5 Steps to Turn Curious Shoppers into Decisive Customers

May 10, 2017

If you're a retail advertiser, you're looking to reach customers at the right time with the right product, at the very point when they’re deciding:

To buy or not to buy?

Retail remains huge in the U.S. and is the fastest-growing industry across Europe, with growth expected to exceed £215.38 billion by 2017. It’s now more important than ever to keep your customers engaged throughout their entire shopping experience. With this in mind, brands now need to focus on creating a seamless user experience to help close that final sale.

Take stock of what you’re currently doing and adjust where necessary. Here are five tips to help your efforts.

1. Set up a sales funnel

Know exactly what you want your potential customers to do next, and then create a series of steps that help you turn prospects into customers. Remember that you have people at different stages of the buying cycle on your site at any given time—from people at the research stage to those ready to purchase.

People at the top of the funnel aren’t yet ready to make a purchase, so don’t ask for the sale too soon (i.e., ‘Buy Now’). Customers need to commit before they’re ready to purchase. Provide value before asking for a sale, and capture an email address and phone number that can be added to a custom audience, and then used at a later stage to retarget and re-engage with the customer.

2. Make the checkout process easy

Ultimately your end goal is to convert lookers into buyers in as few clicks as possible. Be sure to:

Keep the checkout page clear of any distractions.
Provide directional cues as part of the checkout process—tell your customers what you want them to do next.
Lower your form fill fields—only ask for the information needed to complete the order.
Allow for guest checkouts. Don’t force the customer to register an account in order to make a purchase.
Consider allowing sign-ups with social media account logins (e.g., Facebook). With a one-click option you can autofill parts of the checkout or registration process.
Offer an incentive to increase basket value, e.g., free shipping on orders over $50.

3. Show customer testimonials

Publish customer reviews, as these may be the tipping point for customers on the cusp of a purchase.

4. Create a sense of urgency

Whether it’s time-based or stock quantity-based, creating a sense of urgency will persuade your customers to take action.

5. Re-engage

This seems like the simplest solution, but it’s often left out of the marketing mix. Remarketing through Facebook will help to boost conversions and reduce the overall cost per customer acquisition. Once you’ve successfully added your Facebook pixel to your website, build out Website Custom Audiences. You have several options available to you, including:

Anyone who visits your website
People who visit specific pages on your website / but not others
People who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time / based on time spent on your site

Remember Lookalikes

Remember you can also create a lookalike audience based on people who’ve visited your website. A lookalike audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to people who already are.

Use Dynamic Ads

If you’re a retailer with a product catalog, you should take full advantage of Dynamic Ads. With this ad type, you can promote any item from your product catalog dynamically to people who’ve expressed interest on your website. The main aim of Dynamic Ads is to reach more people or to retarget shoppers to complete their sale. There are many great things about Dynamic Ads, a few of which include:

Automatically generate ads based on your product catalog and ad creative templates.
Show specific product ads based on particular user behavior on your website.
Generate lookalike audiences to find more people who may be interested in specific products on your site.

To learn more about Dynamic Ads and how they can work for you, read the following articles:

Making use of available tools can help you turn curious shoppers into decisive buyers, reaching and converting the precise audience you need to influence—potential customers, existing customers, and even people who’ve never heard of you. The possibilities are as broad as your ad campaigns make them.

If you’d like help setting up stellar campaigns that attract and retain customers, just get in touch.