Mythbuster Monday: “It doesn’t matter how customers found us”

This sounds ok if you already have lots of customers who are buying your products or services. This situation becomes a problem however, when your sales and profits are stagnant or decreasing, and you don’t know why.

With only a general idea of where your customers are coming from — Google for example — and not knowing their demographic profile and which search terms they use to find your website, you are virtually flying blind. So in the event that your sales drop off, how are you going to fix this problem? How can you rebuild momentum when you have no idea why you lost customers in the first place?

The answer is to have enough information at your fingertips so that when you notice a decrease in traffic or conversions, you can quickly identify exactly where this is occurring in your sales funnel and you can adapt to these changes.

There are, in general, four different strategies you can use to identify the source of your customers:

1. Web analytics: If you have a website, you must make use either of Google’s free analytics or another analytics package. This type of software identifies and quantifies the various sources of your traffic, so that you can instantly see where the drop-offs are occurring.
2. Paid advertising: You need to measure the traffic from each one of your paid ads, whether that is a Yellow Pages ad or an advertisement on Facebook or Google etc.
3. Ask them in person: Sometimes it is difficult to determine which ads are actually working or which ads bring in the most customers. An effective way to do this is to use different phone numbers for printed ads, but that can be quite expensive. So simply ask people how they located your business, particularly if they phone you.
4. Survey your customers: If you have an email list, create a short survey and ask them how they originally located your business. Some might not respond, but some will and this will help you find out which of your campaigns are the most successful. Also, you can add a short survey to the sidebar on your website, asking people to ‘tick’ a box indicating how they found your website. You can even give them a free e-book or a discount voucher if they complete the short survey.

The take home message is that you should proactively manage your business, so that in the event of a decrease in traffic or conversions, you can rebuild your momentum and get back on top quickly. For more information on SEO or website design, call us on (07) 3333 2932 or request a free quote online.