Offering products to customers is a crucial step in business. How can we ensure that our products do not only meet the customers’ needs but are also successfully accepted and purchased by them? There are some effective ways to introduce products to customers and it is crucial for businesses to understand how to offer products to customers properly for a more satisfying customer experience.
Why Offering Products Effectively is Important
Offering products in an effective way helps prevent your product marketing strategies from looking bland. Most importantly, your products need to stand out and not camouflage in an already saturated market. Here are some reasons why it’s necessary to offer products strategically:
1. Helps Increase Sales
An effective product offering can increase the likelihood of a customer making a purchase. When customers see value in the product and feel that the product meets their needs or problems, their likelihood to buy it increases. This, then, means more sales for your business.
2. Building Good Relationships with Customers
While obtaining sales is outrightly important, offering products to customers in an impactful or effective way will create a long-term, profitable relationship for your business and the customer. The birth of ideal customer engagement will eventually give birth to customer loyalty, that will maintain the stability of your product sales in the market.
3. Increase Customer Satisfaction
When products offered by your business match your customers’ expectations and needs, this will increase the level of customer satisfaction. Moreover, supported by excellent customer service, it will increase customer satisfaction over time.
Satisfied customers tend to return to shop again and can become advocates recommending your business to others in the future.
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4. Differentiation Factor from Competitors
In a competitive market, the ability to offer products well can be a significant differentiation factor.
When buying a product or when customers choose to communicate with you, they are not only interested in your product. Customers are also looking for additional value that you can offer.
If customers feel that you are not only selling a product, but also providing added value and a positive experience, they are more likely to choose your business over competitors’.
5. Increase Product Development Opportunities
When you offer a product or offer a service to a customer, interactions occur. This is where you hope to learn the needs of customers or the problems they want to solve with the solutions you have. Through insights from interactions or conversations with customers, you can obtain new ideas for product development or even spin-off new products. Interactions with customers can give you undiscovered answers.
6. Optimize Promotional Budget
By understanding how to offer products to customers effectively, businesses can optimize their marketing budgets. A marketing strategy that focuses on messages which are aligned or consistent with those of customers’ can produce better results than an undirected campaign.
How to Offer Products to Customers
1. Understand Customer Needs
Products present in the market are expected to be a solution to the problems experienced by customers. Therefore, it is necessary for you to understand how your products fulfil your customers’ needs before offering them to your customers.
Conduct research or discussions with the audience according to the demographics of your target market. If necessary, you can offer one-to-one consultations. Elshe Skin, one of Qiscus’ clients, conduct in-person consultations with customers to understand the skin problems its target market was experiencing.
This way, your business can make well-suited product offerings or solutions that match your customers’ needs and problems. If you feel that your product is not answering your customers’ problems, it can be a point of evaluation to improve product performance.
2. Focus on Solutions, Not Just Products
Customers come to you with problems, hoping that you can provide solutions to the problems they are facing. If you sell services as products, focus on superior features of your service that can help solve their problems. Providing after-sales services can also offer customers a sense of security and assuredness, or learn how to use or enjoy your products or services effectively.
3. Communicate with Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is the key to attracting customer attention. If you are not excited about the products you offer yourself, why should potential customers be? Convey information about the product using a positive and passionate voice. Your optimism and enthusiasm for your own product is one of the persuasive steps in offering products to customers.
READ MORE: Qiscus AI Assistant: Make Customer Interactions More Valuable
4. Engage Customers in Conversations
Try to build a two-way conversation with customers. Don’t just talk to customers – speak with them. Ask relevant questions to engage them in conversation. This helps you to insights you may not get by not speaking with them and gives customers a chance to share their views.
5. Provide Best Options and Bonuses
Once you have successfully communicated the value of your product and understand your customer’s needs, provide special options or incentives to encourage them to make a purchase.
This special bonus or intensive can be the X factor that can push your customer to buy your product. This way of offering products seems to be common and widely practiced by most business people. However, to make things more attractive, offer product packages or free products on second and subsequent purchases instead of just discounts.
How to Get Customers Interested in Your Products
Love at first sight doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships, but also to your relationship with your customers. How can you make an offer if the customer doesn’t even glance at your product?
The steps below will help you to create love at first sight when customers set their sights on your products:
1. Use Attractive Visuals
The way to attract customers is by using attractive visuals. Choose colors, typography, and supporting visuals that are attractive and visually appealing to customers.
Learn about brand identity and color psychology so that you can present visuals which excite the customers’ attention. Make sure you use photos with high resolutions for that x-factor visual effect.
