As the path to purchase gets more complex, how do you begin building a more integrated approach to your conversion strategy? Our experts share how to navigate seamless buying experiences for higher-value products.

The modern buyer's journey has shiftedin the last year with greater emphasis on the use of social mediaduring the consideration stage and an ever-rising preference of online purchases across industries.

In our latest workshop, ‘A Smoother Sale – Creating Seamless Paths to Purchase for Higher-Value Products, our experts discuss the change in buyer journeys - particularly in the context of high-value offerings and non-physical services, the building blocks - and common challenges - of a strong path to purchase, including key elements for a successful buying journey across UX, audience nurture, retargeting, and customer communication.

Our experts:

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In this Article:

  • The change in buyer journey’s – and how it’s impacted various industries
  • The foundations of a strong path to purchase for higher-value products
  • Key considerations for boosting your buyer’s journey

READ OUR KEY LEARNINGS FROM THE SESSION BELOW, OR WATCH THE FULL WORKSHOP HERE

The Change in Buyer Journey’s – and How it’s Impacted Various Industries

Due to the advancement in technology and the rise of digital channels, the buyer’s journey has witnessed a major shift over the past few years, including customers having more control over purchasing experiences, an increased use of social media during the consideration stage, and a growing number of touchpoints before a purchase is made.

While these changes are evident, the impact they have across business sectors are differed as Felix Billson, Chief Marketing Officer at Moot explains below:

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The Foundations of a Strong Path to Purchase for Higher-Value Products

In today’s digital age, marketers must integrate their channel strategy at every stage of the buyer’s journey to pique your customers’ interest and drive stronger lead to conversions. However, the modern buyer’s journey isn’t always a direct path to purchase but one full of detours, loops and dead ends. Our experts share the foundations of a strong path to purchase – particularly in the context of higher-value products.

Learn How to Improve your Customer Journeys for Better Conversion

Getting the right data infrastructure in place

Amy says, utilise your current data and think about how you can start to track data at various touchpoints in the buyer’s journey, because without this infrastructure in place, you're just working on a hunch without any real evidence to your strategy.

Therefore, when you’re not seeing conversions, to solve this you begin tweaking around the edges of those touchpoints, as you haven’t got the data to get you to the root of the problem.”

View our Round-up: 5 Ways to Get More from your Marketing Data

Creating targeted landing pages

Sean highlights “according to research by HubSpot, businesses that have 31 to 40 landing pages generate 7 times more leads than websites with 1 to 5 landing pages. This shows how vital landing pages are when it comes to targeting audiences searching for a specific product, particularly in terms of that high value proposition.

Landing pages encompass all the good practice elements of showing why this is the product they should have, thus making it easy for customers to make that purchase.”

Read our Web Development 101 article: Optimising your Website for a Successful 2023

Addressing frictional points in a measurable way

Osh says, “as marketers you should have deeper understanding of frictional points that we have put in place and have a clear approach on how to address those. For example, looking at things like anxiety, motivation or value proposition trust and tweaking your strategy to overcome these barriers – this could be through copy, layout, or the way we frame products.”

Osh adds the importance of addressing frictional points in a measurable way, “have an experimentation mindset of how we test something, what have you learned from that and how do we move forward to begin building those customer insights.”

Amy Naughton, Director of Client Services at Jaywing on the foundations of a strong path to purchase

Reconstructing your design for a better buying experience

More than half of all web traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices – a number that will only increase in the years to come with the use of smartphones.

For businesses and marketers, this means if you’re not designing your website and buyer journey for web and mobile users, you’re going to lose a lot of customers.

Felix says, “it’s great to have product imagery, but if it's impacting your mobile design, which we know everyone is buying on, or they're buying now natively through social platforms like Instagram, Meta, or buying apps – people still need to be able to enjoy their buying experience on these, particularly around the higher value purchases.

Discover 5 Tangible Ways to Build Customer Experience into your Strategy

Having a holistic view

Felix adds, “when we're looking at elements around those higher values and services, it’s about being able to give that more holistic view. Let's take a sofa for example, it's great being able to buy a sofa in isolation and see them against other sofas, but if you're on that product landing page, customers want to see other products in your range that are similar or complementary to the item they’re looking at.

Even with your email marketing, it's far more about social proof and being part of that collective, as in what are people buying or looking at – here are some other complementary items, this really gives that sense of value to the customer and could lead to higher level of conversions.

Read our Email Marketing 101 article: Tips for Driving a Stronger Email Marketing Strategy in 2023

Key considerations for boosting your buyer’s journey

Understand your analytics to get actionable insights

Osh highlights “tools like hot jar can give you an indication of what users are doing, you can see session recordings, you can see heat maps, you can even do some pop-up surveys, to give you real insights into your customers that you just don't get from your existing customer data.

It's about finding actionable insights that are going to make a difference to both your customers experience, but also making performative measurable difference to your bottom line effectively.

Improve your site speed

Sean says, “make sure that you're either at or below two seconds for page load, or if you're using the Google PageSpeed insights test, you have a score of 80 or above. Because people just abandon pages if it takes too long to load, and with increased competition they will just go and find somebody else that they'll have a better website experience with.

Read our SEO 101 article: 10 Quick Fixes to Improve your SEO Strategy with Limited Resource

Audit your content

Amy says,what I would suggest as an immediate action is to pull apart two or three pieces of content, don't take your two best performing pieces of content or your two worst, take two or three bits that are kind of in the middle, and then start to answer audit specific questions:

  • Was that content building the right trust signals for your brand?
  • Were you using social proofing to prove a point in that content?
  • Is the density of that content efficient?
  • Is there too much cognitive overload?
  • Is imagery used effectively?

Using tools to either do that or sentiment analysis to really break those questions down.

If you're investing in your conversion strategy this year, make sure you're getting the most from your time. GO! offer cost-free agency recommendations, pitch management, and more - get in touch to get started.

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