Get Your Front End Acquisition Strategy For International Clients

Online internet businesses are often in the business of attracting and selling to new clients. The strategies for selling to first time customers are referred to as Front End Acquisition.

What Is Front End Acquisition?

Front End Acquisition refers to all of the marketing and communication that happens before a person becomes your customer or client. It starts from the point in time when you client does not even know you until his first purchase.

The methods that work for Front End Acquisition will not work with existing clients or Back End. And the methods used to market successfully to your Back End will not work on your Front End Acquisition.

Identify Different Sales Methods

In online sales the difference in the two strategies is very distinct, and an oversimplification could be:

• Front End Acquisition often relies on Landing Pages.
• Back End Sales will often come through email marketing.

Why are these different sales methods used?

Because marketers need to identify the state or frame of mind his readers are at in order to write the sales letter.

Use Your Landing Page As Part Of The Front End Strategy

In a Front End Acquisition strategy, the Landing Page will typically:

• Have a unique website address or URL
• Be one page long
• Convincing sales copy
• Only lead to the order page

But what is important to note is:

• Landing pages are written for specific traffic, specific readers, specific people and people in a specific frame of mind.

Get Your Prospect To Your Landing Page

How do visitors get to your landing page? This is an important question. The answer to this question will help you write a better landing page

Internet marketers use a variety of ways and you can even create one landing page per source of traffic:

• Google Adwords – you pay Google to send you traffic by buying keywords. This can work well if you select the right keywords and if your offer and your sales copy are strong.
• Strategic alliances where other people recommend your landing page to their email list or subscriber list.
• Traditional marketing methods – include your landing page url on relevant printed materials; teleconference preview calls; fax broadcast; classified ads
• Article marketing – submitting articles for online publication with a link in your author bio box
• Press releases – online press releases get good visibility in Google searches. An aggressive campaign can get you lots of traffic.
• Link building – through exchanging links with other websites who are not your direct competitors, but who share the same target audience as you do.
• Paid online advertising – on other websites your target audience goes to.

You have a choice of methods that are either free or that you have to pay for. If you choose to use any of the paid methods be sure to calculate how much money you want to pay and stick with that budget.

Calculate Your Customers Lifetime Value

The best way to calculate how much money you should pay for Front End Acquisition methods is to first establish the life-long value for your average client. You need to:

• Put a lifetime value in years or months.
• Calculate exactly how much one client represents in profit over the whole time they are your client.

It is a question of math. Find out how much profit each client brings to your company in his lifetime as a client. You will find it easier to set a limit on how much you are willing to spend to acquire each and every customer.

Knowing the Lifetime Value of your customer will also give a money value to even the slightest improvements in your online sales conversions.

Your Front End Acquisition strategy can be tweaked in each of its different phases to help improve your results and your profits.

It is important to set up both a Front End Acquisition and a Back End Sales strategy. The Front End Strategy is visible on most websites. The Back End may only be visible once you are a customer

Back End Sales are usually easier to get than Front End Acquisitions. When looking at the cost of acquiring new clients, most business see that it is much, much cheaper to focus on Back End Sales.

But is this wise when you want to get more international clients?

Develop Your International Business

A Front End strategy can be even more valuable to a business seeking international expansion. A good Front End Strategy is the cheapest form of international business development.

As usual, you have to market to your audience. You will need to spend more time tweaking your Front End Strategy for an international audience simply because you don’t know them as well as your domestic market.

But once you have established a strategy that works, you have just opened your business to a whole new market. It’s international business development on a shoestring budget.

So what about your international visitors?
Are you leading them through your Front End strategy?
Are you following the statistics for your international readers so you can tweak your Front End Acquisition strategy to suit your international markets better?