🕵️♀️ How customer insights from guided selling improve your online store
Customer insights from guided selling help you understand the “why” behind the “what” and the “who”. And this helps your web store perform better from purchasing to marketing. Do you want to know why?
Companies that use customer insights to generate 40% more turnover than their competitors and perform better than 85% than their peers. It is therefore not surprising that €446 million is spent annually on market research in the Netherlands. Companies want to understand who consumers are, what they want and what they're looking at.
However, market research is not available for most web shops. It doesn't feel urgent, it's certainly not free, takes time and is a big one disconnect with the day-to-day business. Moreover, market research is not perfect. It is done by market research agencies among consumers who participate in market research - so-called “respondents”. But they are therefore mainly representative of consumers who participate in market research 🤔.
As a webshop owner, you can of course also interview your own customers as part of market research. But this also faces some challenges and concerns. It is a distraction from the main goal (buying products) and there are quite a few opportunity costs. For example, you can email a customer who has just bought something with a questionnaire about their experiences, but you can also contact them to leave a review. What else is worth? Research often gets the bottom line anyway.
Customer insights into the current e-commerce landscape
And that's a shame. Because customer insights help you do it'why'to understand behind the'what'and the'whomsoever'. By understanding properly why buying people, you know which customers are looking for which result. This then helps you to effectively manage your e-commerce business. Think of purchasing or developing products that suit the needs of the customer. Or creating marketing messages that seamlessly match what customers are waiting for.
To what extent can you use market research and your own e-commerce landscape to answer these questions? whom buys? what do they buy? And most importantly: why?
For whomsoever consult your CRM/CDP to find out the gender, region and age distribution of your buyers, for example. However, this is not complete because a customer profile, or customer segment, is much more than these socio-demographic factors.
For what you can include current product sales to see what the “best-selling products” are. For example, a 90x26x200 mattress with hybrid cold foam, pocket springs and plenty of support in a mid-price range. Or a wireless leaf blower with a blowing speed of 270 km/h, large collection bag and shredding function. But are these products sold because they actually best meet the needs of most buyers? Or are they sold because they are the most sold? And that's why you're at the top of the list? With the most reviews?
And why? Why buy who what? What is the need that the product fulfills? What part of the current e-commerce landscape helps you gather those critical insights?
NONE!
No current data point, and therefore system, currently helps you understand why customers place their order with you. Yes, they were looking for a product and they obviously found it with you, but why?
Gather critical customer insights with guided selling
Well, you should actually ask your customers that. But not with a retrospective survey that nobody is waiting for. How then? Simple: the same way as in the store. The time-honored sales conversation. “Hi, can I help you with anything? What are you looking for? What will it be used for? What else for? When? Why?”
With guided selling, you help customers online exactly like in the store. You ask them a few questions in a decision aid and then recommend the product that suits them best.
Precisely the why is central to guided selling. After all, many customers don't know what they want to buy exactly, because they don't know the products and specifications well enough to do that. But if you ask them why they want to buy something is a lot easier to answer. After all, that question is about something they do know well: themselves!
- Do you sleep on your back, side, stomach, or are you a turner?
- Would you rather go quiet and beautiful, or sporty and fast down the slopes?
- Do you expect to use the headphones in public transport, by bike, or indoors?
By helping customers humanly you don't just sell anymore. You also collect rich data that tells you exactly whomsoever your customers are and why they want a product. These insights can be used for two Great Goals: marketing and product development.
1. Strengthen your current marketing efforts
With the marketing saying “50 percent of your marketing budget is a waste of money, you just don't know what 50 percent” we're not going to win an originality award, but that doesn't make it any less true. understanding whomsoever your customer is a why buying them helps you use your marketing (budget) more effectively.
Web shops use the data from guided selling decision aids in four areas:
SEA - The battle for the customer is nowhere as fierce as inside Search Engine Advertising (SEA). The search terms are highly paid and eat at the razor-thin margins of web shops. Analyze the guided selling data to get to where the customer is looking for. Is there already an Adwords campaign live for “public transport headphones”?
The insights also help you stay away from competitive product-related ads (“KitchenAid Artisan Elegance stand mixer 4.8 litres”) and focus on the customer discovery phase (“best cake mixer”). Advertising in this phase is often cheaper, more effective and gives you more opportunities to load your brand.
SEO - Content pages that rank highly in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) are the way to attract customers without paying for them. And the content that scores best is advisory content! But on which niche advice content is waiting for customers, so which one will bring you the most? Guided selling data answers those questions.
Newsletters - Need inspiration for the newsletter? Look no further than the insights from guided selling. If 45.6% of your customers are looking for public transport headphones, that might be a good use case to highlight in the newsletter.
CDP integration - The above applications are all based on aggregated data. However, guided selling data is also extremely valuable and useful for enriching the individual customer profile. In a decision aid, customers share rich, contextual data about themselves and their situation. Integrate that zero party data into your Customer Data Platform (CDP) and use it to personalize a newsletter, web pages or retargeting.
2. Product development and purchasing
In addition to all profiling bells and whistles, it's especially important to offer the right products for the successful running of an e-commerce business. In other words, products that meet customers' needs and for which they are happy to pay the requested price.
But yes, which products are those exactly? The customer's taste is erratic and a wrong purchase can result in a lot of dead inventory and a substantial depreciation. Customer data from guided selling gives you easy insight into your customer's needs. Are they looking for convenience, comfort, budget or power? Are your frying pans used to fry tofu or a steak? Are they students on a budget or professionals in ambition?
By starting with why and understanding what drives your customers in their purchase becomes the what a fill-in exercise. This way, you can make better, less risky choices for product purchasing and development.
Win with why
Customer insights are essential, but are caught up in the daily e-commerce hustle and bustle. There is no time and attention to set up a separate system or project “for this again”. But for truly valuable insights, you don't need a market research firm with a lot of respondents at all. You pick them up by asking your customers about their why - while also helping them get started better.
Guided selling has a direct impact on your most critical e-commerce KPIs: conversion and expenses. That's great, of course, but the data that guided selling provides is probably just as valuable and essential for the sustainable development of your webshop.
You can win in e-commerce by focusing on the why.
Read more about guided selling and how other web shops use decision aids? Check out:
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