The growth of online retailing has led to a landscape filled with purchase situations where a customer needs a little bit more confidence before they are ready to buy. Product ranges are becoming more vast and technical; there are more products on offer, retailers, and ways to buy products and there are even more occasions to buy gifts for people. Whenever faced with one of these situations, Intelligent Guided Selling solutions can be the difference between a shopper purchasing from one retailer or another.
What is Intelligent Guided Selling (IGS)
Intelligent Guided Selling is the process of helping a shopper find the perfect item based on their budget, needs and mindset. Our IGS platform does this in real-time through the use of dynamic questions, acting as a digital shop assistant. Our Chief Customer Officer, Brad Christian, recently wrote a blog explaining exactly what Intelligent Guided Selling is so if you would like to find out more, you can read the blog here. As a result, there are a lot of different performance-based benefits to implementing IGS including improved conversion rates, better customer loyalty and higher average order values. There are also a ton of additional benefits with IGS, with some of the bigger benefits listed below.
Know your customer
One of the biggest differences between retailing success and failure is a brand’s ability to transform basic data analysis into actionable insights. eMarketer found that 88% of ‘winners’ (brands with higher annual sales) in retail believe that data analysis has become a critical element in their overall strategy. Intelligent guided selling solutions do the hard work for brands. By incorporating the customer mindset into our platform, we are able to give our clients insights that are directly related to customer motivation, which can then be fed into their Customer Data Platforms and used to improve their other marketing efforts. If designed properly, IGS can also play a crucial role in gap analysis, highlighting areas where product lines aren’t catering for website visitors or help show trends before they even happen.
The thinking person’s approach
Knowing a customer’s mindset is often the difference between converting them or not. When in-store, shop assistants are able to speak to customers, ask questions, understand their motivations and mindset to be able to give the recommendation that will provide the customer with the confidence to buy. This interaction is difficult to implement online and is commonly missing from most e-commerce sites. Intelligent Guided Selling solutions not only provide a platform for customers to engage with brands but also uses consumer psychology to make customers more likely to convert. One of our Customer Journey Specialists, Lucy Holm, recently wrote a blog explaining the role consumer psychology plays in the purchase cycle and how we make sure that our service uses the way we think about purchasing effectively to maximize our clients’ returns.
Beat competitors on third-party sites
While selling your products on third-party sites does provide a great route to market and provide plenty of promise, it does have some setbacks. Brands often have a lack of control on how their products are positioned and how customers engage with their brand. Not only that but your brand is also being sold alongside your competitors, making it easier for visitors to review options and possibly choose a competitor. IGS gives brands back control and provides a key competitive advantage, ensuring that our client’s brand stands out.
“Without a strong brand behind your product line, there’s little to compel a buyer to choose you over another option. And with so many options in most markets today, branding is more important than ever.” – Shopify, 2017
#NoFilter
Website visitors want retailers to make it easy for them to find their desired product and relying on product filters simply isn’t enough. Research from Baymard found that sites offering mediocre product list usability through basic filtering have abandonment rates between 67-90%¹ and at the moment only 16% of major e-commerce sites provide a reasonably good filtering experience (cxl.com). The problem with product filters is that they are predominantly designed for customers who know what they are looking for or understand the more technical aspects of a category or product range. They don’t help the majority of shoppers who need more guidance to make their decision. Well designed customer journeys using IGS overcome these issues by ruling out irrelevant products whilst educating customers about technical specifications.
Maximize Marketing Effectiveness
Retail is the sector that spends the most on digital advertising with over $20 billion spent each year in the US (marketingcharts.com). When making that big an investment in attracting visitors, smart brands want to maximize the chances of converting these visitors to purchasers. That is exactly what Intelligent Guided Selling solutions provide. After implementing our software, clients have seen up to a 500% improvement in conversion rates and 2.8x increase in revenue per customer that engages with our customer journeys.
If you would like to find out more about how an IGS customer journey will improve how you engage and educate your consumers while personalizing and improving their online experience with your brand, get in contact now.
