Best Practices For Increasing Product Registration Rates
Manufacturers typically don’t have direct interaction with end customers as they mainly rely on mass media to market and channel partners to sell and service their products.
Brands now need to engage and deliver better customer experiences throughout the lifecycle to acquire and retain today’s increasingly connected, mobile and social consumers.
Product registration is critical to establishing a direct connection with customers that buy products. Here are six best practices to increase registration rates of your products.
1. Simplify Registration
Current product registration is a paper card or a long web form, discouraging customers from filling in and completing the registration.
Brands tend to ask too many questions in an effort to capture demographic information, intimidating the customer.
Using mobile devices, registration can be simplified to a single scan of a QR code or barcode. The customer information can be pre-populated from their profile, avoiding re-entry of information and increasing registration rates.
2. Deliver Tangible Value in Return for Customer Data
Customers typically don’t bother to register products as they don’t see any real value or need. In fact, some customers are apprehensive about spam email, or a deluge of direct mail if they share their contact information.
Brands must demonstrate the value for customers by allowing them to easily manage product ownership and warranties. Some brands offer incentives such as additional warranty and discounts to buy related products, accessories or services.
Brands need to provide an opt-out option for marketing material and earn their trust by clearly stating their privacy policies.
3. Simplify Access to Help, Support, and Assist
As part of the onboarding, customers require help and assistance to setup, install and use the product. Registration can be used as a way to gain instant access to digital knowledge resources including videos, manuals, tutorials, and FAQs.
Customers will also be able to access support and services easily from their “Own” list. Providing this access to knowledge resources will not only increase product registrations, but reduce product returns and traffic to call centers.
4. Collaborate with Retail and Channel Partners
Retailers and channel partners are concerned about sharing customer information with brands. Brands can address these concerns by focusing on the mutual benefits of building stronger customer relationships. Retailers can gain additional revenues from selling accessories, service plans and related services.
Brands can provide better customer support to foster customer loyalty and increase repeat purchases. Registration rates can be significantly improved by integrating with Point of Sale (POS) systems and electronic receipts from the retailer. Both brands and channel partners can use co-op marketing to reach and engage these consumers.
5. Empower and Enable Customers for Brand and Social Interactions
Registration can facilitate connection to customer communities for sharing of product ratings, reviews and getting help from social networks. Customers can instantly share product and brand preferences on existing social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
As a result, companies can grow sales through word-of-mouth marketing. Customer location and contextual information from social networks can be utilized to gain better insights into customer sentiment and trends.
6. Adopt Practices from Major Tech Companies
It’s quite possible Apple has as close as it gets to 100% registration rates of their devices as customers gain additional value from iTunes and App Stores. As products become more connected, brands can use similar strategies to deliver additional value through integrated services. Products can be auto-discovered and registered to reach 100% registration rates.
Product registration is an onramp for customer engagement and brands can realize better lifetime value of customers by increasing the registration rates.
To learn about the our Registration Smart Blox and the overall Warranty Management Solution, contact us.