A successful friend of mine once told me, if you want to make money just keep moving. Keep doing things. Keep making phone calls. Keep passing out business cards. Don’t stop. Make mistakes, but don’t worry because one day you’ll do something right and it will stick.
He wasn’t a multimillionaire but he had a real estate brokerage in Manhattan and never worked a regular job a day in his life. Somehow he knew how to get customers in the door. There’s a ton of articles online about how to get new customers. It would seem that the subject has been boiled down to a science. Those who understand the formula make money. Those who don’t go out of business. And yet some people seem to just have a knack for it. If we are lucky we can have a little bit of both.
Customer Conversion- The Meat and Potatoes of Doing Business
One of the first problems that people run into is that they confuse lead generation with customer conversion. While implementing lead generation strategies is a vital step towards customer conversion it‘s not the same thing. Lead generation happens when you’re out on the field shaking hands, getting people’s contact info, building email lists and generating brand awareness. Not all of these folks are going to be customers and there’s a difference between generating leads and generating quality leads. Quality leads are people who are at a predisposition to considering your product as a solution to their needs.
If you are selling a kitchen remodeling package, your quality lead would be married middle aged homeowners. If you had an email list filled with twenty something year old kids living in dorms, that email list is close to useless.
Customer acquisition on the other hand is the process by which we turn those leads into actual paying customers. Your job in customer conversion is funneling those quality leads into your consideration pool and then into paying customers. They must first become aware of your brand. Then they have to actually consider your product before they buy it. You can read more about the differences between leads and acquisition here.
How to Convert Leads into Customers
Before you buy ads, make sure that you have your target market down. Once you are sure of your niche, consider forms of marketing that make calculating your return on investment (ROI) as easy as possible by taking advice from market leaders. For example, it’s much easier to calculate your ROI if you can track clicks on ads than it is to figure out if your leads are coming from the billboard you rented or the commercial time you bought on TV. There are many handy tools online for keeping track of your ROI.
One of the hidden gems of internet customer conversion methods is the A/B landing page test. Shh! Don’t tell your friends about this one. When we spoke earlier about boiling down customer conversion to a science this is exactly what we were talking about. Most people build a landing page and leave it there untouched expecting some sort of internet magic to happen. But there is no reason to leave it up to fate.
Enter the A/B landing page test. Simply create two versions of your landing page. Perhaps you had trouble deciding between two headlines. Don’t trash one. Test them both. See which results in more conversions. When you have successfully figured out which landing page was more successful, do it again. Keep refining your page until you have a monster lead conversion.
Of course there are many marketing methods for gaining new customers. But sometimes the simplest methods are best. A product that sells itself takes out all the heavy lifting. Ask yourself, am I helping people? If you have confidence that your product will help people, folks will notice. People don’t want a sales pitch, they want a need satisfied. But most importantly don’t be scared to try. Be action oriented. When you are action oriented you create a positive mindset that is absolutely magnetic. Remember you lose 100% of the shots you don’t take.
