Improve The Buyer’s Journey With Seamless Execution
One of the biggest challenges in business is turning leads who have no prior experience with your brand into converting customers? This is a customer-centric age. People are spoiled for choice, with competition so intense in every industry that brands can’t afford to ignore the needs and interests of the market. If they do, customers will simply go elsewhere to find a product or service. There are multiple stages in the buyer’s journey, each implementing different tactics that will take the lead onto the next stage of the funnel, getting closer to a sale. Let’s find the gaps and improve the buyer’s journey for greater revenue growth.
What are the Stages of the Buyer’s Journey and How Can You Improve it?
The duration it takes for a potential customer to become a paying customer will depend on your industry, product and services as well as who your audience is. To improve the buyer's journey, you can follow these steps:
Awareness
In the awareness phase, a business must build credibility and visibility. The first step to improving the buyer's journey is to understand who your target audience is and what their needs and pain points are. This will help you create a personalized and effective buyer's journey that addresses their specific needs. Prospects at this phase of the customer journey are open to new information, and targeted content will be the most appealing as it offers value that resonates at a personal level.
Consideration
In the second stage, brands must prove their worth to get prospects to seriously consider their product or service as a potential solution worth buying. You can use personalization here through user case studies.
A spotlight focusing on a relatable person, showing how the product or service changed their life for the better is a great tactic. Lastly, you can distribute free samples or offer free trials of your service, ideally tailored to the specific needs of each prospect.
Purchase & Decision
In the decision phase, brands can leverage more personalization by arranging free consultancy calls from an expert. Prospects can discuss concerns and find out more about the product or service in relation to their specific needs.
In this scenario, it’s important that you have a knowledgeable sales team that is not only good at customer experiences but is also highly-trained with your product range.
Customer Retention & Loyalty
It is observed that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%.
Here are a few ideas to build customer retention with personalization:
Follow-up calls to help the customer get the most out of the product/service.
Emails that address their previous purchase, offering related products or a top-up of the last item if it is running low.
Online customer satisfaction surveys/polls.
Many companies miss out on more business because they don’t follow up with customers. Every sale is an opportunity for a new relationship. Therefore, companies should make sure they stay in touch with customers, as they can personalize future marketing and communications with all the information gained from the first sale.
Advocacy
The customer journey presents companies with a wealth of data and insights about each customer, and you can use it to continually enhance the level of personalization in your campaigns.
If you can funnel more people through other customer journey phases to this stage, you’re on the right track. At this point, customer satisfaction is so high that people are marketing for you.
So, how do you encourage people to do this?
You can use personalization to show people how valuable they are to your company. A great way of doing that is through loyalty reward programs that motivate people to spread the good word about your brand.
People are more likely to refer a brand to their friends and family if they know they will get something in return, such as a discount or free product.
Conclusion
Businesses must work hard to understand the customer journey so that they can devise funnels that have user intent in mind at every phase. When you add personalization, you stand a much greater chance of engaging people — and converting them.
SP Data Digital is a technology platform and service that focuses on personalized customer experiences. With us, you can develop a well-oiled sales funnel. To learn more about our services, contact us today.