Get Your Customers Waiting In Line For Your Products!
After being involved with many companies which have succeeded and failed, I have found that there are four distinct areas of creating a business that really make a difference.
Acquiring
Customers use products because it solves a problem that they recognize and identify with. After they have determined that your product solves their problem, they automatically start thinking of others they know who are having the same problems and attempt to spread the word. Depending on the level of excitement your product conjures up in your customers will determine what lengths they go to spread the word. It is very important to make spreading the word easy.
After making your product naturally viral, you then need to focus on how to acquire customers cheaply through more traditional avenues like Pay Per Click, Social Networks, Classified Advertising and offline presentations/product meetings. Try all of these areas to see which brings you the most qualified customers at a price per customer that you can afford.
After all of this, it is time to scale. The most important area of scaling your customer acquisition process is building the proper systems and processes to service all of the customers properly. These systems may include a multi-lined phone system, more employees, purchasing more software or creating a handbook that lists all steps to onboard a customer to your business. Processes and systems are paramount to scaling your business.
A business using processes to easily on board customers and beat the competition:
Engaging
All the time I see businesses make the mistake of forgetting about their customers after they convert them. This is a cardinal mistake as statistics show that it costs 3x more to acquire a customer then to re-sell to one you have already converted. So how do you engage your already converted customer? The answer is different for each business but it comes down to knowing what your customer wants to know more about.
If your selling pez dispensers (as eBay initially did) to candy shops, candy shops probably want to know how they can sell more of these or fit more candy into each dispenser to increase their prices and overall bottom line. If your a web design company, your customers want to know more about the new features you can build to increase the usability/like-ability of their websites. As you can see, the pattern is what you can do for the customer.
A company who engages their customers well:
Retaining
Retention is an area that is comprised of customer service, marketing and continuing innovation. Customer service is paramount in retaining customers because they want to know that you are able to efficiently help them with their problems and that you are happy to do so. Customers believe that their issues are most important and you have to build systems that accommodate every customer issue in a manner they are happy with.
Marketing is very important because having customers that are not within your target demographic increase the likelihood of attrition. Track your retention rate against your marketing objectives and see it should display that your “target” customers suffer much less attrition than those that are a bit outside of your “target” demographic.
Innovation of your product is becoming increasingly important especially in the United States. There is so much competition in each industry that it easy to lose customers to competitors who are adding features, lowering prices or doing what you do better.
A company who has a record 95% retention rate:
Monetizing
A revenue model that can be applied to the online and real world is the “freemium” model. It’s quite simple actually, create two versions of your product - free and paid. The free customers will be monetized by advertising or lead generation for other related companies to yours. The paying customers will enjoy your product free of solicitation.
When thinking about monetizing customers dont think too literally about who your paying customer is, just make sure someone is paying. Google does a great job of providing a ton of great products for free and monetizing on the backend through targeted advertising and lead generation.
A $12 Billion Dollar powerhouse whose products are free:
