your number of abandoned carts, the amount of carts recovered, the revenue, and there’s actually a weekly summary digest email, so you can keep track of that over time.

So that is in the Earth bundle, our lowest cost plan at LifterLMS, ’cause we love to help course creators and membership creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, build successful businesses, and cart abandonment recovery is a huge opportunity. So that cart abandonment recovery is my number one tip for r-recovering lost sales.

The next six or five tips I’m gonna give you on your checkout optimization Are more about creating higher conversion on the checkout you already have. It’s basically getting people to complete the cart they already have. Not necessarily recover ones that are lost. So the first thing that’s important in checkout in terms of conversion optimization is reducing the number of fields at checkout.

So what do I mean by fields? Fields are the little boxes that people type in information when they’re completing an enrollment in your course or your membership. So the cool thing about LifterLMS is we have a form fields manager for your checkout fields. So the basic thing you wanna do is, particularly if you have a digital program, is to remove the address field.

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So if you’re not shipping anything, if you don’t know- need to know where people live or what their address is, go ahead and remove that field. Basically, the way this works is on a checkout, you want people to have to do as little amount of work as possible to pay you, so there’s no point in asking for their physical address if you don’t need it.

So you can reduce those fields and increase your conversion rate on your checkout. The other cool thing too is LifterLMS has a add-on called Custom Fields, so if you need to collect some kind of custom information or custom data, like company name as an example, you can create your own custom field at checkout.

But if you wanna do the absolute minimum, what I recommend is email address, password, and that’s it. That’s the most conversion-optimized checkout field situation. However, if you need to collect more information, like company name, or you need their phone number, or you need their physical address, you can of course add those.

But best practices in conversion optimization, whether somebody’s opting in or enrolling in something for free, or if it’s a paid program, is to limit the number of fields. And if you’re doing a paid program, keep in mind You’re not just asking for their first name, last name, email address, desired password for their account, and so on.

They also have to enter their credit card, the year of expiry, the three-digit code on the back, and so on. So the amount that we can reduce those fields and the amount of work somebody has to do to buy your products and programs, the better. So keep that in mind. And one more pro tip for you, LifterLMS, as an example, has places where y- people confirm their email address they have to type it in a second time to make sure there wasn’t a spelling error, and so on.

You can remove those confirmation steps if you want to, which in general I actually recommend doing just to limit that extra step from the checkout. But if you wanna make absolutely certain that somebody entered the correct email address or type their password a second time to make sure they’re not gonna make an error later, you can turn those features on.

But I recommend turning those off so the confirmation step is not required. Which streamlines the checkout and it removes all that friction from the checkout. My third tip for you is to add social proof to your checkout. So what do I mean by that is trust is everything in checkout. If you’ve done the work, if you’ve built a great product, if you’ve built a strong company brand, personal brand, you’re gonna come with that trust in spades.

People aren’t gonna care, they’re just gonna buy your stuff. But particularly if you’re working with colder audiences who don’t know you, don’t necessarily trust you, I definitely recommend sprinkling in some social proof onto your checkout page. So on WordPress as an example the checkout from Lifter is embedded. It’s a block, it’s a short code, it’s a content area that’s its own thing, and it sticks into a page, i.e.,

your checkout page. But what some people don’t realize is they can add content above and/or below the actual checkout experience. So definitely below, and even in cases above, I recommend adding a key testimonial, maybe mention of the reviews you have “Oh, we have, 4.9 stars on Trustpilot across 300 people.”

Or most importantly, I think a targeted testimonial that speaks to the return on investment, whether that’s time or money in the program, is a great thing to add below the checkout, which means it’s right below the moment they’re gonna click the button and do their checkout. So before they’ve entered their stuff and they’re j- they’re on the last, fence to jump before becoming a customer, and they just look right below that button and you can see a very strong testimonial, ideally from someone That your buyer might know or be aware of, maybe a micro-celebrity or influencer and that sort of thing.

And that stuff really helps boost your conversion optimization by injecting social proof. So you should have social proof throughout your site. You don’t have to go overboard with it, but it’s definitely helpful to sprinkle testimonials on your homepage, on your about page, on your checkout page, on your courses and membership sales pages as well.

And by the way, with LifterLMS, there’s an easy button called Aircraft, which is our page builder for modern WordPress. It includes pre-done patterns, and we have several testimonial patterns for inserting a strong testimonial or a grid of testimonials or some trust logos like Trusted by and all that stuff.

