These are the steps we’re going to take in this blog:
- Step 1: Design
- Step 2: Website integration (the where and how)
- Step 3: Understanding your audience
- Step 4: Content creation and SEO
- Step 5: Audience building based on advisor behavior
Quick disclaimer: This is not an implementation guide to bluebarry’s product advisor. It’s not an explanation on how to build the product advisors for your online store. The content you’ll read on this page is focused specifically towards building more marketing success. It teaches you how to positively impact the marketing activities you and your team are executing.
Defining “success”
But first, what do we mean when we say “success”. In our eyes, a successfully used product advisor at least:
- increases webshop conversions;
- helps your visitors find products that exactly match their needs;
- captures customer insights that truly make a difference for your brand;
- impacts marketing metrics across your funnel;
- helps build and understand marketing audiences.
The importance of guiding orienting buyers
Before we dive into all the steps, I want to shortly touch upon the importance of guiding buyers. If this is already very clear to you, please go ahead and jump to the specific steps right away. On the other hand, repetition doesn’t hurt ;).
Reducing decision fatigue
With every additional product, and every additional product specification that your buyer needs to weigh in during their decision making, you’re adding an additional trade-off. And guess what? Our brains don’t like trade-offs. The more trade-offs we make in a decision, the more we regret that decision afterwards. This is because we are aware of the upsides of the other products that we could’ve chosen.
More products, more specifications, doesn’t improve your buyers’ decision making. It makes their brains fatigued… And that ultimately means your potential buyers DON’T DECIDE…
Or worse; decide to buy somewhere else.
Boosting re-buys
With a product advisor, your customers don’t have to make these trade-offs during their decision-making process. The tool does the job for them. They don’t need to compare every option and product alternative out there.… They are being guided to the product that fits their situation perfectly. This literally means they will be happier with the purchase because they don’t experience any loss aversion at all.
And it even stimulates them to buy again from you. Look at this McKinsey consumer buying journey report. They built this report back in 2009, but it is very relevant today.
They research 20.000 different subjects and found the following:
When buyers become aware of their problem, in other words; when their buying journey is “triggered”, they immediately have a couple of initial brands/solutions that pop up in their brains. They call this the “initial consideration set”. 70% of the time a chosen brand ends up being one of the brands out of this initial set: 70%!
I want to go one step further. In the same report, they explain that the biggest reason for buyers to buy from a brand is their previous experience. Which means that when you improve your webshop experience, which you are doing with a product advisor, you increase the chances that they’ll buy again.
So yes, your webshop experience matters. A lot. You might get a lot of conversions, but did you get the re-buy or a positive referral? A good webshop experience contributes to these metrics.
And a well-implemented product advisor can definitely give your customers’ buying experience a positive boost.
The steps to marketing success with a product advisor
Now that we’ve covered the importance of guiding visitors, we can discuss the 5 steps that will turn your guided buying software into a true marketing success.
Step #1: On brand design
You’ve probably worked hard on your brand. On the strategy of your brand, but also how it looks and feels. And that’s a good thing. Branding and brand strategy are fundamental to your marketing activities in general.
Whenever your audience has a touchpoint with your company (not just with marketing), that’s when branding occurs. One of the most important things is that branding is aligned throughout the organization and throughout your (marketing) materials. You don’t want any inconsistencies here, people will notice. This is why you need to ensure that your product advisor’s design fully fits your brand. It’ll hurt your brand if you have a beautiful looking website, but the product advisor just doesn’t fit that design.
With bluebarry there are two ways of doing this:
Existing templates
This is a great, and fairly quick way, of getting a product advisor live on your website without being inconsistent with your website design and product advisor design. You just use a standard template and layout, customize colours, buttons, images and texts. And you’re ready to go.
Customizable user interface
Just take a look at this example from Nike’s shoe finder below (a product advisor). Of course, this product advisor is fully custom built for their website. But you just feel that it fits their brand and website. When we were building bluebarry, we didn’t want to limited our users from cool applications like this. That’s why we made it possible to build a custom design for your product advisor. This means you still benefit from the ease of building and maintaining your product advisors in bluebarry. But on top of this you can go all out on the design.
Just make sure you have experienced (web)designers that can help you do the job.
This is Nike’s ShoeFinder. Fully custom built for Nike. But if it fits your brand, building a custom design on top of bluebarry definitely belongs to your options.
Step #2: Website integration
Next up; integrating the product advisor on your website. It’s important to think about where and when your visitors will see the product advisor. It doesn’t help to show a product advisor to someone who already decided on the perfect product, and wants to make a purchase. It will end up distracting them. This is not the case for a more orienting visitor, who still needs a little guidance during their buying process.
There are two very important aspects of website integration:
Make it part of your website’s customer journey
As you know, your buyers go through stages in their buying journey. In some stages it makes more sense to put a lot of emphasis on the product advisor, than in others. Orienting buyers need a bit more guidance by default.
Here are the most common places that we see our users add their product advisors:
- Homepage
- Category page
- Product page
- Menu section
- Combination of the above
On every page, you again have multiple options:
- Do you trigger the advisor with a button, banner, or even by exit-intent?
- Do you place this trigger on the top of the page, or more down the page?
- Does every category need its own product advisor?
- Are you going to A/B test the different options?
All important to think about as a marketer, a product advisor can be a great extension to your marketing funnel if aligned properly.
Don’t worry if you’re unsure of all of the above, we would love to help you out here and show you how others are using it. But having a base line idea of where, how and when you want to show your advisor(s) definitely is an ingredient to success.
