Raiders of the Lost Sales Prospect

It’s Christmas time. Retailers are busy, and stress levels are understandably high. But how often would you expect this sort of treatment?

Wouldn’t you rather the shop assistant spent some time with you, getting to know the sorts of things your Mum might like, and suggesting products other people in your situation bought?

The answer seems obvious, and yet many e-commerce websites fail to engage visitors at what’s known as the ‘explorer’ stage. They seem to treat people who don’t know what they are looking for as unlikely sales prospects —- and yet, isn’t it likely that the people desperately trawling the shops for ideas are likely to make a quick purchase when presented with a good idea?

So let’s say that somehow our poor customer hits on an idea for what sort of present might work. He’s now what we call a ‘hunter’, searching for a specific product:

Oh dear! Once again, the shop assistant has failed to address the customer’s real needs, and the customer has left unsatisfied (or perhaps even intimidated!) as a result. The problem is that explorers and hunters can make up a very large proportion of your website’s visitors. By relying on your customers to make decisions before they arrive at your site, you run the risk of alienating these visitors in favour of the more focused ‘trackers’, who have a specific product in mind, but who are also often likely to leave a site if they aren’t offered exactly what they are looking for.

In contrast, by suggesting product ideas that match key segments, you can address the needs of explorers and hunters, and engage customers much earlier in the decision process, which ultimately means you gain sales that would otherwise be lost. Additionally, customers at the explorer and hunter stages are much more open to suggestion than trackers, which leaves you plenty of room to be persuasive in your marketing. Brick-and-mortar retailers use this strategy all the time in mail-outs, so why should your website be different?

In case you’re worried about the poor guy above, things worked out OK in the end:

(For more information about explorers, hunters and trackers, see our article Consumer Roles in Online Decision Making