Episode #082: Your Customers Online Behavior with Jeff Shore

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Jeff: When a customer reaches out to you online, just how serious are they really? Let’s talk about that on today’s episode of “The Buyer’s Mind.”

Announcer: Welcome to “The Buyer’s Mind,” where we take a closer look deep inside your customer’s decision-making mechanism to reverse engineer the perfect sales presentation. Now, please welcome your host, Jeff Shore.

Jeff: Welcome everybody, back to “The Buyer’s Mind.” I’m Jeff Shore, your host here, the opportunity that we have to be able to look inside the customer’s mind and try and figure out how they make purchase decisions. And then when we do that, when we understand the way that our customers think, we can reverse engineer our own sales presentation to make it easy for them to do just that.

And today, we’re going to talk about the customer’s online experience and what’s happening when they are online. So I got a question for our show producer, Paul Murphy. And Murf, here’s the question. I’m going to put you in this scenario. You’re online because you need insurance. And so you’re finding a couple of different options out there and there’s one page that says, “Click here for a fast quote,” right? And you’re looking at it saying, “Great. I can go in, I can put in a little bit of information and I’m going to find out right now how much their insurance costs.” Okay? So you click on the page and you put in some information and then it goes to the next page and it says, “Give us your name, address, email address, all this information. And then somebody’s gonna to call you very soon. And we’ll give you a quote.”

Here’s my question for you, Murf. How quickly are you going to bounce off of that page or are you actually going to fill it out and see, hit Submit?

Paul: No, I’m gone. I am so quickly gone. Because you expect, if they say, “We’ll get it to you now,” they’re going to get it to me now. If I’m getting a phone call later, that’s not now.

Jeff: That’s not now. That’s right. And at you, you’re trying to do this anonymously. You don’t want to talk to anybody and so you just click…you just close the page.

Paul: Absolutely.

Jeff: Right? You just close the page. Okay. Marketers call that the bounce off rate, the bounce off rate. The bounce off rate is tracking the percentage of people who, when they get to that page, bounce off that page, just close it and move on. You know what the bounce off rate is for all products in the United States? Ninety-seven percent. Ninety-seven percent of people are just like you, Murf, and just like me, by the way. They’re going to get to that page and they’re immediately going to bounce off that page.

Paul: That seems crazy high.

Jeff: It really, really is. And yet whenever you talk to people about this, they’re like, “Well, that’s what I do. That’s what I do.” This is what just about everybody does. And so then the question is what does that say about the 3%? Murf, what do you think it says about the 3%?

Paul: What does it say about… They really want to know what they want to know and they’re willing to wait for it.

Jeff: Yes. And so those 3%, you know, by virtue of that… I mean, just put yourself in that position for just a moment. If I’m actually going to click Send, what does it mean? It means I am very, very…I am so serious that I’m going to give you all the information you’re asking for right now. That’s how serious I am.

And I want to just tell you right now, that is a huge clue about the quality of that prospect. Somebody who was sending information and saying, “Here is all my contact…” Do you know how have much marketers pay to get good contact information? Here’s somebody volunteering it to you and asking you for help. This is what we trainers sometimes call a buying signal.

Look, this is the idea that that customer is out there saying, “Please, help me, and please help me now.” The customer who finds you online is gold. It’s gold and it’s gold. It’s sitting right there in the surface. You don’t have to dig for this gold. It’s right there. And I want to make a suggestion here to you as to how to both meet these…the needs of these people who submitted on that form and then blow them away. And I want to give you that suggestion in two words: speed and personalization.

The quicker you can contact that person, the more you have the inside advantage over everybody else that’s out there. Speed is everything. Because at the time that they’re filling out that form, that is when their emotion is the highest. That’s why so many customers have instant chat popups that say, “Hey, can I help you with something right now?” And they are doing that because they know that that’s when that customer is most engaged. So if they’re filling out a form, at the moment they fill out the form, that is when they are at their emotional apex.

But the more time that passes, what happens? Well, life happens. Work happens. Their kids happen. And all of these things move their attentional focus away from the moment where they hit the send button. So when I can get back to them very, very quickly, I’m still connecting with them while their emotion is high, in fact, I might be connecting with them while they are on the webpage for one of my competitors and I can then quickly jump in and interrupt my competitor’s sales presentation, which doesn’t break my heart at all.

So the first thing is speed. And the second is personalization. So what we’re gonna look at here is one thing to have an auto response clearly generated off of a CRM system here. But what you want to do is you want to make it as personal as you possibly can. That means that we’re using their name in that follow-up. That means that when we reach out to them, we’re trying too…we’re saying, “Hey, listen. Oh, hey, I see that you’re in Denver. And, you know, how about those Rockies?” I don’t know what you want to say. You gotta do something here that finds some aspect of personalization. Why do we want to do that? So the customer knows you’re not a robot. So the customer knows that you’re actually a real person who’s reaching out to them.

And by the way, when you look at relationships, that’s how relationships work. It doesn’t begin with, “Hi, I’m Jeff. Can you do me a favor?” That’s not how relationships work. Relationships work because we connect, we bond, we find some sort of common ground.

Speed and personalization. So I want to make this suggestion here to you. The next lead that you get, the very next lead that you get, understand what the customer had to go through just to hit send in the first place. And then ask yourself the question, how quickly can I get back to them and how personalized can I make this? If you get those two things right, you are going to pick up gold nuggets that are lying right there. And you’re going to have the opportunity to make a radical difference in the lives of the people you touch.

All right, there you go. Another episode of “The Buyer’s Mind.” Now you have the opportunity to go out and apply it. But if you’re listening right now at jeffshore.com or on YouTube, hop over to iTunes if you would, please. Rate the show, drop in a quick review, and by all means, subscribe. Growing that subscriber base helps us to grow it even more and to get the word out to more and more people. We really, really appreciate it. It means the world to us. But until next time, go out there and change someone’s world.