Not knowing why customers buy is like a merry-go-round ride.
Ever wondered why some customers buy and others don’t? Selling courses or memberships can be daunting if you can’t answer this question. Because if you know why, you can immediately fix them, and then clients will start to buy. But if you don’t know why customers buy, you feel like you are in a merry-go-round guessing cycle.
And here’s where things get worse. You start to think customers aren’t buying because your course is not good enough. So you again put your focus on fixing your course instead of fixing the real problems. But busy work doesn’t pay bills.
Why customers buy?
You need an answer to this question. It’s not a choice anymore. You are in the business of selling info products, and you need customers to buy from you.
Well, it turns out that the answer to the question isn’t that complicated at all. In fact, as you look closer into how customers buy, it’s quite the opposite. It’s pretty darn simple.
- They see a course.
- They like or dislike what they see.
- And they buy or leave.
Isn’t that so simple? However, it turns out that the problem is not with the customers. It’s with the ones selling courses or memberships. We often tend to complicate this by overthinking. Let’s explore the three reasons in detail.
1. Customers Notice Your Offer (Or Don’t)
Depending on your business, customers see your courses in one of many places – your website, emails, or ads. But nothing happens until they notice your offer. And when they have, you’ve successfully managed to grab their attention.
But attention is like air–it flows. And unless you give it direction, it’s gone. So it’s your job to get the attention and quickly redirect it to your offer. How do you do it? Two steps.
1. Get their attention
You do this with your email subject line or headline, depending on where your buyers are. If your audience is on an email list, you send them emails. In this case, it’s your email subject line that matters most.
If you’re reaching them on social media, then you use an advertisement or a social media post. And this time, the headline in your ad or an image gets their attention.
2. Give it direction
Now that you have the attention, you must quickly redirect it to action. And the action is to read to the next line or click a link or a button. You do this with a combination of copy, visuals, and a call to action.
Isn’t it pretty straightforward so far?
Mistakes at this stage can prove very expensive.
But still, many creators and business owners fail at this step. And they fail despite getting the attention and redirecting it to the call to action. Any guesses why?
They target the wrong customers. No matter how well you write your headline or how persuasive your sales letter is, you’re in trouble if you’ve got the wrong person reading it.
2. Customers Love Your Course (Or Hate It)
Suppose you managed to get your customers to check out your offer; it’s time to present it to them. What came to your mind the moment I mentioned the word offer?
The most common answer I get to the above question is price. The second most common answer is bonuses. And that’s where the problems lie. Let’s look at the four reasons why customers sing and dance with their wallets in hand after looking at your offer…
- Perceived value match: They feel your course is packed with something they perceive to be valuable.
- Like the pricing: Your customers feel it is right for them.
- You made it easy to pay: They love how easy it is for them to buy your course.
- Your guarantees are spot on: You made the right ones that vaporized their biggest questions and objections.
And so long as you are doing these, your customers will keep buying your courses. But unfortunately, not every course creator focuses on all four. In fact, most business owners focus on just two of these four reasons.
This narcissistic mistake can cost you. A lot.
The biggest mistake many small business owners make at this stage is to focus too much on perceived value and pricing. They spend all their time reading about pricing and creating a perception of value. So much, that they completely let go of the other two. I find this extremely self-centered.
Price is what you care about. But your clients don’t care about just the price. Do you know what they value even more? About how easy it is to pay. I wrote a whole post on this topic that you might want to read if you’re interested.
The other thing is guarantees. Everyone is tired of the standard “30-Day Guarantee.” Think from your customer’s point of view. What might they want as a guarantee?
3. Customers Feel Compelled to Buy (Or Don’t)
At this point in this “three-reason process,” your customer has everything they need to buy. They are looking at the offer. And just as they think about whether to buy their phone rings. It looks like an important call…and your offer just lost its importance. Suddenly, everything you did this far is all about to go down the figurative toilet drain.
Throw in a float and save your drowning offer. Bring it back to the surface.
No matter if your offer’s irresistible, they are gone if you can’t hold your customer by the cuff or collar. But how do you do that when you can hardly hold the customer by the cursor? You hold them by embedding two nasty bugs called urgency and scarcity. And the only solution to getting rid of these nasty bugs is clicking the buy button.
Oh, that reminds me of the mysterious “shy buy button syndrome”…
Did you know that so many sales pages suffer from this syndrome? Simply put, it seems like many business owners are shy about asking for a sale. They are so shy that they hide the buy buttons at the bottom of the page.
Don’t be shy of these bright buttons. Flaunt them. And remind the reader of these wonderful life-changing tools. A little nudge is always good to the brain to take that million-dollar action!
Scarcity and urgency are a loving couple.
One of the biggest mistakes I see with course sales pages is using one, not the other. Don’t split them. That’s not how they work. Use them together, and you will hear the “ka-ching” of the buy button a lot more.
And that brings us to the end.
This blog post was first published in the Paid Course Creator Newsletter. You can click here to subscribe to the newsletter for free.
To your prosperity,
Kartvee