Customer experience is part of your product. The relationship between swift, attentive customer service and sales is extraordinary. An article published in the Harvard Business Review investigated a car rental company that streamlined its customer service notification approach. The results were very telling: “By the end of the pilot, the unit’s on-site customer service scores had doubled, revenues from upselling had climbed 5%, and the cost of serving customers had dropped 10%.”
Who buys your stuff? That’s the central question most successful marketers will need to answer. Along with knowing your audience, properly doing your job as a marketer also involves a deep knowledge of the product or service that you’re trying to pitch to your customer. Ever notice that the best salespeople are often those who are customers themselves?
Identifying The Right Customer
How do you figure out what qualifies someone as the right customer? There are two parts to identifying whether or not a customer is appropriate. The first is checking the general features and profile of the individual. For instance, you normally wouldn’t try to peddle perfume products or lingerie to men.
Profiling and knowing your market makes a bigger difference than you think. In fact, companies devote entire marketing strategies to the idea of buyer persona creation and fulfillment sometimes. As it turns out, categorizing people with accord to the similarities in their backgrounds and buying tendencies is a very robust and effective marketing tool that not enough businesses take advantage of.
The other part of identifying a customer beyond profiling is adjusting your approach and framing to fit the tastes of that customer. The Nielsen Norman Group notes that the average time that a user will spend on a website is 59 seconds. While this does not capture offline sales, you can be sure that people will not have patience if you don’t get to the point when pitching them a product. Your product may serve a customer in a relevant way, but without the right presentation, a customer that might have otherwise taken interest in your product will now walk away from it.
Setting Up The Buying Environment
After you’ve determined who you’re selling to and how you want to frame your product, the next part of the marketing strategy for getting the right customer is creating the correct buying environment and mindset. Here’s an interesting example of buying environments you might have noticed in your own life: supermarkets and retailers. Retailers like Walmart actually have a sophisticated strategy that utilizes the placement of prices and products to prime buying behaviors and increases the number of purchases customers make.
These strategic marketing ploys used by retailers are noted in another study by the Harvard Business Review which reports: “By using various communications vehicles, including displays, packaging, sales promotions, in-store advertising, and salespeople, at the point of purchase (POP), the marketer hopes to influence the consumer’s buying decision.” It’s important to note that the merit of the product and the historical inclinations of the customer may not be enough to fully predict decision-making behavior at the point of purchase.
As another example, if you’re trying to sell a contract for exercise equipment to a client, you might choose to do so over a workout with that client so the environment can do the talking and set the mood for you. When it comes to conversions on websites, businesses also are looking to set up the buying environment in a way that best predisposes customers towards purchases. Doing things like eliminating clutter and form fields actually drives conversions.
Relating Increased Customer Orientation With Improved Customer Service
Finding a customer that is both informed and primed to buy your product or service will greatly ease and improve the customer service process. If you have customers that are all familiar with your product, know why they are buying it, and have no trouble with the complexities that come with the maintenance and care of that product, then your customer service jobs become much less difficult. This is because the client will do a lot of the conceptual heavy lifting themselves.
Entrepreneur expresses the principle behind marketing to the right customer as part of the process of determining the ideal customer to allow clearer and more streamlined business operations. The article claims that: “The greater clarity you have with regard to your ideal customer, the more focused and effective your marketing efforts will be.” Harnessing the power of buyer personas and then crafting the experience of a product as part of the purchasing experience will produce the greatest amount of these ideal customers.
