Acquiring new clients is vital for any business.
Without a cost-effective, monitored strategy, advertising budgets can be wasted and results versus planned growth forecasts can come up short!
Here are 5 ways to get new business and reduce client acquisition costs.
Set up effective digital conversion tracking on Google Analytics
Test and measure headlines, and images on your website
Monitor internal conversion rates within the business i.e phone calls, emails and walk-in traffic
Communicate with clients and prospects regularly via email
Ask for referrals
Before we begin discussing how to get new clients, it is important to understand what makes up client acquisition costs.
How do you calculate client acquisition costs?
Calculating the cost of acquisition is simply adding all your annual marketing costs and dividing by the total number of new clients in that period. As simplistic as this sounds it is an effective measure.
If you require any more information please reach out on our contact page and we will be delighted to help you.
Below we provide more detail on the 5 ways you can improve the cost of acquisition and increase the number of new clients.
1. Set up effective digital conversion tracking
The Facts and Data foundation for the effectiveness of the spending is sadly overlooked by many businesses and believe it or not, many service providers. Conversion tracking is not that hard to do and is so critical for successful digital marketing.
With tools like Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4 and Ad Platforms such as Google and Facebook, there is no excuse not to have an effective measurement of marketing metrics and conversion tracking.
What is your Baseline? If possible, ideally go back six months and trend by month your key marketing metrics by source: traffic, engagement, conversions. Add to this a trend of your spend by month – service provider costs + any ad spend.
Why a Baseline? As you roll with campaigns forward, success is driven by a feedback loop – what is working and what is not? With trended numbers, you get facts and data feedback.
It's advisable to have an industry expert set it up for you tailored to your business's needs or alternatively there are plenty of tutorial videos on YouTube to guide you.
Conversion tracking can take the form of eCommerce sales, enquiry form completions, newsletter signups, free report downloads, clicks on phone numbers from mobile devices, and clicks on email addresses from desktop and mobile devices.
The benefit of tracking conversions is to acquire good data, establish the success of a campaign, plus send that conversion data back to Google or Facebook as a conversion which helps the ai algorithms understand what type of prospects are converting. This allows the algorithm to better filter and find more clients for your business.
2. Test and Measure your ad and website copy
If you speak to any of the successful marketing service providers, they will tell you the importance of testing your marketing. Good providers know that they do not understand the intricacies of your market and clients. Without testing, you run the risk of campaigns or content losing readers and potential clients when a simple tweak may have made a significant difference.
If you run paid advertising or create content for your website, testing different titles, sub-headlines and images can pay significant dividends with client acquisition.
A good starting point is within Google Analytics 4 under Reports - Engagement - Pages And Screens.
There you will find a list of webpages with useful data on how people are reacting to your content. Time on a page is a good relative measure.
Each industry will be different however it's a great way to see if your content is resonating with your readers and if your titles, colours, layouts etc are helpful.
Also, be sure to look at Desktop versus Mobile traffic differences by applying “Filter”.
There are many paid tools out there to help you such as Optimizely, Zoho, VWO and hundreds more so there is no excuse not to get testing!
3. Monitor your Sales Conversion Rate
Many business owners fail to test the conversion rate within the business, i.e staff answering the phone, replying to enquiries by email, dealing with customers walking into the business and so on.
We see opportunities in most businesses to improve in this area and a starting point is for all staff to make notes in a CRM of all customer engagements and the outcome.
Some basic sales training can assist in this area and the tracking can be trialled for a month to check on progress. What are response times? How are your staff interacting, are they asking open or closed questions?
Detailing the interactions between staff and potential clients can identify high performers who can then share their techniques with other staff members. Scripts are useful if the business is larger and this should be revised on a regular basis or when staff change. Some simple sales training and encouragement can make this part of the business a conversion machine.
At the start of every month, have a conversion staff meeting and ask the question: What can we do better? Go through the conversion rate stats from the previous month and get feedback from the staff members. Have a whiteboard with conversion goals, sales goals and ways to improve.
More often than not, great ideas will come from people dealing with clients directly and these meetings can produce some gems for the business. By focusing on conversions, the staff will be more encouraged to do better and participate enthusiastically in the meetings.
The reality is all efforts made will be wasted without optimising the sales part of the success equation.
4. Communicate with Clients and Prospects!
Successful sales and marketing driven businesses always have crisp, simple and effective ways to communicate with clients and prospects. As a foundation are accurate contact lists: names, names spelled correctly and correct and complete contact details. The investment of time and attention to detail to get this right is an investment you will never regret.
Businesses with solid lists are valuable in a buyer's eyes and having, for example, an email list means the business is in control and not reliant on social media or paid ads to communicate with existing and potential clients.
Use direct comms to drive traffic to your website – more traffic= better ranking = more traffic! Also, having an “irresistible offer” on your website is a must-do and these like other things need testing.
If you are in the manufacturing business you could provide a downloadable PDF about how to maintain the item you manufacture or 10 ways to extend the life of the item.
Talking with clients will help you gather a lot of questions and these can be prioritised based on the number of times they get asked.
The secret with an email list is to put out regular helpful content targeted at solving your customer's problems. This can be content written within the email or a news-style display of useful articles on your website.
By helping the industry you will be seen as having authority on the topic and will attract business this way.
5. Ask for referrals!
The practice of asking for referrals goes back many years and was very common in the 1980’s. It is a highly effective sale technique and many industries such as real estate and insurance still use it. It can be easily implemented into your business with an email to a client after work is completed.
Referrals can also occur when a business rings a client to check on how they enjoyed the service or product. At that time you could ask if they know anybody who may enjoy the same product or level of service.
The Pros:
Leads can be easy to convert due to the rave reviews they have already received from the referee.
The cost of acquisition can sometimes just be a phone call and a few hours of your time.
The strategy for success can often be duplicated as the businesses may be very similar to the referring business.
More referrals may come from the relationship also
The Cons:
The need for your services or products may be not as strong as the referees.
Some people can be standoffish at first so being subtle and getting the potential client to open up about their business can help break the ice.
Summary
The reality is a lot of marketing effort and $’s can be put into acquiring clients and accordingly you will have good weeks and bad weeks however what we strive for is continuous improvement.
Wherever your business is at with sales and conversion, or paid advertising successes, with effort, your client acquisition programme will improve over time, and so will your client acquisition costs, which is always good for the bottom line.
We hope you found these 5 ways of increasing client acquisition helpful for your business and as always you are welcome to reach out to one of our advisors if you seek more information.
- The BSP Team
