Although marketing media may change and evolve frequently as more technology is pumped into the market, what doesn’t change is the psychology behind why customers buy. At Information Street, we’ve honed our marketing model to a razor sharp edge, where we systematically break down the turning points that affect a customer’s decision – to buy or not to buy. We also understand that a sale doesn’t end at the value exchange – we foster relationships and absorb our customers into family, making sure everyone involved enjoys the benefits of a mutually agreeable relationship for years to come.
The New Nine Steps to make sure you have loyal, trusting and happy buyers for a lifetime are as follows:
Attract
Attracting customers to your product or service is the first and most important step to kickstarting your perfect customer lifecycle. For digital products or services, this translates to traffic to your offers – whether it’s organic or paid traffic. In this section, we will break down the 3 characteristics of the perfect traffic flow that gears towards converting warm traffic to buyers.
- Target
For traffic to work for you, you must have a long, hard look at the intent of your traffic and where it’s coming from. The only people that should be viewing your offers are targeted visitors who intend to solve problems. This comes through many sources – people searching for keywords on search engines, and clicking through to your search engine optimized website, people clicking on an ad you’ve places, or people clicking a link on your email newsletter – and many others.
- Attract Interest
People only buy from people that they know, like and trust. This means that in order to keep your visitors from bouncing to somewhere else, you must immediately spark their curiosity and establish rapport to convey that you share common ground with your potential customer base. This can be conveyed through techniques like writing powerful, intriguing headlines that can’t be ignored, and moving on to describe how you’ve personally faced the challenges that most of your potential customers identify with off the bat.
- Collect Leads
A deadly marketing trap that most amateur marketers fall into is following the traffic-sale model – where a visitor is hard sold a service and after buying the product they are never heard from again. This is a major pitfall, and the most successful marketers understand that a customer once is almost always a customer again and strive to connect and build relationships with potential buyers. This comes from collecting the phone number, email or any other other contact point for the customer so that you can offer free value, help solve problems and potentially sell more services to them in the future.
Sell
The sell is the second component of the perfect customer lifecycle. After successfully driving targeted visitors to your offer, hooking their attention and establishing basic rapport, it’s time for you to phase shift to Sell.
- Educate
In the Educate phase, you need to establish rapport with your visitor, convey your authority over their problem domain and explain how you can solve their problems. It is now time to engage logic and educate your potential customers in detail about your product or services, and bridge any gaps that come up between their need and your solution.
- Offer
After you Educate your potential customers about your product, you need to put a compelling offer of your product or services in front of them. List out your product features, write engaging descriptions. This is a great time to educate your customers about the additional value you are offering them (usually for free) and offer upsells as well.
- Close
We come to the favorite phase of any marketer – the Close. Make sure you offer easy payment methods, immediate downloads, and anything else you can to facilitate a quick close. Keep testing, tracking and improving your selling system every week till you have it honed to perfection.
Wow
Another rookie mistake that alienates marketers from their customers is skipping the Wow phase. We like to simply define the Wow phase as going above and beyond the call of duty for the customer – anything post-sale that makes your customer go “WOW!” qualifies as a check-mark for this phase. Read on to understand how to wow your customers and create powerful, almost-addictive relationships between them and you, and spark rave reviews on ecommerce forums and your feedback forms.
- Deliver & Wow
Off the bat, you need to ensure speedy product delivery. In case of digital downloads, they should get a download link to their inboxes in the next 10 mins. If you need a sales team to contact your customer, WOW! them by making sure a person from your team calls in the next 20 mins, or the first thing next morning. Instant gratification is underrated – use it to your advantage. Ensure your customers are enjoying your product by sending them “thank you” mail, followup emails and your customer feedback forms.
- Offer More
Wow your customers by going above and beyond the call of duty by analyzing which of your products are usually sold together, or tailor fitting more of your services according to customer needs. The customer will feel grateful for your personal touch – which contributes to better relationships.
- Referral
When you’ve established that the customer is very happy with their purchase, it’s the right time to introduce them to your referral system. Here’s our biggest secret to get more referrals, and we’re disclosing it to you for free here – ASK THEM! By simply asking your customer for referring your services to their network who might need similar solutions, you create a sphere of possibility for more sales. You can even incentivize referrals by offering WOWs – for example, getting a free upgrade, a lifetime membership to your paid website, priority support, or getting 1 month of subscription for free.
This model forms a basic framework for refining and personalizing your own perfect customer lifecycle. As closing thoughts, we would highly recommend incorporating as many steps from the above model that you possibly can – and constantly test, tweak, improvise and improve till you have an optimum model that can be scaled infinitely.
If you’d like more information and a free workbook that will help you design your own Perfect Customer Lifecycle, get your existing model audited by our clever system and a way to create a hands-off process to automate your entire sales process, be sure to Sign Up Here, and we’ll send you your free workbook in the next 10 minutes. We wish you all the very best in your marketing endeavours!
