How to recognize a good customer?

How to differentiate a good visitor from a bad one?

Each visit on your website has a cost (each visitor generates traffic and you pay for this traffic). Therefore, it is better to ensure that each visit is profitable. Moreover, each visit you receive follows the promotion you have done, and as a result, each visit has a cost (if you pay an advertisement cost per click, for example, each click made by a bad visitor is a waste of money). Therefore, it is vital for you to be able to recognize a good visitor from a bad one.

In order to reach this goal, you need to know both the product and the market. Each product has a specific potential market. Most beginners’ mistake is to believe that a product is made for anyone - that’s wrong. In order to define your target, try to segment the market (for example, the market of “cane” should be segmented first of all by age; it would be hard to sell a cane to an eight year old child!). Once the segmenting has been done, promote your website exclusively via the targeted segments.  Certain tools, such as Google Adsense, provide their customers with the possibility of spreading their advertisement in a highly targeted way. As a result of such measures, the risk of having a useless visitor click on your ad is significantly decreased.

In addition, try to have empathy - try to get in your prospects’ shoes when you prepare your advertisement.  Whether the ad is textual or graphical, it should match the following criteria:

1. Attractive -  it should encourage people to click on it.
2. Clear - the information should be easy to recognize.
3. Transparent - visitors should be able to immediately guess the kind of site it is linked to.

If the above three criteria are met, you will only receive visitors who are fully aware of what they will find; it is the best way to have a good return on investment.

What could be the impact of a bad customer?

Once a visitor is on your website, he/she could buy something and become a customer. A neophyte would think “Any customer is a good customer”. The above mentality is a mistake - bad customers do exist.

A customer is represented by three main elements: an income source, a person to inform, and a person to educate.  If, effectively, from the income point of view, any customer is a good one, then from the two other points, it is really different!

A customer should be informed, which means that you should, at any given time, give him the required information to urge him to buy. The transmission of such information could be done via a global impersonal marketing plan, but usually, it is done through a direct marketing plan trying to reach each customer personally.  These kinds of programs (in order to know more, you should get more information about “CRM”) are money and time consuming. Therefore, a customer who is hard to convince or who requires too much attention would not be a good customer. In this specific case, the best action would be to identify this customer as early as possible in order to not spend any money on him/her.

A customer should be educated, which means that you should, at any time, shape him to make him fit the product. You will need to answer his questions, solve his problems, and ensure he corresponds well to your customer’s criteria (for example, for some high class restaurants or hotels, a certain standard is required; not all customers are welcomed). If a customer refuses to be educated, has a bad behavior, or makes more trouble than he solves, then this customer probably costs more money than he generates, and he is obviously not a good customer. In this case, to ignore him would not be enough (you will always need to spend time solving his problems, he could have a bad influence on other customers, etc…), and you should accept, in this situation, the possibility of getting rid of him.

Once you’ve clearly identified those who will be good visitors (a clear segmentation of the market and a comprehension of the main marketing method are essential), and those who will be good customers (usage of personal customers’ data is necessary to classify them), you will notice that the quality of your website’s visitors will suddenly improve, that you will have fewer problems to solve, and that you will save a lot of money.

Julien RIO.