Reducing Perceived Barriers to Buying

Your prospective customers perceive barriers in doing business with you. (That's why more of them aren't flocking to your door.) But to the degree that you reduce the risk of making the wrong decision -- choosing you -- the easier it is for them to give you a try!

Today's example: Upon purchasing a computer accessory recently, I found an insert for Stuffbak. Their value proposition is simple: put our sticker on your camera/phone/etc. and register with us [for free]. Some day, when you lose the device and we recover it, you pay us a nominal fee [$20] to rejoin you with your lost toy.

They've tapped into a point of pain (more than the loss of equipment, now we are very likely to lose personal data, documents, photos, what have you) and provided a pay-you-later insurance policy!

In retail and foodservice, this is called the "free trial". I recall lots of miniature pink taster spoons from Baskin Robbins' (Ice Cream) as a child. Businesses using this technique successfully today range from CostCo to Starbucks.

One consultant offers free weekly teleconferences, as a way of lowering customer barriers to using his services. This lets them "try on the hat" of being his client and hearing how he works, before they ever have to commit to being one. Myself, I do something similar through this column!

How might you help your customers (and your business) by deferring cost, eliminating or reducing risk, and making it easier to climb a board?

Treat Your Captive Customer Well

It has long irritated me that my cellular carrier [currently Cingular, but this has changed over the years] offers minutes in packages, but the fine print makes it clear that any extra minutes are charged at premium rates.

Where is the sense in that for me as a customer? Where, in my customer experience, is there any precedent for buying an incremental amoung more product and paying more per unit than I paid for the last ones?

I call that screwing the captive customer. This is probably not the reason for such high levels of "customer churn" each month on the part of the carriers, but it probably contributes to it.

Then along comes Sprint, whose marketing people recognized that they had an opportunity to "do the right thing". It may not be perfect, but when I hear that minutes above my plan rate cost less than those I just purchased, I feel like they are treating me right.

The lesson here is simple. Imagine your customer is your mother (or your darling Aunt Barbara) and look at it from her perspective. Ensure that your pricing and other business practices reward (or at the very least, do not penalize) her for making the choice to do more business with your company!