New blood. Fresh meat.
Pardon the graphic references, but they cut to the heart, so to speak, of one of the most important goals of your business: drawing in new customers. But how do you convince folks to do what you want them to do — namely, buy your products and services — and keep them coming back for more?
Consider the weight not only of today's purchase, veteran marketers say, but the benefit of brand building for the long term.
See also: 6 Ways to Acquire New Customers via Social Media
"Were always asking, 'What's the lifetime value of a customer?'" says Deborah Lammon, SVP, Portfolio Partner at UM, which handles Sony Pictures Entertainment and Electronics accounts. "We want to engage that person, not just once, but over a long period of time, maybe the lifetime of a franchise."
Customer acquisition may be part art and part science, with gut instinct still factoring in, but there are some best practices that can set you apart from the masses.
First impressions are everything, say executives at female-targeted lifestyle digital publication PureWow, who stress that the landing page — the web address that acts as your front door — needs to be attention-grabbing, uncluttered and bold.
"We A/B test landing pages like crazy and are in a constant state of design and redesign with landing page templates to ensure we capture all users across all devices," says Alexis Anderson, PureWow’s director of marketing and partnerships. "We pour tremendous time and energy into driving qualified users to our landing pages to sign up for email. If they don’t take the last step to actually enter their email address, it's a waste."
From extensive research and tinkering, Anderson came up with a few tips for that initial point of contact:
Make it clean and simple-to-use
Offer a clear call to action and robust incentives
Design attractive, click-ready creative
Including a demo video on the landing page can increase conversions by 10 - 20%, according to Renee Warren, co-founder of Onboardly, a consultancy for tech startups. Glowing endorsements from satisfied customers can also mean the difference between a looky-loo and a buyer, she says.
To get the most from that early outreach, a marketer needs to consider where the consumer is in the conversion funnel, says Dave Martin, SVP, Ignited, a Los Angeles-based ad agency. Native ads, short-form content and other awareness builders can kick off the relationship for the uninitiated. If the potential buyer is already leaning toward your brand, having expressed interest or shopped your site in the past, it's time to target that person with a promotion or special offer, he says.
"There needs to be an incentive to close the deal," Martin says. "And the smoother the process is from the first time you touch a consumer to the point that he hands you his credit card, the more likely that consumer is to convert."
For client Fresh & Easy, for instance, Ignited put "geofences" around its small grocery stores and sent out discounts and coupons via mobile and digital ads to consumers who were within a mile of the locations. Getting people into the stores so they could experience its European-style do-it-yourself format was the top priority, Martin says. The results were "better than expected" and outperformed advertising on other media platforms.
See also: How to Use Social Media For Better Customer Acquisition
To combat so-called "banner blindness," where consumers have trained their eyes to skip over omnipresent banner ads, Ignited has sent tailored ads to the 18-to-35-year-old consumers who have shopped vacations with its client, Contiki Travel.
"We've collected the data, and then we made the most of it," Martin says. "It’s about retargeting with dynamic creative and discounts."
UM’s Lammon agrees, saying it's a mistake to talk to all potential customers in the same way.
"The message needs to feel like it's specific to that person," she says. "Tailor it as much as the technology you're using will allow."
Lammon's group focuses mostly on massive-scaling social networks these days, such as Facebook, Vine, Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter, to draw in audiences for Sony products like the feature film The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Vaio.
"We're looking for resonance, not just impressions," she says, "because we want the message to spread beyond the initial customers we're reaching out to. We want it to extend through their social networks."
Though her group gathers reams of data, Lammon cautions against relying too heavily on numbers. To avoid getting "bogged down in data," she always injects the human touch. "You need great systems and technology that can help you dive in to the data," she says, "but you need humans, live brains making decisions."
Knowing your consumers is one thing, respecting them is another, with Martin pointing to a current trend of marketers disguising advertising as content or making big, hollow offers to try to snag site traffic.
"If the consumer clicks on something that promises a $100 discount, and they get to the (landing) page and it's actually a buy-one-get-one offer, they're gone," Martin says. "It’s the same if they think they’re going to read an article or watch a video and instead they get thrown to a sell page. Tricking the consumer is a big mistake. You'll lose them before you ever had them."
Image: iStock, Mikey_Man