Online businesses live or die by their ability to find, and more importantly, activate, new customers. Digital entrepreneurs can always do more to shake extra customers loose, and many leave customers behind because they’re afraid of intruding on them. While the line between marketing and meddling can be thin, there are proven ways entrepreneurs can reach out to potential customers.
Pre-Emptive Engagement
Most entrepreneurs think that the brand-customer relationship starts when a user joins and starts buying things. It’d be presumptive to think otherwise, after all. However, when you have your marketing hat on, it helps to be pre-emptive. That is, engage ASAP when someone engages with your product/service.
This is done via bespoke marketing platforms that can handle data taken from visitors. While they may be anonymous datasets to you, it is possible to examine user behavior on-site and gain insights into what they’re looking for. This work is often done by an AI-powered customer activation platform that can parse heavy datasets and form context-specific conclusions, based on the nature of your business. This enables a level of personalization that can bring early prospects in, as opposed to a standard, one-size-fits-all prompt.
Make Onboarding Fun
Another way to better activate customers is to take the friction out of signing up. There are several ways to do that, like ensuring you have fast load speeds, but another is making the process fun. Gamification does just that, adding superficial visual elements that make your site more interesting to engage with.
For onboarding new customers, less is more. Some apps out there lean heavily into gamification, like budget or calorie trackers that are disguised as city-building games. That’s overkill. For onboarding, gamification is as simple as a progress bar that helps customers visualize the sign-up process. Many will be tempted to complete it. Splitting a long sign-up form into three or four smaller steps is also a great way to remove friction and help more customers convert.
Retargeting Lost Customers
Sometimes your next customer isn’t a new customer at all. It’s the prospects who dropped off after a few purchases or disappeared after creating their account. There are entire ad suites that are built around retargeting old customers, often by highlighting known pain points and communicating to the customer that they’ve been solved. Of course, you need to actually solve them first.
That’s where feedback becomes critical. It’s not just a means of ensuring quality and retaining existing customers; it can also help bring old customers back into the fold. If your audience is big enough, then many digital marketers will recommend starting a community (or engaging with it, if fans have created one already). That way, you get a one-stop shop for what current customers want and what they think you could do better.
Between these three methods, you can activate customers who are finding, entering, or have fallen out of your sales funnel. For most business models, the solution is twofold. Remove all friction from business engagement, and use personalized insights to reel new customers in or call old customers back.
