Everyday you open your store on right time like 9 AM or 10 AM. You are very hopeful to get some good numbers of customers today, make some good sales & get some good profits. You open your store, clean it & wait for customers to come. You wait and wait. Either customers come or not come. It is not under your control. If you get more customers today, you feel lucky. Because you made some good sales & thus good profits. And if you do not get as many customers as expected, you feel sad due to less sales & less profits. This is the typical like of every store owners.
There was time like before year 2000, you do not have to worry for customers at all. You just have to open your store on right locations, customers have demand for your products & they just come to you for buying. You do not need much marketing, do not need to give any discounts. Customers just keep purchasing from you & you are getting enough high profits to become rich.
You think your business life will be same & more prosperous in future. Population is increasing, so the customers are, thus your sales will too increase. But this is not the case. There are some villains in every good life & they just come to your life uninvited. And they are no one else but your new competitors.
Your competitors sell same products as you do, but they do it differently. They do some traditional marketing like billboards, flyers, audio promotions, door to door promotions etc. Not only this, they also give some small discounts. Due to these, most of your old customers go to their store. As result no only you lose customers, but also sales & profits. Your dream of easily becoming rich just got ruined. To survive, you also start copying what the competitors are doing. You copy in more improved way. You do some more creating marketing & give little extra discounts than your competitors. Then you got your customers back, your sales back & then your customers.
Then you feel some peace of mind too. You know that no matter how much competitors come, you just have to learn what your competitors are doing, do some extra marketing & give some extra discounts. This is the life of all store business owners before 2006 to 2009. But then you got the biggest villains ever. The rise of internet and the rise of online competitors. They not only do business differently, but also they changed the behavior of your customers.
Due to the rise of internet & rise of online competitors from 2009, the behaviors of your customers changed drastically. They not only just changed, but made a huge U turn. Now in 2022 onwards, the buying patterns of customers have changed very much. This is the main reason of decline of customers to your store, less sales & less profits.
In this article, I will explain you the major behavioral changes in your customers.
Customers Behavior Of Shopping Has Changed From Offline Search To Online Search:
Previously when a customer feel a need, they used to go to market, visit some stores and purchase items.
But now customers 1st go to online. They go to google 1st. Search their required product. In outside, they need to visit many store, which is time consuming. But in online, they visit many store with in few minutes. If they found their products online, then 75% of customers buy from there. Rest 25% go to nearby stores, check products, then compare price. Then some purchase from the store and some do not purchase at all. The do-not purchase customers again visit online & buy from there.
Only the customers who do not have knowledge on online shopping or who do not find their product, visit the offline store. Many offline business are surviving from these types of customers. They are mostly combinations of customers from village, customers who lack online online shopping knowledge & customers who do not find their products online. But these types of customers are gradually reducing. Because gradually they are learning online shopping, they are bombarded with advertisements from many online shopping websites while they are browsing any piece of internet. They are attracted to the simple discount offers which any offline store can also provide, but not doing.
Before 2009, 90% customers are purchasing offline. Only 10% are purchasing online because of they are unable to find their products in their area. Also in past there was some problems like delivery delay, trust issue, return issue, internet penetration issue etc. due to which online sales were very low. But now situation has changed completely. Now 99% people are using internet. Everyone has mobile phone & high speed internet. Everyday they are spending time on internet browsing various websites and apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, video games etc. They are using google for finding any thing. They are reading articles, news all online. Less are reading book and most are consuming time online. In past customers were mostly outside, so traditional marketing like billboards were working. But now customers are mostly inside their home & using their mobile to see the world. Now they are consuming ads from internet. They are influenced by it. They are making almost all of their shopping decisions by it.
Currently 75% of customers are purchasing online & only 25% are purchasing offline. Gradually these online shoppers are increasing. Pretty soon in 2 to 3 years, almost 90% customers will shop online. So any business which is not online will be close down in future due to lack of sales.
Customers mind share has changed and always rapidly changing.
In past there were fewer stores. And customers mostly spend their time outside + watching TV. Customers mostly know where what items will be available. They were also influenced by various billboards, poster marketing.
But now situations have changed. There are hundreds and thousands of stores for particular product. And the ones which is taking most of customer attentions is winning the battle. The successful business know where the target customers are spending their time most and that is online. So they are doing various digital marketing to get their attentions. Successful business are getting the attention of customers by various digital marketing, getting their personal data like emails, mobile numbers etc. and getting more personal attentions by marketing via these data. Who is spending more is getting more attentions. Due to this, customers decision making process is changing. Now when they need a product, they are influenced by these decisions and purchasing from there.
Customers are influenced by offers.
There was time when products were fixed price mostly. Some are even high like dth recharge. Customers have no options but to purchase from these stores. The stores giving some offers are getting some more sales, while the store who is not giving offer is tolerating some lack of sales. This was the game in past.
But now there are thousands of stores, both online and offline. And everyone is getting the attention of customers by giving offers. In past 10 years, customers has bombarded with tons of offers that they are almost addicted to it. Without offers they are thinking a business is looting them. Even if you need to hike the price & then lower it with offer, customers will still want them, instead of fix rude price. Also simply making offers do not work. You need to get the attention of customers with the offers. The business who is doing this is getting customs attentions and getting sales.
So What You Can Do to Make Your Business Survive:
Customers are the root cause of any business success or failure. If you want to be successful in your business, make your business keep running in the future, not have any plan to close down; then you must adjust your way of business with the customers behaviors. You must adjust your business doing model as per the customer’s rapid changing behavior. Otherwise your business will be doomed in near future anyway.
You need to make your business in such a way that, when a customer search a product in google or any search engine, your store must come at 1st. When a customer want to know more about your products, they must know them instantly. For this you need a proper website where you can list all your top selling products. But remember that just having a website is not same as making your business online. Having a high quality website will not influence your customers. Without proper digital marketing, you can not reach to your customers & can not take part in their mind share.
After making a proper website, you need to get the attentions of your customers repeatedly. For this you need to do all sort of digital marketing, There are hundreds of strategy to do in digital marketing, but you do not need to do all of them. Just stick to few of them & you are fine. Also before this, 1st learn the basic of digital marketing & then follow it. In simple way of saying, in digital marketing, you 1st collect the data of your customers & reach to them on constant basis with your offers. So you need to do them consistently.
To make your business survive for the future, you need to do 3 things as soon as possible.
1) Make your business online.
2) Do digital marketing & collect customers data continuously.
3) Make offers & send to your customers continuously through various digital platform.