We live in a world where eCommerce epitomizes the expression spoiled for choice. That’s great news for customers, but it’s not always good news for businesses. It’s up to you to ensure that your store, products, and service stand out, and that customers choose to shop with you.
One way of doing this is to understand customer psychology. Knowing how purchasing decisions are made and what their main drivers are is an integral part of any sales strategy.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at how understanding your customer’s mindset can drive sales.
Let’s dive in!
What Is The Definition Of A Customer Mindset?
“If you want to know how to sell more, then you better know why customers buy.” – Steve Ferrante
Adopting a customer mindset is about putting yourself in your customer’s position and finding the core of what they are looking for. It’s about stripping away the corporate jargon and getting to the root of what your customer really wants and why.
Too many companies spend more time advertising their history, strategy, and product instead of pausing to find out what their customer’s needs are and where they stem from. A customer mindset turns this approach on its head, effectively putting customer needs on top of the priority list.
The Cognitive Process Of Consumerism
All consumers go through a cognitive process when deciding whether or not to invest in your product or services. Understanding the cognition behind what drives, motivates, and attracts customers to take action can act as a key for unlocking consumer satisfaction.
In 2021, the high level of business completion has given rise to the active learning of consumer behavior and cognition. Sometimes known as neuromarketing, uncovering the ways in which consumers are influenced to make a purchase decision has become a huge part of modern marketing strategies.
- Doubt-avoidance tendency: Consumers do not like making uninformed or dubious purchases. Reviews, multiple high quality product images, and any other examples of a product’s quality are crucial for removing doubt from their purchase decision. This becomes especially true with eCommerce, where consumers do not have the option to touch or feel a product in real life.
- Center-stage effect: Particularly when buying gifts for others, an item placed in a centre-stage position becomes more desirable to the modern consumer. This is because cognition prompts us to believe that if something gets placed in the center of a display, that must be because it is popular. Therefore, it’s a smart purchase.
- Reciprocity: Although this aspect of consumer psychology is less relevant to eCommerce websites, it remains a consistent pattern of behavior. Brands that offer something of value (testers, information, free products) are more likely to result in a purchase because consumers feel obligated to respect the notion of reciprocity.
- Scarcity: The consumer’s cognitive urge to make a purchase increases when products get advertised as scarce. Only two left in stock, last day of the sale—statements like this appeal to the modern consumer because a product’s value amplifies when it’s a rarity.
Overall, what neuromarketers have picked up from years of analyzing consumer psychology is that emotions are more closely intertwined with purchase decisions than previously believed. Cognitive bias, personal history, and social acceptance all play a crucial role in consumer behavior.
Understanding Cognitive Biases
Cognitive biases are the subconscious beliefs and ideas we have about the world, yet have little awareness or control over. Social and cultural biases shape so much of how we think and behave. But most of them happen below the surface of conscious awareness.
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Biases are unfounded but deeply ingrained ideas or beliefs that we’re taught or subconsciously pick up due to upbringing, media, and societal norms. They influence our judgments without us even realizing it. But their global predictability has made it easy for companies to capitalize on those patterns.
The average consumer is not aware of the fact that they are more likely to buy something if it’s placed in the middle of a webpage, but they’ve become conditioned to do so. Understanding cognitive bias is crucial for eCommerce businesses to reach their financial and professional goals.
Using Personas, Journey Mapping, And Data To Your Advantage
Consumer culture has been around long enough for marketers to develop reliable strategies for taking their business model to the next level. But with such a high level of competition, companies need to find new ways to use those strategies to their advantage.
Here are a few:
- Personas: Personas are semi-fictional representations of consumer groups. By categorizing consumers into groups based on similar goals, motivations, and demographics, marketers can gain a better understanding of how to attract them.
- Journey mapping: Journey mapping is the process of mapping out the average online consumer’s trajectory from the home page to check out. Directions between each pivotal step need to be clear and easy to follow.
- Data: Data is the pinnacle of modern marketing strategies. By running data analytics programs on the consumer behavior and patterns on your WooCommerce website, you can gain significant insights into what their needs are.
These three elements of consumer tracking can serve as invaluable assets to your marketing strategy, no matter how experienced you are as a company.
How To Maintain Staying Power
Staying power is the factor that determines whether a consumer will stay or leave on your WooCommerce website. Close to 70% of online shoppers discard their items after placing them in a cart, which means eCommerce strategists need to work on maintaining their consumer’s will to stay.
- Minimize distractions: The less clutter on your website, the easier it is for consumers to stay focused on the task at hand. The human brain is predisposed to distractions when shopping, but a minimal approach to layout can make all the difference.
- Provide numerous payment options: Many shoppers may choose to discard their items because of limited, unclear, or inflexible payment options. Make sure you have a wide variety of payment options to accommodate consumers’ individual needs. Additionally, ensure that you provide a customized invoice with a complete breakdown of all costs for the service or product purchased. This creates transparency and provides both you and the customer with a legitimate paper trail.
- Make delivery free: Up to 60% of online shoppers will abandon a cart due to unexpected expenses. If the delivery fee is only advertised at the last moment, it can scare the customer off. Instead, try to find creative ways of including the delivery fees into the total product cost and preventing unnecessary cart abandonment.
What eCommerce customers want is for businesses to anticipate their needs before they’ve even realized they had them. While this may seem like asking for a lot, modern consumers know you are competing with thousands of other brands for their attention.
What’s more, the analytical tools and data that WooCommerce platforms now have access to make consumer demands much easier to accommodate. If you can use these tools and data to understand your customer’s mindset, you can learn how to increase your sales and continually grow your consumer base. Thinking like your customers unlock a world of potential.
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About our Guest Author: Wordplay ninja, article alchemist, and knowledge inquisitor. Melanie Robles is an experienced freelance writer and editor covering a variety of topics. When she’s not consumed by the creative vortex, she spends her time exploring new fields of knowledge to broaden her horizon.
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