In this post I will tell you about an "alternative" strategy (but which does not exclude) the sales funnel that you hear about everywhere. After the introduction to the standard funnel approach I will show you the 5 key tools to increase sales at zero cost.
In 90% of cases when a client calls our agency they ask us for help in using a specific marketing tool to increase sales .
Google Ads, Facebook ADS, email marketing or SEO if we want to mention the most requested ones.
And as you know, they are all tools that have a consultancy cost (ours) and management cost (the budget), and that bring results more or less in the future, depending on whether they are addressing a latent or conscious demand.
However (and for this I always thank Alessandro Sportelli and Manuel Faè for their studies) practically all start-up businesses forget that leveraging acquired customers is the way to increase turnover at zero cost .
And it really is!
In fact, it eliminates the main cost in today's marketing, which is the creation of a sales funnel (more or less long depending on the sector in which you sell) that progressively convinces people to become your customers.
The classic steps are:
I intercept you
I draw your attention
I make you react to a stimulus
I'm trying to sell you something
Well, all this has a cost that is all the greater, the further away the person you want to live with is from having decided.
I repeat: cost to buy or create the skills, cost for advertising space and cost of the time it takes to "cultivate" the contacts you have received.
The hidden mine
Yet there is an opposite strategy that is based on creating rapid profitability and that is used by every successful brand you can think of.
Which?
Sell as much as possible to the customers you have already acquired!
The ingredients to increase your turnover now and at zero cost are these:
Having built a customer database with useful information related to their purchasing process
Knowing your customers' purchase frequency
Already have complementary services and products in mind to offer them
Increase usage occasions
Create a structured strategy to fuel word of mouth
Customer database
If you know a little about marketing, you are already aware that all the activities with a high ROI are those done on an audience of potential customers who have already heard about you .
For example, on Facebook, advertisements performed well on custom audiences (those who have already interacted with your company; if you don't know these mechanisms, you can take our free video course on Facebook ).
In a store, Whatsapp campaigns perform well but SMS campaigns on people who don't know the store perform poorly.
In a company, newsletters to people subscribed to your mailing list perform well, while cold DEMs to contacts who don't know who you are perform poorly (same thing for Linkedin).
And so on .
It is therefore essential to build over time a database of contacts who know you and a database of customers.
The first to keep track of the results of conversion campaigns, the second (that of customers) to contain useful information for your company's marketing activities .
If you have a restaurant, for example, you need to have a customer database that contains people's birthdays, so you can send a promo to celebrate it at your place, or even just to send a greeting message.
If you sell an insurance product you need to know if the customer has children, if he plays particular sports, his age and so on, always to offer products suitable for him.
And this information needs to be interconnected with the next steps.
The frequency of purchase
90% of the SMEs we come into contact with do not have a customer database and do not actively stimulate a new order/purchase after the first.
But not only that: it does not know the average consumption and repurchase times of its products (if you do not know how to obtain this information from your customers you can find out here how to do market research ).
But why is this important? Simply put: because if you know the purchase frequency you can program timed marketing activities precisely to remind the customer of your products and services when they need them, and without purchasing advertising.
This way, without any customer acquisition costs, you increase your turnover.
How to do?
With an offer or a simple email reminder of the same product at the right time, for example, an action that can also be performed offline with a phone call or a letter.
Complementary products
Well, your customer has purchased! After celebrating and billing, you must immediately think of a marketing strategy for:
Encourage second purchases
Encourage the purchase of complementary products
Again: it seems trivial, but if you do not implement a procedure (which may include the use of online and offline tools) you leave this part of your turnover to chance.
The most classic and well-known example (but absolutely applicable also to small and medium-sized businesses) is Amazon: has it ever happened to you to buy on the platform and then not receive a proposal for a product "who bought this also bought..." ?
Why is it not done in SMEs? Simple, because there is no database (go back a few points and start again :-)
Occasions of use
Use cases are once again tied to customer knowledge: When are your products or services purchased? Under what circumstances? Can they be given as gifts? Can they be sold as a subscription?
Answering these questions will help you understand whether you can increase the opportunities for using it.
Word of mouth
If you want to delve deeper into the topic, a good book is The Art of Word of Mouth , perhaps not the most recent, but full of ideas on how to encourage it.
Once again: word of mouth must be planned and built, but there are some key elements today that should always be included in a marketing strategy.
That is to say:
The collection of reviews
The collection of references
In the first case, word of mouth is created "among strangers" which, however, increases trust in your products/services.
In the second case, you get real potential customers in exchange for a concrete advantage to an acquired customer who becomes a referrer.
There are real software to automatically manage this second aspect, and some (like Omnistart) become a real game for the customer, pushing him to the maximum diffusion of your contents in exchange for prizes.
Conclusions
In conclusion, by mixing the 5 elements described above it is possible to really increase sales at (almost) zero cost.
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