There are five stages of customer buying cycle these are; awareness, consideration, preference/intent, purchase, and repurchase stage.
- Awareness is the first stage where the customer identified his need
and realized that your business could satisfy it. - Consideration is where the customer considers your product or service for his needs and also the product or services of your competitors.
- Preference/intent is a client’s rational and emotional predisposition to one solution or another, ultimately leads to a purchasing decision.
- Purchase, where the customer considered all other options and decided to buy or avail your product or service.
- Repurchase. The emotional and rational process that (optimistically) prompt to a repeat shopping.
As you can see from the explanations above, each buying stage are unique thus you need to create different offers for each stage. Failing to create such may lead to customer’s lost of interest.
Imagine, walking yourself in a gadget shop, you have no intention of buying a new laptop, you are just checking out. Then comes a salesperson who keeps on following you talking blahs about their product convincing you to buy. The tendency, you will get annoyed and walk out.
Now, here’s another scenario. You already decided to buy a laptop and walks to a gadget store, but none of the salespeople paid interest in you. So, you will again get annoyed and will find other gadgets shops thus lost of sale for that shop.
The scenarios given above are examples of buyers in different buying stage. The persona on the first scenario is on the first stage of the cycle where the visitor isn’t ready yet to make a purchase whereas the latter is the opposite.
How to Create Different Offers for Each Buying Stage
On the first stage of the cycle, your visitor isn’t ready to buy yet he may identify his need but not yet willing to purchase. So what you will do if your visitor isn’t ready yet? Lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is the process of keeping your customer in touch over a period and building a trusted relationship. Effective lead nurturing is to accelerate the leads to consideration stage.
Consideration stage. Communication is the key ingredient in this juncture. The details you obtain from their visit will help you identify where are they in the buying cycle and how much nurturing they need. Also, this is the part where you have to build trust, communicate useful content, engage and interact.
When the visitor asks you for samples and demos, he is clearly showing intent to buy. He now becomes a prospect so, this where your proposals or initial offers comes in.
Your customer has already decided to trade his hard-earned money for your product or services, but it doesn’t mean he can’t change his mind. Remember the second scenario given above? Therefore, to avoid such change of mind to happen, make this process as smooth as possible for your customer.
The customer purchases your product or service, and you think your job is finish. You are wrong! Now is the time to leverage their excitement. Ask for their shopping feedback, keep in contact with them thru emails, social media or personal outreach. Happy customers are willing customers and more likely to return for repurchases.