So that’s all included in the Aircraft page builder, which works with any modern WordPress theme, not just our theme, Sky Pilot The next thing I wanna help you optimize your checkout with, and this is another very powerful way to keep the checkout and prevent the abandonment, is what’s called an exit-intent pop-up.

So I wanna give a nod to our podcast sponsor, Popup Maker, a great friend of the show from Code Atlantic. WPpopuppmaker.com, go check it out. But basically the way exit intent works is when somebody goes to your checkout page, and let’s say they enter their email, or they don’t, and they’re going to abandon, which means they move their cursor up to the top corner as if they’re gonna navigate away in the browser.

Popup Maker will detect that. That’s called an exit intent, and it gives you a trigger that you can have a pop-up pop up on the screen. So what can you do with that pop-up? Basically you’re stopping the immediate exit so that they have to take an action. And when this is done well, it’s really not annoying.

If somebody wants to leave, they can just click the X, close it, and leave. But what do you do in that message? You have a pop-up as somebody is abandoning your cart. There’s three main things you can do. The first thing you can do is just confirm the value of what you’re delivering. So you could say something like, “Are you sure you wanna leave?

You were just about to get the best course about XYZ. Close this now and complete your checkout. If not, no hard feelings, we’ll see you back another day.” So that’s number one, which is confirming the value. Number two, what you can do is you can try to use another conversion optimization technique, which I call the coupon close.

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So what a coupon close is somebody went to buy your product, let’s say it’s $1,000, and they’re abandoning the checkout. They may or may not have given you the email address and you have one chance to try to save this sale. So what you can do here is you can offer a fast action coupon. And the way this works is- You can provide a coupon code, let’s say, for a 10% discount so they can save $100 if they go ahead and complete their purchase.

Of all the three, I actually recommend this one the most simply because I’ve done it and I’ve seen it work really well. So that’s using wppopupmaker.com’s powerful pop-up tool to do a coupon close when somebody tries to abandon your cart. And then the third final option is to do a downsell.

So there’s a couple different types of downsells. One is to suggest in the pop-up a cheaper product. So if, let’s say, you’re selling an expensive membership and somebody’s abandoning, what you could do on the pop-up is say, “Hey, no hard feelings. It looks like you’re ready to go, and you’re not interested in the membership right now.

Can I interest you in the most popular course inside the membership, which is only 10% of the cost of the whole membership?” That would be a downsell from the membership to the course. Another kind of downsell, or you could consider this a fourth type of pop-up that you could do, is to instead of trying to capture the sale, is to capture the lead.

So what you do here is “Oh, it looks like you’re not ready to get the membership. That’s fine. I’ve got a free resource ready for you. Just enter your email here, and we’ll send that right over your way.” So basically what you’re doing is you’re downselling from the paid product to a free product.

And remember, you may or may not have this person’s email address, so at least you are capturing the lead. So that is exit intent pop-ups. I highly recommend the most powerful pop-up solution for WordPress, which is Popup Maker for doing that. It has deep integration with LifterLMS. If you get the Pro version, there’s all kinds of fancy LifterLMS related stuff you can do.

We actually have another episode on this podcast about Popup Maker’s deep LifterLMS integration. The next checkout optimization tip I have for you is to offer multiple payment gateways. Some people miss this, and I highly recommend against missing this. So what does that mean? So in LifterLMS as an example, and again, all the strategies here apply to whatever checkout tool you’re using, but if you’re using LifterLMS, we have several payment systems.

The most popular are LifterLMS’s Stripe payment gateway and LifterLMS’s PayPal payment gateway. And what you wanna do is make sure you have both installed, activated, and connected to your Stripe and PayPal accounts. So why is this important? The truth is, if you’re serving to a global audience, not everybody has access to credit cards, which is like the bread and butter of Stripe credit card payments.

In some countries, that’s not even an option, but people would gladly buy your courses and memberships if you offered an alternative, which is PayPal checkout. So PayPal is available in way more countries and can just service more of the world. So it’s important to get outside of your particular behavior.

Maybe you always shop online with a credit card, but there’s a huge portion of the world that uses tools like PayPal to do their checkout. So essentially, the way it works in LifterLMS is you set your primary gateway. Let’s say it’s Stripe, so when somebody hits your checkout, it assumes they’re gonna pay with credit card.

