Before we explain guided selling
There is something you need to know first if you want to understand the core of this topic.
First of all, the available WooCommerce businesses or online shops around us are not very suitable for personalized products.
Suppose I want a baby pillow for my 2-year-old kid and went to look it up on google. What Google does is show me every possible result and millions of hits on the product. Top brands and SEO-rich sites always stay in the first row.
That’s actually good but not for me as a customer because now I have to go through hundreds of pages to look for a single baby pillow that I want.
Now imagine a shop that sells baby pillows only and has got the right price and right size for my baby. Facts-
How this shop is going to push the product through all the competitors?
Can it help me find my baby pillow in the shortest time?
It obviously can if the shop owner knows what is guided selling solution and applies it correctly to his shop. And this is what makes guided selling an ultimate solution for eCommerce.
As you are reading this article, more and more people are changing their online stores into guided selling systems. More than half of the world’s eCommerce will adopt guided selling within the next few years.
Now if you are wondering what is guided selling and why people are prioritizing it so much, let’s continue to the bottom of this article.
Following the topic, you will also get to learn-
- How Guided Selling can drive more sales
- How to nurture customers
- How to personalize your shop
- How to boost sales without force
What is Guided Selling?
By the definition and practical terms, Guided Selling means a process that guides a customer from entering your shop to closing a deal in a polished manner that helps the customer the most.
Guided Selling is a kind of virtual shop assistant that inquires the customers to determine their needs and recommends products that are most suited for them.
It’s a kind of funnel system that converse with the customer in order to find what they are looking for and help them decide at the end of the journey.
The guided selling system actually advises the user and supports them in getting the right product at right time. Also, the system helps you analyze the user behavior on your online shop in order to further improve the user experience, shorting products to let people navigate easily, and close deals successfully.
In summary, Guided selling helps you by understanding the users’ needs and recommends the best products for them.
What makes Guided Selling so important?
Let’s learn some facts about our current eCommerce marketplace-
- More than 75% of customers are discouraged to buy non-personalized products
- More than 80% of customers need additional support during a purchase event
- More than 80% of customers want to pay more for good customer service
If your online shop faces any of these three problems right now, that’s the reason why your sales aren’t improving.
Guided selling combines all three solutions for these problems; supporting customers, personalizing products, and advising on choices. This is why you are hearing about guided selling more often from all kinds of sources.
For a brick-and-mortar shop, it’s easier to talk to the customer and help them make their purchases. For an online eCommerce shop, it’s not possible to converse with a million customers at once. This is a major problem that needs serious concern if you want to improve your sales.
Although we have automated chatbots and search optimizations for showing predictive results, these are not smart enough to converse with the customers.
What we really need is a guided selling system that can act as a virtual shop representative and help your customers to find their products. That’s a superior method of selling products than simply tossing everything on the shop homepage.
How exactly Guided Selling works?
As you already know what is guided selling, now it’s time to learn how it works in specific.
Guided selling is a kind of product recommendation system that reads the customer’s intention before suggesting any products. The system creates a step-by-step process through questionnaires for the customers to answer. After it reads the answers, the system searches for the best matches against the answers and displays them to the customers.
While the guided selling system helps improve conversations with the customers, that kind of strategy doesn’t apply on global terms. Now people want to have more choices and freedom of selection.
Amazingly, guided selling can analyze customer data, thanks to the AI integrations, to understand their decision-making process. Guided selling takes customers as people and learns from their behavior.
The result is a sophisticated system that educates itself by learning customer preferences throughout history and helps give the best customer support.
Example of a guided selling process
Suppose I want to buy a headphone for daily usage. Now, an eCommerce shop with guided selling will inquire me about my choices before displaying the product.
It may ask-
- What type of headphones I am looking for, wired or wireless?
- What’s the size & fit?
- What’s the budget?
- What is my preferred color & brand?
By giving answers to these questions, I am actually helping the guided selling learn about my preferences and suggest me some products that are within my budget and match my taste.
It’s just one example of the real thing and there are thousands of other users of guided selling. Most importantly, the guided selling system sees customers as decision-makers, instead of sales, and acts upon triggering their interest to finally close a deal through real conversations.
As for the customers, they hurry to purchase the product they found by conversing or getting advice from guided selling. The results are-
- A steep incline in sales
- Successful customer engagement
- Confirmed deal closing
- More traffic
- Successfully interacting with customers
- Gain more leads
So many benefits from a new step always bring more people into liking the guided selling system. But there are more reasons why it’s more important for engaging your customers. All the features benefit both parties equally, maybe more for the customers.
