5 creative ways to get new customers online

Getting new customers is the goal of many websites, but often after launching, site owners wonder how to do it.

1. Newsletter

The newsletter is still the golden grail of marketing in my opinion. It’s effective as hell, personal and immortal. I’m sure I’m slightly biased, however, I’ve had such a good experience with it that I can’t really do otherwise.

Try it too and see.

2. Proactive outreach

This method is particularly suited to individuals, smaller agencies and generally people solving specific problems for specific customers.

Direct outreach (cold outreach) has a very bad reputation. Who would also praise spam emails containing a message that a company will make you a new website for half the price and you will get a key chain as a gift. You know the email has gone to 100 other addresses and if it’s already in your inbox, you automatically delete it.

**But there is another way.**I’ll try to illustrate it for you with my business, which is web development.

1. Survey– First, I would write down all the possible places I could help people. In the case of websites, I would chooseindustry +Place(for exampleconstruction companies+**Brno)**and I’d make a list of everyone I thought I could help.
2. Personalised address– Many people send uniform emails because they believe that it costs too much time and work to “personalize” emails. They are wrong. Yes, it does cost some time. However, it also costs some time to write non-personalized emails – albeit less. It’s always about efficiency.And even if it takes writing a personalized email10x (estimated) longer than a non-personalized one, the payback may be100x –1000x higher – especially considering that in many industries (web development is certainly one of them) a single customer canpaythe entire outreach campaign. Let’s look at the numbers, which I will try to make as reflective of my experience and reality as possible. Let’s say you sell an item/service that makes you a profit of £3000 when you sell it: Uniform email -> time to write 2 hours -> 100 addresses sent (1:33 average time per email) -> 2% response rate -> 2 potential customers -> half of them we agree with -> 3000 CZK profit of the campaign Personalised email -> skeleton writing time 2 hours + 10 minutes of personalization each (11,33 minutes each) -> sent to 100 addresses -> 40% (last time I tried) response rate -> 40 potential customers -> half of them we agree with -> 60 000 CZK profit (2000 % / 200xdifference compared to a non-personalised campaign). Numbers are always difficult to estimate, but it is a matter of principle. In my experience, personalization has always paid off handsomely. If you don’t feel like writing, I recommend you to make short personalized videos using Loom or at least use software like YAMM, Snovio or Lemlist and personalize your emails at least at the level of dynamic fields. P.S. Spam campaigns can also ruin your reputation, both in the classical sense (people will remember and say so) and in the online sense (Google will, for example, make your emails less deliverable to Gmail inboxes). These hidden costs of “spam” should also always be kept in mind.

3. Establishing cross-cooperation

Find out who is working with the same customer segment as you, but fulfilling a different need or solving a different problem.

If you have a car insurance company, the same segment but different customer problem is solved by car dealerships, car dealers, car rental companies… These are all places with which you can arrange interesting and mutually beneficial cooperation (win-win).

If you are a hairdresser, you can reach out to a beautician, wellness studio or massage parlour. If you’re a copywriter, you can approach an SEO specialist, a web agency or a translator.

Investing energy and diligence in this direction is definitely worthwhile.

1. Think of 3 industries you could cross-pollinate with,
2. List 100 people/companies in the industry you would like to work with,
3. approach them with an offer

Looks like a lot of work. And yes, I can assure you, it is an extreme amount of work. However, if you try to do it, there’s a solid chance that by the end of your “career”/company life, you’ll have no shortage of contracts. At worst, you’ll just end up with a passive funnel of potential customers.

I think that’s worth a try.

4. Contents

Now we don’t think of content as articles, videos and promotional material – that is, what is commonly considered content. By content, I mean advice.

If we again follow the example of my business, it would probably be important for me to be mainly in Facebook groups, because that’s where people solve problems with the site most often.

I would try

1. to be as helpful as possible,
2. groups to monitor regularly,
3. not to sell anything directly to the people I help.

I would also try to follow this three-point checklist in all other places where people solve problems (forums, live meetings, discussions under YouTube videos, etc.).

In the long run, I would also try to direct people to my Discord, where I would be sure that they can ask me anything at any time, and it’s also a platform that I can use to let the world know what I’m doing.

5. Giving things away for free

On the internet (especially the Czech one) it is still rather common that when you get something for free, you feel that it really hurts the donor. If it’s not exactly a discount coupon, but some content (ebook, course, email series) it often feels like it really hurts the giver to give these things away for free, and they look like it.

They are often short, unoriginal, unhelpful, and generally unpolished. Do it differently. First of all, remember thatfree, there is never anything.

If people give you an email for “free content”, they often give you the opportunity to end up “earning” content many times over than if you paid for it directly with money.

That’s why I wouldn’t be afraid to invest in “free content”. Massively. You’ll always get a return.

I personally tried this strategy when I was doingAdvent Web Challengewhich gave me a lot of hours of work, but it was for people’s email – which, as I indicated, is definitely not free.

However, it has been great for me and I highly recommend trying it out as I think it can pay off for you too.

These 5 creative ways have always worked well for me. Let me know in the comments how you find them, or if and what experience you have with getting new customers!