Acquiring new customers is essential to eCommerce growth. However, the rate at which your customers convert can highly impact the revenue that you pocket at the end of the day. Today, we’ll discuss 7 helpful ways to accelerate a customer’s decision to purchase. That way, you can most effectively apportion your funds and gain shoppers more quickly than your competitors.
7 Ways to Accelerate a Customer’s Decision to Purchase
- Brand-provided education
- Effective email marketing
- Instate customer loyalty programs
- Make the customer path clearer
- Incentivize trials
- Search engine optimization & paid search
- Social media strategy
Now let’s discuss how you can implement each tip to decrease the amount of time it takes for your customers to convert.
1. Brand-Provided Education
Sometimes customers hesitate to purchase because they aren’t 100% decided between you and a competitor. However, providing valuable, motivating education about your brand, products, or services can help a customer overcome their doubts and persuade them to make a purchase.
So, how can you, as an eCommerce owner, realistically provide customers with this information? Here are some proven methods:
- Blog posts (instructional content, how-to’s, etc.)
- Live or pre-recorded webinars
- Comparison guides and charts
- Behind-the-scenes video clips
- Consumer case studies, success stories, social proof
- One-on-one consultations
By surrounding customers with resources that familiarize them with and teach about your brand or products, you’ll eliminate doubts and encourage faster conversion rates.
2. Effective Email Marketing
Most business owners realize the importance of utilizing email marketing to retain clients. However, effectively capturing email data and following up on customers who didn’t yet complete a purchase can make the difference between your store flat-lining or flourishing.
Therefore, the key to successful email marketing is sending targeted content in a timely manner. Statistics show that business owners who send three abandoned cart follow-up emails gain 69% more orders than those who only send one. Marketing emails — when implemented with strategic intention — are a great way to keep potential and past customers primed, engaged, and ready to purchase.
3. Instate Customer Loyalty Programs
Sure, customer loyalty programs are a great way to retain customers. Plus, they maximize marketing efforts by effectively transforming your clients into passionate brand representatives. However, programs that reward buyers for shopping with you are highly effective at converting new customers, too!
In fact, statistics show that 82.4% of shoppers are more likely to buy from brands that offer some sort of rewards program. This works by instilling a preemptive sense of trust in a customer. In other words, if you’re willing to reward them for purchasing from you, your products must be worth it, right? Oftentimes, your effort to emotionally connect with customers in this way is just the persuasion they need to overcome any doubts and hit the checkout button.
4. Make the Customer Path Clearer
In a world where your competition is only a few clicks away, you cannot risk losing customers to a messy, unorganized, or otherwise confusing website. If you want to accelerate a customer’s decision to purchase, you need to ensure that their path to doing so is very simple.
Though we could talk for hours on the impact of a good site theme, here are some other practical areas to consider with regards to a clear customer path:
- Identify, address, and resolve customer pain points and path roadblocks.
- Map and evaluate the typical journey of your target audience based on site history.
- Provide easy access to the most important information.
- Reduce the number of actions needed to reach your CTA buttons.
- Ensure CTAs are obvious, clear, and well-positioned.
5. Incentivize Trials
Shoppers respond very well to the opportunity to try something before spending money on it. This is proven evident by the success of many popular TV streaming services’ one-month free trial period. Customers view it as a low-risk, high-reward situation, and, after gaining trust in the service, feel comfortable to continue paying for it once the trial ends.
However, what if, instead of services, you sell physical products? Though it’s true that not every business can feasibly offer a free trial, you could consider offering a discount code for first-time buyers. After all, shoppers love good deals. Often, FOMO (the fear of missing out) will motivate them to take advantage of a deal more quickly to ensure that they don’t pass it up. As a result, you’ll notice a decrease in the time it takes a customer to complete their purchase.
6. Search Engine Optimization & Paid Search
Though some people simply shop online for fun, keep in mind that necessity is still a large motivating factor for many shoppers. So, as often as possible, make your site visible to customers when they need you the most. How? You can do so through effective search engine optimization (SEO.)
Consider it this way: when shoppers have a need they don’t know how to fill, often they will just open a browser tab on the internet and search for it! By properly following the common guidelines and industry best practices for SEO, you can appear higher in search results. To provide your brand with an additional boost, consider setting a budget for paid search advertising, too.
Then, when you’ve implemented other decision-hastening strategies (like those mentioned in this article) the customer’s decision will be easy and lightning-quick! This winning combination has helped many small brands to reach billions of new shoppers.
7. Social Media Strategy
As technology advances, social media and commerce are becoming ever more intertwined. Thus, it's important to craft a strategic, on-brand social media presence. This works in a few ways to accelerate a new customer’s decision to purchase:
- A well-established social media page gives shoppers a reason to trust your brand.
- Engagement with and from happy past shoppers provides social proof.
- Effective social media posts can display your products in an appealing, realistic, emotional, instructional, or otherwise appropriate and persuasive manner.
- Social media marketing offers the opportunity to retarget interested shoppers and some platforms even offer the ability to purchase without leaving the app.
Some business owners are intimidated by the thought of curating a perfect social media feed, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Start by looking at some of your competitors’ profiles to find out what works. Then, to make posting easier, make a schedule in advance and “batch” create content (photos, captions, etc.). By doing so, you’ll convert shoppers at a higher rate than ever before.
Accelerate Your Customer’s Decision to Purchase — A Key to Long-Lasting eCommerce Brands
As a business owner, both your time and funds are valuable. Don’t waste either by overlooking the rate of speed at which customers convert. By implementing these seven strategies, you’ll more quickly move customers through the sales funnel and accelerate their decision to make a purchase.
Once you acquire a new customer, it’s time to work on keeping them. Check out our favorite tips for retaining your hard-earned eCommerce customers.
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