Learn how to be a relationship manager to increase sales for your business.

Client acquisition may sound complex, but it can actually be a very simple process to understand. And small business owners should find comfort in knowing that there are a variety of ways to acquire new customers and grow an online business.

A good way to look at the whole picture is to look at yourself as a relationship manager. As a relationship manager, you maintain a balance, tending to both sides of the equation. And in order to attract a potential client, to begin your relationship, youve got to look at a variety of different mediums, including search engines, email marketing and banner placements. Customer acquisition is basically the end result you should be focused on delivering from the marketing campaign.

New Internet Traffic Solutions

Internet traffic solutions are being developed on a continuous basis, so it can be fairly easy to get caught up in the potential of thousands of prospects knocking at your virtual doorcaveat emptor! One of the biggest factors that people have to be careful about, especially if theyre in the mortgage or finance business, is cost-per-lead agreements. The price usually sounds great, and they may even boast exclusivity, but in my experience, the actual conversion rates has been low.

To be clear, the most important question you should be asking upfront is, Is this lead going to be resold? Is this just for my use? The lead industry can be tricky, so make sure youre completely clear on what the details are before you jump in. Once youve figured that part out, youll want to look at what specific types of leads would work best for you and your website.

Web Analytics

In order to determine whats best for your site, you need to employ web metrics. For those of you who dont know, metrics is the tracking of analytics on your site. And analytics measure your visitor activitywhen somebody comes to visit your site, how many pages they visit, what actions they take basically using a cookie to track their movements across your site. Web analytics or web metrics are still evolving, and can get complex in a hurry, so if youre not a professional in a specific area, it would do you good to employ someone who is. Let them play at it, so you can do what youre really good at.

Easy-to-use Analytics Tools

There are several easy-to-use analytics tools out there that you can use, though, including Google Analytics, Inspectlet, Clicky, and Chartbeat. The point is, you want to try to predict as much as you can prior to placing media buys, such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads.

You want to predict the action that your site visitor will take to make sure youre allocating your marketing bucks in the most efficient and effective areas. For example, you wouldnt want to pay for an online campaign that drives visitors to your site when youve got faulty conversion points within your site. Testing the conversion flow on your site first will point out weaknesses; point to where visitors fail to follow through on a call-to-action. So test, fix the leaks, then look into media buys.