In a previous article, we looked at what makes a business smooth and seamless for a new customer. I’d used the example of “Uber” for a smooth and seamless experience but since Uber After looking at 59 businesses, I’ll combine the best practices into 5 actionable tips.
What Is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition is the process of gaining new customers. A customer acquisition funnel is the sequence of steps customers would take when considering your service before they decide to hire your service. By designing the acquisition process as a funnel, we can visualize the number of customers gradually decreasing through the steps i.e. for each customer who hires your service, 100 other customers considered you but did not hire your service.
Breaking down the Customer Acquisition Funnel
Let’s look at each step of the Customer Acquisition Funnel for a business solving some need
in real estate purchase.
5) Awareness is the step where potential customers find out about your business.
4) Consideration is when potential customers are considering your business products or services to decide on whether they will hire you.
3) Engage entails customers engaging with you to make the purchase.
2) Delivery refers to the stage of providing products or services to your customers.
1) Post-Sales Service is the step where customers close the loop on their purchase with feedback, follow-up questions, or buy more from you.
Tips to improve customer acquisition for small businesses
Small businesses can improve in 5 ways. I’ve tailored the below notes for businesses in real estate including, but not limited to:
Mortgage brokers
Property surveyors
New build snaggers
Electricians
Smart home consultants
Painters
Domestic cleaners
Real-estate agents
House renovation developers
Tip on Awareness
Improve Awareness by engaging Word of mouth sharing via sell-side real-estate agents and mortgage brokers. Most businesses say they get customers through three paths:
Word of mouth
Organic web search - which are boosted by Google Reviews and SEO
Paid web search - Google AdWords
To increase your acquisition of customers, consider boosting your word-of-mouth channel. How? Connect with sell-side real-estate agents (e.g. Lynam Auctioneering) and mortgage brokers (e.g. Park Financial). Offer preferential service to their referrals, a referral fee to them, or start with appealing to their incentive of closing the deal quickly and being known as the agent who provides good quality recommendations.
Tip on Consideration
Quicken Consideration by providing transparent rates where possible. Where not possible, explain the factors that determine the rates and expected time for the customer to receive a quote.
You reduce the number of steps in consideration by providing the prices upfront. You also reduce the customers who reach out to ask for a quote but do not move forward due to the price.
Tip on Engagement
Accelerate Engagement by providing a self-service web form for customers to provide their contact and house information so that an automated outreach can start.
This works better than other methods, like:
Getting the information over email or a web contact form leads to unstructured data and possibly some missing information
Getting the details over the phone can be hard with a variety of accents or if the customer does not have good reception or headphones at that time.
Tip on Delivery
Improve the Delivery of your product or service.
A few days to do so are by
using a tool such as Calendly to make scheduling self-service, where possible.
using a template software such as Home Inspector Pro to create a report with more details in less time.
Also, improve the availability of the agents for home visits by delegating tasks to virtual assistants. For sole trader businesses, hiring multiple virtual assistants to handle
accounting,
scheduling, and
finalizing reports.
Tip on Post-Sales Service
Improve post-sales Service by buying an off-the-shelf IVRS or, at the very least, configuring voicemail along with a daily schedule to respond to voicemails. Provide an email ID and schedule a regular time to respond to inbound queries. This will reduce the uncertainty faced by customers when reaching back to the business.
Bonus Tip #6
Provide a personal touch to your customers after your service by calling them within 24hrs of your service to
verbally ask for their feedback and
if the feedback sounds positive, request a Google Review.
If the feedback is not positive, that is an action item to look into and consider fixing
If you are a team, not just a sole trade, allocate 5mins per call for a CxO to make the call.
Would you like to discuss more?
If you would like to discuss tailoring these tips to your business and situation, you can reach me at Consulting @ Spark Creative Technologies.
Originally published at https://harshalpatil.substack.com on Aug 23 2022