If you want to get people to buy from you, you need to understand the reasons people employ when making purchasing decisions. Price may be important but what about quality and reputation? While there are many reasons customers buy from you, the following is a list of eight of the most popular reasons customers buy from a specific company.
Price:
Many customers choose price as their primary reason for buying from a specific business. Businesses that attract customers based on lower prices are sustainable only if they do a HUGE volume in sales, like WalMart. Most businesses that compete with lower prices are forced to continually lower their prices even further when another business has a lower price. In the small business world, many of the competition think they have to compete on price and based on their lack of business acumen, will often lower their prices below their break-even. When the price is the principal reason a prospect buys from you, the customer’s loyalty is based purely on price and not the company. The customer has no loyalty to your brand or business and will buy from another company if they have a lower price.
Convenience:
With a good physical location and/or a frictionless online buying experience, consumers are often willing to pay a higher price for a business’s goods and services.
For example, Chewy.com, the online pet food retailer, is the epitome of convenience. Not only does it remember your previous orders and payment information to make ordering frictionless, but they also offer free shipping and have heavy bags of dog food delivered directly to your door.
Customer Service:
By having knowledgeable and friendly employees that are quick to respond to the customer’s needs and who follow up after the sale, a customer will reward the company with their loyalty, resulting in repeat business. In contrast, poor customer service will often be manifested in bad reviews on consumer review sites like Yelp and Angie’s List, causing prospects to not even consider doing business with the company.
Cause:
When the business and the customer have the same values such as being veteran-owned, having a history of giving back and community involvement or making it clear that part of the proceeds of a sale goes to a charitable cause, the customer often connects philosophically with the business. The result is that the customer will not only be a loyal customer but also a Social Agent for the business, and help spread the word.
Trust:
The customer must know that you have a history of reliability and that you are not a risky bet that will come back to bite them later. They must know that you will not take advantage of them if it suits you. Businesses that have 20-page contracts and lots of fine print do not elicit trust. Consider the last time you discovered you were being hit with overdraft charges from your bank or extra fees for services you were not aware was part of the contract. More often if you don’t trust the organization, you probably wouldn’t be doing business with them anyway.
Outside of lying, there is nothing that erodes trust quicker than a lack of consistency. Each experience must be just as good as the last one. For example, if each time a customer visited your restaurant they discovered the quality was great on some days and not so great on others, they would soon find another restaurant to dine at.
“Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time.”
Leadership Guru: John Maxwell
Hours:
Customers want to make purchases at their convenience, not yours. Therefore your hours of operation and the days you are open are very tangible reasons customers may frequent your business. This is especially important for a Business to Consumer (B2C) business.
How can you incorporate elements of the eight reasons that customers buy from a particular business into your business?
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