How to Sell to Different Customers Without Jeopardizing Conversions

Source: Neil Patel

Everybody loves choices, right?

We all love having the opportunity to choose between different items on the menu at our favorite restaurant.

I love browsing the store for new clothes.

It’s usually fun to have many different options to choose from.

Except when you’re trying to convert new customers.

It turns out that giving your visitors too many choices on a product page, for instance, can have negative consequences.

Too many choices lead to friction.

Friction leads to more bounces.

And that hesitation usually results in fewer sales.

Removing friction, on the other hand, almost always boosts conversions.

For example, reducing the number of form fields from six to three can deliver a 66% average conversion lift.

The problem is that you probably have different products for sale on your site. You probably are trying to sell those products to different audiences, too.

All of these potential combinations create more variables.

And these variables create more complexity of choice.

So selling multiple products to multiple audiences can dilute your results.

Thankfully, there are ways to still sell your product to different customers without watching your ROI float down the drain.

First, I’ll explain why this commonly backfires.

Then I’ll show you exactly how to prevent it in each case.

Why selling to different customers often backfires

The New York Times reported on a study about the “paralyzing problem” of too many choices.

Here’s what happened.

The first day, they set up a stand at a local grocery store to offer jam samples.

Initially, they offered 23 different varieties of jam for customers to try.

That large number of options piqued a lot of people’s interest.

60% of the people who passed the stand stopped to try their jam.

So far, so good, right?

But when they closed up their stand for the day, they found that only 3% of people converted and bought their jam.

That sounds pretty similar to the average conversion rate for most websites when you think of it.

Pretty awful, right?

The next day, they found some good news, though.

They went back to the same grocery store stand but reduced the number of jam samples down to six (from 24).

The flavors were all the same as the day before. All they reduced was the number of options.

The result?

They saw a 30% higher conversion rate that resulted in 600% more product sold!

Reducing choice is a proven factor in generating more conversions.

It reduces a lot of the tension people already experience while buying.

Here’s how to sell to different customers at the same time without bombarding them with too many choices.

1. Create offer-based ads for specific customer segments on Facebook

Just 42% of marketers report finding success on Facebook.

That sounds crazy when you think about it. Facebook advertising is one of the best ways to grow your business right now.

But many marketers are still having trouble measuring ROI.

Here’s what these survey respondents replied when asked if “things were going well.”

The majority of marketers were “uncertain.”

Obviously, Facebook can be amazing if you know what you’re doing. It’s one of the best ways to reach billions of people to buy your products.

There’s no shortage of customers on Facebook to acquire, retarget, and convert.

But that volume can also become a problem.

There are too many segments. There are too many advertising options to use.

Here’s how to sell to all of your different customer segments without risking a drop in sales.

Start by segmenting your offers into each funnel stage.

In this example, I’ll show you how to create a Facebook Ad for targeting traffic that’s already landed on your site.

The trick is to then re-work your messaging based on who these people are.

Let me show you what this looks like so it makes sense.

Step #1. Create a custom audience based on engagement with your Facebook page.

This custom audience is perfect for B2B companies, for example. These websites typically don’t see that much website traffic.

And you only need to promote your business to a few people when each client is worth thousands of dollars each.

Next, click “Facebook Page.”

Step #2. You can target brand new visitors who just heard about you by narrowing this audience down to people who’ve visited your page in the last month.

You can call the name anything memorable. It’s just for your own internal use.

Step #3. You can use specific interactions or engagements to target people in the middle of the funnel.

For example, these are people who’ve left comments on some of your recent posts or shared them with their friends.

That interaction is a signal that they’re ready to hear more about you.

2. Speed up customer research with self-selection

Let’s say that you sell a software product to two very different companies.

One might be a scrappy startup. The founding team or single marketing-focused hire might use it on a day-to-day basis.

The other might be an enterprise client. They have teams of people who want to use the product.

The tricky part is that each company is using the product for very different reasons.

The scrappy startup might want to grow ASAP. They’re looking to get more customers and increase their return on ad spend.

The enterprise client, on the other hand, is looking for a tool that makes their internal team more efficient. They’re interested in saving time.

That’s not the only thing that’s different, though.

The price each is willing to pay is also completely different.

The scrappy startup needs to keep costs down to one or two seats max. The enterprise company wants 25-50 seats and is less price-sensitive.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Companies run into problems all the time because they’re being pulled in all directions. Many of my own companies have gone through this same issue.

Fortunately, there is one trick I’ve learned over the years.

One of the easiest ways to reduce hesitation on a pricing page is to help customers self-select.

In other words, make their choice easier by simply recognizing their ‘name’ and ‘scenario’ from the others.

Box does an incredible job of reducing the headache of a typical pricing page.

They allow different customers to segment each plan by their business type.

If you’re looking for a business-wide option, you have three plans tailored to your needs.

If want to choose an individual plan, you probably don’t want to go through all of the Business and Platform plans that don’t apply to you.

Thankfully, you can flip over to the Individual section in that case.

See how effective this is?

Realistically, Box has potentially a dozen different pricing…

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