Last night I purchased a custom product for obo. Agency online. As the clunky shopping cart experience ended, the vendor then attempted to get a Net Promoter Score. A little early to ask my opinion. And the kicker: this afternoon at two o’clock, I get an email from the vendor offering a discount on another product if I order in the next three days. This disregards the fact that my first order from this vendor will not arrive for at least another ten days!
With no way to judge the quality of their work, the vendor believes they deserve an NPS of 10, and more of my business.
It made me wonder just how much time and energy they put into understanding their buyer and making the purchase journey an easy and enjoyable process. Doesn’t seem like much.
Truth is, today’s buyers are smart; they know what they want and are maybe a little impatient. When selling anything, it’s crucial to know who your buyer persona is in order to market correctly and to the right people.
The days of cold advertisements are long gone, as buyers prefer personalization without too much invasion of privacy. So how does a business catch an elusive prospect? Start with building buyer persona(s), and follow that step up with mapping the buyer’s journey.
Buyer experience refers to the journey that your ideal buyer goes through when converting from prospect to client. Your buyer persona is the foundation on which you build your buyer experience—it involves deciphering how buyers want to start shopping with you, complete a purchase, and also become long-term clients through future purchases and upsells.
Understanding Your Business
Understanding your business can seem like an obvious and almost unnecessary step in the process. Of course you know your business! It’s what you think about every day, right? While that may be true, do you really know how buyers want to interact with your business? Sometimes it can be tough to step away from your business as an owner and put yourself into the buyer’s shoes. You need to remember that your thoughts on your own products and services are not those of your buyer persona.
Instead, you need to think about the solution your business provides in order to better develop your buyer persona. There’s a certain number of steps each buyer will take when interacting with your brand and going through the purchasing process. You want to be sure that each step in this process is personalized to your buyer persona and allows for various levels of access to the sales funnel, as not every buyer will be coming in at the same place.
Developing Your Buyer Experience Process
It’s important that you figure out the buyer experience “sweet spot,” where you stick to the middle of the bell curve of personalization. Your buyers want things personalized, but also to a level that doesn’t creep them out with how much you know about them. All buyers will be different; again, this process will depend on your buyer persona. One key goal you want to stick to is making your buyer’s lives easier. Buyers are impatient when it comes to the purchasing process, and they need easy access to finding the information they want. Some want to read a lot about you and your products, while others want to go straight to the checkout because they’ve already made a decision.
Remember that you want to be sure your buyer doesn’t get lost in a sea of information, some unnecessary to what they need. The Internet has opened up buyers to a whole world of information, but they can sometimes get lost during a search. You want to include just enough information to nurture the buyer’s experience, but not too much to deter their interest or just simply confuse them.
Final Thoughts
It can feel overwhelming to create your buyer persona and buyer experience for your brand. It’s not an easy feat, but it is necessary to understand how your buyer interacts with your brand and what steps you can take to make the process simpler and more enjoyable for shoppers.
With so many companies out there to shop with, you want to be sure you’re creating the best possible buyer experience to bring in prospects, convert them to clients, and extend their relationship with you to future sales and upsales. A personalized touch is key to building this relationship, and it’s okay to know that not everyone will be in love with your products or services. Focus on the buyers you know need the solutions you provide, and you’ll find the best results from that engagement.
Contact us today to learn more about the buyer experience, or creating a buyer persona, and what we can do to help you strategize and build these for your brand.
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