Business owners and entrepreneurs tend to concentrate on the final destination, ‘How can we sell more products?’ or ‘How can we increase our customer base?’ Well, this seems logical as these measures generally contribute to the company’s finish line directly. However, business owners cannot start selling more products/services or memberships until they clearly know how their customers arrived at the purchase decision.
A brief on the buyer’s journey
Each customer goes through the buyer purchase decision process, also referred to as the buyer’s journey. The reasoning is that each customer arrives at the purchase decision after thorough research and analyzing alternative options.
Below are the five steps every customer takes before arriving at a decision:
- Problem or need identification: Customers start their journey after identifying or realizing that they need something, be it a toothbrush or a plumbing service, for instance.
- Information research: Customers start looking for solutions to meet their problems or need.
- Alternative production analysis: The customer narrows down the solutions and makes a list of the potential products and options.
- Purchase decision: The customer selects the solution which meets his/her requirement the best.
- Decisions post the purchase: The customer might think to drop positive feedback if he/she had a pleasant experience or return the item based on the experience.
The significance of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
Every customer isn’t the same, and so, trying to promote the same product to the whole group could lead to unfavorable results. This is where the role of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) comes to play. CRO involves an array of experiments that alter some aspects of the landing page to grab the attention of the customers. It considers several user preferences as well, whether they like a particular kind of content or like to browse on mobile over desktop, etc.
Ways to enhance the buyer’s journey and boost your brand’s conversion rate:
Now that you have an idea about the buyer’s journey as well as conversion rates, here are a few ways through which you can curate a better buyer journey and boost your brand’s conversion rate:
- Study the customer personas:
Businesses cannot start reaching more customers until they know and understand their present audience. This might require segregating the audiences into different small groups like desktop users vs. mobile users, urban users vs. rural users, and more. The more data a business finds on such personas, the better they can use that information to make optimization decisions.
- Plan the buyer’s journey:
Create steps that users take from the minute they have an issue to the time they buy a product/service to solve the problem. How did they get to know about your brand? What tools did they use to carry out the research? Here are the three major stages of the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness:
At this stage, customers realize they have an issue and are exploring solutions for it. They might be asking family or friends for advice or looking at various discussion forums for answers. In this stage, the buyers will look for the business’ website, click on blog posts, or engage via social media. Hence, you should put up website content and blog posts that concentrate on common issues the customers face and explain how your company’s products/services can solve them.
Try to help a buyer identify as well as understand their issue. This builds faith in your brand instantly and places your brand as a reliable source of information- that will, in turn, influence the buyer’s decision when they are ready to make a purchase.
- Consideration:
In this stage, once the customer has narrowed down their options to only a few companies, they conduct further research about each company’s particular offerings to see if they can address their need or issue. Therefore, in this phase, you need to focus your eCommerce marketing efforts on bringing out the significant advantages of your products/services. Use your core product/service webpage content to align the benefits and features of your solution with the customers’ trouble points. Besides, you can also use video demonstrations, testimonials, social proof, and case studies to display your solution, which other customers have loved, and reveal how it’s better than the alternatives they may be considering.
- Decision:
When the customers arrive at this stage, they’re ready to select a company and make a purchase. They start thinking about the final products that’ll determine which solution meets their requirement the best. Here, in the final stage, focus your marketing strategy on:
- Why is your brand better than the others?
- How you assist the customers before, during, as well as after the purchase?
- How have the existing customers had an incredible experience with you? (testimonials, social proof)
- Offers that motivate the buyers to make a purchase decision.
Understanding where a customer stands during these three stages can help you choose the right brand messaging medium, be it through a phone call, a social networking site, or an email marketing campaign. The customers, in awareness and the consideration stages, might require convincing or educating. Meanwhile, in the decision stage, they might need reassurance on their purchase and/or motivation to buy again.
- Add personalization and recommendation :
Ask the world’s top bloggers, the rules of writing an effective advertisement they will say personalize as much as you can. So personalized digital experience is a must for achieving a high conversion rate.
Instead of providing a single, vast experience of the whole product range, Ecommerce Personalization helps in shortlisting the right product of the right choice to the viewer.
Also, personalization and product recommendation in a branded tracking page play a huge role in customer retention.
- Provide effortless delivery and return experience:
Customers are looking for an effortless and transparent delivery experience that extends to return experience as well. The value of on time delivery with the accurate date is the primary reason, when they place an order, almost 60%.They also appreciate being notified in case of any delay. Adding to this easy return and exchange policy can get you repeat customers.
So investing in right technology and automation can help you in providing an effortless and transparent delivery experience and also in maintaining the timely communication with the buyer.
- Maintain a good post purchase communication:
When businesses do not maintain relationships that they have developed with their consumers, the consumer leaves to look for better alternatives. In fact, several studies have consistently revealed that retaining existing customers proves to be more profitable in contrast to gaining a new customer.
So just not focus till the purchase happens, communicate with your buyers proactively, build an emotional connect with your customers. Don’t left the communication cold after a purchase.
Email communication is still the king and try investing in automating email communications. Let your customer feel appreciated by asking questions like “how would you recommend our products to your family and friends” .
Learn how eCommerce companies are driving growth with focusing on the best post purchase experience?
Understanding customer behavior could be a complicated task if you don’t have a proper plan ready. But when you have the right tactic implemented, and when the conversions are monitored closely, it becomes easy to conduct customer analysis.
So, why waste any more time? Utilize the ways mentioned above to formulate a better buyer’s journey and boost conversions for your business.