8 Ways to Help Customers With Their Purchase Decision

It’s no secret that no business in the world can thrive without customers. However, contrary to popular belief, the most important part of the whole sales process is not when the customer finally decides to buy. Don’t get us wrong- a purchase decision moment is a big one but how to get to one?

Instead, the entire process of being able to attract customers, influence their behavior and encourage them to make a purchase plays a huge role. Therefore, businesses that aim to improve their operations and maximize profit must pay close attention to every single aspect of the buying process.

🚀 Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 🚀

What this means is that you first need to understand that customers won’t just wake up one morning and decide to buy your product. Instead, their purchasing behavior will be influenced by numerous different factors. Businesses that only focus on improving the final stages of the buying process, such as streamlining their checkout process and boosting their exposure through SEO, are missing the bigger picture. While all of these aspects certainly do require attention, they’re only a part of the whole.

So, before you start optimizing some of these processes and relying on various strategies that will help you attract new customers, you must first understand how the buyer’s journey looks like. Understanding your buyer’s journey will not only help you make the entire optimization process far easier, but it will also enable you to help your customers make purchasing decisions more easily.

As the name suggests, the customer purchase decision-making process is when customers identify their needs, discover a product that could potentially suit those needs, do some research about it and decide whether or not they wish to purchase it.

Understanding each segment of this process is extremely important for businesses, as they can easily use that knowledge to influence their customers’ behavior.

Now, unlike in brick-and-mortar stores, where you can rely on your top salespeople to encourage customers to make a purchase, things work a bit differently in the online realm. There’s far more data that can easily be generated by observing online shoppers and their behavior in the online world. Therefore, every business should rely on that data to better understand every single part of the customer purchase decision-making process.

With that in mind, let’s first explore the stages of the customer purchase decision-making process to be able to understand them better.

Blogging is currently one of the best ways to attract new customers. Avid blog readers are always looking for fresh topics they can learn more about, so they’re very likely to not only follow your posts but check out your business as well.

By making sure you create high-quality content, you can offer real value to your audience. Besides, the content you create may end up offering your audience the solution they’ve been after.

Read 7 Things You Should Have in Mind When Creating a User Persona

If your target demographic mostly consists of a younger crowd, consider replacing blog posts with vlogs, as the younger generation tends to respond better to video format. Or you can choose to rely on both written content and video, thus expanding your reach even further.

In today’s social-media-oriented environment, businesses can easily use these platforms to reach an audience. You can easily reach out to and interact with your audience over various social media platforms by establishing your brand, choosing the right tone of voice and creating an interesting brand persona.

Brands that manage to set themselves apart from the rest and establish a great relationship with their audience will be able to encourage their customers to make a purchasing decision far more easily.

Even though email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, it still provides an excellent opportunity to reach out to customers.

Make sure you create a good email marketing strategy and share relevant and useful content with your audience. This will encourage them to do business with you and encourage them to share their experiences with others, thus boosting your exposure even further.

Personalized emails and special offers tend to drive the best results, so keep that in mind as well. Finally, since email marketing is quite affordable yet it offers great ROI, it can come in more than handy, particularly for small businesses.

Another great way you can not only reach your audience but also influence their buying decision is through SEO. When online users are looking for any type of solution that will cater to their needs, they will usually type in certain keywords or phrases in the search engine. Once they’re greeted with their search results, they will usually look no further than the first results page.

So, in order to ensure that they have a chance to come across your business, you need to make sure you optimize for SEO.

Another thing you should keep in mind is the fact that consumers generally prefer businesses that offer value to them instead of the ones that are simply trying to push their offer.

That’s why you should consider hosting webinars, offering free downloadable content in the form of guides and how-tos, aside from simply promoting your products.

So, if you’re selling any type of equipment, for instance, consider offering your customers in-depth videos on how to use the said equipment. Moreover, you should also include downloadable user’s menus and any similar type of content that will encourage your audience to make the purchase.

7. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Finally, to be perfectly blunt, customers simply love free things. Let’s face it – who doesn’t!? Therefore, another way you can easily encourage your customers to make a purchasing decision is to offer them something in return.  Promotions, sales, coupons, and free trials pose great means to make your customers more likely to buy from you and ensure that they will be coming back for more.

This is also a great way to potentially attract new customers as well, as sometimes a coupon or a sale is all it takes to encourage potential customers to check your business out.

So, when promoting your products or services online, don’t only think about the end goal – which is making a sale. Instead, consider the entire journey your audience will go through until they decide to convert into customers. That way, you can navigate them down this road far more easily, which will most likely result in satisfied customers that will keep coming back for more