What is your goal for your potential customer?

What conversion rate do you have for enquiry to sale?

As a marketer these are questions that you should be able to answer for each customer segment and each product sector.  In this day and age, data is your (best) friend and you should be able to identify which areas to fine tune and which to push hard to deliver the best return on investment (and to demonstrate that marketing is a revenue-generator, not a cost centre!).

Knowing the answer to the first question, you can develop customer journeys that see the second answer increase – better quality customers delivering more sales with a decrease cost per acquisition (CPA).  A real sweet spot for marketers.

But how to do this?

This can be a massive project, never-ending in fact, so let’s not start too big.

Which customers to target?

Use the data to identify which customer segment has the lowest CPA and the highest items per transaction (IPT).

What characteristics does this customer segment have?  You want to hunt out more of these customers in your potential customer pool and work to convert them.

• Do they live in a particular location?  Target your Google Adwords and Facebook advertising there.
• Are they of a similar age? Target your Facebook advertising accordingly.
• Do you know what time of day they are more likely to visit your website?  Weight your advertising spend to match this.
• What ads did your current customers respond to?  Make sure your creative mirrors this messaging and presentation.
• What interests do they have based on either their previous carts or what they indicated when they signed up for your communications (if you aren’t asking, you should be!)?  Target your Facebook advertising accordingly.

It isn’t potluck where you find potential customers – use your existing customer pool to identify the prospects most likely to convert and generate the most income, and then use that to shape your advertising placement and messaging.

What is your goal for this segment?

It isn’t necessarily ‘purchase immediately’.  By crunching the numbers you observe if they purchase on the first visit their cart value is only $65.  If they purchase on the second visit, their cart is $105 for only an extra $1.70 average cost per click (CPC) in remarketing.  You get an extra $40 for only an extra $1.70 in digital spend.

The goal is to purchase on the second visit to the website with an average cart value of $105 and IPT of 2.3

Knowing the destination you can then mark out the journey you want this customer to take.  It is important that you have the following in place:

Landing pages

Make sure your customer visits a landing page relevant to them, don’t just plonk them on the home page.  If you know what your existing customer likes and is most likely to purchase from your online store, build a landing page showcasing this product for your potential customers with a similar profile.

Use tools like: Related Products, You Might Also Like; Customers Like You Purchased.  People are both time poor and many segments don’t like to feel they are different, there is safety in knowing what other customers have purchased – it reinforces their ‘good’ decision to shop with you.

Remarketing

Take advantage of Google Adwords and remarket to your potential customers once they have left your website.  Dynamic remarketing means that you can present the exact product/s they clicked on while on your site.  Standard remarketing will present general ads for your website.

Forms

Make sure that you invite people to sign up for special offers and newsletters.  But don’t do it when they first land on your site – they will shut the pop-up without signing up.  How long do people spend on your website?  Time your pop up for less than that.  Or have it present on every page.  Capture their details so that you can then remarket to them most efficiently.

Social media

Make sure you have social media remarketing set up as well – using your subscriber lists to do this is an extremely efficient way to do this.

So if you have all of these set up and ready to roll you can then map out the journey you want your customer to take.  Once they leave your website, how do you want to continue to engage with them?

A journey map can be as simple or as complicated as you would like – if your journey to purchase is longer, or if it is B2B customer you can implement different, more frequent types of contact to ensure that your remain top of mind, always adding value to the experience – this isn’t about broadcasting, but narrowcasting – getting your communication right with the right customers to maximise your return on investment and their lifetime value.

There are ways you can look at maximising your existing customers by increasing their IPT or frequency of purchase using the same journey plan methodology.

Fantastic technology exists to make us better marketers – marketing automation enabling 1-to-1 communication, journey planners, dynamic content organisers, segment and list matching are some of them.  Take advantage of the data you have, and these great tools to become revenue generating.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.