Ever wondered, what are the things that turn off customers even after putting so much effort?
Building trust in your audience takes a long time. However, a small mistake can revolt them immediately.
In this highly competitive world, customers won’t think twice before switching to other brands.
Even worse, they may not come back to your again.
Hence, you need to keep in mind those things that can take your customers away
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Often potential customer turn-offs are caused by trivial circumstances. Most of the time, we overlook such factors.
Despite this, there can also be some severe reasons behind it. Those reasons may include delivering low-quality products or unresponsive customer care support, etc.
All you need is to leverage a dedicated approach to evaluate the sales performance and website analytic reports.
To help you with this, we have picked the common slips that can take out your prospects forever.
1. Making Overly Promises
Some merchants become so aggressive, selling products faster that they try to make the offer as lucrative as possible.
Say, you sell tees for men. Now, if you offer “Buy 1 Get 5 Free”, would anyone believe in such a product?
It is practically an impossible thing to get 6 tees at the cost of one.
Some buyers will immediately switch to other products presuming it to be very cheap material. And if few of them purchase it, they are unlikely to be satisfied with the quality.
This not only harms your revenue aspect but also spoils your brand reputation.
Thus, you need to keep the price reasonable, not cheap.
2. Poor Social Media Presence
Today, people are getting social media savvy day by day.
If you decide to ignore this platform altogether, building trust among the potential customers would be strenuous.
We know it is onerous, updating the social pages every day with something new and engaging.
But when your prospects search for your brand on these channels and don’t find you, they perceive an adverse image regarding your business.
Again, having a visually appealing social media presence is not enough to bring customers to your store. You have to be responsive there proactively and amiably.
Sometimes customer care representatives give rude replies to the negative comments of the users. This kind of act can prove detrimental to such business. It may disgust the potential traffic there.
Hence, you need to respond to such poor feedbacks also in a polite and friendly way. A decent gesture is of great value to your audience.
Furthermore, you need to continuously track your social pages to reply to your audience at the earliest.
3. Too Complicated Products
Suppose you buy an OTG and never end up with properly baked food. Would you take another OTG from that brand?
It happens to the users when they come across a complicated product. If a consumer can’t find a way to use your product effectively, they will choose to leave your product.
This kind of reaction is common when the creators of the product fail to simplify its usage procedure.
To check if your products are complicated or not, you may offer a 5-second test. In a five-second test, you let users use your product for just 5 seconds. It will enable you to understand their thoughts regarding the product.
It also helps you to understand how much mental resource users need to operate your products.
If you realize the product is too complicated, you can use a few ideas to simplify it.
The simplification can be done by eliminating the steps and making the process intuitive.
Additionally, you can use elements such as a progress monitor, which will act as GPS for customers.
Even after doing all this, if you still feel to simplify the product or service, you can leverage FAQs, answering some generic queries of customers.
4. Keep Customers on Hold
Just imagine, you call a customer care number, and they take hours to connect you to their representative.
Nothing can be more frustrating than waiting for a long time to be attended by the company representatives. It can happen in retail stores, restaurants, or offices. And I’m sure you also have gone through such a situation at some point.
People want to get their job done faster. They are impatient and won’t allow you to keep them on hold for hours. In fact, a study revealed, a mere 40 seconds hold can take away 15% of customers.
Hence, you have only 20 to 30 seconds to respond to your leads. If you fail to attend them within that time, you may lose them forever.
5. Negative Reviews Online
One of the biggest things that can turn potential customers away is negative comments online.
In this internet era, downbeat news against a brand doesn’t take much time to get viral. And undoubtedly, it is vulnerable for any business.
As per a study, 97% of buyers read reviews online before making a purchase decision. Again, 94% of consumers avoid brands that have negative comments.
Thus the marketers emphasize online reputation management to lessen the impact of negative reviews. For this, marketers need to obtain more and more positive comments, making sure the prospects find only the positive remarks about your brand.
Of course, the comments should look organic. Thus a few criticisms against thousands of positive remarks look natural.
