And we’re not talking real pirates here, but a good dose of Pirate Metrics!

If you’re struggling to make sense of funnels, lead capture, engaging your audience this post should really help you.

I’m going to map out a strategy that works, is easy to follow and will help you visualise a customer journey that will get you attracting and keeping customers!

We’re talking about growing your business, improving the customer journey and understanding how to measure your success

Are you ready?

AAARRR!

Now I’m borrowing begging and stealing from a number of places to pull this together, first of all, Pirate Metrics were invented by a guy called Dave McClure and he was talking about a way to measure the success of marketing campaigns.

 Acquisition – Activation – Retention – Referral – Revenue = AARRR

Then the lovely people at Active Campaign added an additional A

Awareness – Acquisition – Activation – Retention – Referral – Revenue = AAARRR

And then I’m going to take this a step further and rather than just talk about this Pirate AAARRR as metrics, I’m pulling back and going to turn it into a methodology; a sequence of events you can use in your business to attract your customers!

Here’s a caveat for you, not all businesses need all 6 stages, some do, but it’s worth thinking about it as a whole process and then think if some elements don’t make sense to you.

Aaarrr you still with me?

So here we go…

Awareness

This is the first stage of attracting your customers. The ‘woo hoo’ here I am type of marketing.

So when people ask you what is it your hoping to achieve with all the Facebook posting and you say, I just want people to see that we’re here, that’s this stage; awareness.

It’s the first point of contact with your brand, and how you start building brand awareness.

The tools you use for this are in person, or social media, or being found on search engines. And the way you can measure your success is through the likes, comments, and shares you get on your posts, or the number of people you chat with at a business event.  This might even take the form of word of mouth

We’re hoping some of these people will go and take a look at your website and check you out and then…

Acquisition

This is the first transaction with have with our potential customers. But no money is changing hands at this stage!

This is where those pop-ups, webinars or lead captures tools come into their own. You are exchanging a piece of content with their contact details, so you can keep building a relationship with them.

You can start collecting this organically as and when people visit your site, or you could pay for Facebook ads to drive people to your fabulous content. It all depends how quickly you need to build your audience.

And you’ll be able to measure the success of this by the number of people who sign up.

Activation

At this point, you’ve hooked your audience, they’re interested. Could you offer them a free trial, a free discovery call, a free Facebook group? Someway to experience your amazing product or service before they commit?

The success of this strategy will be measured by the number of people who grab your freebie. Then we’re onto…

Revenue

Our first R and then one where the money comes in. Bet you were wondering when this point would happen!

All this nurturing and building a relationship needs to pull people towards buying your products and services.

And clearly, the success here is measured by money in your bank balance. You might want to take a look at how many people you started off with at awareness and compare that to the number of people who buy.

A good conversion on an email list is said to be about 2%, although I have heard of people hitting 40% - but be warned that is very rare.

So you can see that you need to be attracting a lot of people in this sales funnel to see some sales at the end.

And so visualise a funnel. What you’re doing is popping as many people into the funnel as you can at the top, and moving them along by different ‘touch points’ so that some of them plop out the bottom of the funnel as customers. A funnel by is nature is big at the top and small at the bottom, so it paints a pretty good picture!

But that’s not the end of this Pirate methodology. Getting customers is tricky and costly, so why don’t we try and keep them and get them to re-purchase, become raving fans and tell everyone how amazing you are!

Retention

How do we make those customers sticky? We want them to stick with us for as long as possible!

Are there other products you could offer them? Could you upsell when they’re at the point of buying?

Supermarkets are really good at this stage, that’s why there are magazines, DVDs and gift cards at the tills. We thought we were done with our shopping, but they convince us to pop a few extra things onto the conveyor belt.

Could you do that with your business?

Could you ask them if they want to be added to your email list so you can keep in contact with them? Could you run a loyalty scheme?

It costs 5x as much to attract a new customer, then it does to keep a current customer interested. So, you want to spend some time thinking about this element in your strategy.

Referral

Can you get them to refer others to you? Could you ask them to write testimonials? Would they tweet or write a post on Facebook about how great your service was?

'84% of consumers reported always or sometimes take action based on personal recommendations. 70% said they did the same of online opinions' Nielsen insights

And when you ask for testimonials, ask people to leave them on google, LinkedIn or Facebook so others can see them too.

Got you thinking?

I hope this has got you thinking about the journey you can pull people on towards you and then get them to continue buying your products.

This is a little sample of the type of thing I do with my clients – I know that creating a whole strategy like this is a big affair and involves some tech know how, but it’s worth it!

If you want your business to be successful, so need to be getting out there and being visible, but also being strategic!

Interested in working on this with me and creating a watertight strategy that wouldn’t worry the Titanic? Why not book a discovery call and find out more?

Why not map it all out on a piece of paper and see this as a pirate journey, it might help to make sense of the different stages your customers will go through.