Stripe’s gonna do the checkout, but there’s a little radio button where they can say, “No, I don’t wanna use credit card. I wanna use PayPal instead.” It switches over, and then they can immediately check out with PayPal. So definitely go ahead and unlock the, more buying power by offering multiple ways for people to pay you.

LifterLMS also has what’s known as the manual checkout as well. So you could add a third option, which is essentially a way to request any kind of payment. So you could be like, okay, first option Stripe, and then there’s PayPal, but then you have a third option, which is send me Venmo or send a check in the mail to my business.

And the way the manual payment gateway works is they complete the checkout, they get the instructions to send you the money, whether that’s a bank transfer, a Venmo request, could be crypto could be a check in the mail, and you basically just give them those instructions. And then their order’s gonna go through, but they’re not gonna get access right away, and you’re gonna get a notification as the site owner that somebody has done a manual checkout, which then tells you to go check the mailbox, check your bank account, check your crypto wallet, or check whatever method that you ask them to do.

And once they pay you, you can manually approve the checkout, and they’re gonna get instant access to their course or membership from that point. So definitely look at multiple payment gateways as a way to optimize the checkout. Now, the sixth and final checkout optimization tip. I have for you, a bonus one, is to make sure your checkout is optimized for mobile.

So what we often forget, particularly if you build a lot of websites or you have an online business, a lot of the time you’re working on a laptop or desktop computer, maybe with multiple monitors and all this stuff. But at LifterLMS, one of our company values is learner results first, which means that we’re always thinking about the end user, basically our customer’s customer.

What is the learner doing? And the reality is, a lot of online education and e-learning happens on mobile devices and tablets. So even if you as the course creator, the coach, the education entrepreneur, the website building professional, don’t really do a lot of website stuff on mobile, a lot of the end users do.

What that means is the checkout experience needs to be super optimized for mobile. They shouldn’t have to try to be on their phone and pinch zoom in on checkout fields and can’t see everything. It doesn’t scroll great. That’s not the case with LifterLMS, particularly if you’re using LifterLMS’ Sky Pilot theme, which is the most advanced WordPress LMS theme with exclusive focus on e-learning.

It’s literally one of a kind on the internet, and it was built from a mobile first standpoint. So fifty-nine percent of e-commerce transactions on the internet based on the stat from Sellers Commerce, is happening on mobile devices. You really need to make sure when you build your website and your checkout. That it is mobile optimized.

And also keep in mind- Particularly with mobile devices the mobile abandonment of the cart is even higher than desktop computers. So if you use a strong mobile-optimized theme with mobile-optimized checkout like Sky Pilot, and then you use the LifterLMS cart abandonment recovery add-on as an example, you’re way more likely to close more sales.

The other piece of mobile optimization is you have to have good hosting for your website. LifterLMS is the most performant, secure mobile-optimized LMS on the market, but you still need to have good web hosting. Every second in delay from a study by a company called WP Rocket equals a drop in 7% on conversions.

So every second your website takes to load on the checkout screen, you’re losing 7% of the conversions, which is huge So we have a list on the LifterLMS website of the top WordPress hosting companies that we recommend that are fast and are gonna give you speedy LifterLMS checkout. And really you want your whole site to be fast all the time for every reason, but at checkout, it’s super important to have that speed on checkout.

LifterLMS is built for it, and you need to have web hosting that is fast as well, which is one of the reasons why we recommend the LifterLMS checkout is so simple and streamlined that the checkout is just fast. If you use a tool in WordPress like WooCommerce, it has way more going on the checkout screen and can be slower and so on.

We do love WooCommerce as well, but if you want the most optimized, simple, fast checkout for courses and memberships I would recommend going with the native LifterLMS checkout and our Stripe and PayPal payment gateways. So checkout optimization is really about two things. It’s about recovering abandoned carts and also optimizing and keeping the users checking out that you already have.

So go get yourself the LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery add-on. I’m super excited about it. Again, not to toot our own horn, but we’ve recovered $319,000 using our cart abandonment system. The LifterLMS cart abandonment system is very similar to the one on the LifterLMS software checkout site. I think you’re gonna love it.

So if you’re just getting started, go get the Earth bundle. That’s our e-commerce bundle. It’s gonna have everything you need for courses, memberships, checkout, payment gateways, cart abandonment recovery, and so on. If you have any questions about any of this, please reach out to us. Conversion optimization is real.

Checkout optimization is a huge part of that. I hope you found this episode useful, and we will see you in the next one. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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The post 6 Ways To Optimize Your Course And Membership Checkout appeared first on LMScast.