As a marketer, your job is to ensure every touchpoint and interaction with your brand is the best it can be. Marketing is NOT just about promotion or advertising, but how people experience your brand. The point of most brand interactions and where you need to make the best impression possible is the path to purchase.
In a perfect world, your customer journey might look something like this:
- Consumers discover your product category while researching how to achieve a goal.
- They compare your product to your competitors and choose your brand.
- They consider the perks and buying options available, and pick a store to buy from.
- They purchase your product and become a customer.
It rarely goes that smoothly and it’s usually more complicated, but even with a thorough customer journey map, most brands have a problem they can’t see: there are holes in the customer journey.
At PriceSpider, we create conversion optimization tools to help brands close these holes and maximize sales. Here are some of the holes we often see causing brands to lose sales.
Driving traffic to your competitors
Once someone leaves your website, you lose control of the customer journey. Even when you send them straight to your product page on a retailer’s site, there’s always a risk that some consumers will move on to a competitor’s product page.
To provide the best possible customer experience, retailers often include related products on their product pages. This works in your favor when they highlight add-ons, accessories, and product variants from your catalog. But it works against you if they drive customers to your competitors—especially if they make competing products more appealing than yours.
When this happens, a percentage of the traffic you drive to that retailer is essentially going to your competitor. And you usually have no way of knowing that it’s happening, or how serious the problem is.
Since our Where to Buy software gives you access to retailers’ in-cart data, you can see how often people buy a competitor’s product instead of yours. If it happens more often with a particular retailer, you can address that with them, or else simply de-prioritize these sellers on your product pages. By prioritizing sellers that don’t drive traffic to your competitors, you’ll plug these holes in your customer journey.
Low retailer conversion rates
When choosing which retailers to highlight on your website, you want to prioritize the partners that will maximize your sales. But if you’re only using total sales to determine which retailers to highlight, you may end up losing sales by driving customers to stores with lower conversion rates.
You can influence which retailers consumers choose by changing the order they appear. By prioritizing retailers with the highest conversion rates, you can ensure that every click you drive to retailers has the best chance of leading to a sale. And since our Where to Buy gives you the in-cart data you need from retailers to track conversions, you can identify which retailers have the best conversion rates—so you can plug holes caused by low-converting retailers.
Poor seller coverage
If you have a robust catalog of related products, then part of your customer journey likely includes introducing consumers to products that complement each other. When retailers carry more of your catalog, they can help you by highlighting related products on your product pages—and they’re motivated to do this, because it increases the average value of the transactions on your products.
But if a seller doesn’t carry much of your catalog, you’re missing easy opportunities to both promote related products and increase the value of transactions. That’s why our Where to Buy reports what percentage of your catalog various sellers carry and helps you identify ways to increase your product assortment.
Retailers that don’t carry much of your catalog may have lower transaction values, or they may have to fill in the gaps with related products from your competitors. As you dig into what people buy alongside your products, you’ll see the places where you need to flesh out your catalog or expand your offerings with specific retailers.
Basically, you’ll find opportunities you didn’t know you had, and you’ll stop missing out on easy upsells.
Find (and fix) the holes in your customer journey
You can’t solve problems you can’t see. And unfortunately, many brands simply don’t have the data to see the holes in their customer journey. Where to Buy gives you visibility into what happens when visitors click to buy your products on a retailer’s website, so you can send people to the places that benefit your brand the most.
Schedule a demo to see how Where to Buy can serve your brand.
