Ecommerce Marketing: Using Your Phone to Increase Sales

Gabriel Gutierrez | Feb 15, 2022

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Hey guys! Tanner Larsson here, and today I want to talk to you about something that can hurt your ecom business’s sales if not handled properly.

That thing is the dreaded transaction decline.

Transaction declines are when someone tries to make a purchase on your store, and they have the money but for whatever reason, their card gets declined. Maybe because of AVS mismatch, or who knows what. There are all kinds of reasons why cards get declined.

However, this whole process is automated, so most of these customers will try one or two times, get frustrated, give up, and that’s the end of it. So, those transactions are declined, your other customers’ transactions are approved, and everything goes through like that.

Save the Sale

What many ecom business owners don’t realize is that there’s a report that generates on almost all ecommerce platforms that you can either activate or deactivate, and it gives you a list of all daily declines, even as they happen in real time. 

Most people ignore these reports, but at BGS, we have one of our customer service representatives (CSR) call the would-be customer and say, “Hey, I noticed you just had a problem trying to make your purchase. You were trying to buy x-product and your card got declined. Would you like me to help you get that to go through?” Oftentimes, the issue is not that the person doesn’t have the money to cover the transaction, but rather a technical glitch or error due to their lack of technical savvy.

You can save up to 80% of your daily declines simply by having a CSR call them as quickly as possible after the decline happens and offer to assist in getting the transaction to go through.

Doing so not only helps increase the number of sales you make but also boosts good will with your customer and builds brand loyalty because you’re showing them that you actually care, you noticed they were having trouble, and without even having to raise their hand, you reached out to help.

Another great thing about this is it doesn’t require a highly trained salesperson. You can literally use one of your existing customer service reps. Just set your ecommerce platform so that whenever a decline comes in, a notification gets sent to your CSR letting them know to call the person ASAP.

Now, speed is important here. You want to call within 30-60 minutes of the decline—no longer than that. I personally like to shoot for 15-20 minutes. The sooner you reach out after the problem occurred, the more wowed the customer is going to be, and the higher the likelihood that they still have their credit card close by and want the product they tried to purchase.

Wrap-up

This is a very simple strategy that you can easily incorporate into your ecommerce business. And like I said, Build Grow Scale saves up to 80% of our daily declines just by adhering to the process I’ve explained. That’s a huge boost to our bottom line! And then we put them through our sales funnel, or we can always upsell them on the phone too.

So anyway, check it out in your ecom cart, see how many declines you’re getting today, and then give it a shot and see how many you save. You’ll be glad you did.