You may believe you know what your customers want, but the truth is that their preferences change on a daily basis. To keep your company relevant and appealing to new and returning customers, you need to evaluate the key factors that influence purchase decisions.
Purchasing decisions are rarely made in an instant. As consumers become more discerning about how they spend their money online, they’re more likely to be influenced by a range of factors, from the credibility of your company to the unique experience you can offer.
Studies have shown that the consumer decision making process is a complex and versatile thing. Everything from a client’s past experiences with your industry, to their socio-economic environment can influence their purchase decision. For companies in the competitive e-commerce world, this means it’s crucial to gain a clear insight into what’s actually influencing your customer’s choices.
In order to create an effective marketing strategy, marketers must take into account buyer behavior. Buyer actions refer to actions taken by individuals in relation to purchases of a specific product or service. Marketing must understand the buyer behaviors such as whether raising the price will affect the buyer’s perceptions of the product or brand, and therefore produce a fluctuating sales volume.
The easiest way to ensure you’re cultivating a community of loyal, engaged customers, is with the right research. Ecommerce store analytics and insights can give you an insight into which deals, tools, and strategies deliver the right results.
However, it can also be helpful to evaluate some of the key factors that influence purchase decisions in every industry and market.
Since the pandemic, the shift to online shopping has accelerated on a massive scale.
Around 89% of buyers who shopped online during the pandemic said they wouldn’t return to exclusively in-store personal shopping experiences in the future. However, just because consumers appreciate the convenience of online shopping, doesn’t mean they’re willing to accept a less informative, supportive, and educational buyer journey.
The information you include about your product or service on a website page can have a huge impact on the chances of your customer completing the buying process. Today’s consumers demand more insights into product details, benefits, and values than ever. Some are even turning to AR applications, so they can more easily visualize the products they’re going to get before buying.
Enhancing your product pages with plenty of relevant, useful, and engaging information will help consumers make the right decisions about which products to buy as they check for alternatives. With the right product page design, you can even reduce your customer acquisition costs, and increase average order value, by suggesting which products might work well together, or providing customers with a narrative about each item.
The Dialogue app, for example, allows companies to create unique upselling and cross-selling opportunities within the product page and checkout pages, by showing items frequently purchased together. You can even create automatic bundle offers based on your website data.
Additional information and guidance aren’t the only things today’s shoppers miss from in-person interactions. They’re also craving the personalized experiences and that emotional connection they used to get when shopping with a physical sales rep. Ecommerce personalization is emerging as a critical strategy for business leaders who want to build brand loyalty and encourage repeat purchases.
Today’s consumers want the brands they buy from to understand their needs, and respond to them with unique solutions. This means a one-size-fits-all approach to selling is no longer appropriate for most consumers. Instead, business leaders need to think about how they can adapt their website dynamically to suit consumer behavior, and the different decisions consumers make.
Implementing personalized elements into your store can be an excellent way to increase your chances of sales. For instance, you could use dynamic segmentation and AI-enhanced applications to suggest recommended products to customers based on their previous purchases or actions. You could display different content based on your customer’s browsing habits, or offer unique offers to different kinds of clients, to help them feel special.
Personalization tools can help with everything from optimizing the checkout to suit the specific needs of each customer, to delivering the right offers and deals at the perfect time to increase conversions. Whatever you do, your customers should feel like the shopping experience they get is unique to them.
Today’s consumers are driven by the constant search for exceptional, reliable, and trustworthy customer experiences. Though online shopping has become more commonplace in recent years, so have various threats facing today’s digital consumers. This means many clients are unwilling to hit the buy button unless they have evidence, they can trust your business first.
There are various ways companies can infuse their e-commerce store with a sense of credibility. Optimizing the checkout page with various trust badges from transactional leaders is a good start. Advertising the rewards and accreditations you’ve achieved in the past can also make customers more likely to trust you during the decision process.
Perhaps the easiest strategy of all is to leverage the reviews and testimonials left by your existing customers as a form of social proof. According to studies, around 90% of people read reviews online before they purchase a product. Highlighting your reviews on your product pages and throughout your website will show customers you’ve already proven your worth to other customers.
You can even publish negative reviews, and use them as an opportunity to show customers how you deal with unhappy clients and turn them into advocates for your brand. Remember, it’s not enough to simply collect reviews from customers, you need to make sure you’re willing to act on them.
Customer experience has become the most important part of any purchasing decision in today’s e-commerce landscape. 58% of customers even say they’ll pay more for an item they’re purchasing if they know they’re going to get a good customer experience as a result. To generate a good experience for your online store, you’ll need to start by thinking about the customer journey.
Think about how your customer navigates through your site to search for the products they need, whether they consume reviews and different information on your product pages and blog before making a purchase, and how you can help them make the right decisions. The simplest changes can make the biggest differences to customer experience, such as:
Helping customers to move seamlessly through your online website when they’re shopping and providing them with personalized content as they shop will ensure quicker, more convenient conversions.
Give your customers the option to add new items to their basket from within the checkout, so they don’t have to hit the back button. Give them a range of payment options to choose from, and consider implementing a guest checkout process.
Sometimes companies will need to return a product, and they don’t want to deal with a complicated process when this happens. Making the returns journey as easy as the purchasing journey will have excellent results for your brand reputation.
At the same time, make sure there’s always someone available to offer help to your customers when they need it. Investing in chatbots to answer common questions, and building a good overall customer service strategy into your store should increase your sales.
Around 50% of customers say they’re consistently spending less this year. With various cost of living crises and recessions to worry about, purchasing decisions are becoming more difficult. This means you need to ensure you’re giving your customers an excellent deal.
One option could be to create subscription options for the products your customers buy most, to help them save money on their repeat purchases. Subscriptions help to reduce some of the headaches of remembering to buy products for customers, and help your company access a source of recurring revenue. Alternatively, you could consider giving special deals on price to your best customers.
Track your VIP clients and offer them special deals when they make multiple purchases in a row. You can even send different deals straight from your shop to different customers using segmentation. Even simple offers, like giving your customers access to free shipping can improve their evaluation of your store. Free shipping is actually one of the most important factors influencing the decision making process. It helps customers feel like they’re getting a great deal.
Source: www.convertflow.com
Consider experimenting with different ways to make your products seem more valuable and worthwhile to your clients. You can use your research and analytics to determine which of your campaigns are pushing customers to shop more.
The purchase decisions made by customers can vary based on a number of factors, from how personalized their shopping experience feels, to how much they value your product. Taking the time to figure out which factors influence your customers most will help you to create a sales strategy that generates not only a higher return on investment but more customer loyalty.
Remember, since purchasing decision factors consistently change, it’s also a good idea to keep a close eye on your e-commerce store analytics and reports, so you can adapt according to your changing knowledge of what consumers want.
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