Engaging your invisible customers

‘Nurturing’ is more important now than ever before because our buying habits have changed.  There’s a fair chance that the first place someone comes across your brand will be online.  They will see you on social, or they will find a link to your website in a search.  And if this is the case then that person will remain completely invisible to you unless they decide to place an order.  Imagine you run a vegan bakery shop.  You can hear that the bell above the door keeps ringing and the door keeps opening but no-ones comes in.  Must be the wind you think, and go back to your Sudoku.  Five minutes later you jump out of your skin as a grinning customer appears in a momentary ‘poof’ at your till with a bulging basket of cakes holding out their credit card.  But hang on – the bell above the door rang five times but only one customer came to the till?  That’s what online business is like.  You have no chance to engage a customer until they decide they want to buy.  And if they don’t buy then you never even knew they were there.  You might have been a hair’s-width from someone deciding to go with you rather than buying from your competitor but you never had the chance to win them over.  They might have had an obscure question that your competitor had in their FAQ section but you’d never thought of – but if only they had asked!  You had no chance to engage and influence their decision.

This is why you see so many websites offering free downloads in return for an email address, or inviting people to sign up to a mailing list for exclusive special offer deals.  They are not interested in giving you information, they want some indication that you were there in the first place.  If someone has made it as far as your website then there’s a decent chance that they are in your target market.  You want to be able to engage with them in their decision-making phase, and convince them to buy from you not your competition.  It’s why websites give you annoying popups when you first load the page or try to leave.  This works, for some companies.  If your product is the kind of thing that someone has to put thought and research into before buying, then there’s a good chance they will give you an email address in return for some information that will help them make their mind up.  If what you sell is more of an impulse buy, then maybe you’ll have to offer something better to get their email address out of them, such as signing up to your mailing list will get them a 20% discount from their first order.