However, if you have too many unfavorable reviews online, the above method will not work there. In such cases, you need to address those unhappy customers personally to fix that issue.
6. Inability to Understand Customer Needs
Understanding customers’ needs help the brand to effectively target its audience. If you are can’t provide them what they actually want, they will look forward to your competitors.
Suppose your brand sells shampoo and conditioner. If visitors come to your site searching shampoo for dry hair and find suitable hair type information missing there, they will leave your site then and there.
Thus, you need to understand the possible expectations of the audience to attract them to purchase your product.
To know why understanding customers, their needs, and expectations matters, read this guide.
7. Poor After-Sale Service
Companies often focus on the number of sales made, ignoring the importance of after-sale services. However, it is the prime customer turn-off factor.
Suppose you buy an air conditioner from an online store. At the time of purchase, the company promises free installation within 24 hours of delivery. But after receiving the delivery, the customer care representative doesn’t respond to your call for ten days.
After installing it, you realize the ac is not working. Now, what will you do with that costly scrap? Most of the online stores offer only 10 days return policy.
For sure, you will post a negative comment for the brand online and never consider that company in the future. Other prospects, aware of such a terrible incident, won’t try any product of this brand ever.
Thus, if your marketing is not that robust, excellent after-sale service can subdue it. But if an unhappy customer Tweets negatively, it spreads like wildfire. It not only takes away existing customers but also alerts the leads.
8. Poor Product
Everything in your business revolves around your product and services. And there is no way around that. This is because we humans value things based on relevant experience as per our expectations. If anything falls short of our expectations, we choose to move on from that. The implications can be seen in customer behaviors that we all are familiar with. Customer refunds, high bounce rates, low conversions, and poor reviews are signs of our inability to convey our products and services effectively with transparency.
To make things clear, we need to divide consumer behaviors into two categories.
Pre Purchase Behaviors
High bounce rates, abandon carts, low conversion rates, lower scroll percentages may happen due to a poorly designed website. Whereas other factors like the high loading time of your landing page can worsen the situation. People are continually being bombarded with an excessive amount of information from everywhere. As a product owner, you need to make sure that you can convey the highest info to the users. However, you need to understand that maximum info doesn’t mean excessive information. We need to systemic the whole information in more digestible chunks.
Post Purchase Behaviors
Refunds and bad reviews are doing much damage to many businesses. It is often understood that refunds and other negative post-purchase behaviors happen due to the poor quality of the fulfilled goods and services. Sometimes the reason can be quite different. Often, owners can’t clearly define and demonstrate their products or services to the customers. These behaviors are quite common. To reduce the no of refunds, returns, and negative reviews, you need to improve the quality of your offerings and then make sure that no false benchmarks are being set up in the minds of your prospects.
9. Inconsistencies in Prices
Inconsistencies regarding the price of the products often create distrust for such brands in the mind of consumers.
Often we witness the price inconsistency between the landing page and the product page or checkout page of a site. Nonetheless, such discrepancies are also observed between the social media page and the website landing page of the same brand.
Say followers of your brand visit the site after getting interested in the price list on the social media page. If they find entirely different prices for the products on the website, they won’t proceed further due to the loss of trust. And undoubtedly, they will stop following you on social sites.
Today, people use smartphones to visit several sites for comparing product prices. They want to ensure purchasing goods at the best price offer. Hence, it is not possible to fool them with the price discrepancy. On the contrary, this type of mistake can lead to customer turn-offs woefully.
Final Thoughts
Besides the reasons explained above, several other factors also trigger the bounce rate of websites, taking away the customers forever. Such things include
- Improper placement of call-to-action buttons
- Bombarding with popup notifications
- Long checkout page
- Not having a mobile-friendly site
- Difficulty in navigation
To counter the situation for your business, you need to prioritize usability and simplicity over distracting features on your website and landing pages. Secondly, you must set the users’ viewpoint as the foundation for the design and product improvement. After setting up the foundation, you should work on product features for the end-users.
