In this post, I’ll walk you through some proven ways to grow your online business quickly.
It isn’t just dry-and-drab theory that doesn’t help anyone. You’ll see real examples you can learn from and apply to your business.
Let’s get started.
The first thing you should do is put a personality to your site, to your value proposition.
The more places you can put it on display, the better.
People are more likely to buy from a company that’s charismatic and personable.
With a personality on your website, you’ll stand out from the crowd.
That’s not all.
You may have different landing pages and offers. How will customers remember each of them?
There should be a common theme that unites them all. Today ConvertKit is a successful autoresponder brand with millions in monthly recurring revenue. Here’s how they added personality to their product and attracted the right target audience.
Everyone who worked on ConvertKit was a former blogger. As such, they were tuned in to what bloggers felt. Above all, they knew what the target market wanted the most. This reflected in their MVP, their landing page copy and elsewhere.
This singular focus helped carve a unique niche. The rest is history.
The information is there, but it’s so helpful that the customer can see how it will make them feel better about their choice.
You want your site to be a fun place for your audience to come back.
You want them to have a good time with your brand, and you want them to stay with your brand.
A good website will do all of the above things.
That’s why it’s so important to make it enjoyable for your audience. No one likes to be bombarded with ads all day long. But a personality that shines through? Everyone wants that.
Create a customer loyalty program to retain your existing customers and attract new ones. This will skyrocket sales. Acquiring new customers is up to 10X costlier than selling your products to existing customers. Building an appealing customer loyalty program will spark their interest, as well as the interest of the potential clients.
The more they’re willing to spend with you, the more benefits they would get in the long run. Call this what you want – quid pro quo, reciprocity, or returning the favor. If you manage to make your customers feel special, it encourages reciprocity. This helps your business grow.
By the third year in business, ConvertKit began generating around $80,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue. All this time the growth was mostly organic— through influential bloggers talking about the service.
So they built on that. Everyone who became a customer was also offered a chance of becoming an affiliate.
They had 13000 customers and over 4000 affiliates. They still use affiliate marketing. It still works for them.
When you want to establish a foothold in the market, you’d want to use proven tactics. Preferably ones your competition uses. There is no reason why something that worked for them won’t work for you. Don’t feel the blame for emulating ads or strategies someone else is already applying. And is experiencing success with.
Research ads that have been working well for them. To conduct research, use platforms like AdBeat and or Similar Web. Slip into the magical world of landing pages, ad copies, and other proven strategies your competition uses.
Find what works and emulate.
Do you want to expand your business and target the right audience in a flash? Build an impressive email list. Additionally, this is one more way of cultivating customer loyalty. You’ll also need a lead magnet that would make people click that subscribe button. Yet, this is all in vain without a sales funnel. Companies like GetResponse, Aweber, ConstantContact can help you a lot with building and managing your email list.
When you think of email lists, you imagine it must have hundreds of thousands of contacts to eke out conversions.
Not true.
A Chiropractor based in San Francisco generated about $1000 from a tiny list of 45.
All he did was collect the emails, draft a 3 part series of emails that promoted a 50%-off first-time patient “Summer Tune-Up” service. There was the initial email about the offer, a followup email and a final email just before the deadline.
A barebones approach without any expensive graphics resulted in $1000 worth of new business.
Webinars fall into a category of proven ways of growing and promoting your business and services relatively fast. You can introduce anything you want to market with this automated selling tool. The biggest advantage of webinars is that they captivate wide audiences quickly. This way, you will automatically boost your sales day after day.
Just make sure to generate interesting topics or the ones that have already proven themselves. You could either go for one spectacular webinar once in a while or do multiple ones in a month. That one big webinar should be all about influential visual slides. High-impact slides are entertaining, memorable, and keep viewers engaged.
Once again, we can learn something from ConvertKit.
Other companies would hop on to Facebook and start running ads. They had zero budget for that. So they worked with what they had.
Content marketing, referrals, and webinars. Of this webinars were the most effective.
Webinars were cheap to run, and they naturally built a community around a new product. They were also the first thing Darrell found that consistently produced new signups. So, he stuck with it.
They went all-in with this and witnessed massive growth, booking as many webinars as they could physically.
They didn’t reinvent the wheel. They gave the same webinar though hosted by different partners. They reached out to affiliate partners who were a willing participant in the program.
In the first year, hosting 30 webinars a month, sometimes two of them a day in a back-breaking schedule.
There’s a reason a free product like webinars work. It’s a great way to generate sales and increase the average order value of your customers.
And it’s not just a fun idea to generate sales.
I’m not just talking about the “free” part of the phrase.
I’m talking about the “bonus” part.
You want to convince your audience that they’re going to get something from the webinar. It shouldn’t be a sales pitch.
Working with an effective team who watches your back will ensure the prosperity of the business. Effective teams are made of highly-motivated people willing to give 101% of themselves. Give them a sense of purpose and belonging. They’ll respond with better results
Working for the sake of salary won’t make them motivated. Yet, making them realize the bigger goals will make your employees want to prove themselves. A powerful brand acquires new customers constantly, but that is the case with quality employees as well.
Team-building activities are the best place to create a bond with your employees. Talk to each of them, ask about ideas, make them feel their opinion matters. On the other hand, team buildings are great for performing collaborative tasks as well.
Training sessions and seminars can help them improve their knowledge and skills. Give them the opportunity to grow and see your business grow with them.
Ultimately, you can’t know which approach works best until you apply it. Refine your approach and focus on the ones that make your business grow. At the end of the day, putting an accent to customer retention takes time but it is doable.