Do you want to increase your revenue without more marketing investments? Five ways to shorten your customer journey. Working to shorten your customer’s buying journey is the first step.
What is the buying journey?
The purchase journey is all the actions a website visitor takes before ultimately purchasing.
The purchasing process can take a few minutes or a few months.
Sometimes the buying journey is limited to your website (which is the best case scenario), but consumers often visit many websites before they finally buy from you.
Why does the buying journey need to be shortened?
The fewer steps a customer has to take to buy from you, the less chance there is for them to stumble across your competitor, change their mind, or forget what they wanted to buy.
The longer your target customer takes to think about buying something, the more doubts they may have or the more distractions they must overcome.
You want the buying process to be smooth and short so that you can make the purchase with ease.
Here are 5 ways to shorten your customer’s buying journey.
1. Make your website faster and more user-friendly
This one’s pretty obvious: you want your website to load quickly to avoid distracting your customers, and you want it to be easy to navigate so your customers can easily fund what they need.
While this is easier said than done, depending on your CMS you may be able to do this internally:
- For WordPress or Woocommerce site owners, here is a guide to make it faster
- For Shopify site owners, here is a simple tutorial to speed up your store
You can also use Bing’s Clarity tool, a free usability monitoring tool that allows you to record user sessions and access heatmaps of how people use your site:
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
This is a great way to determine when and why people leave your site, which page elements most distract or engage them, and whether they find the site user-friendly.
Google’s Search Console also provides access to speed and mobile usability metrics and areas for improvement.
2. Simplify your checkout process
The fewer steps it takes for a user to make a sale, the better. Avoid back-and-forth emails at all costs. Steps you can eliminate in the checkout process include:
- Email Confirmation
- Load different pages to complete your purchase
- Load your shopping cart on a different page (instead of allowing an immediate preview on the current page).
A great example of streamlining the checkout process is vcita’s online scheduling feature which allows service-based businesses to schedule appointments instantly without the traditional back and forth or phone follow-ups:
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
You can set up this self-booking experience as a fly-in that appears on your website, or as an automatically generated landing page on your customer portal. To further remove friction from the booking experience, you can accept payment at the time of conversion, and with vcita’s integration, it’s easy to set up the engine to send your service customers an invitation to join your Zoom call.
Another great example is PayKickstart’s checkout widget, which drives instant sales from the current page and avoids issues associated with loading times:
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
To simplify your checkout process, consider:
- Create a Buy Now button to enable purchasing from the current page
- Bypass the cart and let buyers buy immediately (this is what Amazon is doing: you will be able to pay immediately or go to the cart as options)
- Supports PayPal, allowing your customers to pay instantly without providing credit card details.
3. Prioritize your branded searches
Whether you want it to or not, your customers will search for your brand name in Google.
The more your brand grows, the more diverse and unpredictable these brand-driven search queries will become. Your current and future customers will:
- Compare you to your competitors
- Search your reviews and case studies
- Research your reputation and pricing, among other things.
The more you can control the top search results (and search elements) for all search queries that include your name, the faster you can get that customer back to your site and the more control you can have over their buying journey.
- Research and monitor brand-driven search queries just as you would monitor the position of general targeted queries.
- Create diverse content such as videos and images to occupy more space in the SERPs driven by your brand.
- Answer questions in the “People Also Ask” box on your site, FAQ or knowledge base
- Survey your happy customers to better understand your brand perception and what problems you can solve. Customer feedback is important for content creation and sales funnel optimization.
According to brand statistics , customers need to see a page 5-7 times before they remember it. In other words, to get people to buy from you, you need to be in front iraq telegram data of them multiple times in a short period of time to shorten the journey. This means appearing in brand searches every time, with branded images and videos to build brand recognition immediately.
Your goal is to control as much of your branded SERP as possible, so talk about your product and brand:
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
4. Repositioning investments
No matter how great your products are and how smooth your checkout process is, some people will still leave your site for various (usually welcome) reasons.
Here you can use remarketing ads on Facebook and Instagram to bring them back to your website. Make sure you pre-install their tracking pixels before running these ads to collect all the data.
Facebook will allow you to create custom audiences ten tips to improve email deliverability to serve personalized ads to people who have visited your website or specific pages on your website, such as a shopping cart or checkout page.
Further reading: Mobile, Web, and Facebook Retargeting Done Correctly
- Monitor and analyze your sales funnel
Keep an eye on these conversions and adjust your asia email list strategy accordingly.
Microsoft’s Clarity can help you discover page elements that are turning people away or distracting them. Google Analytics will help you discover pages that are leaking conversions.
SharpSpring’s analytics dashboard can integrate these and many other data points to monitor your sales funnel and identify issues to fix.
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />
Summarize
Shortening your customer’s buying journey is a task that involves a lot of experimentation and measurement. You’re never truly done because buying journeys are always changing as they include more devices, more competitors, and new technologies. The 5 steps above are great starting points, but never stop innovating!
