Using Marketing Automation to Catch The Ones That Get Away

Over the weekend I needed to hire a car so I did what most people do these days and searched Google, found a reputable car hire broker, entered my details and picked the best value car for my needs.

So far so easy.

I then entered all of my contact details and credit card payment information and pressed the big ‘Process Order’ button, for some reason nothing happened. I pressed it again and still nothing. How very annoying. I’m not sure if this was a problem with my Firefox browser or their website but either way it was a total pain. I closed down my laptop and cursing to myself vowed to do it the next day.

2 hours later I got an email from the company saying:

“We noticed that you did not complete the booking form on xxx for your car hire.

If you booked your car hire on xxx or with another car hire provider please ignore this email and accept our apologies.

Alternatively if you wish to complete the booking form and your car hire booking on 121Carhire.com please click the link below or copy and paste it into your web browser.

url to shoppingcart with my details already populated

If you are having any difficulty in booking your hire car, please email us and we will do all we can to resolve your problem.”

Now this is very smart marketing. All too often when we think of marketing we think about how to generate leads, however all the way along the sales process we need to make it as easy as possible for people to buy for us. This includes thinking ahead and preparing for what if scenarios.

This car hire company had done this. They realise that if someone has gone to the trouble of entering all of their details then they must be pretty serious about doing business. They also realise that sometimes things go wrong and by preparing for this they stand a chance of closing more business than if they just ignored this scenario.

With systems like Office Autopilot and Infusionsoft this kind of follow up functionality comes as part of their shopping carts and makes it very easy to fix these kinds of holes in the sales process.

So are there any gaps in your sales process that customers might be slipping through? Perhaps they visited your website and now can’t remember where it was or they tried to conduct a transaction but something happened in the middle of it. By thinking about and preparing for these kinds of scenarios you can close more sales without any extra marketing cost.