Top 10 Key Principles That Drive Customer Decisions!

Today’s customers are bombarded with so many choices that it overwhelms them, and they find it challenging to make a decision. Your product or services may be great, but it doesn’t matter until you understand what drives your target audience’s verdict.

Let’s Check out Top 10 Key Principles for a Customer Decision:

1. Improving your offerings constantly

If you have succeeded with a product, it does not mean that you just keep selling it to your customers without updating and improving it. If your solution is what the prospect is looking for, you still need to take the responsibility of overcoming its shortcomings. And making it better after understanding the prospect’s needs. The ability to learn and adapt quickly is what equates to your business growth

Track your conversions to understand how your current strategy is functioning. Tweak it now and then and check your conversations using Google analytics. While Google Analytics is great, sometimes it is essential to get a more detailed and comprehensive tool to keep track of your conversations. 

Hence along with using Google Analytics, it’s a good practice to also use alternative to Google Analytics to understand which strategy works best for your business and provides the best solution to your customers.

2. Help customers by eliminating the choices

With so many choices in the market, the customer/prospect takes more time than needed to come up with a decision. Understanding the customer objections and working towards eliminating it will take one step further than the competitors, which will encourage the customers to opt for your services instead.

3. Emotions can influence customer decision-making 

Spending money on technology, products, and services will yield no result if the prospects cannot relate to your product. Being able to understand the customers’ emotions and capitalize on it will make you a successful businessperson. 

Here, the lowest pricing is not the only option for more conversions, but proper product marketing is also important. It should be such that the customer spends more on your product compared to your competitors

4. Provide solution, not only your product 

Your intention as a business should be to prioritize what the customer needs rather than only focusing on the revenues.

Many times, it is essential to incur a short-term loss to gain a long-term profit. Your sales team should not focus on selling the products to the customers, but instead, they should ask the customers how your business can help them.

Additionally, implementing a robust “know your customer” (KYC) process can further enhance your understanding of customer needs and preferences.

Focusing on the customers’ issues will help them understand that your brand really cares about their needs. And they will be positive for going forward with your brand. You can also set-up knowledge management software to provide guidance during the entire customer journey and that results in more customer loyalty.

5. Keep evolving 

Be it an online store, a brick & mortar store, or a product catalog. Keep things changing with time. A customer will not be surprised with the same homepage in an online store. A customer in a physical store will always want to see new products, new brands, or some alterations to the products. This will drive a customer decision for sure. 

Keep your products up to date with the new arrivals. Keep a section that defines new arrivals and stores should mean it in real sense. This will not only drive traffic to that section but also improve conversions remarkably. 

6. Trust

Do not just offer your product/service to the prospect but also build a relationship throughout the process so that he returns to you again, and can send more referrals to you.  

Understand the problems carefully that customers are seeking a solution for, attend them at every step, and also take customer feedback at the end of the service. This entire experience will encourage a positive image of your brand in the customer’s mind. And remember, the best marketing is through word of mouth.

7. Offers add value to “customer buying decision.”

Customers will prefer to opt for a discounted price often. But what if the offers insist them to change their buying decision? i.e., a discounted rate if you purchase three items instead of one. A prospect comes to buy a product with some decision in mind and with a specific requirement. 

So the offers that don’t fulfill their purpose or insist them to purchase such items just to avail the offer will not work. Keeping offers that are equivalent to everyone in the house will work, i.e., a prospect purchasing one t-shirt will also get some discounted price. Rather than the one with bulk purchases would get the discount. 

Here the intent of giving offers is, it should be adding value to their “buying decision.”

We often find online stores with great offers. The eCommerce merchants need to learn that practice to get evolved with the offers i.e., a value-added offer. 

8. Keep it Simple!

When you are dealing with online customers/prospects, you need to keep things simple. No use of jargon and no complexities in displaying the products. eCommerce merchants should keep in mind to present things in a simple manner to their prospects. Anyone with a “quick purchase decision” in mind would not like to spend time in complex functionalities of product search. 

For example, in an eCommerce store; if you have kept product categories, filters, site search and other helping hands to simplify a product search is a winning factor for customers to search for a product.

Try out our BigCommerce Development Add-on for Advanced Site Search:

Advanced Site Search

9. Ignore the Wrongs and Focus on the Rights:

Blaming your failure on circumstances is not how successful business people work. Stop looking for the things which haven’t worked for you. Focus on the strategies that worked for your business. Work out new strategies which you have not tried yet to bring in new prospects. Focus on what the prospects seek by stepping into their shoes and the solution will appear right in front of you.

10. Established image 

Once established, is always cherished. Yes, a customer can drive other customers’ decisions. Customer reviews and customer feedback are the best bet to drive a solid decision. Excellent product reviews always establish a positive brand image. Resolve customer problems and strive for the best solution. It will always leave an outstanding impact on customers. It will also inspire them to do mouth to mouth publicity of your products/services. 

For example, in an eCommerce website; we always look for the product reviews first while purchasing. A negative review or lousy rating never inspire us to trust that product, even if we haven’t tried yet. 

So this is the way of establishing trust in customers. Once you give 100% integrity to products and solutions, customer feedback will play their role automatically. Here appreciating customers with some great rewards for a customer review will also motivate them to purchase the product and put a useful review often.

Businesses that care about the customers as much as their revenues have more probability of succeeding as they are brewing the perfect recipe for business success.

About the Author

Leave a Reply