The New Year begins with global economic headwinds putting pressure on both corporate budgets and consumer spending. This is the time to sharpen focus on customer acquisition and interaction. Most small businesses do not have sales teams, but that shouldn’t deter them from seeking business prospects, driving conversions, and realising sales in 2023.
Here are some ideas to create a conversion strategy this year.
Identify your perfect customer
This first step is often glossed over. Your innovative sales strategies will only work if their reach the right prospects. Create an ideal customer profile (ICP) by studying your customer base and mapping their journey with you. Optimise your time by targeting only your most valuable prospects first.
Build detailed pictures of your prospects. Characterise the company, stakeholders, job roles, employees, and locations. From current customers, characterise pages visited and time spent, to enrich the profile. This can help you make targeted sales pitches, foresee roadblocks, and drive better conversations.
Automate lead generation
Small businesses must automate most of their sales process. A chatbot, for example, that sits on your website can engage visitors, answer questions, and even collect lead information. Building a fully-functional chatbot is not complex. Codeless tools with drag-and-drop interfaces enable users with little-to-no coding experience to create simple, yet sophisticated, AI-powered chatbots. Many marketing and sales tools already come with configurable chatbots. When the prospect wants to engage with a human, the chat can be transferred over to you or a team member.
Timing is everything
You must engage with the customer at the right time in their journey, with the right information. Set up chat triggers on your website in high-traffic pages – like product pages, or “About Us” – with messages relevant to the stage in the your sales funnel. Time your trigger optimally, for example 20 seconds for first-time visitors and 30 seconds for repeat visitors.
Irrespective of whether your digital marketing uses email, social media, phone or any combination, think strategically about timing. Social media and email marketing is best when potential customers are likely on their phones, such as during a commute or lunch break. Planning engagement times, and refining them across campaigns based on actual responses, will lead to better marketing efficiency and stronger conversion rates.
Connect with your industry
While we may live in a digital world, there are still plenty of opportunities in physical and conventional marketing. Omnichannel strategies – that combine traditional and online methods – blend the convenience and efficiency of digital channels with meaningful and personal direct interactions.
Don’t overlook the importance of trade and business events, which can still be very effective lead-generation tools, even when used sparingly. While there are costs involved, exhibiting your brand or product at carefully selected events, in front of the right audience, can provide awareness and higher quality leads, increasing sales conversion rates. To generate the best ROI, select events whose demographics match your ICP and where you can test and refine outcomes in follow-up events.
The best sales strategies are clearly targeted, grounded in existing prospect and customer insights, and remain experimental in their approach. Such a strategy need not be daunting for small businesses, though. Tools like Zoho SalesIQ – a digital customer engagement tool to communicate with every site visitor at every stage of the customer lifecycle – can help.
The new year might bring economic uncertainty, but a strategic and optimised customer conversion strategy and execution plan can reduce your business risk and drive your ongoing customer growth and success.
