Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

One of the things I like about the aMember membership site software is that it allows us to see when someone has completed the first step of becoming a member or purchasing an information product, but doesn’t complete the entire transaction.

For whatever reason, when a prospective member abandons the process, they stop short of completing the second page and do not put in their credit card or PayPal payment information.

Online stores have worked this problem for many years, figuring out ways to minimize abandoned shopping carts. Our membership sign up forms are the same thing, and we too constantly think about how we can make the process as dead simple as possible.

The first page of our membership form has 6 fields to complete, all required, including first name and last name. Right off the bat some usability experts in internet marketing say that’s a problem. They would argue that you should have one single item on that first step – an email address field. By making that first step just an email, if your prospect abandons the form at anytime after that first page, you can contact them and ask if they need further information or had any problems.

Currently, we can tell if someone stops after the first page, but not if they start completing the first page and stop right there. The experts are absolutely right on this point, however we are somewhat forced to live within the capabilities of aMember. At this time, if someone abandons the process at any time on the first page, I have no way of knowing – and that bothers me – a lot. That’s on our list to work on…

Here is the form as it currently presents:

The first thing we do to minimize abandoned membership forms is to put our phone number front and center at the top. It is vitally important to me that if someone has any trouble or second thoughts at this point that they can pick up the phone and talk to me immediately (assuming it’s not 2:00 am of course.) Putting an email address there is a distant second choice because most people know email isn’t instantaneous. People won’t bother emailing and simply click away.

If someone completes the first page but doesn’t complete the second page, their account is still created in the system, but shows that payment has not been made.

Here is the second page of the form:

Each day, sometimes multiple times per day, I login to our membership system and see how many accounts were created but were abandoned before payment was made. The process can be abandoned by the prospective member for millions of reasons. Anything from, “I thought this was a free service” to credit card declines. On the credit card decline side, that’s a bit easier to tell. After I check incomplete transactions in aMember, I head over to our Authorize.net account to see if that same person’s credit card was declined. Unfortunately I don’t have the same ability in PayPal.

No matter what the reason may be for not completing the transaction, every prospective member who abandons the process gets a personal email from me. aMember also does this automatically 24 hours after the process was abandoned, which is nice if I’m out of touch, but I like to send a more personal email as well.

It’s simple and to the point:

Dear Joe,

I saw that you had started the process of getting a Pass to TraderInterviews.com but didn’t get a chance to finish it.

Hopefully our site didn’t give you trouble but if it did, please let me know and I’d be happy to process your membership manually.

If there was some other information you needed or wanted to know before getting the Pass, feel free to call or email me directly. I answer my own phone all day.

All the best,

Tim

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Tim Bourquin, Co-Founder, TraderInterviews.com
27285 Las Ramblas Ste 235 | Mission Viejo, CA 92691
(office): 1.949.348.2590 x. 15 | (fax): 1.949.348.2851
email: tim@ideasfordownload.com
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I’ve tried different variations of this email – some more salesy and “pitch-like” than others. But I found a simple, no pressure email works best to get a response.

About 30% of the people who get the email respond. I’m surprised a bit, I guess, that more people don’t respond, but everyone has their own reason and perhaps they just decided it wasn’t for them and don’t want to have the conversation. Of those that do reply, about 10% actually then join after all. I wish it was more, but it’s still enough to make the extra effort to reach out to them.

If you have ways you minimize membership form abandonment, I’d love to hear about them.

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