How To Keep The Cost Of New Customers Down

Acquiring new customers can be a very resource consuming task. But it is a must in every type of business even if you do a great job of keeping your current customers happy and continually buying from you.

Some businesses must get new blood into the sales funnel on a grand scale such as those in the consulting business where work is done in spurts or on a one shot basis. Others, like in retail, just need to at least keep up with the normal attrition rate for customers that move or grow out of the products being sold.

Regardless of which of these boats you are in, the smartest move you can make is to obtain these new buyers in the most cost effective and efficient way possible. Usually this means using a form of direct marketing to possible prospects.

There are two pieces to do this correctly. First, you must have a system, not just a plan, to constantly contact these prospects and make them stand up and volunteer to be a customer.

And second, you must use demographics and commonalities to pin point the correct target market and keep it as narrow as possible. This is the only way to avoid wasting resources of time and money.

One of the best ways to get a narrow niche of people that are strong prospects and keep the cost of acquisition down is getting lists with very specific demographic details in them. The other is doing a joint venture, which this article will not cover.

Working with a list provider, either online or directly with a human broker involved, is the way to carve out a list with the right attributes to it. Demographic examples that are helpful to most consumer based businesses would be household income, age, sex marital status, home ownership, car ownership, magazine subscriptions, etc.

For business to business demographics things such as company revenues, number of employees, industry, a person’s title, etc. all come into play. Plus there are many more ways to slice and dice attributes to come up with a very concise list.

Keep in mind a list of 10,000 semi-targeted names will cost a lot less than 1,000 highly targeted names but over all, it will save in the time in money needed to follow through on your marketing system funnel you will be putting these prospective customers through.