Automated Retention that Lowers Acquisition Costs

ACCELERATING BUSINESS GROWTH 

Good day, It’s Anthony here from selfanagedbusiness.com. Today I want to talk about accelerating your business growth. And with that, I want to talk about automating your attention and also reducing your acquisition costs. It probably sounds pretty woo and it probably thinks that you can’t achieve this. Reducing customer acquisition costs. Lowes acquisition costs.

How to retain customers who are leaving?

How do you maintain customers?

• ATTRACTION

One of the key things that we’ve just been looking at is the use of ads for attraction to our programs.

They want to say attraction to our programs.

What I’m talking about is like, what ads work under the right circumstances for the right person to take some kind of action?

Now, what we’ve done is we’ve focused.

We’ve noticed that some ads that are performing really well in other industries are great to swipe and deploy and launch in our industry.

We tweak them a little bit, but the ads that I can see, they’re working. We take and deploy those within our business and we test them.

You’d be very surprised at the response rates that you get once you understand what’s working in a specific industry may also work in your industry.

So look to other industries, first of all, to increase your business growth.

• RETENTION

The second thing, let’s talk about retention of customers.

Customer retention.

Now, for most of us, we have some form of customer. It’s like being in a service-based business where you’re dealing with clientele.

One of the things that you’ll do is you’ll have existing customers. Now, if you look at your competitors, your competitors may have what’s called a follow-up system to retain those customers, which could be some form of a group, could be some form of a mail out, whether it be by email or physical mail.

Now, most businesses are just one-offs.

So in other words, they’ve used your service. That person then moves on.

Customer acquisition strategy.

However, what you should be doing is understanding, well, how can I look at retaining those customers over the longer term?

So a good example I’m going to use is a carpet cleaner.

And what you’ll find is that carpet cleaners will only come to your house when you need the carpet cleaner. And it could be when you’re moving out. It could be that you’ve had a spillage. It could be just an annual spring clean.

Now, if you think about it, what if your carpet cleaner was to send you specific information related to something completely separate from carpet cleaning?

So, for example, the cleans your carpets, six weeks later, you get this thing in the mail, whether it be physical mail or an email that says, hey, how’s the mold going in your bathroom?

Do you need some help looking after that mold? Right.? It’s offering a separate service for carpet cleaning.

However, what it’s doing is it’s making you think, well, hang on a minute, they’re following up with me then what you might want to do is send up a second follow-up email after that.

So another six, maybe eight weeks after that, which could be again, hey, would you like some help with the spring cleaning of your house? If it’s coming into spring cleaning, we offer a dusting service.

We’ll come around and we’ll dust your blinds, dust your house, and we’ll look after that type of stuff for you. It’s a house cleaning service. It’s got nothing to do with carpet cleaning.

Then what you could do is start looking for the third and the fourth emails and it’s generally the last one that you’ll start looking to offer the same service that you may have delivered prior.

Now, what is this doing for the customer?

So you have the customer, and you’re offering a separate service. Yes. However, you’re also keeping that contact with them and you’re also keeping yourself at the forefront of their mind.

So whilst your competitors might be off like once a year offering you a discount, hey, carpet cleaning, 50% off, whatever the case may be, once every twelve months you potentially getting more customers more regularly and you don’t have to worry about offering that discount.

So let’s switch gears a little bit.

So we just talked about retention.

Let’s now move across to how you can get the average transaction size up.

Now, I’m just going to run through some key points here.

How to retain customers?

• So the first one is the evolution of your services.

So what you might do is you might offer a carpet cleaning service, which I just spoke about. But your second service could be a grout cleaning service, right?

Removing mold from bathrooms. And then look at what’s the next service after that. It could be cleaning wooden floors. I’m just using examples here as a carpet cleaner.

However, I think you’re starting to get the picture that whilst you can offer different services, you’re building on your core service, which may be carpet cleaning, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly they grow.

• The second thing is to evaluate who you’re selling to or who your specific customers are.

Now, if you’re just thinking of taking on anybody, which most new business owners do, you might want to rethink that strategy and say to yourself, hang on a minute, I just want to focus on affluent customers, the customers that are going to spend the money with me and can afford to spend the money with me.

So a good example of this is you wouldn’t want to be going around selling, say, carpet cleaning services in an area that’s probably a lower socioeconomic area.

You’d want to sell it in an area that has the money to spend a more affluent area because then you can start offering more services as well like we just described.

• The third thing is personalized ads.

So how do you create personalized ads?

Well, you need to be talking to the customer. You need to understand copywriting in some shape or form, but you need to make it specific to that particular customer.

So you need to understand and get into their world and understand what they’re looking for.

• The fourth thing is Control Ads

What you’ll need to also focus on, and I’m just going to talk about this is rotating what we call your control ads.

So have the specific ads that you can lean on, but rotate those specific ads.

So for example, we run an ad on Facebook to get people into our free group. But what we do is we’ve got four different versions of that and the four different versions relate to the specific types of times of the year, like whether it comes into school holidays, whether it comes into Christmas, for example, whether it comes into Easter.

So theme it, is another good way to achieve that.

Plus it also shows variety.

• The fifth thing is newsjacking.

So newsjacking is a term that’s used in the copywriting world to take headlines that are currently working. Like if you’re standing in a line at Woolworths, Woolworths is a grocery store here in Australia.

Have a look at the trashy magazines and have a look at the titles on the front of those trashy magazines.

So Who magazines are a great place and you’d be surprised at how quickly you can just rip off their headings and apply them to your ads or content that you’ve got.

Okay, speed up your slow seasons.

Now, what does that mean?

So when you come to December 26, between December and January, it all comes into a bit of a slow period.

What you want to do is start thinking, well, what can I do to attract my clientele?

You might want to give away something.

So you know, you might want to give away holidays as an example. And there are plenty of ways you can do this to achieve it and you can do it inexpensively, but you’d be very surprised if you give something away how quickly you can build up that clientele.

The other thing that I’m going to say is to use multiple media and use it across multiple touch points. So what you should look at is starting to look at, you know, social media.

So use Facebook or Google ads, then switch it up. Use physical mail, use emails, use different touch points around those slower season periods and you’ll be surprised at the response that you get for your products and services.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this video and I’ll talk to you soon.