Implementing your tag or script
We have supportive documentation available that goes more in depth on how to implement the bluebarry tag on your website. But we need to highlight a marketing aspect here: website usability and tracking.
Tracking means that you are able to retrieve as much of the usage data as possible. Website usability means that the advisor works all of the time.
A lot of adblockers are blocking TagManager tags, which is probably a known issue in your marketing team. That’s why we would suggest not using Google Tag Manager, but implementing the tag hard coded on the pages of your website.
No worries, implementing bluebarry’s script or tag on your website doesn’t slow it down or negatively affect your SEO performance.
Step #3: Understanding your audience
When was the last time you had the chance to talk with your target audience before they made a purchase? About what they struggle with related to your product. About the problems they face. Or personal details about themselves…
Understanding your target audience is vital to marketing success. And we all know this, this isn’t new. Knowing where your audience struggles with is key when you want to build high performing campaigns, well-read content, perfectly-crafted branding, etc.
I’ve been a marketer for almost a decade now and found that that’s what truly makes or breaks a business’ marketing success. It transcends marketing, I feel like understanding your audience (customers) is a company-wide thing. Or at least it should be.
But now, with a tool like bluebarry, you can literally ask questions to your audience before they buy. Imagine the insights you can generate. And the best things is; you are not annoying your visitors. Do you know these surveys you get at the end of a purchase? Those are annoying. Only if you are very very satisfied, or very very dissatisfied, you’ll complete a survey. Which results in getting information from the extremes, and the extremes don’t represent your “normal” audience.
Bluebarry fully logs how questions are answered, allowing you to see the exact distribution of responses. And these insights are so valuable.
Here’s a simple example:
One of our users is a webshop where you can personalize printed pictures on different materials. This is an established webshop with a decent revenue. However, they did not know how many visitors were looking for a personalized picture for themselves, and how many were actually personalizing a picture for someone else.
A major gap in their understanding of their audiences. With one simple question added in the product advisor, they were able to easily figure this out: “Who are you buying a gift for?”.
Figuring this out is of tremendous value to their content creation and campaign ideation. So a product advisor can do more than just helping your buyers buy. It can also help you understand them better (without being the annoying pushy webshop).
Step #4: Content & SEO
In step #3 I explained that you can’t put out great content if you don’t understand your audience. And that you can generate insights with product advisors to make sure you understand your audience a little bit better than without one.
Now let’s look at this from a content creation perspective…
A vitamin supplier is using a product advisor to guide their visitors to the perfect supply of vitamins for their specific situation. They use a product advisor to recommend vitamins based on the symptoms. They don’t really have a video or blog strategy in place, but are figuring out a plan.
An example question in the product advisor is: “On a day-to-day basis, do you experience any one of the following?” In this case the potential answers could be along the lines of:
- fatigued at mid afternoon
- stressed out immediately after waking
- tired even when sleeping sufficiently
After a month of running the product advisor, you find that:
- 60% answers A
- 25% answers B
- 15% answers C
What does this tell you???
That you need to start building (video) content that addresses being very fatigued in the afternoon. What the potential reasons are. How to prevent that from happening. Of course having the right dose of daily vitamins is in this case one of the solutions. You want to aim to become a problem expert and problem solver for your audience. They will reward you for it.
This is just an example, but you can think about this from your own situation and from an SEO perspective. Because putting out content that your audience wants to consume is one of the things that’ll drive organic growth. And the perfect topics might be hiding somewhere in a product advisor that you should launch.
SEO success is also hard to relate directly to revenue. Through a product advisors you can see which blogs / pages / keywords really have a buying intention. Since those are more likely to use the product advisor.
Step #5: Audience building based on advisor behavior
We arrived at the last step of this blogpost. This step is my personal favorite. Because I think this is sort of a “hidden” benefit for most eCommerce businesses. But once you get it, you can’t unsee the value it can bring.
Every activity in bluebarry can be captured. With ‘activity’ I mean: answering a question, open the advisor, view the result page, you name it. And all of these activities can be sent to other marketing tools to further take advantage of this.
For example, bluebarry is sending events to Google Analytics. In Google Analytics you can build custom audiences based on events. Which means you can build audiences based on the answers that are given in your product advisor.
Get it?
Here’s a use case:
In bluebarry you may guide your buyers by asking a ‘budget question’: What’s your budget? With answers like:
A: Below 400 EUROs
B: Above 400 EUROs
All the visitors that gave answer A (below 400 EUROs) can be grouped into an audience. And the same goes for everyone that gave answer B (above 400 EUROs).
If you have a bit of additional digital marketing experience you know that you can use these custom audiences to retarget them with Google Ads. Now you can decide that you only want to show products < 400 EUROs to that specific target audience.
You can do this with all your answers, or keep it simple and just build an audience based on if they launched the advisor on your webshop. Launching the advisor definitely shows you buying intent, which increases the likelihood of them buying by being retargeted.
In this example I used Google Ads, but it works for every platform that supports sending events; Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, wherever you run your ads.
Let’s get to work
You read about the 5 most important ways of using a product advisor to build marketing success. I think that most people underestimate the insights and power that a well implemented product advisor holds… I might be a bit biased, that’s why I love to turn to our customers to find out if the steps above are true.
And up till this point: they are.
Our customers mostly buy for the conversion increase, but stay for the insights and the additional – sometimes ‘hidden’ – benefits I explained in this blog.
If you want to continue this conversation with me or one of my colleagues, make sure to join a demo and try bluebarry. It would be an honor to me if you can re-run the steps in this blog post and use it to your advantage.