What are the factors that influence customers’ purchasing decisions?
Do Digital Marketing influence customers’ purchases?

Customer purchase decision

Customer purchase decision is important as it is “the thought process that leads a consumer from identifying a need, generating options, and choosing a specific product and brand.” (IGI Global, 2020). Customers go through the decision-making process when they want to purchase something. This decision-making process is constituted of five diverse steps: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and postpurchase behavior (Solomon, 2011).

Digital Marketing

Moreover, Digital Marketing is crucial nowadays as businesses can approach customers in a new way and understand their behavior (Adam Barone, 2022). Digital Marketing can be defined in many ways although a global definition is “the use of digital channels to market products and services to reach consumers. This type of marketing involves the use of websites, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other similar channels” by Adam Barone (2022). With recent technologies and new trends, businesses had to reinvent the way they market themselves.

Thus, new digital marketing channels came. For instance, website marketing: is the tool to carry out online marketing campaigns, pay-per-click advertising: allows marketers to reach users through paid ads, content marketing: is to reach users thanks to content, email marketing: is mainly used to turn leads into customers, social media marketing: to create brand awareness, affiliate marketing: with influencers that promote products, video marketing: which is a crucial search engine and finally SMS messaging: to send recent promotions (Adam Barone, 2022).

Digital Marketing on customers’ purchases

Furthermore, “Digital marketing itself is enabled by a series of adaptive digital touchpoints encompassing the marketing activity, institutions, processes and customers.” (Kannan, 2017). Thus, as customers switch to digital, the number of touchpoints is increasing by 20% annually (Kannan, 2017). Moreover, as Plangger, Grewal, de Ruyter and Tucker (2022) explain, “Digital
technologies emerge and develop, they are essential to strategic marketing effectiveness in terms of grabbing customers’ attention, securing patronage, and ultimately, loyalty.” Therefore, there is a high potential for companies to engage their customers with brand messaging and offerings (Plangger, Grewal, de Ruyter, and Tucker, 2022).

These new channels are powerful to firms as it helps them to deliver significant value to customers, attract the right ones and boost customer value (Kannan and Li, 2017). 95% of retailers recognize the benefits of using an omnichannel approach to consumer targeting, acquisition, and retention (Varadarajana, Welden, Arunachalam, Haenlein, and Gupta, 2022). Also, customers who use multiple channels to purchase tend to be more engaged and active and spend more which generates more revenue for companies than single-channel customers (Varadarajana, Welden, Arunachalam, Haenlein and Gupta, 2022).

 

Therefore, we can ask ourselves : What is the impact of Digital Marketing on customers’ purchases?