Everyday, we have to make thousands of decisions. From when to brush our teeth, what to wear today, what to make for dinner, through to all the decisions you have to make at work. All of this before lunch time! It’s no wonder that so many customers suffer from indecision and the lack of purchasing power.
When you’re under stress, your body reacts in several ways. Your attention span gets shorter, you can have increased anxiety, and, quite often, have a fear of making decisions.
Couple All of these external influences that your customer is making everyday along with being bombarded by the same information from every single retailer, and your customer, can move into a state of stress and anxiety. And this leads to overthinking the purchasing decision, letting fear creep in, and eventually, just walking away from the whole buying experience.
So, how can you, the retailer, conquer the indecision barrier?
You have to pull down those barriers. What you need to do, is create a zone of security and here’s how you can do it.
Offer a guarantee
Retailers shy away from offering guarantees, because they think it’s going to cost them a lot of money.
But if you’re confident of your products, and your service, really, how many people are going to claim on your ‘guarantee’?
If you’re scared about offering a guarantee, maybe you need to step back and analyse your customer experience and see where you think you’re lacking.
Try before you buy
This could be anything from having testers available, or offering free samples, right through to letting a customer taking a product home for a set period of time.
Allowing a customer to try the product out, is the biggest removal of the indecision barrier.
Have you ever thought about letting a customer hire a product? In a similar vein to try before you buy, you could allow a customer to hire a product for a short period of time, and if they choose to go ahead with the purchase, the hire amount is deducted from the sale price.
I did this for a number of products in my store, and had a 100% conversion rate!
And my last, super simple way, to overcome your customer’s indecision barrier, and move them to a sale, is to have an open, advertised returns policy.
Again, so many retailers that I talk to, shy away from a generous returns policy, with the fear that it will be abused.
If you stand by your product choices, then you should have nothing to worry about. Making sure that your policy is transparent, and actually letting your customer know that they can return change of mind purchase within a set period of time, can be the deciding factor for many fence sitters.
If you have someone who claims against your guarantee, make sure that you have a system in place to get feedback on WHY they feel like they haven’t been delivered what they were promised. This will help you to fine tune your business for the future.
Plus, I’ll add this in, because it’s so, super-important. You should follow up with your customer. If you sell a product that can often be the basis of procrastination and indecision, ALWAYS make sure that you follow up with a phone call to ensure that your customer is getting the most benefit from their purchase.
If you’ve found this information useful, come and join the Bringing Business TO Retail community. You’ll find a bunch of retailers from all over the world, chatting all things business. Best of all, it’s free.
Until next week, be profitable
