WA Day 15: The Customer Purchase Lifecycle

byCaseyAPayne

162 followers

9 years ago

At the end of yesterday's training I was suppose to go through a "side training". There were 7 parts, 6 excluding the intro. Here are the thoughts I jotted down during each part. I'm back to the main training tomorrow!

The Customer Purchase Lifecycle

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/the-custo...

#2 - Phases of Customer Lifecycle

Three phases are described

1. Research
2. Decision
3. Purchase

If you can catch someone at #3, that's best because they just looking for the best way to buy the product. They mention this phase being had to catch people and that makes sense to me. If I already know what I'm going to buy I usually just go straight to Amazon. That said, everyone isn't me! Also, that's only for physical products.

Something I've been researching myself for a while are robo-investors. There are some REALLY good blog posts out there explaining the pros and cons. I could have very easily clicked through one of them to sign up for a service.

I just had an epiphany of sorts! Selling digital/service products would be much easier to do than physical products because there isn't an online marketplace, like Amazon, where they can be purchased (except for eBooks). This the person will most likely end up there through an affiliate link if they're in the decision or purchasing stage. I'll keep this in mind as I create content and look for products to promote.

Research/Decision

I'm ultimately planning on putting a lot of focus on list building. This way you can educate the prospect even further, daily or weekly or monthly, and be sitting right in their inbox when they're ready to purchase. You can also personal address any questions they might have by reply to emails.

#3 - How to Know if You Understand Your Customer

This one is titled understanding your customer, which is really important! Kyle also touches on understanding keywords and where a customer is in the buying process. For example someone looking for "sports cars" is in the very early research phase or they might just be looking for pictures to draw.

Someone searching "where can I buy a McLaren F1 in Wisconsin" is ready to buy!

#4 - Leveraging Company Advertising and Branding

Use brands and advertisements in proper keywords to leverage finding people who are further along the customer lifecycle.

#5 - Finding Awesome Customer Keywords

This is essentially mixing the above with good keywords. A number of the examples had "review" in the keyword. Like, for example, "wealthy affiliate review". When someone searches something specific like "wealthyaffiliate review" they are most likely far along in the buying process. They're probably ready to buy.

This is probably true for yourself, but what led me to Wealthy Affiliate was looking for a review of Clickbank University. I was already REALLY well informed and SUPER ready to buy. I can't remember how I found CU, but I know that I told a friend about Clickbank the day before and I went to Clickbank to look around... actually this is how I ran into.

THAT day I was ready to start working on making money online. I watched the entire CU video (it was long). After that I looked for a review and found a really well put together review of CU vs WA. I still didn't really understand what WA. This person even had a sales page for WA, but I never read it. I kept clicking around the site to see if this is someone I could trust. Read the whole about me page. Rapport was instantly built because we had a lot of things in common. But... I STILL wasn't ready to buy!

Then I ran into a blog post where they reviewed another product. They reviewed it highly and then talked about how they implemented it. There were updates from the last year with the results and the amount of money they spent. It still wasn't making money, but he also stood by his review and was still working on it.

That was awesome! That's what sold me. I just went looking for a WA link and signed up right there...

That's something to think about. It wasn't the sales page that got me. It was their About Me page and the review of a different product... That trust is important!

#6 - Understanding How You Buy Stuff is Powerful

Funny! That's what I just described above! It IS powerful! I just took two things away from what I wrote above.

1. Have a KILLER About Me page to build rapport.
2. Make EVERY SINGLE blog post awesome to build rapport.
3. Make it easy for them to find the place to make their purchase.

I have a feeling that what I'll mainly be "selling" is my trust so they're get on an email list.

Something also came from reflecting on the post I wrote the other day for juggling.

People searching "how to" something aren't looking to buy something. They're looking for information on how to do it RIGHT NOW.

That was deep for me to think about! I'm going to rework that blog post, but I'm going to create another blog post titled "What's the Best Book to Learn How to Juggle?" and then have a review for the book that I listed in the original "Learn How to Juggle in 5 Minutes" blog post.

This goes back to points #3 and #5. It's really important to get into the mind of your customer (and yourself!) I'm sure you'll get better and better at this as time goes one, but understanding why "What's the best.." is better than "How to..." is big. That's said, it's best to try both and see what the numbers say! You don't have to make decisions from your gut. Numbers will tell you if something works or not!

#7 - Creating Long Term Customers

This is mainly what I'll be focusing on. I love what I'm learning about SEO, keywords, affiliate stuff, etc. What I'm really going to do is start collecting contact information (name and email) as quickly as I can. All of the marketers I was following and studying before this were email marketers. You can do some BEAUTIFUL stuff with a good list.

Here's the thing about having a list. You might run into a guy who is a buyer NOW, but his wallet disagrees with him. You made have actually completed the sale but... because you didn't get his information he'll probably end up buying it somewhere else! Who's going to go to all of the trouble of finding YOU again?

Now, this isn't relevant to a lot of products but... when you get into certain products with higher price tags it's TOTALLY relevant! I'll give you a start of my first IM purchase.

I found a guy I really like but he was WAY too expensive for me. I still followed his stuff but I knew that I wasn't ever going to buy from him. Not soon anyway. Then I ran into his protege with products closer to my price range. I followed him for a long time. I watched videos, was on his email list, watched him do stuff live, etc.

One day he had a product and I had the $500 to buy it. I probably had $600 to my name at the time but I bought it!

Do you know how long it took me to get there? A whole year! Do you want to know when I was ready to buy? DAY ONE! I was TOTALLY sold by the video his mentor made. If I had the money, I would have purchased right then and there!

That's the cool thing about WA. You get 7 days without needing to pull out a credit card! What I plan on doing is creating a series of emails that give people some "pre training" for WA. I think I'd be able to get WA to convert even better if I spent a little time coaching people before they signed up. We'll see when I get there...