It may leave you a bit surprised but do you know that a customer makes from 20 to 500 media touchpoints before making a purchase? Moreover, the average length of the journey of a B2B buyer varies from 7 to 12 months.
Your success in getting existing and potential customers to buy from you has much to do with how you create and nurture positive buying experience. If you don’t want to lose your prospects to competitors, it’s important for you to identify your target audience and understand their expectations, preferences, requirements, and priorities. How?
What’s The Buying Experience And Why Is It Important?
The buying experience can be described as the perception of a buyer of the complete buying process – from realizing the requirement to searching for all possible options and finally making the purchase. The buying experience is formed in the mind of the prospect by multiple interactions (also known as touchpoints) between your business and the prospect. These interactions may be in the form of word-of-mouth recommendations, social media campaigns, promotional emails, commercials, or online advertising campaigns. Mapping out these touchpoints can be critical to creating and nurturing positive buying experiences.
There is no denying the fact that price and quality of products still remain the most important factors in the mind of a prospect when making a purchase. A recent survey disclosed that 52 percent of respondents said half or more of their purchase decisions are influenced by convenience.
Outstanding buying experiences help you:
- Shorten the sales cycle
- Increase repeat customer rates’
- Increase conversion rates
- Build trust among your audience
- Get more high-ticket clients
- Improve customer retention and satisfaction
- Improve brand reputation, acceptability, and awareness
How To Improve The Buying Experience To Convert More Customers?
- Always put the needs of your customers first: Undoubtedly, customers don’t always follow a similar or neat path when making a purchase but you can map each interaction your business has with existing and potential customers. By doing this, you can support and encourage your prospects, irrespective of the twists and turns they make during the buyer’s journey.
- Make it easy for buyers to raise questions: There is no denying the fact that Content is the King but your prospects want to have a glance of the people behind your brand who are ready to assist. 63 percent of people who reached out to a business via a live chat are likely to make a return to that website. 9 out of 10 users expect proactive, customer-oriented, and responsive live chat on your website as it is the fastest way to get answers to questions.
- Demonstrate relevant expertise: People need to trust from you before they buy from you. Therefore, it’s important that you don’t commit the mistake of making your audience leave your website to find customer reviews, feedback, and testimonials. Place them on the landing pages and link to reputed third-party review platforms like Clutch or G2. If you want to get reviews from your existing customers, you should encourage them with a free upgrade, Amazon gift cards, or simple discounts.
- Answer all buyers’ questions upfront: As much as 73 percent of customers are ready to pay slightly more for a product or service offered by a business that is transparent and answer their questions before they even ask. You should never hide terms and conditions and you must always inform your customers when something goes wrong.
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