Selling is about finding those people that want what you have to sell. You will not be very successful if you are constantly having to convince someone that they want your goods and services. Conversly, you won’t have to do very much convincing if you can find your eager audience. If you can rinse and repeat the methods that you used to both find and keep that audience then you are well on your way to being successful. Unless you are a great salesman cold calling and prospecting amongst the general public is going to waste both your time and cost you a lot of money. So finding your target audience is crucial to your success.
If you have a web site then you are hoping that the traffic to it is steady and its volume is high. Getting that volume high is step number 1. If that is the case then step to is making sure that the volume includes people that both need and want what you have to offer.
Consider these 5 strategies to amass your lead prospect list.
Putting Together Your Contact Information Database
Keeping data of the visitors to your site is key. Put every effort into securing these people as ongoing customers. To do this you will need to gather contact information. This information should include, at the very least, an email address. This will allow you to provide them with the information they need to acquire your goods and services over an extended period of time.
To do this provide these people with incentives to share their information. E books and other gifts should be offered in exchange for this valuable data. These incentives, aka lead magnets, are the key to converting your site traffic into subscribers to your lists. Make sure that signup forms are prominently displayed on your site. Typically they will be at the top of your page or in navigation areas to either side of your page. A good conversion rate is between 10 to 20 percent of those persons that see your offer.
Collect Customer Data Via The Use Of An Autoresponder.
Once you get a subscriber your autoresponder starts to do a lot of the marketing heavy lifting tasks. You can, once people decide to do an intial share of ther contact information, request additional details via the use of your drip campaign. The first step comes very early in the message sequence. It starts with the thank you message. You can do the ask for this in a confirmation email for example. The whole idea is to get them to share information about their interests, wants, and needs. This engagement can yield the valuable information you need to maintain happy and satisfied customers.
Engage People So That They Give You Enough Information For You To Help Them
Your potential customers found yu on the web because they were searching for something that was important to them. They found you and your site. That’s win, #1 for you. As mentioned above you need to faciliate the next step. This step involves providing a medium for you to engage in ongoing encounters. Your inquiry form or other mechanism engages your customers and gets needed information.
Providing the customer with something of value, for free, that not only reflects both what you have to offer and gives them an indication of what you can provide throughout their long term engagement with you. If you are an affiliate marketer then something that is of value to those interested in products and services in the niche you are promoting should be offered. For example, if you are offering something in the email marketing niche then a free eBook about list building may do the trick.
The best thing that you can do is to find as much as you can about your prospect’s immediate needs. Make any inquiry forms you may have visible on the pages that are frequented most by your site visitors. Areas like your home page and any other uber populer pages on your site. Answer any inquiries from those forms as quickly as possible.
Creating A Customer Need Feedback Loop
Your visitors will fall into several categories. When people visit your site they will see pages that may reflect something you have to sell. In these cases some, may immediately purchase fom you. Others may make an assessment that your site is not immediately useful to them and leave immediately. Everyone else is somewhere between these two polor opposites.
In any case, see if you can get information about why they are leaving without taking any positive action. Inquiry pop-up forms that appear when folks are leaving can serve this purpose. This last effort to make a connection is one that can pay dividends in the near and longer terms. You may get the information that you need to close the sale. You can achieve this by utilizing any number of followup mechanisms. Calls, drip campaigns, etc. This form will give your site it’s need feedback loop tool.
Poll your customer base. These are like surveys online for cash.
Its all about targeting as stated earlier. Survey the contacts on your list so that you can make sure you understand what will sell. A newsletter is a great medium to garner the trust needed to get your subscribers to respond to your survey.
Poll your customers several times per year (2 to 4 times). The poll’s questions should be constructed so that you understand what goods and services they currently need and will need. Find out what they like of dislike about your products and services. Use this as an opportunity to solicit constructive criticism from your subscribers. Make sure that you make any changes needed to address any criticism they may give. If customers want you to add completely new products to your mix then see if the business case makes it worthwhile to do so. If it does then do it.
Conclusion:
Use the aforementioned strategies to fine tune your targeting. Further use them to make your site visitors long term customers. If you can do this you will reap the rewards that other successful marketers are currently experiencing.