Where are your best potential customers?

When allocating your budget for a new marketing campaign, it is sensible to ensure your best potential customers are covered first. Then you can spread the budget progressively over other target groups in accordance with the potential of each.

It may be sensible, but many companies do not seem to adhere to this in practice.  So it was good to find an American web company using their HBX Analytics solution to measure conversion rates according to the source of the visitor for some major e-commerce companies.

The practical conclusions are:

1. The people who already know you well enough to type your URL direct into the browser are your best targets.  So make sure you are keeping in contact with them effectively.  Maximise repeat business and encourage referrals.
2. Search engines are not surprisingly the next best source of traffic because they direct you people who are already searching for a relevant product or service
3. Only after you have maximised the search engine marketing should you go on to banner adverts, directories and other referring links.

Do you really put your customers first?  Or do you ignore them in favour of new sales?

Talk to you next month!

Stephen Orr