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What does customer service mean to you? Does it mean merely avoiding returns and customer complaints, or does it mean going well beyond what customers expect to make their interaction with you truly a memorable one? Truly great customer service that brings customers back requires conscious effort. Let’s look at a company whose reputation for […]
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Most customers have limited spending dollars which they must choose how to spend. With all the competition vying for every customer dollar, it is important to set yourself apart and show the customer why you deserve their business. This does not mean you have be the cheapest, rather, if customers perceive your service or product […]
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Understanding your customers is essential to winning 
them over. Sales teams and marketing professionals have long worked hard to learn as much as possible about their intended audiences, putting the information to use in turning them into loyal customers.
In recent years, these teams have used buyer personas to better direct their marketing messages and sales efforts. With buyer personas, fictional descriptions are written about different types of customers to give team members better direction as they reach out to them. One way this information can be used is in pricing the products a business sells. Here are some ways buyer personas can help.
Understand Customer Budgets
With a buyer persona, a brand puts itself in the shoes of its customers. In the process, business owners start to think like their customers, who likely compare prices before buying and choose the store with the lowest prices. Whether it means offering special discounts and coupons or using price-comparison software to find the lowest price, businesses must look at their own products the way a customer would.
Businesses often make the mistake of merely guessing about its own customer base. Instead, it can be much more beneficial to interview actual customers to learn as much as possible about their unique budget challenges and how they make buying decisions as a result.
Beat Competitors
When creating buyer personas, retailers should pay particular attention to competitors. Why would a customer choose to shop with the competition rather than with your own business? A business should closely monitor competitor prices and note where they fall when compared to its own prices. Even wealthier families will often choose to shop where prices are lowest.
In addition to interviewing customers, brands can also benefit from pulling analytics on purchases, shopping cart abandonments, and other online behaviors. For in-store customers, businesses should closely watch for instances of showrooming, as well as the number of customers who exit the store after browsing for a while without buying anything. This could be a sign that customers are realizing that they can find the item elsewhere for a lower price.
Pricing products accurately is essential to winning customers. Creating buyer personas can help a business learn more about the amount a customer is willing to pay. Once a business understands the budgetary needs of its intended audience, comparison technology like PriceManager can help by providing insight into pricing trends across an entire industry.