2. Clear Product Descriptions
Convey information about the product in an interesting and intriguing way. Use short and clear sentences in product descriptions in your e-commerce platform and even your online and offline product catalogs. Focus on the benefits of the product and how it can fulfil the customer’s needs or problems.
3. Build a Story Behind Your Products
The storytelling method is still widely used today in product marketing – because people just loves hearing stories. Tell a behind-the-scenes story about your product development process or a narrative on the solutions you are trying to offer.
Package your product stories in various formats, ranging from audio, video, or infographics. Even web dramas and podcasts are new entries in product storytelling.
Stories allow your customers to learn more information about your products but also help them capture the value that you are trying to offer to customers through the stories that you tell.
4. Utilize Customer Reviews
Display customer reviews or testimonials about the product. This provides social proof that your product is valued by others.
There are many ways to collect product reviews from customers. The traditional survey methods are often used and works well especially through comprehensive survey platforms. In addition, you can also collect reviews of your products on e-commerce platforms, social media, or conduct focus group discussions (FGDs) which are more intimate.
Make sure the reviews you display are positive and authentic.
5. Create Interactive Content
Create interactive content to attract customers and curate them based on your customer persona. Vary content and play with audio, visuals and images.
To get the most out of your content, first learn about your product’s buyer persona. Learn more about this first by conducting customer research. Take advantage of platforms, such as Qiscus Customer Data Platform, to collect important data about your customers.
6. Active Customer Support
A good product is not a guarantee for a business to continue to grow. Unresponsive customer support is also a determinant of customers not looking at you.
How can you offer products to customers if your customer service (CS) is not working at its best? Set up a useful CS team which is always ready to answer all your customers’ questions.
Remember to equip your CS team with the best customer service tools. If you want to be more responsive, you can utilize a chatbot to respond to customer inquiries 24/7. This way, your customers won’t run to your competitors.
Use WhatsApp Business API to Offer Products to Customers
While learning how to offer products is important, the medium where you disseminate product information and provide a space for customer interaction is just as important. Without using the right medium, interesting content, valuable interactions, and responsive customer service will not be able to run well.
Consider WhatsApp Business API! WhatsApp API itself is the enterprise version of WhatsApp Business, where you can communicate with thousands or even millions of customers in one WhatsApp account. You will also enjoy several benefits by using the WhatsApp Business API:
1. Broadcast Promotion Without Fear of Being Blocked
WhatsApp Business API allows you to send broadcast messages with very little risks of being blocked by customers. If you want to broadcast messages in the non-API version of WhatsApp Business, you will have to store customers’ numbers one by one before they can receive your messages. This is not necessary with WhatsApp Business API. Your number will also automatically be recognised as a legitimate company name instead of an unknown number – this increases trust in your customers.
2. A Clearer Call to Action
WhatsApp Business API allows businesses to surface a clearer call to action to customers. Your customers will also be able to click on a link through the form of a button that is more visible to customers. Customers can immediately press the call to action button and start diving into your catalog or product offerings.
3. Quick Responses with Message Automation
WhatsApp Business API also supports responsive customer service. It provides advantages in the form of message automation. Message automation performance will also increase if you use WhatsApp Bots. In this way, no customers will feel ignored. With WhatsApp being the most used medium in the world today, using it for your business is worth considering.
4. Wider Reach of Customers
Broadcasts without fear of being blocked, blue ticks, and comprehensive omnichannel dashboards support you to reach more customers. But, as its name suggests, did you know that WhatsApp API can be integrated with various applications that support your business productivity? For example, for more efficient customer service and sales needs, you can integrate WhatsApp API with e-commerce and other social media. For matters relating to lead generation, integrate with Omnichannel Chat or the Customer Relationships Management (CRM) platform.
5. WhatsApp Catalog Support
WhatsApp Catalog support is useful to make it easier for customers to learn about your products. Using WhatsApp Business API allows you to integrate your product catalogue with Qiscus Shop as a chat commerce solution.
Qiscus Shop as chat commerce is not only useful for displaying products as a catalog. It is also helpful in processing transactions made by customers. Offers, ordering and delivery processes can be done from one dashboard.
6. Accurate Performance Analysis
WhatsApp Business API supports product offerings to customers with accurate dashboard analytics. The data you will obtain is not only in the number of messages sent or others, but also summarizes the performance of your customer service agents.
With this existing data, you can also improve your brand’s performance in terms of message creation, marketing strategies, and performance of the resources you have as well.
WhatsApp Business API Activation with Qiscus
While it can be overwhelming that there are many parts to offering your products, Qiscus offers you a wholesome solution with everything under one roof to power up your business. Keen to activate your Qiscus Omnichannel Chat platform? Contact Qiscus here to activate it today!
