We specialize in building digital marketing funnels. These intrinsic roadmaps are designed to cause the most amount of noise in a sea of ads that force leads to opt in to your offer. What can I say about that offer? It’s a rush. Some clients are looking for calls and others look for forms to be filled out. But no matter what it is, you want to get the traffic there.
The truth is, anyone with a decent AdWords budget can direct traffic to their website. Now, whether it’s the right traffic is a different story. Today, I’m going to share the “lost customer” journey — a stage in this funnel construction that marketing pros like myself typically hide from clients. The lost customer journey is when prospective customers you’ve targeted don’t convert.
In this article, I’ll discuss four stages to keep in mind to help bridge the gap from lost customer to converted customer:
1. Do an audit.
Stage one is simple: Do an audit of your skills and resources.
Most brands don’t have an infinite budget. Most agencies don’t have unlimited resources. For our own internal team, we avoid those who claim to be “experts.” The reality is, the best marketing is about testing and retesting, and the top marketers that I’ve seen have always been students of their industries.
Give yourself an honest assessment. Know your limits. There is always room for improvement. Before you can target any type of lead, you need a truthful answer of what you can do and what you can do great.
For example, if you’re launching a pay-per-click campaign, ask yourself if you can build new landing pages. If you’re a website owner selling e-commerce products, double-check that you are measuring every action on your site.
The recommendation is not to deter you from moving forward, but to nudge you into focusing on what you already do really well and finding ways to amplify it.
2. Put a retargeting plan in place to stay top of mind.
Stage two is an eye-opener. I’d like you to go on Amazon and find something you’re thinking about buying. Check out the reviews. Look at related products. Click around the site for a bit and at the end of your adventure, don’t buy it.
It won’t be long before Amazon sends you follow-up emails asking you to complete your purchase. Sure, you can delete these emails, but what about those remarketing ads following you around on the web and Facebook? There’s no hiding.
What Amazon does great, and what we can learn from it, is to assume that the customer will not buy the first time around. Take from Amazon’s playbook with email campaigns and remarketing. Stay on the buyer’s mind.
The customer journey is never just taking them to your digital storefront. Often times, true success is when you are able to be their shadow around the web.
3. Keep the relationship going even after a sale is made.
Stage three is all about that moment you think you’ve closed a deal. It happens when you have a conversion. Here’s a secret: A deal is never done when the sale is made. Never. Yet so many stop marketing once they close that initial sale.
What you should be doing is leveraging upsells to further push your brand. Now, say you don’t have a second product to sell — what about getting a testimonial, review and/or referrals from your customer(s)? Imagine what that could do for your product.
If you do have more products to sell, consider leveraging promotions to help ease your customers into the funnel a level deeper. This isn’t the time to be greedy and do a hard sell. When you have customers, now is the time to show appreciation.
4. Test and retest.
Welcome to stage four, where nothing is what it seems. You’ve been running your campaigns for some time and have had some success, but those milestones you thought you’d hit are a bit flat. Or better yet, you passed your milestones but just barely. Now what?
Is the answer to dump more money into your campaigns? In theory, you’d get more exposure, right? I’m going to suggest an alternative approach: test and re-test. When is the last time you did some good old-fashioned A/B testing? How about A/B/C testing? It’s probably been a while.
As a marketer, testing is everything. I highly recommend looking for new platforms to play on. Have at least one campaign that is outside the norm of what you normally do.
The thing is, if all you do is the same thing every day, week and month, nothing will ever really change. Things will just stay the same. Your job as a marketer is to find ways to push the needle in your direction. Testing new campaigns will open your eyes to data you otherwise would never have access to.
The Lost Customer Journey
The customer journey is never a straight line. It’s never a right turn. It’s never a “yes” or “no.” It’s a series of events, happy accidents, advanced tactics and, every now and then, a little luck.