That’s what we all are looking for.
What is guided selling’s secret for making customers happy?
1. No longer choice paralysis
Remember my baby pillow?
Once I found your shop after strolling through the options, how are you going to sell me the pillow I’m looking for?
It happens that there’s is not a single product listed for any specific niche. Sometimes, the number could soar thousands or more. But that doesn’t help me, as a customer, to make a decision on a particular product.
With guided selling, you can ask me questions about the pillow I am looking for like the color, size, price, etc. Then based on my answers, the guided selling system will filter all products automatically and display the best results.
By narrowing down the options, I can now pick between a few items that match my requirements. This is the most amazing part about Guided selling.
We are itched to say the WPCommerz has a nice plugin for WordPress is the perfect example of such a guided selling system that picks the most suitable products based on the customers’ choices.
2. Customers can be educated easily
One of the biggest advantages of guided selling is educating customers about the product or services that you are selling.
Consider having a website that sells smartphones. Now, try to think about these questions-
- How many people know about the phones you are selling?
- Is the manual about the tech available to the public?
- If it’s the latest product, how many people know about the features?
When answering these questions, you will find that 6 out of 10 people coming to your online shop don’t have an accurate idea about the specs of the product. That means there are fewer people who know and will definitely buy the product.
If you know what is guided selling then must know that it can be the perfect tool for educating your customers. With guided selling, you can create online sessions, chatboxes, quizzes, and questionaries about your product and let the customers go through it.
This process is highly effective in getting inside peoples’ brains as a user-interactive system. So, you will have to spend less time personally conversing with the customers to sell your products.
3. Open advice for customers
It’s very common for customers to look for another product while purchasing a different product. Nowadays, the majority of people are concerned about online trends and try to follow them.
As a result, you find more people buying the new chocolate bar while they came for a toothbrush. It’s a small example but you can understand how it goes on, right?
Fact is, your customers are always open to suggestions. If you can advise your customers into buying another product that they also need, there’s a high chance you get more sales easily. For your records, this is a proven marketing method adopted by more than 80% of the shop owners globally.
Guided selling works similar to this method. Instead, it’s a lot faster and covers more ground. The system initiates conversations with customers, learning their motives and choices, then smartly recommends trendy products that the customers can’t resist.
It’s a win-win game where you get to profit by satisfying the customers more than they intended.
4. Personalizing products for customers
It’s very important to personalize your products in order to catch the attention of your customers faster.
These days, people don’t usually go into purchasing a product unless they feel some kind of bond with the product. Because of that, it’s no longer easy to recommend products to the customers and close the deal.
So, thinking about what type of products go with the type of customers became a big part of the game. Now, you need to understand the behavior of your customers, what they usually purchase, and how often they switch to trendy products.
It’s going to take a good amount of effort to run through all the sales data to track user activity and devise your next strategy. This part can be performed by a guided selling system. With the support of AI, it can backtrack all the data, customer behavior, and recommends products that fit the picture well.
Due to the restrictions in collecting user data for marketing by GDPR laws, we are bound to use guided selling methods to analyze the market situations and look for ways to improve sales.
Now that you know what is guided selling and how it works for your online marketplace, let’s get to know how to initiate guided selling.
Getting started with guided selling
To get started with guided selling on your website, you need to know your audience better. Unless you know whom you are dealing with, you can’t put a pin on the right guided selling method.
WP Guidant is the perfect guided selling tool for WordPress that lets you interact with the users in real-time and explore every possible option for selling your products.
The system works around your existing shop data on WordPress and doesn’t include/exclude anything from the database. It’s an ideal guided selling maker that can-
- Help you understand customers’ gender & taste
- Help you understand their needs and choices
- Recommend products that match customers’ requirements
- Analyze sales data and help you build the perfect sales funnel
- Filter product data to find and display the right product in front of the right customers
In short, we explained what ideal guided selling is capable of. In the actual field, guided selling offers more mobility to your marketing system by analyzing and utilizing customers’ behavior.
For a common shopkeeper, it takes decades of practice to adapt to a customers’ possible choices at the first glance. As you learned what is guided selling can do, let us tell you that it can understand a customer better in a matter of seconds.
By letting the customers go through a series of steps (quizzes or questionaries), guided selling can comprehend the shoppers’ choices of selection. The result is a more refined sales opportunity that drives more value to the customers.
