If you are a brand looking to scale conversions, an important aspect you need to consider is identifying and providing the correct user experience that matches your customer intent.
You can’t expect someone that isn’t ready to purchase to land on your landing page and convert right away. Sometimes, people need more information about your brand or product. Maybe they are ready to buy but your brand doesn’t come to the top of mind.
How can you learn more about the steps your best customers take and optimize your user experience from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel to drive more conversions?
In this blog, we’ll identify what customer intent is, why is it important, and some strategies you can take to better accommodate your customers intent.
What is Customer Intent?
Customer intent is the behavior a person displays when interacting with your brand.
The behavior can be reading a blog post, leaving an item in the shopping cart for 30 days, or waiting to receive an email about a discount.
By nature, people are creatures of habit. It’s impossible to plan for and implement strategies that satisfy everyone’s purchasing habits but you can identify patterns in the segment of your audience that’ll you can take actionable measures on.
With that said, not one brand’s customer journey is the same. Larger brands like Nike or Adidas have more people with a navigational intent than your local town’s sneaker shop. In reality, only you with access to your back-end data can identify the pain points that need to be optimized to better match customer intent throughout the journey.
Why is Customer Intent Important?
Customer intent is crucial to marketers because if you can identify a specific pattern of behavior taken by people that convert, you can better optimize your funnel experience to help drive more conversions.
Suppose you are attracting visitors to your website that are simply not ready to purchase and you keep pushing marketing messages coercing them to purchase right away. In this instance, your marketing efforts will most likely fall upon deaf ears.
So it’s important to get your marketing collateral to match the customer intent so you can get the most effective results through your marketing campaigns.
What are the Different Types of Customer Intent?
There are 4 types of customer intent.
Navigational
A customer is considered to have a navigational intent when they are looking to reach a specific brand.
Suppose someone saw Nike releases a new pair of Jordan sneakers on social media and they want to learn more about them. They decide to search on Google, for “Nike’s new Jordan release”. Their sole intention is to navigate to Nike’s website. They are not interested in what Adidas or New Balance has to offer.
Informational
The second form of customer intent is called informational. When someone is searching for an answer to their question or trying to learn more about a topic on a search engine like Google, they are considered informational. They are trying to learn about a broad topic. Blog posts, infographics, and videos help satisfy the need of someone that is displaying informational intent.
An example of informational customer intent would be someone searching for recipes for dinner or a step-by-step video on how to barbeque.
Transactional
The most important form of intent for any eCommerce brand is transactional. Someone is considered to be transactional when they are actively ready to purchase. An example of someone that is driving to work and needs to make a stop for coffee. They don’t need any information about the type of coffee they want. The person wants to know where the closest coffee place around them is to satisfy their need.
Commercial
Commercial intent is when someone is investigating a product or service. Think of this being just like informational intent but the only difference is that someone is trying to learn more about your business’s offering.
How to Use Customer Intent Data to Aid Your Marketing Efforts?
Understand Where Customer Intent Comes Into Play
You would think customer intent will only play a role at the bottom of the marketing funnel, but that’s wrong. Of course, if you have a funnel full of transactional customers ready to purchase, you’ll generate lots of conversions. But realistically, the amount of competition in the marketplace makes acquiring transactional customers extremely difficult.
The consideration of customer intent needs to hit every part of your funnel.
Top of the funnel, your main goal should be to attract your ideal audience and start their customer journey. Ideally, you would be using strategies that focus on search engine optimization of content or running paid media campaigns.
The ad content, lead magnet, or blog content should most likely aim to provide the viewer with some form of informational benefit in exchange for their contact information. It’s hard enough to convince someone that has no idea who your business is to purchase your product unless it’s a necessity or your product is that good.
When you venture into the middle of the funnel, you want to continue to build trust by informing the prospect about the solutions to their problem. At this juncture, the prospects you reach will likely still show qualities of being in the informational or commercial frame of mind. You may opt to direct them to resourceful pages on your website or helpful blogs to begin to mold and influence them to be ready for purchase.
Towards the end of the conversion funnel, you want your customers to be towards the transactional and navigational intent. You can achieve this by simply becoming more sales focused and pushing them to pages on your websites that will allow them to make a purchase or simply soften them up to be more receptive to a phone call from your sales team. By the time you reach this part of the journey, only those who truly trust your brand will make a purchase.
When brand trust is created, you can tap into navigational intent because your brand will become a positive resource that the customer will seek out time and time again to solve their problems. They will seek out your brand instead of the competition and will become ambassadors which will help your drive new business.
| Type of Customer Intent | Content |
| Navigational | Brand Specific Websites or Social Media Profiles. |
| Informational | Blogs, Articles, Infographics, Videos |
| Transactional | Product Pages, Websites, Abandoned Cart Messages, Push Notifications |
| Commercial | Product Blogs, Product Articles, Infographics, Product Demos, Product Videos |
Use First-Party Data to Get a Better Read on Customer Intent
The best source of data to best predicts the potential intention of customers in your funnel is to take a look at your first-party data.
When you analyze the characteristics of someone that converted to your product or service, you can identify some of the common paths they chose or patterns that might signify someone is ready to purchase.
For example, let’s say you are the owner of a sneaker eCommerce store. You have a CRM and a CDP full of your customer data and website interactions. When taking a look at people that converted on a sneaker product, you notice that 75% of all the people that converted, took a look at your product page at least 5 times before they made a purchase and have joined your funnel through a paid search ad. You can probably conclude that these people had a transactional intent.
To take advantage of these types of people deemed transactional, you may want to figure out a way to improve the conversion rates on your paid search ad and landing pages. You might look to include things like pop-ups on your landing page or use remarketing ads to increase stickiness and get the person to come back time and time again so they can make that conversion. You can try using push notifications or abandon cart emails to remind the person that they might have left a product in their shopping cart and need to finish their purchase.
Another example is you take a look at your data and notice that it takes another segment of your audience an average of 2 months to convert to your product. This grouping you can probably characterize as more methodical in terms of their research and want to make the right decision. These people might be looking for more information.
You’d want to probably create content or free downloadables to help give this audience segment the information they need to trust your brand and move on to the next step in the buying process.
Conclusion
Adjusting your customer journey for customer intent is a great form of conversion rate optimization. The more seamless experience you can create with the help of your customer data, the odds of your finding large sums of conversions become much greater.
