Grab a pen and piece of paper, open your note folder on your phone, or however else you want to take notes – and let’s start brainstorming your customer’s buying journey.
Why brainstorm the buying journey? Because if you know the path they take to purchase you can design your own growth in sales and we’re going to show you how to do just that.
Put yourself in the shoes of a new customer and think about how you would seek out the product or services you offer. Unless they are recurring customers, they are unlikely to immediately click purchase or book an appointment without doing a little research first. Think about how they would find your website, and how they would navigate your website before making a purchase. Do they want to learn about the brand more before purchasing? Do they want to know the prices and then compare prices with other competitors? Answering these questions as a new customer is the starting point to designing what we call the customer path to purchase.
Once you’ve outlined the questions, if you service or want to attract different types of customers you might divide your customer path into different categories. Sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure, some areas will overlap but, perhaps some customers might have different solutions or products they are searching for.
Look at these different customer examples:
- The ideal customer: Clicks on your website, immediately clicks on what they want to purchase because they have an urgent need, pays, and then confirms their order.
- The customer just looking for information: They are heading to your website to read your blogs, watch videos, and then move on in their decision-making process later on. They are looking for your expert opinions and may purchase in the future but, they aren’t quite ready yet.
- The nosey neighbour: They are looking at hundreds of different brands, websites, stores, etc. to see which company they will go with. You might consider them over-analyzers. They are looking at how you can solve their problems by them making a purchase or want to know who has the best service and typically take much longer to make a purchase as they might be indecisive or overwhelmed with information while researching so they fall down a bit of a rabbit hole.
- The window shopper: They frequently come to your website to look at new arrivals or new articles, but they aren’t ready to purchase yet. They aren’t your ideal customer, but they do enjoy looking at your content.
- The ones that got away: These are the customer you watch throughout their buying journey and find that they fall off the path to purchasing journey. You want to dive in and analyze their buying experience more closely to be able to convert more of these types of customers than you are currently. Find out if a large number of these customers click away on a certain page or maybe a large number of them get to the “buy now” button and then click away without purchasing. If there is a large significant number of customers “falling off the path” during a certain page on your website, it may be time to start making changes to those web pages.
In previous blogs, we’ve discussed when and why you should be changing your website to optimize your buying journeys. But, we also want you to pay attention to what IS working to get more sales from your customers overall. We often focus on the things that don’t work too closely without giving ourselves credit for what does!
Look at your customer’s buying journey and make a list of things that ARE working. Maybe the highest-performing page in terms of sales is the page where you’re highlighting all your credentials. Or perhaps it’s the pages that list a testimonial close to the buy now button. Maybe your highest performing page includes a mention of how your brand came to be and how your brand is environmentally friendly. Note what’s working and where and then apply those learning to other strategies in your social media and advertising as well. Leveraging what works across all platforms helps you scale your business.
If you haven’t done so yet, follow this step-by-step guide to plan your customers’ buying path BEFORE making any changes to your website so that you can make strategic changes that will lead to an increase in sales.
Step 1: Define your target audience.
Defining your target audience is the process of identifying the specific group of people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. It involves analyzing the characteristics, behaviour, and preferences of your ideal customers and creating a detailed profile of them. You might even create a customer profile for each of your most common customer types to help you really hone in on how you can get them to buy more.
Step 2: Map out your customer journey
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps your customers take when they interact with your website. It will help you identify the touchpoints that need improvement and it will help you communicate to your team the where, why, when and how when it comes to making changes that will increase your sales.
Step 3: Analyze your website data
Use analytics tools to gather data on how visitors use your website even if you are a brick-and-mortar store. This will help you identify the popular pages, the page content that is looked at most often, the pages that need improvement, and the pages that are causing visitors to leave. The majority of your customers will have looked at your website before stepping into your physical store or office so don’t overlook it. It’s part of their buying journey.
Step 3: Identify problem areas
Use the information you have gathered to identify the problem areas on your website and even in your sales process in-store. For example, visitors might be leaving your website on the checkout page. This could indicate that there is an issue with the checkout process like a technical issue that the buy now payment processor has an issue for example. If that’s the case they might be ready to buy and want to buy but, are not actually able to buy. Another example might be that there is a form on your website that they have to fill out to get a quote. They might have filled it out and clicked submit but, that form sends to an old email address you forgot to update so you do in fact have ample leads coming in but, because of a technical issue, you’re just not getting them in your inbox.
Step 4: Develop solutions
Once you have identified the problem areas, develop solutions to address them. For example, you might need to simplify the checkout process or make it more user-friendly. You might need to redesign your buying page to simplify the details presented so you only show the details that matter to the customer. Another example might be that you need to increase the amount of information you provide about the product because there isn’t currently enough to make someone feel confident that it is what they need.
Step 5: Test and refine
Implement the solutions you have developed and test them to see if they have a positive effect on the sales you were hoping for. Refine, refine, and refine based on feedback from customers, website data, and actual sales information that correlates to specific products or services you are focusing on.
Step 6: Get the coaching you need to help you increase your sales effectively.
By following these steps, you can plan your customer path effectively and make changes to your website and customer experience which will lead to increases in your sales. However, we know it’s always nice to have a good teacher to help you allow to a way, to give their opinion, look over all the hard work you’ve already implemented in your marketing, and to let you know of other areas you can still improve upon.
If you’re reading this article thinking that sounds great but, I don’t have time or, if tackling a task like this is a bit daunting and you want expert help from the get-go, call us! We’re always happy to help you increase your sales and your bottom line. And, remember you can book a free no-obligation consultation on our website anytime to get answers to your questions and help to create a plan for you to fast track your way to success.
