When it comes to crafting the ideal sales promotion for your marketing campaign, the most important thing to keep in mind is the value of optimizing the customer life cycle.
Image credit: Stuart Miles | FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The customer life cycle consists of five elements:
- Acquisition – the art of engaging the customer
- Activation – the art of getting them to take some form of action
- Retention – the art of winning their loyalty
- Revenue – the art of getting them to buy the main product, as well as cross-sells and up-sells
- Referral – the art of persuading customers to recommend others
Conversions occur because of the customer’s experience with a merchant’s sales promotion. This conversion is not uniform, and observing customer data is one of the best ways to discover the differences between customers.
Once this data has been understood, conversions can be increased through following four strategies:
- Learning to write better copy
- Improving landing page conversions
- Understanding the psychology of conversions
- Considering behavioral economics
Crafting an ideal sales promotion can be done in the following four ways:
Learning to write better copy
At the end of the day, it’s not videos, podcasts or webcasts that persuade people to buy; it’s the words that are used to deliver the message. These words can be written, spoken, or used in video slides. The medium is not as important as the actual words themselves. Studying and applying copywriting techniques is essential for conversion.
Improving landing page conversions
All landing pages are not the same. Some convert better than others. Even when you have the right words, the visual elements have to work as well. Discovering the best elements – like headlines, videos, opt-in boxes, bullet lists, product graphics, etc. – consists of finding models and then testing them to see what works for your particular niche.
Understanding the psychology of conversions
A comprehensive customer profile is necessary for a conversion strategy to be effective. Who are your target customers? Where do they live? What are their buying habits? When do they search for information? These and numerous other questions need to be answered in order to profile and engage a target audience.
Looking at behavioral economics
There is no point selling high-ticket items to low-income visitors or offering free entry-level products to a group who consider free products to offer low-value. Understanding what makes a particular group of people buy makes all the difference to how you set up your landing page and the words you use to persuade them to take action on your promotion.
In summary, crafting the ideal sales promotion for your business is based on looking at the big picture: not stopping optimization at the top of the funnel, analyzing marketing tests to get a better understanding of the real impact of a message, and discovering new strategies to attract customer’s interests.
About the Author:
Marlena Stoddard writes on small business marketing and entrepreneurship. Originally from Senoia, GA, Marlena lives in Santa Rosa, CA with her husband and two children. When she isn’t spending time with her children or writing, Marlena enjoys hiking and photography. For more on Marlena, you can follow her on Google+.
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