Whether you’re offering tasteful furnishings for houses and apartments or you’re a service provider like a plumber, finding new customers is always difficult and expensive. If you’re a smaller operation – perhaps as a plumber where you take last-minute appointments – there might not be anyone to answer queries while you’re on-call. This can lead to lost customers, which few businesses can afford.
Market Online to Attract Visitors
A business can use different online marketing methods to attract new people to their website. This could be through online advertising or subtler promotional activity on home improvement forums (in the case of a furnishing company) or home repairs (for a plumber).
It’s important to determine what the time investment and business expenses will be for this marketing endeavor. When measuring the average order value (or lifetime value of the customer) against the costs incurred by the business to find the new customer, this gives a better idea about whether the activity is profitable or not.
Managed Online Chat for Per Lead Opportunities
When a business selects a Home Service Back Office (HSBO) provider, they’ve chosen to get a chat service where a third-party representative will live chat with visitors to their website.
The idea with this type of provider is that they can become familiar enough with your business to represent it in the first instance for website visitors. Engaging them in short conversations, they can discover what product or service that they’re interested in and provide useful information, where appropriate. This operates day or night, late evening or in the wee hours.
The HSBO operates on a per lead basis. This means that they receive a payment from the website owner when they have found a new potential customer and forward that ‘lead’ onto the company to get in touch with the person or company directly.
Understanding the Cost of Acquisition Correctly
Clearly, the cost to acquire a new customer mustn’t exceed their value. For companies with deeper pockets, they can view the cost to acquire a customer vs their lifetime value (Amazon.com does this).
However, for companies that only have so much working capital or money to devote to marketing, the return on the investment must be faster. For these businesses, their first order from the new customer must provide sufficient profit to, at least, cover their acquisition costs in full.
Without significant additional investment or borrowing to fund expansion, companies must often place restrictions on how much they can spend on marketing. As such, better marketing ensures a faster return through new sales to effectively recycle the marketing budget repeatedly. With less funding available for marketing purpose to expand the customer base and sales volume, companies should focus greater attention on marketing efforts where the results are quicker. That way, they can do more with less.
For businesses that wish to increase sales, other than selling more to existing customers, they cannot get away from customer acquisition. Whether a furnishing specialist, a plumber or another business altogether, finding smart ways to bring in new customers affordably is enormously important.
