Analysing Buyer Motivation: How to motivate your customers to buy more

Why do people shop? Especially why do they do it online? While many consumers shop online everyday, their motivations and needs are not always apparent to business owners. Usually, retailers only have an insight on the products bought and the pages viewed. Understanding your consumer’s motivation can help you design campaign, products and even websites that target your consumer’s motivation. So why do people buy? Our guide will help you understand why understanding motivations is critical for your business the major theories that can help you understand them better. 

What is Buyer Motivation? 

Motivations refer to the feelings thoughts and instincts that encourage people to buy certain products. Buyer motivation or “buying motive” is a mixture people emotional and rational states that drive them towards a purchase. 

Understanding these emotional and rational states and the needs that compel consumers to buy can help you in designing targeted marketing campaigns, since identifying the right buying motivation can lie at the heart of messaging. If a consumer is not motivated to buy your product, regardless of how good your campaign is, you will end up with no conversion. To understand these motivations better, we must look at how a consumer progresses through their purchase journey. 

1. Awareness: this is the instance when a consumer first hears about your product. 
2. Interest: Stage during which the consumer develops an interest for your product.
3. Consideration: The evaluation period when the consumer considers if your product meets their requirements. 
4. Purchase: Consumer decides to enact the purchase.
5. Post-purchase: The consumer evaluates their shopping experience and the product
6. Re-purchase: the customers may become interested in buying more from you.

Every stage in this process motivates your consumers differently. Some common categories of buying motivations are listed below: 

Product Buyer Motivation: This category refers to the motivations that is comes out of the product itself for example it’s size, shape colour and features.  

Patronage Buyer Motivation: Here consumers are motivated by brand itself, which motivates them to buy a product over others. 

For both categories consumer’s motivation may have an emotional or rational aspect to them. Their final decision maybe motivated by the “feeling” that a product/brand is good, or they may arrive at that conclusion ‘rationally’. 

Common motives behind a purchase: 

Desire for Gain: Here customers are motivated by their need to be in possession of your product. The underlying motivation being that possession will result in direct financial gain such as the buying of stocks. 

 Fear of Loss: Consumers purchase to mitigate the affects of loss and damage for example getting insured. 

Security and Protection: People also buy to prevent loss and ensure security. An example of this is the purchase of locks or even anti-virus software. 

Comfort and Convenience: Consumers also but to ease their daily tasks and make them more stress free. This type of purchasing occurs typically for items like dishwashers and washing machines. 

 Pride of Ownership: This purchase is made due to associated sense of greatness of the product and company. By buying, consumers come in possession of “luxury items” that lend them a sense of prestige. 

 Suitability: This type of purchase is motivated by the buyer’s own demands and requirements. For example the owner of an appliance that runs AAA batteries will not purchase AA ones. 

Finding buyer motivation: 

Where is your traffic coming from? 

Analysing the source of your traffic is key to understanding your customer’s motivations. You can start by identifying what channels earn you the most traffic and then peer closely at the distribution of the traffic. You must pay attention to how many sessions end in a purchase and whether those sessions occurred due to paid marketing or the arrival of organic traffic. Invest smart in the channel that earns the most conversions, don’t just run after the volume of traffic!

What are the demographics of your customers? 

Your consumers social characteristics can be a strong indicator of their buying motivations. Rudimentary demographics such as gender, age and location can help you determine which subset of consumers respond most positively to your product. For example if most of your conversions are coming from millennials,  it might be helpful to align your market messaging to a younger tone. Similarly, location can help you decide the cultural tones of your marketing campaign as well as identify critical shopping periods in a year (around a religious holiday)  for that group. 

What are they Buying?

It is important that you pay close attention to how each of your products is doing. This means understanding how much traffic each product was able to draw and eventually how much of that traffic converted. Moreover, by undertaking a product-by-product analysis you can also investigate the performance of your product pages, consumer behaviour on these pages as well as identify ‘pain points’ for your consumer. These insights will not help you write better product descriptions but also help you design a better product page. Hence if you see that certain pages have a higher bounce rate than others, it might be time to call your UX team and ask for a redesign. 

Understand consumer interest:

Understanding what interests your target consumers, is essential to designing a shopping journey that is engaging as well as seamless. This means identifying visual elements as well as cultural themes that pique the interest of your audience. 

Implementing your findings: 

Use buying motivation and acquisition channel to sort your consumers

By categorizing your audience according to their motivations will help you plan your marketing messages as well as campaigns. Using the same marketing techniques across the board regardless of consumer need or channel will make your message irrelevant for a very wide set of possible consumers. To reduce this, plan messaging individually and pay special attention acquisition channels. 

Utilize demographics and interest to match promotions

By analyzing the demographics data of your consumers, you can design special promotions and deals that will attract a specific type of consumer. Additionally, coupons and discounts can offer a similar utility if applied wisely to the consumer group that is most likely to respond to free or low-priced items e.g. students. 

Increase customer value per product

If some of your products are struggling to make a mark, understanding the reason behind this can be crucial to improving your business. In this case, identifying which products are doing well is also important since you can use these products to “upsell” the products that aren’t performing. 

Using Google Analytics: 

Platforms like Google Analytics can help you identify many of performance metrics discussed in our post above. The Analytics platform lets you analyse your traffic from multiple viewpoints such as source, conversion rate and bounce rate, moreover it can also help you identify UI elements on your pages that are deterring users from buying. If you want to focus on building better products and managing your teams, rather than prototyping UI flows, bSecure can help ease your burdens.

As a plug and play solution, bSecure has already mapped out a seamless buyer journey that reduces friction regardless of buyer motivation. Moreover, our Builders can utilize Google Analytics once they join us so that they have all the information they need to design efficient campaigns that convert! You can view our guide on integrating bSecure with Google Analytics here, and to read more about what data can do for you business read our blog here.