Currently, traditional lead generation may not bring the expected results. One of the best ways to attract new customers is to use growth hacking techniques, which will more effectively and quickly bring interested customers right down the sales funnel. Discover 9 creative ways to increase your sales.
- Create sequences of hyper-targeted content
To increase conversion in an online store, you need to define your target audience and learn how to reach them with a personalised advertising message. The more we narrow down the target group, the better. Recipients expect content and offers tailored to their interests, needs, and expectations. By determining the profiles of the recipients who meet the given criteria, we have a better chance to achieve our sales goals. Targeting is the process of selecting the audience in order to identify the target group that may be most interested in products or services. On the other hand, hyper-targeting selects the offer and advertising message in even more detail to a strictly selected group of recipients. Advertising activities are carried out mainly in social media – the selection of profiles is based, among others, on the user’s gender, age, and interests. On social networking sites, recipients post a lot of information about their preferences and lifestyle – publicly available data can be the basis for creating personalised ads. In other words, we give users exactly what they need.
- Get an insight into customer behaviour with alerts
Alerts are a very valuable function of marketing automation systems, allowing you to monitor user activities on the website. Events that we can set an alert about include, but are not limited to creating an account, registering for a free trial period, clicking on a message or link, downloading an ebook, visiting a subpage with a price list, confirming attendance at a webinar, or watching a demo. The selection of events depends on the goals and specificity of the business. This may also be related to a certain level of scoring or inactivity for a given period of time. An automatic alert is sent to employees to draw attention to the change in the user’s relation with the brand. Owing to this, you can easily react to recipients’ actions in real time.
- Increase sales with automatic incentives
Marketing automation allows you to use the best sales tactics based on growth hacking. One way to increase sales is to offer users additional value in return for taking a given action. For example, a customer may receive an additional benefit in return for a service recommendation in social media. All they have to do is to share the link, e.g. on Facebook or Twitter, or send it directly to a friend.
- Human factor limitation – rely on AI
Marketing automation tools are based on algorithms and artificial intelligence. Thus, they can relieve the marketing and sales teams involved in the creation and dispatch of marketing campaigns. After establishing the automation scenarios, the system itself decides when, to whom and what advertising message to send. Owing to this, it is possible to significantly reduce the impact of the human factor in repetitive tasks – intelligent software does it automatically, reacting to customer behaviour. The tasks of marketing automation tools include segmentation of contacts and dispatch of customised campaigns, creating dynamic forms on a website, reminders about an abandoned shopping cart or after-sales communication (e.g. “Rate the product”).
- Drip marketing – send drip campaigns after each action
Drip campaigns are a form of automation that consists of creating a set of messages and then sending them to recipients over a specified number of days. Drip Marketing can include both email and push notifications. The moment of sending each advertising message is based on predefined triggers – you can schedule the message to be sent after registering on the website, and then 2 days later. In this way, we convey messages gradually, adapting the strategy to user actions and behaviour.
- Use user-generated content
User-generated content is created by recipients on their own initiative. This may come down to comments on social media under brand posts, posts on online message boards, reviews on opinion pages or blog articles related to the brand’s industry. Giving users control over content creation may seem a bit scary, but thanks to it we can effectively develop and strengthen the relationship with potential customers. Moreover, user-generated content can be more effective than conventional marketing content.
- Re-launch sales to inactive leads
In the lead nurturing process, we consistently prepare the audience for the purchase. Unfortunately, hot leads may lose interest and not get engaged in further brand communication activities. Then it is a good idea to include inactive recipients in your re-engagement campaign to stimulate interest in the offer and encourage purchases. Sometimes this is the best and only way to get the user back into the sales process.
- Use detailed audience data
When creating marketing campaigns, it is worth using as much data as possible about potential customers and dividing them into groups according to the assumptions made. An important segmentation criterion is the customers’ motivation and needs. Behavioural segmentation allows you to identify the specific needs of recipients – unfortunately, the data is not as easily accessible as in the case of demographic segmentation. By using information on the purchasing needs, feelings, brand attitude, or lifestyle of users, you can adjust the advertising message accordingly. It is worth using dynamic marketing to attract the attention of the audience on the website and create remarketing campaigns.
- Communicate in real time
Regardless of whether we are dealing with B2C or B2B marketing, it is always worth being up-to-date and monitoring alerts with marketing automation. For example, when a potential customer is viewing a price list subpage, you can display a real-time notification banner asking for contact details or encouraging them to take advantage of the offer. In this case, time is important – the user is more likely to make a purchase if he or she receives all the information they need to make a decision right away.
