| ENCOURAGING TRIAL

The trial step within the share of wallet funnel involves encouraging potential customers to make their first purchase or try a product for the first time. It's a crucial stage where brands aim to convert awareness into tangible actions, often leveraging incentives, special offers, or unique value propositions to prompt customers to experience what their products have to offer.

For CPG brands looking to encourage trial of new or existing products, marketing efforts should be focused on:

• Educating consumers beyond initial awareness about the value your products add to their lives.
• Promoting exclusive trial offers or discounts to incentivize customers to make their first purchase. 
• Creating easy digital paths to purchase your products at their preferred retailer, where consumers are more likely to try something new. 

Leveraging retail ecommerce experiences in your organic and paid marketing efforts helps your brand meet customers wherever they are in their journey. This is especially beneficial for creating a frictionless transition from the awareness stage to the trial stage. Pixel events are sent back to your ad platforms from your retail ecommerce tools (as covered in the pixels section), providing your brand with the data and insights needed to begin building a trial-level audience. This audience can then be utilized in future marketing campaigns focused on trial experiences.

Once customers move from being aware of a brand to actively engaging with it through a trial experience, the door opens for creating positive initial interactions that can ultimately lead to repeat purchases and long-term loyalty. More on that in the next section.

| BUILDING A TRIAL AUDIENCE

Customers in the trial stage have progressed from merely being aware of your product(s) to actively preparing to make their first purchase. While your brand has successfully moved the shopper further down the funnel, the trial stage still involves a level of skepticism and the potential to influence whether or not these first-time buyers will convert into repeat customers. Directing these shoppers to retail ecommerce experiences, particularly those that leverage daily inventory scanning and create paths to purchase at local retailers where loyalty is strongest, helps eliminate unnecessary roadblocks (such as broken or out-of-stock links), creating a positive introductory experience with your brand.

If you recall from the previous section on awareness, pixeling your store locator and/or shoppable PDPs is a highly effective way to build a valuable audience of high-intent shoppers on your ad networks. When considering marketing efforts for the trial stage, keep this audience top of mind for retargeting and guiding visitors from early research to initial purchase. Leveraging your store locator or shoppable PDPs as landing pages in these campaigns not only educates the shopper about the product(s) you’re promoting, but also creates seamless paths to purchase at their preferred retailer directly from your onsite experiences. This tactic benefits information-driven shoppers and impulse shoppers alike.

Brands aiming to promote trials of new product launches or limited edition items should consider pairing rebate options with their retail ecommerce experiences. It’s no secret that limited-time deals and introductory pricing help attract a broader audience and often guide shoppers from consideration to purchase. Including rebates or coupons directly on shoppable landing pages can help eliminate the initial barrier to entry for deal-conscious shoppers and those hesitant to try something new at full price. Plus, anything clickable can be linked to a shoppable landing page, so this tactic can be leveraged across multiple channels while building audiences for future marketing efforts. 

Check out this case study on how one brand used Pear’s rebate option to run A/B tests and increase trial on a new product launch.